Sources: ahead of a Fed meeting in January, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky personally directed individual trades, overruling executives, leading to large losses
In January, Celsius Network boss Alex Mashinsky gathered his investment team to tell them he would be taking control …
Later enforcement action broadened the stakes beyond trading losses: the SEC, CFTC, and FTC sued Mashinsky and Celsius over alleged fraud, while CFTC investigators had concluded the lender misled investors.
First-order effects
Celsius’s investment executives lost decision-making authority over individual trades, while Celsius absorbed the reported losses from Mashinsky’s directions.
Mashinsky became directly associated with operational risk-taking at the lender rather than solely its public-facing leadership.
Second-order effects
The reported overrides give creditors, investigators, and regulators a more concrete basis to examine who controlled Celsius’s trading decisions as the company entered bankruptcy.
Celsius’s senior-management failures became harder to separate from its wider investor-misconduct allegations, reinforcing the scrutiny that later reached Mashinsky and the company.
Third-order effects
If crypto lenders concentrate discretionary trading authority in founders while weakening internal investment controls, governance failures can become a central source of customer and regulatory risk rather than an internal management issue.
The trend: The Celsius episode is part of a broader reckoning over whether crypto lenders’ founder-led risk taking was matched by accountable internal controls.
Alex Mashinsky took control of Celsius trading strategy months before bankruptcy https://www.ft.com/... he can start a crypto club at whatever penitentiary he should be spending years at in the not too distant future
@tier10k
@tier10k on x
Mashinsky took control of the Celsius trading strategy and tried to trade the Fed decision 💀 https://www.ft.com/...
@moo9000
@moo9000 on x
How to create guaranteed 20% yield https://www.ft.com/...
@mdudas
@mdudas on x
narcissitic sociopath “In the days before the Fed met, Mashinsky personally directed individual trades and overruled executives with decades of finance experience, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.” https://www.ft.com/...
@mattomattik
@mattomattik on x
https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@lawmaster
@lawmaster on x
@tier10k Tried to make it all back in one trade
@tier10k
@tier10k on x
TLDR Mashinsky sold “hundreds of millions” of BTC before Jan FOMC, Bought back higher the next day Lost $100M+ on GBTC trade Plugged losses by borrowing from other crypto ventures Insolvent as early as March but for CEL holdings https://twitter.com/...
@digitalassetupd
@digitalassetupd on x
Couple corrections for this “FUD” article It claims there is a 1B dollar hole, it's actually 3B. 100M loss on GBTC, impossible, Alex always said they never touched it. So there https://www.ft.com/...
@adamsamson
Adam Samson on x
Alex Mashinsky took control of Celsius trading strategy months before bankruptcy: ‘He was slugging around huge chunks of bitcoin’. https://www.ft.com/... Scoop by @kadhim
@timccopeland
Tim Copeland on x
The company's total losses on its GBTC trade were about $100mn to $125mn, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. https://www.ft.com/...
@kadhim
@kadhim on x
In January, Celsius boss Alex Mashinsky ordered his traders to sell bitcoin worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A day later Celsius had to buy it all back at a loss. “He was ordering the traders to massively trade the book off of bad information.” https://www.ft.com/...