Sam Bankman-Fried Is Facing 110 Years in Prison

"This kind of fraud, this kind of corruption, is as old as time."

Lock Him Up

FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all seven counts in the jaw-dropping conclusion to his fraud trial — and he's now facing a very real prison sentence.

Bankman-Fried is, as NBC News reports, staring down a statutory maximum of 110 years in prison in what district attorney Damian Williams called "one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto."

To be fair, presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan did warn SBF ahead of trial that he was facing a "very long sentence" for defrauding all those investors out of $8 billion big ones.

That same judge, who demonstrated repeatedly during the trial that he wasn't putting up with any nonsense, went on to suggest that if he determines the ex-FTX CEO committed perjury on the witness stand, he may even go above the sentencing guidelines that affect the severity of sentencing, per CBS' reporting.

"Here's the thing: the cryptocurrency industry might be new. The players like Sam Bankman-Fried might be new. This kind of fraud, this kind of corruption, is as old as time, and we have no patience for it."

Coming Down Hard

As Cointelegraph explains, all seven of the charges against Bankman-Fried — which include wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering — carry sentencing guidelines between five and 20 years.

SBF's sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 28, 2024, so we'll have to wait a while to see how hard Kaplan comes down on him. But if he listens to prosecutors, whose recommendations are customarily taken into consideration, it's not outside the realm of possibility that he'll throw the book at him.

If so, it wouldn't be entirely unwarranted; SBF has now been found guilty of so many outlandish crimes that he's looking more like a Batman villain than the crypto whisperer he was once portrayed as.

Nevertheless, it has been stunning to see a crypto case be treated with such severity by the government — and it seems very much to signal that the digital currency industry is no longer the wild west it once was.

More on crypto: Guy Who Stole Billions in Bitcoin Lived a Sad Life