Donald Trump was prepared to quit the US presidential election race for $5bn, it has been claimed.

Representatives of the former president are said to have floated a figure of $5bn (£4.1bn) when they were approached by the accused cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The FTX founder was “exploring the legality” of buying off Mr Trump to ensure he didn’t stand in the 2020 election, according to a new book.

The claim was made in an extract from Going Infinite by the author Michael Lewis, which chronicles the rise and fall Mr Bankman-Fried.

Mr Lewis, who also wrote The Big Short and Moneyball, spent more than two years speaking to 31-year-old Mr Bankman-Fried, who became a billionaire after founding crypto trading platform FTX.

“He explained to me, as the plane descended into Washington, he was exploring the legality of paying Donald Trump himself not to run for president,” the author wrote in an excerpt published by the Washington Post.

“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5bn. Or so Sam was told by his team.”

Mr Lewis also claimed Mr Bankman-Fried was planning to give between $15m and $30m to Republican Mitch McConnell, in the hope he would defeat the “Trumpier” candidates in the US Senate elections.

Mr Trump’s representatives could not be contacted for comment.

Other claims in the book include an allegation that Mr Bankman-Fried lost $300m on a single trade at Jane Street Capital after wrongly betting that Mr Trump’s 2016 election would crash the stock markets.

The excerpt was published ahead of the start of the former FTX chief executive’s criminal trial in New York on Monday where he is accused of fraud and conspiracy linked to the collapse of the business.

Once worth an estimated $26bn, Mr Bankman-Fried is accused of stealing billions of dollars in customer deposits and funnelling the money into risky bets at his personal crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, and to spend on property and political donations.

Mr Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, was accused by US federal prosecutors of channelling millions to Democratic Party candidates and causes. Donations totalling more than $39m made him the party’s second-biggest individual donor in 2021-2022.

Revelations in the book shed fresh light on the internal culture at FTX, once one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

The business converted real-world currencies into digital tokens, enabling consumers to speculate on cryptocurrencies’ rapidly fluctuating values without the checks and balances of the real financial system.