100% of My Investors Stood By Me — And the CFTC Still Pursued This Case

When the CFTC's court-appointed Receiver filed a motion to liquidate the cryptocurrency assets in the receivership estate — effectively destroying the remaining value of my investors' holdings — something remarkable happened.

Every single investor objected.

Not a majority. Not most of them. One hundred percent of the investors in Rose City Fund filed formal objections with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. They retained independent legal counsel. They wrote personal letters to the judge. They filed formal legal briefs. They did everything within their power to stop the Receiver from liquidating the assets that represented their investment.

These are not anonymous statistics. These are real people — Nimish Madhiwala, Bimal Patel, Vamsi Thalluri, Maya Patel, Kumud Patel, Tushar Vashi, Bala Kancharla, Satish Sreedhara, and dozens more — who took time out of their lives to write to a federal judge and say: we trust Sam Ikkurty, we do not want this liquidation, and we object to what is being done in our name.

What the Investors Actually Said

The investor letters are now part of the public court record, docketed as Documents 212 through 243 in CFTC v. Ikkurty, Case No. 1:22-cv-02597 (N.D. Ill.). I have uploaded all of them to the Investor Objections section of the Legal Documents page [blocked] so that anyone can read them directly.

These letters are not form letters. Each one is personal. Each one reflects a real investor's genuine assessment of what happened to their money and what they wanted the court to do about it. The consistent message across all of them is the same: the investors did not feel defrauded by me. They felt harmed by the CFTC's enforcement action and the Receiver's management of their assets.

This is a fact that the CFTC's narrative cannot accommodate. The agency brought this case claiming to protect investors. But the investors themselves — unanimously — told the court that the harm was coming from the CFTC and the Receiver, not from me.

The Receiver's Motion to Liquidate

To understand why the investor objections matter so much, it helps to understand what the Receiver was proposing to do.

In 2023, the court-appointed Receiver filed a motion to liquidate all cryptocurrency assets in the receivership estate. At the time, those assets included significant holdings in DeFi protocols on the Ethereum blockchain — the same assets that had generated the extraordinary returns documented in the StoneTurn expert report.

Liquidating those assets at that moment would have locked in losses at a time when the crypto market was near a cyclical low. It would have permanently destroyed value that, if held, could have recovered and grown substantially. The investors understood this. They had been following the fund's strategy for years. They knew what the assets were worth and what they could be worth.

So they objected. Formally, legally, and unanimously.

What the Court Record Shows

The court record in this case tells a story that is fundamentally different from the CFTC's narrative. Here is what the documents show:

The investors were not victims of fraud. They were sophisticated participants who understood the fund's DeFi strategy, received 139 consecutive weekly updates with full blockchain transparency, and — when given the opportunity to speak to the court — unanimously defended the fund and opposed the government's actions.

The investors were not seeking restitution from me. In a genuine fraud case, investors typically line up to recover their losses from the defendant. In this case, the investors lined up to defend me and oppose the Receiver's liquidation proposal.

The investors retained independent counsel. Attorney Sesha Kalapatapu filed a motion for leave to appear pro hac vice (Dkt. #229) to represent the investors' interests in opposing the Receiver's motion. This is not the behavior of a group of fraud victims seeking justice against a wrongdoer. This is the behavior of investors who believe the government is acting against their interests.

The CFTC's Response to Unanimous Investor Opposition

How did the CFTC respond to the fact that 100% of the investors opposed the Receiver's liquidation motion?

They continued the prosecution anyway.

This is perhaps the most revealing fact in the entire case. The agency's stated mission is to protect investors. The investors — every single one of them — told the court they did not want the agency's protection in this form. They asked the court to stop the liquidation. They asked for their assets to be preserved.

The CFTC's response was to press forward regardless.

This is not investor protection. This is regulatory overreach that harms the very people it claims to protect.

The Broader Context: What the Numbers Say

The investor objections do not exist in isolation. They are consistent with every other piece of evidence in this case:

• 69 investors exited Rose City Investment Fund I (RCIF1) with a mean CAGR of 303%. The investor with the lowest returns had a CAGR of 16.44%. Zero investors lost money.
• Fund II investors received returns as high as 339.55% in one year.
• The independent StoneTurn expert report, prepared by Charles R. Soha, CFE, found no misappropriation of investor funds and confirmed that the returns were mathematically impossible in a Ponzi scheme.
• CFTC Investigator Heather Dasso admitted under oath: "As far as this case, I did not look at the blockchain, correct." She also admitted that no investor ever complained about not receiving their promised dividend payments.

Taken together, these facts paint a clear picture: this is a case where the government pursued a fraud prosecution despite the absence of fraud, the absence of investor harm, and the unanimous opposition of the investors themselves.

Why I Am Sharing This Now

I am sharing the investor objection documents publicly because transparency is the only tool available to someone in my position.

For over three years, I have watched the CFTC's narrative — "Ponzi scheme," "fraud," "investor harm" — circulate in the press and in court filings, largely unchallenged by the countervailing evidence. The investors who wrote those letters to Judge Rowland deserve to have their voices heard beyond the court record. The public deserves to know that the people the CFTC claims to be protecting unanimously opposed the agency's actions.

The investor letters are now available in the Investor Objections section of the Legal Documents page [blocked]. I encourage anyone who wants to understand this case to read them. They are the most direct evidence of what actually happened — not what the CFTC alleged, but what the investors themselves experienced and believed.

The rule of law must apply equally to government agencies and private citizens. When an agency pursues a prosecution that its own alleged victims oppose unanimously, something has gone profoundly wrong — and that wrongdoing must be documented, challenged, and corrected.

I will continue to do exactly that.