Gary Wang

Gary Wang is an entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is known as the co-founder and former chief technology officer (CTO) at FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. He was a software engineer at Google prior to co-founding FTX with Sam Bankman Fried.^[1][2] Following FTX’s collapse, Wang was charged in U.S. federal court and on December 19, 2022 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud on FTX customers, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and agreed to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the FTX bankruptcy estate.^[9]

On November 20, 2024, Wang was sentenced in federal court in New York to time served and supervised release, with the court citing the underlying scheme as among the largest financial frauds in U.S. history and imposing significant forfeiture obligations, in light of his extensive cooperation and trial testimony against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.^[10][9]

Prior to the collapse of FTX in November 2022, Gary Wang was considered one of the richest and youngest self-made billionaires in the world.^[3]

Education

In 2011, Gary Wang attended MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where he studied mathematics and computer science, he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in math and computer science, in 2015.^[6]

During his undergraduate studies, he took part in a variety of technology projects, including coding his team's robot for MIT's Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory competition, and worked as an intern at Facebook.^[5]

Career

After he graduated from MIT in 2015, Wang worked for 2 years at Google as a software engineer. In 2017, Wang became bored working at Google and was persuaded to leave Google by his college friend Sam Bankman-Fried. They both worked at Alameda Research, a trading firm.^[4][7]

Together with Bankman-Fried, Wang founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, and later relocated the company's headquarters from San Francisco to Hong Kong and then to the Bahamas, which has more favorable cryptocurrency regulations. He later cofounded FTX U.S, a sub-organization of the FTX company, which had a license to operate in the United States of America. Shortly after FTX was established, the company became successful and was worth 18 billion US dollars in 2021 and was worth 40 billion US dollars in 2022 before it collapsed in November 2022.^[8]

Controversies and Legal Issues

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed civil enforcement actions against Wang alleging that, as FTX’s chief technology officer and a co-owner of Alameda Research, he wrote code and implemented features that gave Alameda special trading privileges on FTX and enabled the diversion of FTX customer assets for Alameda’s use.^[11] These actions were resolved through consent judgments that included permanent antifraud injunctions and conduct-based injunctions, as well as an eight-year bar on serving as an officer or director of a public company and on association with certain regulated entities.^[11]

On December 19, 2022, Wang pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud on FTX customers, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud.^[9] He subsequently cooperated extensively with the U.S. Department of Justice, the SEC, the CFTC, and the FTX bankruptcy estate, serving as an early cooperating witness, providing source code and internal trading and balance data, and testifying for the government at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 2023 criminal trial.^[9] On November 20, 2024, in light of that cooperation and what prosecutors and the court described as involvement in one of the largest financial frauds, he was sentenced in the Southern District of New York to time served and a term of supervised release, with substantial forfeiture obligations.^[10][9]

In August 2026, supplemental consent orders in the CFTC case imposed a five-year ban on trading certain derivatives products and an eight-year registration ban on Wang, both running from December 23, 2022, and formally closed the CFTC’s enforcement action.^[12] The CFTC did not seek additional civil monetary penalties in light of his cooperation and an existing $11.02 billion criminal forfeiture order entered in his criminal case.^[12]