The CFTC ordered Nishad Singh, a former engineering director at FTX crypto and FTX US, to pay $3.7 million under a supplemental consent order finalized on April 1, 2026 – to resolve the agency’s civil enforcement actions arising from his role in the misappropriation of client funds worth more than $8 billion that precipitated FTX’s November 2022 collapse.
Singh who He begged Guilty on federal criminal charges and cooperating extensively with the Department of Justice (DOJ), and avoiding prison time in his criminal proceedings, the CFTC’s final order imposes no additional civil money penalty beyond the default amount.
We believe that this finding is less a measure of Singh’s guilt, which the factual record has established as substantial evidence, than a calculated signal from law enforcement agencies about the evidentiary value of insider cooperation in complex, code-embedded financial fraud.
⚡️Former Engineering Head at FTX Was Fined $3.7 Million by CFTC
Nishad Singh, former head of engineering at FTX, has agreed to pay $3.7 million to settle a CFTC case over FTX’s collapse.
He also faced charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, but avoided a significant prison sentence after cooperating. pic.twitter.com/chJ1QmtHG3
— Currency Bureau (@coinbureau) April 2, 2026
The structure of the FTX chart was not reconstructed from trading records alone; It took witnesses who understood exactly what the code did and why it was written that way.
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Nishad Singh: The Micro Mechanics and Credit Collaboration of CFTC vs. FTX Crypto
Singh joins FTX Crypto as its Engineering Lead and reports directly to Samuel Bankman-Fried, overseeing development teams across FTX and Alameda Research. The original CFTC Complaint – Case No. 8669-23, was filed in February 2023 as an amendment to the action taken on December 21, 2022 against Bankman-Fried and FTX Trading Ltd. and Alameda Research – charged Singh under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) with fraud by embezzlement and aiding and abetting the Bankman-Fried fraud scheme.
Singh’s sharing mechanism works at the code level as follows: In 2019, Singh implemented “allowing negative flags” within the FTX exchange infrastructure, a feature that allowed Alameda Research to hold negative balances on the platform – effectively giving the company unlimited, undisclosed credit against assets deposited by clients.
image: Nishad Singh
In August 2020, Singh modified the liquidation engine to exempt Alameda from the automatic liquidation protocols applied to all other accounts, and subsequently raised Alameda’s borrowing cap to $65 billion. Neither feature has been disclosed to crypto clients or FTX counterparties.
The $3.7 million recovery figure specifically relates to Singh’s October 2022 purchase of residential real estate — acquired weeks before FTX’s collapse — funded by withdrawals from his FTX account that regulators determined contained misappropriated client funds. This figure is not a new penalty assessed at the supplementary order stage; It represents the return of traceable illicit profits and is coordinated with the parallel criminal forfeiture provision introduced in the Ministry of Justice proceedings.
A preliminary consent order entered in April 2023 had permanently barred Singh from committing further CEA violations, with an April 2026 supplemental order formalizing the quantum of discharge, a five-year trading ban, and an eight-year ban from CFTC-registered entities.
David Miller, director of enforcement at the CFTC, said the reduced financial terms reflected Singh’s “cooperation with investigators,” a description that clearly links the outcome to the value of the testimony. We expect the CFTC will continue to structure consent orders in this tiered manner – separating injunctive relief and trade prohibitions from monetary penalties – in cases where cooperating defendants have already delivered identified illegal proceeds through parallel criminal forfeiture mechanisms.
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Daniel Francis is a technical writer and Web3 educator specializing in macroeconomics and DeFi mechanics. A crypto native since 2017, Daniel brings his background in cross-chain analytics to author evidence-based reports and detailed guides. It is certified by the Blockchain Council and is dedicated to providing “information gain” that cuts through the market noise to find blockchain’s real-world utility.
