Nishad Singh, former director of engineering at FTX crypto and FTX US, was ordered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to pay $3.7 million in restitution under a supplemental consent order finalized on April 1, 2026 – resolving the agency’s civil action stemming from his role in the misappropriation of more than $8 billion in customer funds that precipitated FTX’s collapse in November 2022.
Singh, who pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges and cooperated extensively with the Department of Justice (DOJ), avoided prison time during his criminal proceedings, and the CFTC’s final order imposes no additional civil monetary penalties beyond the restitution amount.
We suspect that this result is less a measure of Singh’s culpability, which the factual record establishes as substantial, than a calibrated signal from law enforcement agencies about the probative value of internal cooperation in a complex, code-integrated financial fraud.
⚡️FORMER FTX ENGINEERING CHIEF AGREES TO $3.7M FINE BY CFTC
Former FTX Chief Engineering Officer Nishad Singh has agreed to pay $3.7 million to settle a CFTC case following FTX’s collapse.
He also faced charges from the SEC and DOJ, but avoided major prison time after cooperating. pic.twitter.com/chJ1QmtHG3
– Coinbureau (@coinbureau) April 2, 2026
The architecture of the FTX system was not reconstructed from commercial records alone; it needed witnesses who understood precisely what the code did and why it was written that way.
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Nishad Singh: CFTC Fine Mechanics and Cooperation Credit Against FTX Crypto
Singh joined FTX crypto as Head of Engineering and reported directly to Samuel Bankman-Fried, overseeing the development teams at FTX and Alameda Research. The CFTC’s original complaint – Case No. 8669-23, filed in February 2023 as an amendment to the December 21, 2022 action against Bankman-Fried, FTX Trading Ltd. and Alameda Research – charged Singh under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) with fraud by conversion and aiding and abetting Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent scheme.
Singh’s code-level stake mechanism works as follows: In 2019, Singh implemented the “negative permission flag” within FTX’s exchange infrastructure, a feature that allowed Alameda Research to maintain negative balances on the platform, thereby granting the company unlimited, undisclosed credit on assets deposited by customers.
Photo: Nishad Singh
In August 2020, Singh further modified the liquidation engine to exempt Alameda from the self-liquidation protocols applied to all other accounts, and subsequently increased Alameda’s borrowing limit to $65 billion. Neither feature has been disclosed to clients or FTX crypto counterparties.
The $3.7 million restitution amount is specifically linked to Singh’s purchase of residential real estate in October 2022 – acquired weeks before FTX’s collapse – funded by withdrawals from his FTX account that regulators say contained misappropriated customer funds. This figure does not constitute a new penalty imposed at the supplementary order stage; it represents the return of traceable illegal profits and is coordinated with the parallel criminal judgment of forfeiture entered into the DOJ proceeding.
An initial consent order issued in April 2023 had already permanently barred Singh from any further violations of the CEA, with the April 2026 supplemental order formalizing the restitution amount, a five-year trading ban, and an eight-year ban for entities registered with the CFTC.
CFTC Enforcement Director David Miller said the reduced financial terms reflect Singh’s “cooperation with investigators,” a characterization that explicitly ties the outcome to the value of the testimony. We anticipate that the CFTC will continue to structure consent orders in this tiered manner – separating injunctive relief and trade bans from monetary penalties – in cases where cooperating defendants have already returned identifiable illegal proceeds through parallel criminal forfeiture mechanisms.
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Daniel Frances is a technical writer and Web3 educator specializing in macroeconomics and DeFi mechanics. Hailing from crypto since 2017, Daniel leverages his experience in on-chain analytics to write evidence-based reports and in-depth guides. He holds certifications from the Blockchain Council and is dedicated to providing “insight gain” that overcomes market hype to find real utility for blockchain.
