As the FTX insider recovers from a dog attack that delayed his prison sentence, he's posting on X about Sam Bankman-Fried's trial and Donald Trump.
REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
In May, Ryan Salame was sentenced to 7½ years in prison for his role in Sam Bankman-Fried's multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency fraud.
As he awaits the start of his sentence, Salame is using his remaining weeks of freedom to post non-stop.
The former FTX executive has returned to social media and reentered the public discourse, weighing in on politics and crypto policy, and joking about his future in prison.
Since his May 28 sentencing, Salame has posted to X — formerly Twitter — over 700 times, often dozens of times a day.
Salame's posts on X offer a window into the mind of a central player in the rise and eventual collapse of FTX, which rocked the cryptocurrency world and led to Bankman-Fried's blockbuster criminal trial.
While preparing for his sentence, Salame has expressed regret — although he contends the full story of his role in the fiasco is largely misunderstood. And he says a key witness in Bankman-Fried's criminal trial lied.
At the same time, he holds Bankman-Fried responsible for turning FTX and Alameda Research from successful companies into textbook examples of corporate malfeasance. He says Bankman-Fried "thought he was a bank and didn't care about lying."
"Alameda made an absolutely insane amount of money without theft. FTX was solvent. Lawyers were heavily involved in everything," Salame wrote on X. "SBF stole everyone's money to pay back lenders after he invested their money into illiquid investments."
Salame carries the online posture of a too-online 30-year-old millennial dad. His X bio links to the US Bureau of Prisons as his personal website.
"Awaiting 7.5 year prison sentence. Former: US Republican Mega-donor, CEO of FTX Digital Markets, Circle Trade, CPA. HK/US/Bahamas. Not a lawyer," it reads.
He has mused on what money could buy him behind bars.
"How much does it cost to be inmate 42069 I wonder," he posted.
Despite facing a long prison sentence, Salame still considers himself a player in the cryptocurrency arena. The FTX saga has solidified many people's views that cryptocurrency is fundamentally scammy. But Salame — a participant in what is arguably the biggest cryptocurrency scam of all time — is a true believer. And he appears to have faith that only the Republican Party can usher America into a crypto-friendly future.
"I genuinely feel like Trump is the only hope America has on the global stage," Salame posted on July 27, the day Donald Trump spoke at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville.
Salame called Trump "the next president" in another post a few hours later.
Nearly every time he posts, Salame is hounded by other social media users calling him a crook. He replies to them with scorn and sarcasm.
"WHen PRisOn RyAN," he wrote in one recent post.
Bankman-Fried siphoned billions of dollars from ordinary FTX customers by commingling their funds with Alameda Research, his crypto trading firm, and using the funds for the benefit of himself and fellow executives. Salame stopped posting on Twitter, where he had frequently weighed in on cryptocurrency news, in November 2022, around the time FTX collapsed.
A jury in Manhattan found Bankman-Fried guilty of fraud and money laundering charges, and in March a judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Salame held executive positions at Alamada Research and at an FTX affiliate company called FTX Digital Markets. According to prosecutors, Salame deceived banks so that Alameda Research could process money transfers for FTX customers.
Prosecutors also say Salame oversaw a straw donor scheme where he and other FTX executives — using customer funds — donated to politicians in Washington, DC, to advance policies and regulations favorable to the company. Court filings in FTX's bankruptcy show the company loaned Salame tens of millions of dollars, most of which he used for political donations. Other former executives who testified at Bankman-Fried's trials said they expected they wouldn't have to repay the money they received in loans.
In May, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan — who also oversaw Bankman-Fried's trial — sentenced Salame to 7.5 years in prison, higher than what prosecutors recommended. He said Salame "knowingly and willfully assisted in destroying the limited transparency that the laws of the United States provide" in campaign finance.
"He knew precisely what he was doing," Kaplan said at the sentencing hearing. "He knew why it was being done. He knew it was illegal. And the whole idea was to hide it from the world."
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Salame says he is misunderstood. He was pushing for pandemic-related policies in DC — not crypto policies, he said on X. He also said banks weren't defrauded.
"This is obvious unless you're stupid," he wrote.
One of his great regrets, Salame said, is that he followed the advice of lawyers who told him to borrow funds from Alameda Research — which prosecutors said originally came from FTX customers — rather than sell his own cryptocurrency assets. FTX's in-house lawyers drafted the loan agreements for executives, according to trial testimony and court filings.
