From 25-year sentences to presidential pardons, a guide to the people who built an industry on other people’s money
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Bitcoin is down 47%. Meet the people who got you here.
Bitcoin hit $126,198 on October 6, 2025. As of mid-February 2026, it’s hovering around $66,200. That’s a 47% decline from the all-time high, and the reasons read like a geopolitical bingo card: Trump’s tariff escalation, a hawkish Fed, a $1.5 billion Bybit hack traced to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and a broader tech sell-off dragging everything with a ticker symbol into the red.
But forget the crash. The story is the people.
The people who built the crypto industry, what they did with the money, and where they are now. Some are in federal prison. Some got presidential pardons. Some are building new companies from the wreckage. One might be dead for all we know. And the pattern connecting them says more about crypto’s relationship with power than any whitepaper ever could.
This is a field guide to ten figures who, between them, account for roughly $65 billion in losses, millions of victims, and a sentencing range that stretches from four months to 25 years. Every legal status below is precise: convicted means convicted, settled means settled, pardoned means pardoned, fugitive means fugitive, and alleged means we don’t know yet.
I’ve organised them not alphabetically or chronologically, but by what happened to them. Because what happened to them, it turns out, depends less on what they did and more on who they knew.
The convicted and imprisoned
Three men. Three courtrooms. A combined 52 years of prison time and roughly $53 billion in losses. These are the ones who went to trial, or at least pled guilty, and heard a judge say a number followed by “years.”
Sam Bankman-Fried: 25 years
The FTX founder stole approximately $8 billion in customer funds and was sentenced to 25 years in March 2024. Judge Lewis Kaplan’s assessment was blunt: “He knew it was wrong. He knew it was criminal.”
SBF’s parents are both Stanford Law professors. His net worth went from $26 billion to whatever the prison commissary will extend on credit. He was reportedly playing League of Legends during investor meetings while his exchange was functionally insolvent. The League of Legends detail is the kind of thing Aaron Sorkin would cut for being too on the nose. A man entrusted with $8 billion in customer deposits, alt-tabbing between a video game and a Zoom call with Sequoia Capital.
His appeal is pending before the Second Circuit, with oral arguments held November 4, 2025. On February 5, 2026, he filed a pro se motion for a new trial claiming the DOJ threatened witnesses. Pro se means he’s representing himself, which, for the son of two Stanford Law professors, is a choice. The motion is, charitably, a long shot.
SBF donated heavily to Democrats. He got 25 years and no pardon. Remember that detail. It becomes important later.
Do Kwon: 15 years
The Terra/Luna founder presided over a $40 billion wipeout in May 2022 and was sentenced to 15 years on December 11, 2025. The judge rejected the plea deal’s recommended 12-year sentence and went higher, which almost never happens. When a federal judge looks at the number both sides agreed to and says “not enough,” the defendant has made an impression. Judge Engelmayer called it “a fraud on an epic, generational scale.”
Before the collapse, Kwon had tweeted “I don’t debate the poor.” After it, he was caught fleeing through Montenegro with a fake Costa Rican passport.
When crypto executives, much like any other fugitive, face consequences, their first instinct is rarely to hire a lawyer. It’s to hire a travel agent.
Terra/Luna was an “algorithmic stablecoin,” which is a polite way of saying it was a financial instrument that maintained its value through a mechanism that worked perfectly right up until the moment it didn’t. The death spiral, when it came, took roughly 72 hours. Forty billion dollars, gone in a long weekend.
Alex Mashinsky: 12 years
The Celsius Network founder was sentenced to 12 years on May 8, 2025, for defrauding 1.7 million users out of $4.7 billion. His slogan was “Unbank yourself.” The prosecutor’s characterisation was less catchy: “a predator who preyed on hope.”
Mashinsky held weekly AMA sessions reassuring depositors that their funds were safe. Weeks later, Celsius froze all withdrawals. During that window, Mashinsky personally withdrew $48 million while his customers couldn’t touch a cent.
