Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky pleads guilty to two fraud counts

Mashinsky was one of several crypto moguls charged with fraud after a slump in prices in 2022 caused firms to collapse.

Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, has pleaded guilty in the United States to two counts of fraud.

Mashinsky, 59, was indicted on July 13, 2023, on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and market manipulation charges. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said he misled Celsius customers to persuade them to invest, and artificially inflated the value of his company’s proprietary crypto token. He pleaded not guilty later that day.

On Tuesday, during a hearing before US District Judge John Koeltl, Mashinsky said he pleaded guilty to two out of the seven counts he was initially charged with: commodities fraud and a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the price of CEL, Celsius’s in-house token.

In court, Mashinsky admitted to giving Celsius customers “false comfort” by giving an interview in 2021 in which he said Celsius had received approval from regulators for its “Earn” programme, which it had not. The Earn programme allowed users to deposit cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether and receive weekly interest payments, offering as much as 18 percent annually.

He said he also failed to disclose that he had been selling his holdings of CEL.