New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on October 9, 2026 a settlement permanently barring former Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky from the securities, commodities and cryptocurr
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on October 9, 2026 that her office had secured a settlement with Alex Mashinsky, the co-founder and former chief executive of failed crypto lender Celsius Network, resolving a civil fraud lawsuit her office first filed against him in 2023. The settlement permanently bars Mashinsky from working in the securities, commodities and cryptocurrency industries in any capacity, closing out one of the highest-profile state-level enforcement actions to come out of the 2022 wave of crypto lender collapses.
The underlying lawsuit alleged that Mashinsky misled hundreds of thousands of investors, including more than 26,000 New York residents, about the safety of depositing funds with Celsius, inducing them to hand over billions of dollars in digital assets based on assurances about risk that the Attorney General’s office said did not reflect reality. According to the complaint, Celsius lost hundreds of millions of dollars on risky investments that Mashinsky allegedly concealed from depositors, and he separately failed to register as a securities and commodities dealer or as a salesperson for Celsius, additional violations the settlement addresses.
Financially, the New York settlement layers on top of penalties Mashinsky already faces from a parallel federal criminal case, where he was ordered to forfeit more than $48 million and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence. Under the structure of the new state settlement, Mashinsky must pay New York an additional $25 million if he fails to forfeit at least $10 million in ill-gotten gains to the federal government beyond what he has already forfeited, and a separate $10 million penalty if he does not serve out his full prison term, creating financial consequences tied directly to his compliance with the federal case’s terms.
Celsius’s collapse in 2022 left a large portion of its roughly 1.7 million customers worldwide unable to access deposited funds for an extended period while the company worked through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Since then, Celsius investors and creditors have recovered more than $3.4 billion through those bankruptcy proceedings, a substantial though still partial recovery relative to the scale of losses the platform’s sudden freeze on withdrawals originally caused. Separately from both the state and federal cases, Celsius’s founders and executives previously agreed to pay $16.5 million to the Federal Trade Commission to resolve related claims.
The press release, published on the New York Attorney General’s official website, also pointed to the office’s broader record of crypto enforcement actions and encouraged current and former crypto industry employees with knowledge of wrongdoing to come forward through its whistleblower portal, which the office said allows individuals to submit complaints anonymously.
This post first appeared in New York Permanently Bars Former Celsius CEO Mashinsky From the Crypto Industry