The AMAs are the cruelest detail in any of these cases. He looked into a camera, week after week, and told people their money was fine. It wasn’t fine. He knew it wasn’t fine. He was moving his own money out while saying it. The word for that isn’t “fraud” in the abstract, legal sense. It’s something closer to cruelty.
| Figure | Losses | Sentence | Key detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sam Bankman-Fried | ~$8B | 25 years | Went to trial; appeal pending |
| Do Kwon | ~$40B | 15 years | Judge rejected plea deal, went higher |
| Alex Mashinsky | ~$4.7B | 12 years | Withdrew $48M while freezing customer funds |
One thing jumps out of that poker table: Kwon’s losses were five times SBF’s, but his sentence was 10 years shorter. The difference: Kwon took a plea deal. SBF went to trial, lost, and paid the trial tax. In the American justice system, exercising your constitutional right to a trial is, functionally, a sentencing multiplier.
The pardoned and the connected
If the previous section is about what happens when the system works, this one is about what happens when the system has a phone number you can call.
Changpeng Zhao: pardoned
Four months. That’s what Changpeng Zhao served for enabling, among other things, transactions linked to terrorism financing. The Binance founder pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, was part of a $4.3 billion corporate settlement, and walked out of custody before most people finish a home renovation. An internal Binance message, surfaced during the investigation, read: “is washing drug money too hard these days; come to binance we got cake for you.”
Then, on October 23, 2025, Trump pardoned him. The conviction was wiped clean.
Trump told reporters, “I don’t know who he is.” CZ told the press he “didn’t do much” to secure the pardon. Both statements are technically possible and practically absurd. Binance holds approximately 87% ($4.7 billion) of the reserves backing Trump’s USD1 stablecoin. You don’t need to know someone personally when their company is holding $4.7 billion of your financial product.
The $4.3 billion fine, at the time, was the largest corporate penalty in DOJ history.
Roger Ver: case killed
The self-styled “Bitcoin Jesus” renounced his US citizenship in 2014 and owed roughly $48 million in taxes. The DOJ charged him with tax evasion. On October 14, 2025, the case ended in a deferred prosecution agreement requiring $49.9 million in payments.
A DPA means the charges get dropped if Ver meets the terms. He pays roughly what he owed, and the criminal record goes away. For a man who renounced his citizenship specifically to avoid paying taxes, this is a remarkably convenient outcome.
How did a man facing federal tax evasion charges get a DPA instead of a prison sentence? A ProPublica investigation in January 2026 mapped the network: Ver hired Christopher Kise, Trump’s personal lawyer, and paid Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby on his behalf. A former DOJ attorney told ProPublica, “They’re basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution.”
Six hundred thousand dollars to Roger Stone. That’s the price of making a federal tax evasion case disappear. For context, Ver owed $48 million. The lobbying fee was 1.25% of the tax bill.
Efficient.
The pardon pipeline
Three crypto figures received pardons or clemency in Trump’s first ten months back in office: Ross Ulbricht (Silk Road), CZ, and Ver. All three had financial or political connections to the Trump orbit.
SBF donated to Democrats. He got 25 years. No pardon discussions have been reported.
The crypto pardon pipeline runs in one direction. The toll booth accepts campaign contributions, stablecoin reserves, and lobbying fees paid to Trump’s personal attorney.
The financial architecture tells the rest of the story. The Fairshake PAC, the crypto industry’s political war chest, raised over $260 million in the 2024 cycle and won 48 of 54 races (89%), making it the single largest super PAC of the election cycle. Not the largest tech PAC. Not the largest finance PAC. The largest super PAC, full stop.
Justin Sun, the Tron founder who was facing SEC fraud allegations, invested $75 million in Trump’s World Liberty Financial. The SEC subsequently dropped its case against him. The Trump family earns 75% of WLFI’s net revenues. So: a man facing fraud charges invests $75 million in the president’s family business, and the fraud charges go away. The Trump family takes 75 cents of every dollar WLFI earns.
Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who oversees crypto enforcement policy, personally holds over $159,000 in cryptocurrency and disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. The unit specifically created to prosecute crypto fraud.
Gone. Just like that.
The fox isn’t guarding the henhouse. The fox owns the henhouse and is collecting rent from the chickens.
The fugitives and the phantoms
Some crypto figures faced the justice system and lost. Others faced the justice system and ran. And one may have been murdered before the justice system could find her.
Ruja Ignatova: vanished
The “Cryptoqueen” is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list with a $5 million reward for information leading to her arrest. She founded OneCoin, a $4.5 billion Ponzi scheme with one distinguishing feature: there was no actual blockchain. No coins. No technology. No protocol. Just a website with numbers on it and a sales force that would make Amway blush.
