Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX CEO now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, sat down with Tucker Carlson for a prison interview on March 5, 2025, and shared his take on where cryptocurrency is headed.
The chat, aired on Carlson’s show, dove into the crypto industry’s regulatory headaches, its evolving promises, and its potential to shake up global finance. Speaking from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, Bankman-Fried sounded reflective but still sharp, weighing in on the U.S.’s crypto struggles and the tech’s long-term promise.
He kicked things off by stressing how crucial clear regulations are for crypto to take off in the U.S., where it’s only about 5% of global crypto activity despite the country dominating 30% of traditional finance. Bankman-Fried pointed to the U.S.’s “unique difficulty” as purely a regulatory issue, saying the Trump administration’s pro-crypto vibes—unlike Biden’s tougher stance—could help. “You look at what the Trump administration said going into office, there are a lot of good things,” he noted, but added a reality check: federal regulators are “big, giant bureaucracies” that don’t pivot overnight. They’ve been “really obstructive” in crypto for years, he said, so even Trump’s push might take time to translate into action.
