The thing that makes me very uneasy about this is... it's crypto. If you let people walk away with anything less than decades in prison you're setting a bad precedent. Why? Because the entire design of crypto is to allow you to squirrel money away, honestly what are the chances that these guys have some cold wallet lying around with a few million dollars in bitcoin? That's what I'd do if I was running this scam.
You're assuming that FTX is the extent of the DOJ and SEC investigations. SBF is going to be offered a deal - "Spend the rest of your life in prison or give us CZ/Binance and all the other big players and be out in 10". Remember, in addition to their chat group labeled "Wirefraud" they also had another one called "Exchange coordination" that the heads of other exchanges participated in. In addition to SBF, CZ (Binance), Powell (Kraken), Ardoino (Tether), and Sun (Tron) were participants.
Not saying that nefarious things weren't happening, but keeping lines of communication open between exchanges is reasonable and is not per se evidence of wrongdoing.
For example, if someone steals a bunch of coins from exchange A then you would want exchanges B and C to be able to made aware of that ASAP so that they can stop the movement of those coins.
They will all get deals to avoid trial because nobody in power wants to dig into political donations or possibly even money laundering from US funds that went to Ukraine with some of it stolen and washed through FTX.
