The nonbinding resolution passed without objection after Bankman-Fried asked for clemency, months after Trump pardoned other major crypto figures, including Changpeng Zhao and Ross Ulbricht.

The Senate agreed Wednesday that Sam Bankman-Fried should never receive clemency, passing a resolution that states the FTX founder should "under no circumstances" get a pardon or commutation.

Itpassed by unanimous consent, a procedure that clears as a measure if not a single senator objects to it.

Senators Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, and Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, serve as the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee's top Republican and Democrat, respectively.

Lummis is the crypto industry's most committed advocate in Congress and has spent years writing the legislation the industry wants. She has led the effort to keep one of its most infamous figures behind bars.

"He had his day in court," Lummis said when the pair introduced the measure on June 17. Gallego's statement ended with four words: "Keep him locked up."

Bankman-Fried is not eligible for release until around 2044. A jury convicted him in November 2023 on seven counts tied to the collapse of FTX, which prosecutors called one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, with American customers losing more than $8 billion.

President Donald Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried. He has cleared Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, along with other white-collar offenders.

Bankman-Fried ran two companies at once. FTX was a crypto exchange, which holds customer money the way a broker does and is not supposed to touch it. Alameda Research was a trading firm he also owned. He moved billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits to Alameda, which spent the money on trades, venture investments, political donations, and Bahamian real estate, while FTX's software exempted Alameda from the rules that would have forced it to cover its losses like any other trader.

The facade was blown open after CoinDesk obtained Alameda's balance sheet in November 2022 and found that most of what the firm counted as assets was FTT – a token FTX had created itself and could issue at will.

The collateral propping up Alameda was, in effect, something its sister company had invented. Further cracks emerged after the prominent exchange Binance said, days later, it would sell its FTT holdings, leading to a rapid collapse in FTT prices.

Customers rushed to pull their deposits, and FTX could not return the money because it was no longer there. The exchange filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022, just over a week after the story ran.

• 1 Live updates: ZachXBT calls hardware wallets complete garbage; BTC steady after Korea rate hike 1 hour ago

• 2 A bitcoin wallet dormant since the 2017 peak just moved $383 million 2 hours ago

• 3 Ether outruns bitcoin as ETF money returns, almost all of from BlackRock's fund 2 hours ago

• 4 Two groups of bitcoin investors sell on the rise as U.S. inflation lifts prices to nearly $65,000 3 hours ago

• 5 Coinbase's Jesse Pollak steps back from Base app leadership after admitting his crypto social strategy failed 11 hours ago

• 6 DTCC moves tokenized securities into live trading, marking a milestone for Wall Street's blockchain push 14 hours ago

• 8 Ostium suffers $18 million exploit as oracle attack wave continues to hit DeFi 16 hours ago

• 10 President Trump expected to meet with senators to work on ethics concerns in crypto bill 17 hours ago

Gate Leads Spot Market Share Gains as CEX Volumes Rise for First Time in Five Months

Gate Leads Spot Market Share Gains as CEX Volumes Rise for First Time in Five Months

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.

Why it matters :

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.