CFTC Closes Its FTX Case Against Ellison and Wang With Bans, No New Fines

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• The CFTC entered supplemental consent orders against Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang on August 19, barring each from trading for five years.
• Ellison is also barred from registering with the agency for 10 years; Wang for eight.
• Neither owes a new fine. The agency credited both with “material assistance” in its FTX investigations.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has formally sanctioned Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, the former Alameda Research CEO and FTX co-founder, closing out the last piece of its civil case against them nearly four years after it began. The agency’s enforcement docket has been anything but settled lately, as it is currently trying to vacate a $5 million Gemini settlement in a major reversal of a crypto enforcement case. Supplemental consent orders entered in the Southern District of New York on August 19 bar both from trading in CFTC-regulated markets for five years. Ellison faces a further 10-year ban on registering with the agency in any capacity; Wang faces eight.

Neither is being fined. That’s notably different from how the CFTC closed out its case against KuCoin, which paid a $500,000 fine to settle its own dispute with the agency. The CFTC’s director of enforcement, David Miller, said the sanctions reflect the pair’s “material assistance in the Commission’s FTX-related investigations,” language that credits their cooperation rather than penalizing new conduct.

That’s the part worth sitting with. This isn’t a new punishment so much as the CFTC finishing paperwork on two witnesses whose actual reckoning happened elsewhere already, on a timeline that has been quietly accelerating for the past year.

Line them up, as above, and today’s move reads less like a new punishment than the last, emptiest entry on a list that already did its real work in 2024 and 2025. There’s little left in any regulator’s docket marked open against either of them.