Pro-Ripple lawyer and US Senate candidate John Deaton has rejected calls to pardon former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, dismissing recent claims that the exchange was solvent before its 2022 collapse.
Bankman-Fried recently published a “10 Myths About Me & FTX” post on X that included a chart modelling FTX’s net asset value at $78 billion by February 2025, compared with a reported $16.5 billion at the time of its bankruptcy filing.
Deaton responded by rejecting the projections and any suggestion of clemency, arguing that creditor losses and the court’s verdict outweigh theoretical recovery scenarios based on modelled token valuations.
For Deaton, the claims amount to revisionism, and he described the former executive as a “crook, thief, and liar,” while criticising what he called a “two-tiered justice system” in reference to alleged involvement by Bankman-Fried’s parents.
Legal observers have noted that such projections often depend on illiquid token holdings, including SRM and FTT, whose valuations may not reflect realisable market depth under distressed conditions.
The debate resurfaces as political positioning intensifies ahead of the 2026 election cycle, with Deaton signalling that segments of the crypto industry remain firmly opposed to narratives that downplay the severity of the FTX fraud.
Bankman-Fried’s modelling assumes bankruptcy had not been initiated in November 2022, but the exchange’s collapse triggered one of the most significant insolvencies in crypto history, leaving billions in customer claims and ongoing recovery proceedings.