- The CFTC won a permanent ban barring Alex Mashinsky from trading in regulated markets and registering with the agency, entered as a consent order in a New York federal court on June 18.
- The action carried no new financial penalty, resolving the regulator’s July 2023 lawsuit accusing Mashinsky and Celsius of misleading customers about the platform’s safety and profitability.
- It follows a 12-year prison sentence, about US$48 million in criminal restitution, and a separate US$10 million FTC settlement.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has secured a permanent trading and registration ban against Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky, closing its civil enforcement action over the crypto lender’s collapse that left customers facing more than US$5 billion (AU$7.1 billion) in losses.
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York entered the consent order on June 18, permanently barring Mashinsky from trading in CFTC-regulated markets, from registering with the agency, and from violating anti-fraud provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act.
The order imposed no new monetary penalty, marking the regulator’s final resolution of the matter.
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The Case the Order Closes
The settlement resolves the CFTC’s July 2023 lawsuit, which alleged that Mashinsky and Celsius misled hundreds of thousands of customers about the safety, profitability and regulatory status of the platform. According to the complaint, Celsius pooled customer crypto and deployed it into increasingly risky strategies while continuing to assure users their funds were safe and earning yield.
The CFTC stated that “Mashinsky and Celsius engaged in a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of customers by misrepresenting the safety, profitability, and regulatory compliance” of the platform.
Celsius paused withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy in 2022 during the broader crypto downturn, freezing customer access to funds as the company’s losses mounted. The case has been described as the agency’s first enforcement action against a digital asset lending platform, a characterisation that underscored how unsettled the rules were when Celsius operated.
The CFTC order is the last in a series of actions against the former executive. Mashinsky was sentenced in May 2025 to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of commodities fraud and one count of securities fraud, with the criminal case also imposing a US$50,000 (AU$71,000) fine and roughly US$48 million (AU$68.2 million) in restitution.
He separately reached a US$10 million (AU$14.2 million) settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, reduced from an initial US$4.7 billion (AU$6.67 billion) judgment, alongside a lifetime ban from the cryptocurrency industry.
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