Mashinsky Alexander

Mashinsky Alexander

Biography

2023: US arrest

On July 13, 2023, it became known that the co-founder of the Celsius criticoplatform, Alexander Mashinsky, was arrested in the United States. He faces charges of fraud in the cryptocurrency market.

Mashinsky was born in 1965 in the Soviet Union. He has worked in a wide variety of industries, often focusing on the most sought-after technology. 57-year-old Mashinsky lived in Ukraine until the age of five, and then moved with his parents to Israel, after which he moved to the United States.

In 2017, Mashinsky founded the Celsius Network, a platform lending to digital assets such as bitcoin. Law enforcement claims that from 2018 to June 2022, he "organized a scheme to deceive customers." It is said that Mashinsky personally received about $42 million from the sale of his Cel tokens.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Mashinsky, alleging that he and his firm raised billions of dollars through the sale of unregistered cryptocurrency securities and misled investors about the private company's financial condition. The SEC said Celsius engaged in "risky trading practices" and issued unsecured loans despite assuring investors otherwise. The company also falsely claimed to have raised approximately $50 million from its initial token sale.

Celsius was one of several notable crypto firms that collapsed in 2022. The company gained popularity by paying high interest rates on deposits of digital assets. Mashinsky was arrested and charged with wire fraud and other crimes. He does not admit his guilt. The court decided to release Mashinsky on bail in the amount of $40 million.^[1]

2025: Sentence - 12 years in U.S. prison for fraud

On May 8, 2025, the US Department of Justice announced that the co-founder and former CEO of the Celsius Network Critiplatform, Alexander Mashinsky, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud. Federal prosecutors sought a 20-year prison term for a 59-year-old defendant born in the USSR.

The case file says Mashinsky misled customers about Celsius' financial condition. It is alleged that it repeatedly misrepresented key aspects of Celsius's business and position in order to attract users and their assets. False statements, according to US authorities, related to the security of Celsius, its profitability, sustainability and risks associated with the deposit of crypto assets on the platform. Against this background, by the fall of 2021, Celsius became one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms in the world: at its peak, its assets amounted to about $25 billion.

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Фото: Bloomberg

Mashinsky made tens of millions of dollars while his clients lost billions. American investors deserve better, "said US Attorney Jay Clayton.

It is also alleged that Mashinsky and others organized a special scheme to mislead customers about their own Celsius CEL token. They manipulated CEL's price, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy it on the open market to artificially inflate the cost. Sometimes participants in the scheme used customer deposits to fund such purchases. The case file emphasizes that without aggressive manipulation, the CEL price would be significantly lower. In some cases, Mashinsky and other leaders of the criticoplatform personally bought CEL to artificially maintain value.^[2]

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