Recently, I’ve again seen SBF issue a statement from prison—this guy really refuses to admit defeat. In his 15-page statement, he claims that FTX and Alameda were not insolvent at all, and says he was “brought down” by bankruptcy lawyers and the new CEO.

According to SBF, when the crisis broke out in November 2022, FTX still had $25 billion in assets and an $16 billion equity value—enough to cover customer withdrawals. He called this a “liquidity crisis” rather than bankruptcy, implying that as long as there was time, it could be resolved by the end of the month. But after external legal advisors forcibly took over, everything changed completely.

SBF directly named the current CEO, John J. Ray III, and bankruptcy lawyers, accusing them of seizing control and deliberately running the bankruptcy proceedings. The statement says the bankruptcy lawyers had a motive to turn the company into a mess, and that they canceled claims on $7 billion worth of FTT as worthless “paper,” paying nearly $1 billion in fees to consultants. Based on his calculations, if he hadn’t been “destroyed,” those assets plus Alameda’s FTX equity would now be worth about $136 billion.

As it happens, this incident is indeed the biggest scandal in crypto history. Alameda had a backdoor into FTX, allowing it to arbitrarily borrow customer funds without collateral to carry out leveraged operations and to inflate the balance sheet with fictitious assets and liabilities. Once the backdoor was exposed, it triggered a bank run, ultimately revealing an $8 billion shortfall and causing about $200 billion in market value to evaporate.

SBF was arrested in the Bahamas in December 2022, sentenced to 25 years in March 2024, and is still serving his sentence. Interestingly, he claims he was the target of political retaliation because he shifted his election donation support from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. He is seeking a pardon from Trump, who previously pardoned the Silk Road founder and a co-founder of a major exchange.

Honestly, SBF’s explanation does sound somewhat reasonable, but it’s hard to imagine the court overturning the verdict just because of his current statement. The stories in the crypto world over the past few years have truly become more and more outrageous.