The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has settled enforcement actions against Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, former executives at FTX and Alameda Research, by imposing five-year trading bans on both and barring them from futures industry registration for eight to ten years.
Neither defendant will pay monetary penalties. The CFTC said in its announcement that it resolved the cases based on their cooperation with the agency's investigation into FTX's collapse.
Ellison, who ran Alameda Research, faces a ten-year bar from seeking or obtaining CFTC registration as a futures commission merchant, introducing broker, commodity trading advisor, or commodity pool operator. Wang, FTX's former engineering lead and co-founder of Alameda, was hit with an eight-year registration bar. Both are prohibited from trading futures on their own account or as a fiduciary for any other party for five years from the date the order is finalized.
The settlement closes a parallel CFTC track to the criminal prosecution of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, whose fraud trial ended in a conviction on all counts in November 2023. Ellison and Wang testified against Bankman-Fried as prosecution witnesses after pleading guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud. Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
The CFTC alleged that Ellison and Wang violated core futures rules by allowing Alameda to use FTX customer deposits without authorization and to control FTX's trading operations. The agency claimed they were aware that Alameda had borrowed billions of dollars in customer funds and deployed them for undisclosed trading and speculative positions. Neither executive contested the allegations in settling.
The registration bars are material. A ten-year prohibition effectively blocks Ellison from participating in the futures industry without seeking readmission years after her release from expected prison time. Both executives had been facing individual administrative proceedings; the CFTC opted for settlements that locked in their admissions without escalating to a contested hearing.
The five-year trading ban aligns with penalties the SEC imposed on other FTX insiders and matches the duration of similar restrictions in major financial enforcement actions. The lack of a civil monetary penalty distinguishes these settlements from parallel cases in the financial sector, where agencies typically impose both trading bars and monetary damages. The CFTC elected not to seek damages in either case, citing the defendants' willingness to cooperate and their expected prison sentences as sufficient deterrence.
