A federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday refused to vacate Gemini’s 2025 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, even though the agency had joined the crypto exchange in asking him to.
U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied the joint motion in an eight-page order, leaving in place the consent order’s injunction and Gemini’s promise not to publicly deny its findings. Gemini has already paid the $5 million civil penalty, the order noted.
“The CFTC’s present assessment that this action should not have been brought does not require vacatur or other relief,” Hellerstein wrote in the ruling.
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What the Two Sides Wanted
The CFTC sued Gemini in June 2022, alleging the exchange gave agency staff false or misleading information while they reviewed a proposed bitcoin futures contract that would have settled on an auction price from Gemini’s own platform. The case settled in December 2024, less than three weeks before trial, and the court entered the consent order on Jan. 6, 2025.
On May 28, 2026, the regulator and Gemini filed together to wipe out the order or, as a fallback, its forward-looking terms. The order says they cited the CFTC’s shift in enforcement policy, which President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order on digital assets helped drive, plus a review the agency conducted after the deal. The CFTC said that review showed it wouldn’t bring the case today, and that its staff had acted improperly, partly by relying on a whistleblower it now considers unreliable.
Why the Court Said No
Hellerstein found that none of it amounted to a significant change in the facts or the law. “Newly acquired knowledge of facts that existed at the time the Consent Order was entered does not constitute a significant change in factual circumstances,” he wrote.
He noted that Gemini knew as early as August 2017 that its own chief operating officer and a subordinate had enabled a fraud scheme against it. The company fought the case for about three years and then “made the calculated decision to settle the case shortly before trial,” the judge wrote. Documents Gemini received later “may have caused it to regret that it settled,” he added, but that did not make keeping the order in force unfair.
The judge called the executive order, a Justice Department memo titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution” and the agency’s new approach “a change in enforcement priorities and policies,” rather than a change in the law. He also rejected the argument that regulatory pressure made Gemini’s consent involuntary, noting the company had lawyers and settled by choice.
The ruling leaves one door open: the CFTC “retains discretion over its enforcement priorities” and can weigh its current policies when deciding whether to enforce the order at all, Hellerstein wrote in the order.
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