A judge keeps Gemini's $5M CFTC order in place after both sides asked to undo it

Serguey Asael Shinder17 October 2026, 08:542 min read

A federal judge refused to set aside Gemini's $5 million settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) even though the agency had joined the exchange in asking him to reverse it, crypto.news reported on 16 October 2026. In the 15 October ruling in CFTC v. Gemini Trust Company LLC, Judge Alvin Hellerstein left the January 2025 consent order in effect. The $5 million civil penalty had already been paid and will not be returned under the parties' own proposal, so the live dispute was over the order's permanent injunction against false or misleading statements to the CFTC and its other continuing terms. (This account is crypto.news's reporting of the court's decision and docket; the authoritative text is the order itself in case 1:22-cv-04563-AKH.)

How the case got here. The CFTC sued Gemini in 2022 over statements made while agency staff reviewed a Bitcoin futures contract that would settle against an auction price on Gemini's exchange; the claim was about allegedly false or misleading representations to the regulator, not a charge that trading on the exchange was fraudulent. Gemini contested it and, less than three weeks before a scheduled trial, settled with a consent order entered 6 January 2025, imposing the $5 million penalty and the injunction. Gemini neither admitted nor denied the allegations. crypto.news stresses a distinction worth keeping: the order is an operative judicial restriction, not a trial finding that the allegations were proved — a November 2024 pretrial ruling (docket entry 182) had denied the CFTC summary judgment except on whether Gemini "made" the representations.

Why the reversal failed. In May 2026 the CFTC and Gemini jointly moved, under Rule 60(b)(5) and alternatively 60(b)(6), to vacate the order or its prospective parts; the CFTC's statement listed six concerns about its own prior conduct, and said the paid penalty would not be returned. Hellerstein's reasoning, as reported: Rule 60(b)(5) needs a significant change in facts or law that makes continued enforcement inequitable, and a change in enforcement policy plus new awareness of older facts does not meet that standard — information that existed before the judgment can be newly learned by a party without being a new post-judgment event. Rule 60(b)(6)'s "extraordinary circumstances" cannot serve as a general appeal from a bargain a party now regrets. The court noted a regulator may decline to bring similar cases in future or police an injunction less aggressively, but cannot erase an existing order through a press release or policy memo.

The takeaway crypto.news draws, and the honest one, is that two things are both true and neither cancels the other: the CFTC publicly changed its view of its own investigation, and the court found no sufficient legal basis to undo the consent judgment. The penalty and the forward-looking restrictions remain on the record.

Source: crypto.news, "The CFTC changed its mind on Gemini. The judge did not." — https://crypto.news/the-cftc-changed-its-mind-on-gemini-the-judge-did-not/