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Sam Bankman-Fried’s Supreme Court petition rests on a fact that sounds exonerating and legally isn’t: FTX customers being made whole doesn’t undo a fraud conviction under the Kousisis standard the Court itself set last year, which means this filing is less a bid to prove innocence than a bet that the justices will second-guess a precedent they wrote themselves.
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In Today’s Email:
**What Matters:SBF Petitions Supreme Court on Conviction 👀Product of the Week:Coinbase Reverts Base App Rebrand🔎Charts:**Blockstream Rejects Ransom, Standard Chartered Sees SKY 5x 📊
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WHAT MATTERS
**State of play: **Sam Bankman-Fried petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn his fraud conviction and $11B forfeiture, arguing the trial court wrongly barred evidence that FTX customers were ultimately repaid in full.
The petition claims it was error to let prosecutors suggest large customer losses while blocking the defense from showing customers were repaid with interest.
Bankman-Fried also argues the $11B forfeiture violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.
In June, the Second Circuit affirmed his conviction, applying the Supreme Court’s 2025 Kousisis ruling that wire fraud doesn’t require intent to cause net economic harm.
The Supreme Court is expected to decide later this year whether to take up the case.
Why it matters: A Supreme Court grant would test whether the Kousisis “no-loss-required” fraud standard can survive a case where the alleged victims were actually made whole, a question that reaches well beyond crypto.
**Our take: **The repayment-in-full fact is doing more legal work in headlines than it will in court; Kousisis already settled that intent to defraud, not eventual outcome, is what matters.
For builders and investors: This doesn’t change FTX creditor recoveries or reopen claims either way, so treat it as a legal sideshow rather than a signal to reposition around SBF-related exposure.
PRODUCT OF THE WEEK
Coinbase is renaming the Base App back to Coinbase Wallet just over a year after its social-first rebrand, repositioning the self-custodial app as a multichain trading “test kitchen” instead.
Coinbase Wallet now supports over 10 networks, adding Robinhood Chain and Monad, alongside Hyperliquid-powered perpetuals, prediction markets, and tokenized stocks.
Head of Wallet Product Ryan Kass said the name change better reflects the app’s role as Coinbase’s self-custodial front door to the “everything exchange.”
CEO Brian Armstrong acknowledged in March that Base App’s social features “didn’t quite work,” prompting the pivot toward trading.
The wallet stays self-custodial, auto-detects scam tokens, and puts new asset classes like predictions and tokenized stocks through compliance review before launch.
**Other cool products: **
Bybit𝕏launches24/7 currency pair per petuals.Etherscan𝕏launchesFlow, visual transaction tracing tool.Uniswap𝕏launchesStablePair Hook, dynamic fees on V4.Renzo𝕏rebrands, launches basis trade product on Hyperliquid.Compound𝕏launchesinstitutional USDC lending, up to 87% LTV.Exponent Finance𝕏launchesincentives for ONyc, srONyc markets.
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CHARTS OF THE WEEK
**State of play: **Blockstream refused the exploiter’s ransom demand for the remaining 598.5 BTC from the Liquid Network exploit, calling the withholding theft and vowing to pursue recovery through law enforcement and forensic tracing.
The exploiter used a caching bug in Elements to mint about 4,000 unbacked LBTC, then converted it to BTC via SideSwap’s peg-out authorization key.
About 3,400 BTC was returned on Sept 7 after the exploiter demanded Blockstream “fix the bug first,” leaving 598.5 BTC outstanding.
The exploiter demanded a 10% bug bounty, threatening a 15% loss to holders otherwise, which Blockstream called extortion rather than responsible disclosure.
Liquid patched the vulnerability with Elements v23.3.4 and resumed block production and transactions on Sept 10, though peg-outs stay disabled during recovery.
**Our Take: **Refusing to pay is the right precedent, but the exploiter already got the real win: framing a ransom as a “fair” bug bounty in public makes future attackers less likely to return funds quietly.
State of play: Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Sky, calling it “DeFi’s federal bank,” and forecasts SKY will rise fivefold to $0.325 by end-2028 as USDS growth drives higher staking rewards and buybacks.
Sky functions like a central bank: it issues USDS, sets governance rules, and lends to agents Spark, Grove, and Obex at a 3.8% wholesale rate.
Those three agents have borrowed $5.9B in USDS combined against a $17.5B limit, leaving room for two to threefold income growth if borrowing scales up.
Sky’s $90M reserve buffer could hit $150M in about eight months, potentially doubling the income available for SKY staking rewards and buybacks.
Analyst Geoffrey Kendrick expects SKY to roughly match ether’s gains and outperform bitcoin through 2028, with slower yield-bearing stablecoin growth as the main risk.
Our take: The fivefold call hinges on Sky tripling borrowing without compressing its 3.8% spread, a harder problem the model assumes away rather than solves.
QUICK BITES
Mexican authoritiesraidhidden crypto mine.Senate Republicansrelease‘final’ Clarity Act draft.Standard CharteredseesSKY token rising fivefold by end-2028.SBFasksSupreme Court to overturn fraud conviction and $11B forfeiture.RevolutsaysKYC, btc tx data exposed after fake request from gov’t domain.Bitcoin, etherriseas inflation data does little to alter Fed interest rate outlook.
NOTEWORTHY READS & MEME
Paul Klay’s𝕏readon why crypto VCs are going bankrupt.Gabriel Saphiro’s𝕏readon 5 Ways of Tokenizing Securities.Keone Hon’s𝕏readon Interest Rates in Leveraged Lending Markets.
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