Onchain, in court: What happened in crypto legal news this week
A US District Court in SDNY entered consent orders in a CFTC case against former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang. Both received five-year trading bans tied to FTX’s collapse. Ellison also got a 10-year registration ban, and Wang an eight-year registration ban. The CFTC said their cooperation materially assisted its FTX investigation. These civil sanctions are separate from criminal cases; Ellison was sentenced to two years in prison and Wang received time served. Separately, US prosecutors opposed a motion to dismiss by Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US soldier accused of making more than $400,000 on Polymarket using nonpublic information linked to operations involving Nicolás Maduro. The government argued his claims about ambiguity in the Commodity Exchange Act are premature and rely on improper factual disputes that should not be decided at the motion-to-dismiss stage.
