SBF live updates: FTX founder sentenced to 25 years in prison for massive crypto fraud

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday for the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed his cryptocurrency exchange and a related hedge fund.

The sentence in Manhattan federal court was significantly less than the 40 to 50 years in prison that federal prosecutors wanted for Bankman-Fried, and much more than the five to six-and-a-half years that his lawyers had suggested.

“They built something really beautiful and I threw all of that away,” Bankman-Fried, 32, said of his co-workers at FTX. “It haunts me every day.”

“It’s been excruciating to watch this all unfold,” he told Judge Lewis Kaplan. “Customers don’t deserve this level of pain.

“I was the CEO of FTX and I was responsible.”

Kaplan increased the sentencing guidelines range for Bankman-Fried to a maximum of 110 years in prison after finding that he had perjured himself at his trial and knowingly obstructed justice.

The judge also found Thursday that the total loss of the fraud at FTX exceeded $550 million. Anything more than that is “just gravy,” Kaplan noted, referring to the fact that any more loss would not increase the top end of the guidelines, which did not control how much time the judge gave Bankman-Fried.

However, Kaplan said he “rejects the entirety of defendant’s argument there was no loss” at FTX, calling that claim “misleading, logically flawed and speculative.”

After Kaplan ruled on the guideline enhancement, several victims of Bankman-Fried began talking about the effects of his crimes.

Bankman-Fried, who was wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, looked at the victims as they talked to the judge.

A jury in November convicted Bankman-Fried of seven counts and held him responsible for the roughly $10 billion of customer deposits that went missing in 2022.