SBF's mother and father inform CNN no buyer cash was misplaced. FTX collectors see it in another way.

Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, the mother and father of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted after the trade’s collapse, used their first televised interview to problem the core premise of his conviction, arguing that no buyer cash was finally misplaced.

“The cash was all the time there,” Bankman stated throughout a weekend interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish. “These have been very worthwhile corporations with billions of additional belongings.”

The timing is just not incidental. On the finish of March, the FTX Restoration Belief is ready to distribute about $2.2 billion in its fourth payout, bringing whole recoveries to roughly $10 billion. A number of U.S. buyer lessons will attain 100% restoration, with one class at 120%. For Bankman-Fried’s mother and father, these figures ought to imply SBF’s exoneration.

“Everyone has been made complete with 18 to 43 p.c curiosity,” Fried stated.

All distributions are denominated in U.S. {dollars} and are mounted to asset costs as of the November 2022 chapter submitting, when bitcoin traded close to $16,800. FTX collapsed in late 2022, upending investor confidence and sparking a wave of regulatory scrutiny throughout the business.

Bitcoin has been on a rollercoaster since then, capturing as much as over $126,000 in the course of the fall of 2025, and now buying and selling round $69,000, means above the value in late 2022.

Nevertheless, an FTX buyer who held one bitcoin receives the greenback worth of that 2022 declare, plus curiosity, not the asset or its present worth. The property is returning roughly 119% of a declare frozen at a fraction of as we speak’s market worth.

FTX creditor consultant Sunil Kavuri has publicly rejected the framing, writing that “FTX collectors will not be complete.”

The mother and father’ protection additionally runs counter to the regulatory framework established in response to the collapse. Bankman described the switch of buyer funds to sister firm Alameda Analysis as routine.

“They have been borrowed by Alameda from FTX,” he stated. “Alameda acted like all people else, placing in cash and borrowing cash.”

If accepted, that argument would normalize the commingling of buyer belongings with a proprietary buying and selling agency, the precise follow new guidelines in Hong Kong, the E.U., and proposed U.S. laws now prohibit. The logic that exonerates Bankman-Fried is similar logic regulators moved to eradicate.

Fried went additional, calling the prosecution “basically political” and arguing the Biden administration “had determined to destroy crypto.”

The political framing displays a broader clemency push towards President Donald Trump, as Bankman-Fried continues to help White Home coverage from jail through posts on X.

Smerconish famous that Choose Lewis Kaplan, who presided over SBF’s prison trial and sentenced him to 25 years, is similar federal choose who oversaw E. Jean Carroll’s civil case towards Trump, some extent he stated was “not misplaced on” the household.

Requested what she would say to Trump, Fried referred to as her son “one of the crucial good, gifted younger males of his technology” and stated he could be “an unlimited profit to the economic system” if freed.

However that door seems closed, not less than for now.

Trump stated in a January interview with the New York Instances that he wouldn’t take into account a pardon for Bankman-Fried at the same time as Trump has granted clemency to different crypto figures, together with Silk Street founder Ross Ulbricht and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Polymarket bettors give it a 12% likelihood of occurring.

Bankman-Fried’s enchantment stays pending, and his movement for a brand new trial faces opposition from prosecutors who’ve dismissed his claims of political bias.