Here's a sentence you don't read every day: a convicted cryptocurrency fraudster, currently serving a 25-year prison sentence, is showering praise on a former president from his jail cell. That's the latest twist in the ongoing saga of Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed FTX exchange.
On Sunday, Bankman-Fried—better known by his initials SBF—applauded Donald Trump's foresight, calling him the "first president" to recognize the strategic potential of both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. This comes after Trump's recent comments at a summit in Miami, where he described Bitcoin (BTC) as "very powerful" and noted that many people now prefer to pay using crypto.
"It's not just people who want to pay you in crypto, increasingly it's AI agents. Crypto is the future of AI-native payments," SBF added, bringing an "agentic payments" angle into the conversation. It's an interesting pivot for someone whose own crypto empire was built on, well, not exactly being future-proof.
The timing is notable. Bankman-Fried's praise arrives just days after World Liberty Financial (WLFI)—a firm backed by the Trump family—launched a new payment infrastructure designed to let AI agents manage funds and transact on the blockchain. So when Trump talks about crypto being powerful, there might be more than just campaign rhetoric at play.
Lately, SBF has become quite the vocal supporter of Trump's policies, covering everything from the economy and foreign relations to, of course, cryptocurrency. Last week, he praised the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran. He has previously claimed that his 2022 arrest was orchestrated by the "anti-crypto" Joe Biden administration as retaliation for secretly donating millions to Republican causes.
He's even tried to paint Judge Lewis Kaplan—who sentenced him to prison and also presided over Trump's federal defamation trial—as a common adversary. It's a curious attempt at alignment from someone facing a quarter-century behind bars.
For his part, Trump has indicated he has no intention of pardoning SBF. So while the praise might be flowing one way, clemency doesn't seem to be on the table.
Bankman-Fried, who filed a request for a new trial earlier this month alleging that the Justice Department under Biden threatened key defense witnesses, seems to be crafting a narrative from prison. Whether it's genuine admiration or a strategic play for sympathy—or perhaps a bit of both—remains an open question. But in the world of crypto, politics, and high-stakes fraud, the plot, as they say, thickens.
