Nishad Singh, the former head of engineering at the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, will pay $3.7 million and face trading restrictions after the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission resolved its enforcement action against him this week, closing yet another chapter in one of the most sprawling fraud cases the crypto industry has ever seen.
The supplemental consent order, entered by a US District Court for the Southern District of New York, imposes disgorgement of $3.7 million and carries a five-year trading ban and an eight-year registration ban, both running from the date of the initial consent order. The bans effectively bar Singh from obtaining any license to operate in regulated markets for the foreseeable future.
The CFTC’s director of enforcement, David Miller, said the resolution was calibrated to reflect not just Singh’s misconduct but also his decision to cooperate. “The defendant engaged in, and aided, significant violations of the Act and CFTC regulations as the former FTX head of engineering, and the consent orders reflect the severity of these violations,” Miller said.
“But this resolution also reflects the Commission’s commitment to rewarding and incentivizing material assistance in Division investigations.” Notably, the CFTC said it is not imposing additional restitution or civil monetary penalties at this time, citing Singh’s cooperation.
Attorneys for Singh told Bloomberg they were pleased the matter was behind their client and that the CFTC had recognized his limited role in the underlying conduct.
Singh faced charges from multiple agencies
This outcome is the latest, and likely one of the last legal settlements Singh faces following FTX’s catastrophic November 2022 collapse. The bankruptcy sent shockwaves through the crypto industry, erasing billions in market liquidity and prompting authorities to charge FTX’s leadership with fraud.
Singh was swept up in the fallout along with four other senior executives, each of whom has since faced a range of civil and criminal consequences. The CFTC originally charged Singh in February 2023 with two counts: fraud by misappropriation and aiding and abetting such fraud committed by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
In April of that year, a court entered an initial consent order finding Singh liable on both counts. At the time, the regulator had sought far harsher penalties, including full restitution, civil monetary fines and permanent bans, outcomes that were ultimately softened given his assistance to investigators.
A separate case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2023 accused Singh of misusing customer funds and committing fraud by misappropriation. That case settled in December with Singh receiving an eight-year industry ban.
Cooperation with prosecutors shaped the final outcome
On the criminal side, Singh’s cooperation proved even more consequential. He pleaded guilty to six criminal counts and was sentenced in October 2024 to time served and three years of supervised release.
Judge Lewis Kaplan called his cooperation “remarkable” and said he was persuaded that Singh’s involvement in the fraud was far more limited than that of Bankman-Fried or Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research.
Prosecutors said Singh brought to the government’s attention criminal conduct they were not aware of and may have never discovered on their own, including information about what they described as one of the largest campaign finance schemes in US history, as well as instances where Bankman-Fried allegedly manipulated FTX’s financials to inflate its revenue figures.
Singh had testified that he didn’t learn of the billions of dollars missing from FTX customer accounts until just two months before the exchange’s collapse, and that he confronted Bankman-Fried about the shortfall during an hour-long conversation on the balcony of their shared Bahamas penthouse. Bankman-Fried, he said, assured him the situation would be remedied.
It wasn’t.
Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence. Ryan Salame, FTX’s former Bahamas CEO, received seven years. Ellison was sentenced to two years. Singh remains the only senior FTX executive to avoid prison time entirely, a distinction that speaks to how much weight federal prosecutors and regulators placed on his willingness to talk.
Whether the $3.7 million disgorgement figure stings much is hard to say. Singh was separately ordered to forfeit $11 billion in the criminal case and agreed to surrender a property, shares of Anthropic, and various crypto assets. In that context, the CFTC figure looks more like a formality than a punishment, though the trading and registration bans carry their own long-term weight.
With this week’s resolution, Singh’s legal exposure across multiple US agencies appears to be, for all practical purposes, closed.