Select what genuinely interests you. Your picks feed directly into our editorial planning. Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of the crypto exchange FTX and has been serving a 25-year prison sentence since 2024. A jury in Manhattan found him guilty on seven counts in November 2023 for moving billions in FTX customer funds to his trading firm Alameda Research. In June 2026, a US appeals court upheld the verdict, and since September his petition has been with the Supreme Court. For investors in Europe the case is more than a courtroom story: it shows why a balance on an exchange is, legally, a claim against the operator, and why the EU's MiCA regulation requires customer funds to be held separately.