FTX’s Caroline Ellison Set to Leave Prison Early

A key figure in the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX is nearly set to leave prison.

Caroline Ellison, a key prosecution witness during the fraud trial of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, is scheduled to leave federal custody Jan. 21 of next year, according to records from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Ellison, 31, has been in community confinement since October, following her transfer from a federal prison in Connecticut, Business Insider reported earlier this month, citing Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Randilee Giamusso. That report listed her release date as Feb. 20.

Community confinement means that Ellison is still in federal custody, but is either in home confinement or a halfway house.

“For privacy, safety and security reasons, we do not discuss the conditions of confinement for any individual, including reasons for transfers or release plans, nor do we specify an individual’s specific location while in community confinement,” Giamusso said.

Ellison, who headed FTX’s sister firm Alameda Research, was sentenced in September of last year to two years in prison after pleading guilty in December 2022. She began serving her sentence in November 2024, and soon had her release date scaled back to July 20 of 2026, three months earlier than planned.

Her testimony at Bankman-Fried’s trial in 2023 helped convict him of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy with jurors finding him guilty of stealing $8 billion from FTX customers, leading to the exchange’s collapse.

Ellison, who had an on-again, off-again relationship with Bankman-Fried, testified that the CEO had directed her and other two executives to commit fraud. Asked by the prosecution what made her guilty, Ellison said, “Alameda took several billions of dollars from FTX customers and used it for investments.”

Those executives were Zixiao (Gary) Wang, the former chief technology officer of FTX Trading, and Nishad Singh, the former co-lead engineer of FTX.

Earlier this month, the three agreed to final judgments from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), without denying the regulator’s allegations.

The judgments include a 10-year officer-and-director bar for Ellison, and eight-year officer-and-director bars for Wang and Singh, along with five-year conduct-based injunctions for Ellison, Wang and Singh.

In other FTX-related news, Brett Harrison, the company’s former president of operations in the U.S., reportedly raised $35 million for his perpetual futures exchange startup Architect Financial Technologies last week.

Harrison was never charged with any wrongdoing and criticized Bankman-Fried on X — then still called Twitter — in 2023.

“I never could have guessed that underlying these kinds of issues — which I’d seen at other more mature firms in my career and believed not to be fatal to business success — was multibillion-dollar fraud,” Harrison wrote.