
Sam Bankman-Fried, the former billionaire who was found guilty of defrauding customers and investors of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday by a federal judge, who ruled that Bankman-Fried committed perjury and attempted witness tampering. The sentencing closes the door on an astonishing rise-and-fall saga in which Bankman-Fried, 32, was lauded as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs before losing more than $8 billion worth of FTX customer deposits.
Bankman-Fried’s sentence is less what federal prosecutors had hoped for: they recommended that he should receive 40-50 years due to the “extraordinary dimensions of his crimes” and the risk that he might carry out a future…