Ex-Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky Gets 12-Year Jail Term

Celsius Network, which was once known as one of the biggest and most prominent crypto lenders of the industry founded by Alex Mashinsky who was also the Chief Executive Officer of the company, has been most recently jailed for more than 10 years in jail over several charges.

On May 08, 2025, the sentence of 12 years in prison was imposed by the U.S. District Judge John Koeltl over the charges of defrauding thousands of customers by luring them to high interest or returns on digital assets deposited in his firm.

The former CEO of Celsius Network pleaded guilty in December, and was sentenced by John Koeltl in Manhattan, yet government lawyers wanted a jail term of 20 years for Mashinsky as they believe he now has regret for what he did

Celsius Network played a key role in the Crypto winter of 2022

Celsius Network is one of the major crypto-based companies that went out of the market in 2022, resulting in losses over $100s of millions, and several reports link its close ties with the FTX exchange that filed for bankruptcy in the same year, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried Fried is still behind bars.

Despite suffering losses of hundreds of millions of dollars and institutional loan defaults, Celsius and Mashinsky made a misleading assertion that the company had the reserves and liquidity to cover consumer withdrawals

Mashinsky stated in May 2022 that Celsius had billions in liquidity; nevertheless, the company blocked withdrawals in June 2022 and declared bankruptcy in July 2022, exposing obligations that were more than $1 billion greater than assets.

According to a January 2023 assessment by a court-appointed examiner, Celsius’s business model had elements that were “very Ponzi-like,” including claims that consumer money had been utilized to boost the value of Celsius’s own token, CEL

In July 2022, Jason Stone, a former investment manager, filed a lawsuit alleging Celsius was a Ponzi scheme. Mashinsky and former Chief Revenue Officer Roni Cohen-Pavon were accused of manipulating the price of CEL by purchasing it on the open market for hundreds of millions of dollars, including client monies, to boost its worth

Mashinsky reportedly made between $42 and 48 million from the sale of his personal CEL holdings at inflated prices as a result.

A quick dive into the Celsius (CEL) token price

According to the data from CoinMarketCap, Celsius (CEL) is currently trading at $0.1063 with a intraday decline of 4.40%, yet the time has a warning over CoinMarketCap is “ Celsius has issued a statement indicating that it is not affiliated with Bilaxy exchange and that it has not listed the $CEL token with them.”

However, in all time frames, CEL prices have fallen around 51.21%, and available data states that the highest trading price of Celsius token to date was recorded on June 04, 2021, of $8.02, and its lowest trading price was recorded on October 16, 2018, of $0.02235.