SBF: A 25-year sentence for an epic fraud
Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence sends a loud message to aspiring fraudsters, said Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. The onetime “King of Crypto” was convicted of “fraud, conspiracy, and several other offenses last year after the spectacular collapse of his crypto exchange FTX revealed an $8 billion hole of missing customer funds under his watch.” Prosecutors may have come away disappointed after they had compared his crimes to those of Bernie Madoff, who got a 150-year sentence for his Ponzi scheme. But 25 years is still “high up in the white-collar rogues’ gallery.” Bankman-Fried was also ordered to repay a staggering $11 billion, a debt he will never shake off.
It’s “a tough sentence,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but Judge Lewis Kaplan cited “the risk” that the 32-year-old “will be in a position to do something very bad in the future.” That, he said, was “not trivial.” SBF’s lawyers had to contend with a judge who had been given plenty of reason to dislike their client, said Alex Kirshner in Slate. In other circumstances, Bankman-Fried could have made a better play for leniency as “a first-time offender, and one player on a whole team of admitted felons.” But SBF seemed to find every way to make himself less sympathetic: obviously lying on the stand, tampering with witnesses, and “obnoxious behavior” that demolished any chances of portraying him as just an “in-over-his-head” kid.
Episodes like this will help crypto grow up, said Will Gottsegen in The Atlantic.
It “won’t ever be the kind of buttonedup, totally law-abiding industry the U.S. government would probably like,” but that’s OK. With regulated Bitcoin exchange-traded funds now sold to the masses by Wall Street mainstays like BlackRock, crypto “appears far more integrated into the existing financial system than it did just a few years ago.”
It’s still a playground for thieves as long as there’s “a credulous public eager to bet real money in search of a big score,” said Zeke Faux and Max Chafkin in Bloomberg Businessweek. SBF’s criminal trial proved that FTX was “crooked almost from day one.” And this was not simply “a good company run by a bad guy.” It was an indictment of an entire industry that hypes up “digital tokens as a sensible choice for novice investors.” The price of Bitcoin is now at $70,000, “higher than the peak of the last cycle,” said Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge. A “suspiciously large number of people” have tried to tell me that SBF “is a oneoff, just a bad apple,” but it sure seems like “the casino’s open” and the “rules haven’t changed.”