Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky heads into sentencing

Alexander Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to commodities fraud and securities fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said he deceived customers about Celsius’s financial health and manipulated the price of the company’s CEL token, conduct that prosecutors said contributed to billions of dollars in losses. Mashinsky was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release, pay a $50,000 fine, and forfeit $48,393,446. The sentencing is the latest chapter in the collapse of Celsius, once one of the largest crypto lending platforms. Celsius filed for bankruptcy in 2022 amid a broader crypto market downturn and liquidity problems, and the case became a prominent example of the risks tied to opaque lending practices in the digital-asset sector. Prosecutors had sought a 20-year sentence, underscoring how aggressively the government pursued the case; the final sentence was shorter but still among the most severe penalties imposed on a crypto executive. The outcome matters because Celsius was widely marketed as a safer, yield-generating alternative in crypto, and the case has become a benchmark for enforcement against alleged misrepresentation and token manipulation in the industry. It also closes a major criminal proceeding against a high-profile figure whose company’s failure affected large numbers of retail customers and became one of the most visible collapses of the 2022 crypto bear market.

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More coverage

• Founder Of Celsius Sentenced To 12 Years For Fraud And Market ... (justice.gov)
• Celsius founder gets 12 years in prison | Banking Dive (bankingdive.com)
• Crypto Fraud Update: Celsius Founder Sentenced to 12 Years in ... (frblaw.com)
• Alex Mashinsky - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

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