The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission imposed five-year trading bans on former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang as part of a 2022 enforcement action linked to the crypto exchange’s collapse.
The consent orders, entered Tuesday by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, also included a 10-year registration ban for Ellison and an eight-year ban for Wang. The CFTC cited their “material assistance” in its FTX-related investigations, according to enforcement director David Miller. The civil case remains separate from ongoing criminal proceedings involving the misuse of customer funds at FTX, where Ellison was sentenced to two years in prison and Wang received time served.
In a separate legal development on Wednesday, U.S. prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed an opposition to a motion to dismiss charges against Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. soldier accused of profiting over $400,000 through event contracts on the prediction market platform Polymarket using nonpublic information. Van Dyke was associated with the January military operation that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The soldier’s motion to dismiss, filed July 31, argued that the Commodity Exchange Act’s treatment of event contracts as “swaps” under the CFTC’s authority was “ambiguous.” U.S. government lawyers countered that Van Dyke’s arguments relied on speculative assertions and improper inferences, stating that his motion sought factual determinations inappropriate at the motion-to-dismiss stage. SDNY Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean Buckley described the arguments as based on “incorrect conclusions about the nature of the charge.” As of Friday, the court had not issued a public decision on the motion.