"Sucks that if I had just sold off my pile of crypto like I was going to instead of listening to multiple lawyers and borrowing from Alameda against it instead, I likely wouldn't be going to prison for seven and half years," he posted on May 29, the day after he was sentenced.
"The legal profession has lost its way... a sad cancer on the world," he wrote in July.
Kaplan initially ordered Salame to report to prison on August 29. But the judge delayed the date after Salame's lawyers said he "was mauled by a German Shepherd while visiting a friend's home" and needed medical treatment.
A plastic surgeon treating Salame wrote in a letter filed to the court that Salame was on the receiving end of "a dog-bite injury to the face."
Asked by an X user last week about the "fake dog bite," Salame said it was "bad."
"Half my face doesn't work still," he said.
Salame pleaded guilty to charges against him in September, shortly before the start of Bankman-Fried's criminal trial in Manhattan.
Three other FTX and Alameda Research executives — Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nashad Singh — all pleaded guilty months earlier and testified at Bankman-Fried's trial as part of cooperation agreements with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, hoping for lighter sentences. Wang and Singh are set to be sentenced in the fall; a hearing for Ellison hasn't yet been scheduled.
Salame didn't testify against Bankman-Fried at trial. According to his sentencing submission, he "offered assistance and cooperation to the government" ahead of the trial, which prosecutors said they considered a "mitigating factor" for his sentencing.
A representative for the US attorney's office and Salame declined to comment for this story.
Prosecutors withdrew campaign finance charges against Bankman-Fried over a legal dispute over jurisdictional issues, and after he was already found guilty of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering charges.
In a message Salame shared on X about not testifying at Bankman-Fried's trial, he said, "I had nothing to offer them without lying."
While Salame didn't testify, he was mentioned throughout Bankman-Fried's trial.
US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York
According to Singh, Salame had access to bank accounts belonging to himself and Bankman-Fried. Salame wired funds to political causes using their accounts, and Singh and Bankman-Fried clicked on verification links to ensure the transfers went through, Singh testified.
Salame primarily donated to Republican politicians and was one of the largest donors in the 2022 election cycle, giving $24 million to right-leaning candidates and causes. Bankman-Fried and Singh typically donated to organizations more affiliated with the political left.
At the trial, Singh said he initially cared about the political donations, but later just did whatever Salame told him to.
"For the majority of them, and after some point in time, my role was to click a button," Singh said at the trial.
The funds for the donations came from loans Singh took from FTX — an arrangement crafted by FTX's lawyers, Singh testified.
Singh said Salame was instrumental in FTX's millions of dollars in real estate purchases using customer funds. And according to Ellison, Salame was involved in a harebrained — and ultimately unsuccessful — project to arrange trades between Thai sex workers to regain funds in accounts that were frozen by Chinese regulators.
Singh testified he was blindsided when he learned Bankman-Fried was using FTX customer funds for Alameda Research's investments. He said he joined the conspiracy to try to fill the financial hole they were in so that FTX customers could be made whole and was "suicidal for days" when that plan failed.
In social media posts, Salame said Singh wasn't being truthful about his role in the use of FTX customer funds. He appeared to suggest that prosecutors convinced Singh to lie on the witness stand.
"I often contemplate how they pressured Nishad into lying about how he viewed his campaign finance contributions," Salame posted. "I have some ideas but I'll likely never know the full extent."
But in another post, a week earlier, Salame appeared to agree with another X user who said Singh "seemed genuinely ashamed and remorseful."
"One of the most genuinely nice human beings I've ever met," Salame wrote. "Guy absolutely wrecked me and I still think this."
On social media, Salame hasn't articulated a specific vision for his preferred cryptocurrency regulation policies aside from a preference for Republicans.
In past interviews, he's said he wanted to achieve a light, libertarian-leaning regulatory touch through bipartisan consensus. But in recent years, much of the crypto industry has shifted rightward. President Joe Biden vetoed a bill in May that would have overturned an SEC rule about crypto custody that much of the industry finds onerous. And in recent years, Trump has gone from calling Bitcoin a "scam" to embracing blockchain technology with Trump Card NFTs and telling the audience at the Bitcoin conference last month that he would fire SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler.
In recent weeks, Salame has weighed in on the 2024 presidential election.
"Democrats have gotten so full of shit it's actually insane, you're in a cult if you think otherwise," he posted last week.
After Biden stepped aside and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Salame reflected on his own future.
"Going to suck waking up in jail burdened by what has been," he wrote.
