CFTC Bans Ellison, Wang From Trading Five Years, Waives Fines Over Cooperation

2 min readPublished 24 Aug 2026

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has closed out its civil case against Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang without collecting a dollar from either former executive personally. Consent orders bar both from trading for five years, according to Cointelegraph, Bloomberg and BeInCrypto. Ellison also received a 10-year registration ban and Wang an eight-year ban, all three outlets report.

Cointelegraph, citing the filings, says the orders were entered in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday and require Ellison and Wang to keep cooperating with the commission. The outlet reports that CFTC enforcement director David Miller said Ellison and Wang were found liable for fraud at Alameda and FTX, but that their sanctions reflect the material assistance they gave to the agency’s FTX-related investigations.

Cooperation instead of cash

Bloomberg reports the agency did not seek monetary penalties based on that cooperation. BeInCrypto similarly reports the CFTC walked away from restitution, disgorgement and civil fines against Ellison and Wang personally, citing their cooperation.

Ellison and Wang were named alongside former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried in the CFTC’s original December 2022 complaint, according to Cointelegraph. Bankman-Fried was later convicted and sentenced to 25 years; Ellison received a two-year sentence and was granted early release in January, Cointelegraph reports. Former FTX engineering director Nishad Singh and Wang both received time served, the outlet said.

Where the outlets agree — and where they don’t

All three outlets align on the core sanctions: five-year trading bans for both defendants, a 10-year registration ban for Ellison, an eight-year registration ban for Wang, and no personal financial penalty for either.

The accounts diverge on the money behind the story. Cointelegraph reports that FTX and Alameda — the companies, not the individuals — were separately ordered to pay $12.7 billion in disgorgement and restitution under an August 2024 CFTC decision. BeInCrypto instead cites an $11.02 billion criminal forfeiture as the figure the CFTC pointed to when explaining why it waived fines against Ellison and Wang. Neither Cointelegraph nor Bloomberg corroborates the $11.02 billion figure, and it is unclear from the reporting whether the two sums describe the same recovery pool, overlapping pools, or entirely separate civil and criminal proceedings.

BeInCrypto also reports that the trading and registration bans run retroactively from December 2022. That detail appears in no other outlet’s account and should be treated as single-sourced pending confirmation.

What isn’t settled

No outlet in this review has published the full text of the consent orders, so every figure and date traces to newsroom reporting rather than the court filing itself. Whether the bans take effect from the August 2026 filing or reach back to December 2022, and how the $12.7 billion and $11.02 billion figures relate, remain open questions.