Altcoin Founder Causes $7 Billion Loss Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison! Price Reacts!

The cryptocurrency winter is a difficult period for both the cryptocurrency industry and investors. During that time, many companies went bankrupt one after another, and one of them was the cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius, which filed for bankruptcy in 2022. The founder and former CEO of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, who is being investigated for his crimes at Celsius, confessed in December 2024. Currently, he could face a prison sentence of up to 20 years. According to Coindesk, the 20-year prison sentence was imposed on Alex Mashinsky for orchestrating a fraud that caused approximately $7 billion in damages to customers. U.S. prosecutors concluded that Mashinsky was guilty of intentionally deceiving customers about the security of their deposits by manipulating CEL tokens for personal gain and requested the court to sentence him to 20 years in prison. "Celsius borrowed unsecured loans, engaged in risky transactions, and secretly manipulated the price of the CEL token using customer assets, while publicly assuring customers that their money was safe. Therefore, the court should sentence Alexander Mashinsky to 20 years in prison as a fair punishment for his years-long campaign of deceit and exploitation, which caused billions of dollars in damages and left thousands of customers as victims. They also added that although Mashinsky told customers that he was "HODLing" with them, he had personally sold $48 million in CEL at a high price. Although the founder was heavily fined, the price of CEL has surprisingly increased by over 80% and is currently trading at $0.15. However, this token is still far from its previous golden period. The all-time high of CEL was $8.02 on June 4, 2021, meaning it has dropped by more than 98% from that level.