Behind bars for fraud, Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky is trying to flip the script on his own collapse. In new court filings, he accuses FTX and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of attempting to “destroy Celsius,” alleging that market manipulation of the CEL token originated from FTX, not from Celsius insiders.
FTX Manipulation Claim Clashes with Mashinsky’s Own Guilty Plea
The claim directly contradicts what Mashinsky admitted in court. In December 2024, he pleaded guilty to one count of commodities fraud and one count of securities fraud, confessing that he “illicitly manipulated the price of CEL, Celsius’s proprietary crypto token, while he was secretly selling his own CEL token at artificially inflated prices.” Judge John G. Koeltl handed down a 12-year prison sentence in May 2025, plus three years of supervised release and forfeiture of more than $48 million in criminal proceeds — one of the harshest penalties from the 2022 crypto lending meltdown.
Prosecutors detailed how Mashinsky misled customers from 2018 to 2022, portraying Celsius as a safe “bank of the crypto industry” while funneling user deposits into risky, undisclosed strategies and simultaneously pumping CEL. The scheme left roughly $4.7 billion in deposits frozen when Celsius halted withdrawals and collapsed. The Federal Trade Commission later secured a $4.72 billion monetary judgment against Mashinsky personally, barring him permanently from crypto and financial services — though only $10 million is payable if satisfied through his existing DOJ forfeiture obligations.
Ex-CRO Walks Free While Mashinsky Attacks Former Ally
Mashinsky’s motion also targets former Chief Revenue Officer Roni Cohen Pavon, whom he now accuses of plotting a “hostile takeover.” He released text messages to bolster the narrative, even though Cohen Pavon pleaded guilty and became a key government witness. In April 2026, a federal judge sentenced Cohen Pavon to time served plus one year of supervised release, with over $1 million in restitution and a $40,000 fine — a stark contrast to Mashinsky’s 12-year term and $48 million forfeiture.
The man who once pitched Celsius as the future of decentralized banking is now attacking his own lawyers, former deputies, and a rival exchange in a desperate bid to reverse a sentence grounded in his admitted CEL manipulation and misrepresentations to hundreds of thousands of depositors. Whether any judge will buy his FTX-centric theory remains unclear; the move may simply be recorded as a last-ditch effort by a fallen crypto lender to claw back a narrative already sealed by guilty pleas, regulatory bans, and billions in documented user losses.