Buy Crypto- Markets
Futures- Spot
- Copy Trade
- Earn
- More
SBF Appeals from Prison, Files 35-Page Motion Accusing Trial of "Collusion"
Original Title: "Former Giant Refuses to Acknowledge Fate, SBF Files 35-Page Motion from Prison Cell Alleging Trial 'Sham'"
Original Author: Sanqing, Foresight News
On February 10th, according to Inner City Press, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), currently serving time at California's Terminal Island prison, is actively seeking a retrial. A pro se (self-representation) motion for a new trial, submitted on his behalf by his mother, Barbara H. Fried, a Stanford Law professor, has been formally filed with the court. This 35-page document, invoking Federal Criminal Procedure Rule 33 and newly discovered evidence, strongly demands the overturning of his 2023 fraud conviction and the 25-year prison sentence imposed in 2024.
Key arguments in the motion include: crucial witnesses (such as former Alameda Research co-CEO Ryan Salame and former FTX.US executive Daniel Chapsky) not testifying, leading to serious trial irregularities; allegations of prosecutorial evidence suppression; and claims of the entire process being politically influenced, with SBF subtly framing himself as a victim of targeted persecution by the Biden administration.
The evidence and arguments presented by SBF in this filing are not aimed at directly proving his "innocence" but rather take a legal strategy questioning procedural flaws in the judicial process.
Core Allegation One: Orchestrated Witnesses and Judicial Coercion
The motion alleges that the prosecution, through threats and inducements, turned key figures against SBF and silenced witnesses favorable to him.
For example, the absence of former Alameda Research co-CEO Ryan Salame. The motion cites Salame's public statements post-August 2024 (including an interview with Tucker Carlson) as newly discovered evidence, revealing the prosecution's efforts to prevent Salame from testifying in support of SBF by threatening legal action against Salame's partner, Michelle Bond.
Regarding the testimony accusation by SBF's former Head of Engineering Nishad Singh, the motion discloses that during a pre-trial meeting, when Singh's initial statements did not align with the prosecution's expectations, the prosecutor angrily "slammed the table," criticizing Singh's memory as "unreliable."
SBF believes that it was this high-pressure intimidation that led Singh to later change his testimony. The motion formally requests the court to order the prosecution to hand over relevant interview notes to prove that the prosecution concealed this coercive process.
Core Allegation Two: The Disappearing "Liability" and the Mystery of fiat@ftx.com
SBF submitted a sworn statement from former FTX Head of Data Science Daniel Chapsky, which rebutted the embezzlement accusation from a data perspective.
The motion points out that the prosecution had presented a large negative balance in the fiat@ftx.com account as conclusive evidence of SBF misappropriating client funds. However, Chapsky refuted this explanation in his statement, calling the prosecution's explanation a "fundamental misrepresentation."
He noted that the negative balance in the account corresponded to cash and assets held by Alameda off-chain. The prosecution only showed the "debit" side's negative balance to the jury, deliberately ignoring the corresponding "credit" assets, thus fabricating a tens of billions of dollars deficit out of thin air.
Chapsky's data analysis further shows that if accounted for correctly for most of 2022, Alameda's account on FTX actually maintained a positive balance of around $2 billion. The prosecution and expert witness Peter Easton intentionally only displayed specific negative balance subaccounts, misleading the jury.
Core Allegation Three: Sullivan & Cromwell's "Asset Wipeout Technique"
SBF also pointed fingers at the law firm responsible for the FTX bankruptcy restructuring, Sullivan & Cromwell (S&C). He accused S&C of artificially creating a "balance sheet insolvency" to align with the prosecution's conviction logic and earn exorbitant legal fees.
The motion notes that FTX had an investment portfolio worth up to $8.4 billion at the time of bankruptcy (including an investment in Claude AI development company Anthropic). However, in the early stages of bankruptcy, S&C and the prosecution artificially treated these slightly illiquid but immensely valuable assets as zero or very low value to substantiate the funding gap.
SBF emphasized that the bankruptcy team ultimately confirmed that customers would receive between 119% and 143% cash compensation, a fact that itself proves his assertion during the trial that "FTX is solvent, and the money is not gone" is true.
Core Allegation Four: Political Targeting and Judicial Bias
Finally, SBF plays the political and procedural cards. He implies that he is a victim of the Biden administration's "political war." As a former Democratic mega-donor, he was swiftly cut off and harshly sentenced after the incident to appease public outrage.
In addition, given that presiding Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has repeatedly dismissed the defense's evidence regarding FTX's solvency in previous hearings, SBF's motion not only requests a retrial but also explicitly demands Judge Kaplan's recusal, citing the judge's extreme bias that has rendered him unable to impartially adjudicate this case.
Is this showdown destined to be a fight to the death?
A Rule 33 motion for new evidence post-trial must demonstrate that the evidence was not discoverable through due diligence during trial. The judge is likely to rule that Salame and Chapsky were known potential witnesses during the trial, and the defense's failure to subpoena them was a strategic choice or logistical difficulty, not presenting "new evidence."
Furthermore, the fact that FTX has a high claims payout ratio (even exceeding 100%) does not disprove SBF's alleged misappropriation of client funds at that time. Unauthorized use of client funds constitutes an immediate crime, regardless of the purpose, with subsequent asset appreciation usually deemed irrelevant in terms of legal guilt, only potentially affecting sentencing.
Regarding the accusation of coercion, absent compelling audio or written evidence demonstrating direct prosecutorial coercion (such as specific recordings of "table banging"), judges typically lean towards accepting the prosecution's explanations of procedural regularity.
Moreover, requesting a senior federal judge to self-recuse due to "bias" is rarely successful in judicial practice unless there is exceptionally clear evidence of a conflict of interest. Otherwise, such an allegation may further provoke the judicial system, being viewed as contempt for the court.
You may also like
Found a "meme coin" that skyrocketed in just a few days. Any tips?
TAO is Elon Musk, who invested in OpenAI, and Subnet is Sam Altman
The era of "mass coin distribution" on public chains comes to an end
Soaring 50 times, with an FDV exceeding 10 billion USD, why RaveDAO?
1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
Parse Noise's newly launched Beta version, how to "on-chain" this heat?
Is Lobster a Thing of the Past? Unpacking the Hermes Agent Tools that Supercharge Your Throughput to 100x
Declare War on AI? The Doomsday Narrative Behind Ultraman's Residence in Flames
Crypto VCs Are Dead? The Market Extinction Cycle Has Begun
Claude's Journey to Foolishness in Diagrams: The Cost of Thriftiness, or How API Bill Increased 100-Fold
Edge Land Regress: A Rehash Around Maritime Power, Energy, and the Dollar
Arthur Hayes Latest Interview: How Should Retail Investors Navigate the Iran Conflict?
Just now, Sam Altman was attacked again, this time by gunfire
Straits Blockade, Stablecoin Recap | Rewire News Morning Edition
From High Expectations to Controversial Turnaround, Genius Airdrop Triggers Community Backlash
App