FTX Token (FTT) jumped in value after Sam Bankman-Fried popularly known as SBF, broke his two-year silence with a post on X.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the now incarcerated former FTX CEO, revealed that he hadn’t checked his email in hundreds of days and discovered that being unemployed is not as relaxing as it looks.
Shortly after Bankman-Fried’s post on Feb. 25, FTX Token (FTT) spiked about 30%, climbing from $1.63 to over $2.
Following his 25-year prison sentence for the FTX disaster, Bankman-Fried expressed empathy for government officials, citing his own experience of not checking emails for hundreds of days.
“Firing people is one of the hardest things to do in the world. It sucks for everyone involved. More often, the problem is that the company just doesn’t have the right job for them,” he said.
“I’d tell this to everyone we let go: that it was as much our fault for not having the right role for them, or the right person to manage them, or the right work environment for them.”
He seemingly referenced a recent email mandate from Elon Musk’s US Department of Government Efficiency, which required government workers to outline their weekly work or risk losing their jobs.
CoinMarketCap data showed that FTT’s price surge was temporary, as it quickly fell to $1.75 within half an hour.
Despite the spike, FTT has yet to recover significantly and still trades more than 97% lower than its peak of $85.02 on September 10, 2021, before FTX collapsed in November 2022.
Bankman-Fried made his last recorded post on January 19, 2023, where he discussed his congressional testimony draft while FTT traded near $2.50.
He also engaged with a post by crypto lawyer James Murphy, known as MetaLawMan on X, by retweeting it on January 20.
Murphy had discussed how a judge blocked Daniel Friedberg, the former chief regulatory officer of FTX, from testifying remotely via Zoom in Bankman-Fried’s trial.
A jury convicted Bankman-Fried of seven offenses, including wire, securities, and commodities fraud, in November 2023.
A judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison on March 28, 2024. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons register, he is serving his sentence at Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center.
Bloomberg News reported on January 30 that Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried had begun exploring a presidential pardon for their son. They consulted legal experts and Trump administration contacts to evaluate the feasibility of clemency.
Recently, US President Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road marketplace, after Ulbricht had served 11 years of his double life sentence.
FTT is currently trading at $1.69, and it is up by 7% in the last 24 hours, while its trading volume over the same period is up by 137%.
