New developments have taken place this week in the United States in two cases of encryption law, involving civil law enforcement in the old FTX case and criminal proceedings initiated by Polymarket predicting market transactions. The former was promoted by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), while the latter was still before the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York.

Pre-FTX executives are banned from trading.

This week, the Federal District Court of the Southern District of New York issued a consent order in an enforcement case initiated by CFTC in 2022, involving Caroline Ellison, former Chief Executive Officer of Alameda Research, and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, co-founder of FTX.

According to court documents, both will accept a five-year trade ban for reasons related to the role of the FTX in the collapse. In addition to the transaction ban, Ellison was also sentenced to a 10-year registration ban and Wang ' s registration ban was eight years.

CTTC law enforcement officials indicated that these arrangements also reflected the substantive assistance provided by the two individuals in FTX-related investigations. The case was civil law enforcement and was dealt with separately from the criminal case of FTX misappropriation of client funds. Previously, Ellison had been sentenced to two years ' imprisonment and Wang had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

The prosecution objected to the motion to withdraw.

Another case revolved around the forecast market platform Polymarket. This week, the United States prosecution filed a file with the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York against the withdrawal motion filed by the accused, Gannon Ken Van Dyke.

The prosecution alleges that the United States soldier profited more than $400,000 in contract transactions in the Polymarket incident, using undisclosed information. The case materials state that he was involved in a military operation against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January this year.

Van Dyke, in his application for withdrawal filed on 31 July, stated that the Merchandise Trading Act, which was the basis for many of the charges, differed as to how the incident contract was to be considered a “vert” subject to the jurisdiction of the CTC. In response, the Government of the United States stated that the defendants had raised hypothetical situations, marginal cases and disputes relating to state lottery laws, which were not issues that needed to be dealt with by the courts at the current stage of the proceedings.

The court has yet to publish its decision.

The federal prosecutor in charge of the case also stated that the accused had attempted to push the court to make an improper factual finding at the withdrawal stage and to make a speculative interpretation based on the indictment in order to deny that the facts constituted “property”.

As of Friday, the Court ' s public case file had not yet produced an updated decision on the motion for withdrawal.