"SBF files for presidential pardon" Jun 09, 2026

Sam Bankman-Fried, 34, has officially filed for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, requesting clemency after completion of his 25-year sentence. Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried, and a White House spokesperson responded to the new filing by pointing back to those earlier comments, effectively rejecting the request. Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on fraud and conspiracy charges tied to stealing billions in customer funds from FTX and is currently held at a low-security federal prison in Santa Barbara, California. He spent the past year attempting to court Trump publicly on X, including praising some of his pardons, a strategy that appears to have produced no result.

The Humanity Protocol suffered a security incident in which about 17 wallets linked to the project were drained for more than 32 million dollars. Terrence Kwok attributed the breach to a compromised private key belonging to a Humanity Foundation member, while on-chain analyst Zach XBT suggested the incident could be a staged market-maker exit rather than a straightforward theft. Spectre reported that the attacker minted 100 million H-tokens and was dumping them for BNB, and the H-token plunged 89 percent within 24 hours. Humanity Protocol pitches itself as a decentralized identity system using biometrics and zero-knowledge proofs to let users prove they are human without exposing personal data, making the ambiguity around whether this was an external hack or an inside job particularly damaging to its credibility.

Morpho raised 175 million dollars in a token purchase round valuing the on-chain lending protocol at up to 2 billion dollars, described as one of DeFi's biggest funding rounds. Morpho lets users and institutions create custom lending and borrowing markets with their own risk settings. The company plans to use the funds to deepen technical and commercial integrations, expand credit infrastructure, and push further into institutional on-chain lending.

SBI Shenzhen Bank is reportedly planning to launch a crypto rewards program for deposit customers this fall, giving users vouchers worth 20 percent of their deposit interest payments redeemable for Bitcoin, Ether, or XRP through SBI VC Trade. A three-month pilot starts June 10 covering ordinary savings accounts and time deposits ranging from three months to five years. SBI is also in talks to buy into BitBank, has reported plans with Rakuten Securities for crypto investment trusts, and is pursuing a blockchain project with StarTale for on-chain stocks, suggesting a broad institutional push into crypto across multiple business lines.

One organizer of a 2024 Bitcoin-linked kidnapping and carjacking plot pleaded guilty in federal court in Hartford to conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery, carrying up to 20 years in prison with sentencing set for August 28. Prosecutors say the man and his brother targeted the parents of a crypto thief who allegedly stole about 4,100 bitcoins in a social engineering scam and flaunted the money in Miami. The group carjacked the couple's Lamborghini Urus in Danbury, beating them with a baseball bat and briefly detaining them. The case illustrates how large on-chain thefts can generate downstream physical violence when perpetrators make their wealth visible.