Every other scam on this list at least had a blockchain. OneCoin didn’t bother. Ignatova sold people access to a cryptocurrency that existed only as entries in a SQL database. The “coin” was a number in a spreadsheet. The “blockchain” was a marketing slide.
$4.5 billion stolen. No blockchain. The founder possibly dead. The co-founder doing two decades. OneCoin is what happens when you remove the technology from a crypto scam and discover the scam works fine without it.
Ignatova boarded a flight from Sofia to Athens in October 2017 and hasn’t been confirmed alive since. A BBC investigation found evidence linking her disappearance to Bulgarian crime boss Hristoforos “Taki” Amanatidis, and multiple sources suggest she may have been murdered in 2018. Her co-founder, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, was sentenced to 20 years.
Kyle Davies and Su Zhu: the arsonists who opened a fire insurance company
The Three Arrows Capital co-founders owe creditors $3.5 billion. Their hedge fund collapsed in June 2022 after overleveraged bets on Luna went sideways, and the bankruptcies rippled outward from there.
Kyle Davies is believed to be living in Bali. He has not appeared before liquidators or any court proceeding. He is, in the most literal sense, a fugitive from his creditors.
Su Zhu was caught trying to flee at Singapore’s Changi Airport and served four months for contempt of court. Four months for $3.5 billion in debts. He was out before the liquidators had finished cataloguing what he owed.
After serving his time, Zhu and Davies launched OPNX, a crypto exchange designed to trade claims from bankrupt crypto companies. Many of those companies went bankrupt because of Three Arrows Capital. They were, quite literally, building a marketplace to profit from the wreckage of companies they had helped destroy.
That’s like an arsonist opening a fire insurance company, then selling policies on the buildings they burned down. And then going on a podcast to explain their innovative approach to risk management.
The repeat offenders and the pretenders
Not everyone on this list committed fraud on a billion-dollar scale. Some committed fraud on a merely impressive scale, and one committed fraud against the concept of truth itself.
Michael Saylor: the tax cheat who became Bitcoin’s loudest evangelist
The MicroStrategy (now Strategy) founder settled the largest tax fraud case in Washington DC history in 2024: $40 million for evading DC income taxes while living in a Georgetown penthouse. That was his second brush with securities regulators. In 2000, the SEC charged him with overstating MicroStrategy’s revenues, resulting in a $350,000 fine and $8.3 million in disgorgement.
Two fraud settlements in 24 years. Most people would keep a low profile after that. Saylor went the other direction. He now holds 714,644 Bitcoin as of February 9, 2026, making his company the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin on the planet. He has described Bitcoin as “a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom,” which is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder whether the person saying it is a visionary or needs to touch grass.
Two fraud settlements and a corporate treasury built entirely on a single volatile asset that’s currently down 47% from its high. The man has a type.
Craig Wright: the cosplayer
Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. The UK High Court ruled that he “lied extensively and repeatedly” and “forged documents” to support his claim. He then filed a $1.15 trillion lawsuit, that’s trillion with a T, in violation of the court order telling him to stop. This earned him a one-year suspended sentence for contempt.
Wright isn’t a crypto criminal in the traditional sense. He’s a crypto cosplayer. He didn’t steal billions; he just wasted everyone’s time and the court’s patience while pretending to be someone he demonstrably isn’t. In an industry full of people who took real money under false pretences, Wright took no money under the falsest pretence of all. He’s the guy at the costume party who insists he’s not wearing a costume, and then sues everyone who disagrees.
The control group: what happens when you don’t commit crimes
Every experiment needs a control group. Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO, is ours.
The SEC sued Coinbase in June 2023, alleging it operated as an unregistered exchange. Armstrong spent $50 million fighting the case. In February 2025, the case was dismissed. By May 2025, Coinbase had joined the S&P 500.
No fraud charges. No customer funds missing. No fake passports. No presidential pardons needed. No lobbying fees to Roger Stone. All he needed was a company that operated within the law, fought a regulatory action it believed was wrong, and won.
