Celsius co-founders ordered to pay FTC over $6m as accountability net widens
Two Celsius executives must pay the FTC over $6m combined, extending liability beyond ex-CEO Mashinsky in the lender's 2022 collapse.
Two former executives of the collapsed crypto lender Celsius have been ordered by US courts to pay the Federal Trade Commission more than $6 million combined, marking a further extension of regulatory liability beyond the platform’s former chief executive Alex Mashinsky.
Shlomi Daniel Leon, Celsius’s former chief strategy officer, was ordered to pay $4.1 million under an order entered on 29 June, while Hanoch “Nuke” Goldstein, the firm’s former chief technology officer, was ordered to pay just over $2 million under a separate order signed on Monday by US District Judge Denise Cote. Both settlements resolve FTC charges that the pair misrepresented the safety of the Celsius platform to depositors.
Reserves, insurance and undisclosed loans
The FTC alleged that Celsius falsely told customers the platform held sufficient reserves to meet withdrawal demands, that it maintained a $750 million insurance policy covering customer deposits, and that it did not issue unsecured loans. The regulator said senior executives continued to assure customers their deposits were safe in the days immediately before the company filed for bankruptcy.
Celsius held some $25 billion in assets at its peak but owed users $4.7 billion when it entered Chapter 11 proceedings in July 2022, one of the defining collapses of that year’s crypto credit crunch alongside the failures of FTX and Three Arrows Capital.
Both barred from crypto marketing
Alongside the financial penalties, both settlements impose conduct restrictions. Leon is barred from marketing or selling products or services that can be used to deposit, exchange, invest or withdraw assets. Goldstein, according to the FTC’s statement, “has agreed to a ban on marketing or selling retail products or services that can be used to buy, sell, deposit, withdraw, distribute or trade cryptocurrency.”
The Leon and Goldstein payments will be credited against a broader, partially suspended $4.72 billion judgment tied to the FTC’s case against Mashinsky, who agreed in April to pay $10 million and accepted a permanent bar from promoting asset-related products. That figure reflects the scale of consumer harm the agency alleges across the entire Celsius enterprise, rather than sums the founders are expected to pay in full.
Criminal case runs alongside civil settlements
The civil settlements sit alongside a parallel criminal reckoning. Mashinsky was sentenced to 12 years in prison in May 2025 after pleading guilty to commodities and securities fraud, with prosecutors arguing he misled Celsius customers about the firm’s profitability, its investment risks and the safety of their funds.
For European and UK regulators watching the aftermath of the 2022 crypto lending collapses, the layered FTC actions against Celsius’s leadership underscore a pattern now familiar from Washington enforcement: financial penalties against founders rarely match the scale of losses suffered by depositors, but permanent bans on further market participation increasingly serve as the more durable sanction. With the FTC and CFTC both having now extracted settlements from Celsius’s top tier, the case stands as one of the more complete regulatory reckonings to emerge from the last crypto credit cycle.
