U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York denied a joint motion by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Gemini Trust Company, LLC for relief from a January 6, 2025 Consent Order. Document 223, filed October 15, 2026 in 22 Civ. 4563 (AKH), is captioned an order and opinion denying the Rule 60 motion. The $5 million civil monetary penalty (already paid) and the permanent injunction against false or misleading statements or omissions to the Commission stay in force.
This is not a new CFTC complaint, not an SEC action, and not a Gemini outage. CoinGecko’s site snapshot at 2026-10-16T08:56:09+00:00 showed Bitcoin (BTC) at $82,234. Coinbase BTC-USD last traded at $82,150.46 at 2026-10-16T09:08:16Z, with the venue’s 24-hour stats range $79,676.02–$82,555.08. That recovered wick is still a range, not a break. The court file is the story.
Narrative is cheap on a day like this. Exit liquidity is not the point either. The point is whether a settled venue can buy its way out of a false-statement injunction because enforcement fashion changed. Judge Hellerstein said no.
What happened
On June 2, 2022 the CFTC sued Gemini, a U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, alleging false or misleading statements of material fact during the agency’s review of a proposed Bitcoin futures contract. After discovery, summary judgment practice, and with trial three weeks away, the parties entered a Consent Order on January 6, 2025 (ECF Nos. 182, 211). Document 223 recites that the order imposed a $5 million civil monetary penalty plus continuing injunctive and related relief, and that Gemini has paid the penalty (ECF No. 219 at 2).
On May 28, 2026 the same parties jointly moved under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(5) to vacate the Consent Order and, in the alternative, under Rule 60(b)(6) to vacate its prospective provisions. They pointed to the CFTC’s current enforcement policies, including Executive Order 14178 (signed January 23, 2025; 90 Fed. Reg. 8647), and to a post-settlement review of internal materials. The agency, they said, would not have filed the Complaint under present standards, and its Division of Enforcement used inappropriate tactics.
Judge Hellerstein denied the motion. He wrote that neither argument supplies sufficient grounds under Rule 60(b)(5) or 60(b)(6). The Clerk is directed to terminate ECF Nos. 215 and 219. The handwritten date on the signature block is October 15, 2026, matching the PACER “Filed 10/15/26” stamp.
Context
The Consent Order was not a fight over whether Bitcoin futures should list. Section 5c(c) of the Commodity Exchange Act lets a designated contract market self-certify a new futures contract, but Core Principle 3 bars listing a contract that is “readily susceptible to manipulation.” Because the proposed contract would settle against an auction price on Gemini’s own exchange, staff review turned on Gemini’s own statements about that auction.
Document 223 walks through four buckets of alleged misrepresentations found in the Consent Order. Gemini represented that the exchange was “fully (pre-)funded” without disclosing customer trading on affiliate loans or undisclosed advances and credits from a Gemini employee. It represented that self-trading was technologically prevented and “prohibited,” without disclosing that no such safeguard existed before around May 2017, that self-trading had occurred, and that instances continued after the safeguard. It represented that its market-maker rebate program was uniform and publicly disclosed, without disclosing bespoke fee deals that two customers used for fraudulent or collusive trading. It submitted historical volume without disclosing that some of that volume reflected those loans, self-trades, rebates, and collusive flow. The Consent Order treated each as material to staff’s Bitcoin futures review and found a Section 6(c)(2) violation: knowingly or recklessly making a false or misleading material statement to the Commission, or omitting a fact needed to keep a statement from being misleading.
Relief tracked that theory: a permanent injunction plus the $5 million penalty. Gemini did not admit or deny the Complaint’s allegations, but it agreed not to take any action or make any public statement denying them. Liability was misrepresentation to the Commission, not a policy quarrel about whether the contract should have been listed.
Rule 60(b)(5) can modify a consent decree when prospective application is no longer equitable, if the moving party shows a significant change in factual conditions or in law. A change in a party’s “perception and knowledge” of facts that already existed when the decree was entered is not a changed circumstance. Rule 60(b)(6) is a narrow catchall for extraordinary circumstances, not a way around the one-year bars on newly discovered evidence and misconduct motions.
Gemini’s public status page read “All Systems Operational” as of 2026-10-16T04:29:01-04:00, with an empty unresolved-incident list. Deposit delays on other venues today (including a minor Kraken Conflux funding notice at 2026-10-16T08:12:20Z) are a different file. This clock is legal residue on a live U.S. spot venue, which is why it sits next to our Bitcoin history page and the Bitcoin news desk rather than an outage log.
Our read
I read Document 223 as a venue-risk print, not a policy victory lap. The Trump-era digital-asset order and a later CFTC view that “this action should not have been brought” do not, on this record, vacate a paid penalty or a going-forward injunction. Hellerstein called Gemini’s December 24, 2024 settlement a “free, calculated, [and] deliberate choice” made after about three years of litigation, with counsel, fewer than three weeks before trial. Gemini also affirmed in the Consent Order that it had read and agreed to it voluntarily, and that no extra-record threat induced consent. Newly learned old facts, he said, may cause regret. They do not make continued application inequitable.
That matters for anyone treating Gemini as a clean U.S. on-ramp. Counterparty risk here is not “will the matching engine halt this hour.” It is whether a still-operative injunction and a no-denial clause sit on the same name that holds customer bitcoin. Policy memos can change what the agency files next year. They do not, by themselves, shred a 2025 consent that the defendant already paid.
Falsifiable claim: by 2026-12-31 23:59 UTC, if the Southern District of New York or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacates Document 223 or enters an order vacating the January 6, 2025 Consent Order (ECF 211), this “still binds” read is wrong. A CFTC blog post saying the case was a mistake would not be enough. A docketed vacatur would.
What to watch
First, the docket in 22 Civ. 4563 (AKH). Document 223 tells the Clerk to terminate ECF 215 and 219. Watch for a notice of appeal, a new stipulated motion, or any later order that actually vacates ECF 211. Until that hits the docket, treat the injunction and the no-denial clause as live.
Second, CFTC enforcement of the remaining terms. Hellerstein noted the agency keeps discretion over whether to seek enforcement of the Consent Order under current policies. A quiet file is not the same as a vacated file. Traders who only read headlines about “crypto-friendly” Washington should keep that split in view when they follow crypto news without getting played.
Third, the Bitcoin tape around this print. Snapshot BTC at $82,234 (2026-10-16T08:56:09+00:00) and Coinbase’s $79,676.02–$82,555.08 session range do not reprice a consent order. If you need a refresher on how we timestamp venue stats versus the site snapshot, use how to read a crypto market snapshot. A decisive range break would be a separate story. This one is the court saying a settled venue does not get a do-over because the administration changed.
Watch the docket, not the slogan.