Armstrong’s trajectory is the counterfactual that makes everyone else on this list look worse. The crypto industry’s standard defence is that regulation is unclear and enforcement is arbitrary. Armstrong proves that you can build a major crypto company, face the full weight of SEC enforcement, spend $50 million on lawyers instead of $600,000 on Roger Stone, and come out the other side with your freedom, your reputation, and an S&P 500 listing.
The bar wasn’t high. Most of the people on this list simply chose not to clear it.
The domino chain: how one collapse triggered them all
These cases aren’t isolated incidents that happened to occur in the same industry. They’re connected by a chain of contagion that turned 2022 into crypto’s extinction-level event.
It started with Do Kwon.
When Terra/Luna collapsed in May 2022, it vaporised $40 billion in value overnight. Three Arrows Capital, which had massive leveraged exposure to Luna, blew up in June. Three Arrows’ collapse triggered margin calls across the industry. Celsius, which had lent heavily to Three Arrows, froze withdrawals in June. Voyager Digital, another Three Arrows creditor, filed for bankruptcy in July. And FTX, which had positioned itself as the industry’s white knight by bailing out Voyager, turned out to be the biggest fraud of all, collapsing in November.
| Month | Event | Losses | Trigger |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2022 | Terra/Luna collapse | ~$40B | Algorithmic stablecoin death spiral |
| June 2022 | Three Arrows Capital liquidation | ~$3.5B | Luna exposure, margin calls |
| June-July 2022 | Celsius freezes withdrawals | ~$4.7B | Terra/Luna contagion, bank run |
| July 2022 | Voyager Digital bankruptcy | ~$1.3B | 3AC contagion |
| November 2022 | FTX collapse | ~$8B | CoinDesk exposé, bank run |
One algorithmic stablecoin. Five dominoes. Roughly $57 billion gone in seven months.
The people running these companies knew each other. They lent to each other, invested in each other, appeared on each other’s podcasts, and vouched for each other’s solvency. And when one fell, the interconnections that had made them all rich made them all insolvent. It was less a financial system than a circular firing squad with a time delay.
The “No Actual Product” club deserves its own mention. Ignatova had no blockchain. Wright had no proof he was Satoshi. Kwon’s algorithmic stablecoin was, in retrospect, a time bomb with a marketing budget. Three different flavours of selling something that didn’t exist, or didn’t work, or both.
The sentencing casino
Justice in crypto cases follows no consistent logic. Geography, politics, plea bargaining, and sheer luck determine outcomes more than the scale of the crime.
Consider the numbers:
| Figure | Losses | Sentence | Years per $1B in losses |
|---|---|---|---|
| SBF | ~$8B | 25 years | ~3.1 |
| Do Kwon | ~$40B | 15 years | ~0.4 |
| Mashinsky | ~$4.7B | 12 years | ~2.6 |
| CZ | ~$4.3B (fine) | 4 months (pardoned) | ~0.008 |
| Su Zhu | ~$3.5B | 4 months | ~0.010 |
| Greenwood (OneCoin) | ~$4.5B | 20 years | ~4.4 |
SBF’s $8 billion in losses got him 25 years. CZ’s $4.3 billion fine got him four months and a pardon. Su Zhu’s $3.5 billion in debts got him four months and a new business venture. The difference between 25 years and four months isn’t proportional to the crime. It’s proportional to whether you took a plea, which jurisdiction caught you, whether you had the right phone numbers, and how much of the president’s stablecoin your exchange happened to be holding.
For context: Bernie Madoff got 150 years for his Ponzi scheme. The combined sentences across the major crypto cases — including the figures profiled here plus key cooperators and co-conspirators — total roughly 120 years. One Wall Street fraudster got more prison time than an entire industry of them combined.
Madoff alone got 150 years. The major crypto convictions combined total roughly 120. The industry is getting a bulk discount on accountability.
There’s also the flight problem. A striking number of major crypto figures facing legal consequences attempted to flee their jurisdiction before or during proceedings. Kwon had a fake passport in Montenegro. Zhu was caught at Changi Airport. Davies is still in Bali. Ignatova vanished entirely. Ver renounced his citizenship years before charges came. In traditional finance, fleeing the country is the exception. In crypto, staying put is.
And then there’s Faruk Fatih Ozer, the Thodex founder sentenced to 11,196 years in Turkey. Eleven thousand, one hundred and ninety-six years. He was found dead in prison on November 1, 2025. Turkish sentencing math operates on a different plane of existence, but the outcome was the same as a life sentence, just expressed with considerably more enthusiasm.
If you steal $8 billion and donate to the wrong political party, you get 25 years. If you enable money laundering on a global scale and your exchange holds the president’s stablecoin reserves, you get four months and a pardon. If you steal $3.5 billion and run to Bali, nobody comes to get you. The variable isn’t the crime, but rather the connections.
The human cost
The satire stops here.
Behind every billion-dollar figure is a population of real people who lost real money they couldn’t afford to lose.
When Terra/Luna collapsed, multiple suicides were reported in South Korea. A family of three was found dead in a suspected murder-suicide linked to Luna losses. The r/terraluna subreddit had to pin suicide prevention resources at the top of the page. The moderators of a cryptocurrency forum became, overnight, a crisis intervention team. They were not trained for this. Nobody moderating a subreddit about an algorithmic stablecoin expects to be fielding suicide notes.
Celsius marketed itself to conservative savers. Not day traders. Not speculators. Not people who understood what a “yield-bearing crypto account” actually meant under the hood. People who wanted a savings account with better interest rates than their bank offered.
FTX victim impact statements described retirement funds wiped out, marriages destroyed, homes lost. More than 2 million people across the major cases lost money.
Some lost everything.
Mashinsky’s prosecutor called him “a predator who preyed on hope.” That’s the common thread across every case on this list. These weren’t sophisticated investors getting outplayed by smarter traders. These were ordinary people who were told, repeatedly and persuasively, that their money was safe. It wasn’t.
Where this leaves us
Bitcoin is down 47% from its high, and the people who built the industry around it are, variously, imprisoned, pardoned, fugitive, dead, or launching new ventures from the wreckage of old ones.
$65 billion in losses. 52 years of combined prison time for the top three convictions. Four months for the man whose exchange enabled money laundering on an industrial scale, followed by a presidential pardon. A massive PAC that won 89% of its races. A deputy attorney general with six figures in crypto holdings overseeing crypto policy. A cryptocurrency enforcement unit, disbanded. And millions of people who trusted the wrong founders with money they needed.
There is a counterargument, and honesty requires stating it. FTX’s bankruptcy estate recovered more than 100% of petition-date claims, though that’s partly because Bitcoin’s price rose between the filing and the distribution, not because the money was found under a couch cushion. Armstrong fought the SEC and won. Crypto technology itself, the blockchains, the protocols, the decentralised applications, none of that is inherently criminal. The technology works. The problem has always been the people given custody of other people’s money, and the system that’s supposed to hold them accountable when they steal it.
That system is, at the moment, for sale.
The pardon pipeline, the lobbying network, the PAC money, the stablecoin reserves held by the exchange whose founder got clemency; these aren’t bugs in the system. They’re the system working exactly as the people with the most money designed it to work. The crypto industry spent over hundreds of millions on political influence in 2024 and got deregulation, pardons, and dropped cases in return.
The crash will end. Bitcoin will recover or it won’t. But the rap sheet is permanent, and the pardon pattern tells you everything about who this industry serves.
The next time someone tells you crypto is the future of finance, ask them which future. The one where Brian Armstrong builds a regulated company and joins the S&P 500? Or the one where the people who stole $65 billion get four-month sentences, presidential pardons, and a fresh set of investors?
Both futures are available. The industry, so far, has overwhelmingly chosen the second one.
References
- DOJ Sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried – Full sentencing details and Judge Kaplan’s remarks on the 25-year sentence
- ProPublica: Roger Ver Lobbying Investigation – The definitive account of how political connections killed a federal tax evasion case
- BBC: The Missing Cryptoqueen – Investigative podcast on Ruja Ignatova’s disappearance and possible murder
- OpenSecrets: Fairshake PAC – Full financial breakdown of crypto’s record-setting political spending in 2024
- Reuters: Do Kwon Sentencing – Judge Engelmayer’s “generational fraud” ruling and the rejected plea deal
- FTX Bankruptcy Recovery – How the estate recovered 100%+ of petition-date claims
- COPA v Wright Judgment – UK High Court’s ruling on Craig Wright’s fabricated Satoshi Nakamoto claim
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