- Claim:
- That depositing cryptocurrency into Celsius's Earn Interest Accounts was a way to earn a high yield without doing anything and without taking real risk. The original complaint alleges Mashinsky described the model as "sleep to earn", and quotes him: "you don't have to do anything, you just go to sleep, and every Monday we pay you yield." It alleges Celsius advertised yields "up to 17% per year".
- Scope:
- New York's civil case against Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky
- Yield Celsius advertised, as alleged
- up to 17% per year
- Prison sentence after his guilty plea
- 144 months
- Announced by the AG, absent from the stipulation
- $35 million
- Damages, deemed satisfied on a condition
- $25,000,000
- Finding:
- busted, and not by us. A court adjudged Mashinsky guilty on two counts in December 2024, one of them a scheme to induce investors into the Earn Program by making false and misleading statements about Celsius's financial condition. He was sentenced to 144 months and agreed to forfeit $48,393,446. Those are court outcomes, recited in the document below.
- Confidence:
- high on the documents, which we read in full on 12 October 2026. Zero on anything not in them. We did not open the federal criminal docket or the DOJ forfeiture order, and we could not confirm whether the consent order has been signed since the copy we read was filed.
- Docket:
- Index No. 450040/2023
- Source:
- original complaint
Busted: the documents contradict the claim. What would change this verdict
Verdict: Busted
The claim
Every line in this section is an allegation from the original complaint, filed 5 January 2023. None of it is a finding, and the phrases below appear nowhere in the 2026 stipulation.
The complaint alleges Celsius “promoted EIAs by advertising some of the highest yields in the market, up to 17% per year”. It attributes to Mashinsky the line that Celsius paid “almost 100 times more than your bank pays you…and we do that without taking any risk…or taking minimal risk”, from an August 2021 interview. It quotes him telling investors that “All you need to do to become a millionaire… is to HODL”.
On scale, it alleges “hundreds of thousands of investors, including more than 26,000 New Yorkers” and that by early 2022 Celsius had amassed “$20 billion in digital assets from investors all over the world”.
That last cluster of numbers is where this blog’s usual warning applies, so here it is in the complaint’s own words rather than the press release’s. Paragraph 24 states: “At least 26,390 New York residents registered as users with Celsius and more than 4,000 of those investors enrolled in EIAs.”
The two New York figures in paragraph 24 of the complaint, and which one the press release puts next to the word investors
The evidence
The document announced on 9 October is a Stipulation and Consent to Judgment with an annexed Consent Order, NYSCEF Doc. No. 138 in Index No. 450040/2023, stamped “FILED: NEW YORK COUNTY CLERK 10/08/2026 02:59 PM”. It runs 17 pages. We read all of them.
There is no $35 million in it. A full-text search of the extracted document returns exactly three dollar amounts: $25,000,000, $10,000,000 and $48,393,446. The “$35 million” in the press release is the sum of the first two. Other crypto yield pitches are examined in the Mining Automatic autopsy and the Goliath Ventures autopsy, and Celsius also appears in the review of nine case files.
Both of those amounts are conditional, in the document’s own words. Paragraph 2 of the consent order:
ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Defendant Alex Mashinsky shall pay to the State of New York $25,000,000 (Twenty-Five Million Dollars) in damages (“Damages”) to resolve the claims alleged in the Complaint, provided that this obligation shall be deemed satisfied upon payment by Defendant Alex Mashinsky of $10,000,000 to the DOJ in accordance with the terms of paragraph 11 of the DOJ’s Forfeiture Order.
Paragraph 3 does the same thing to the other amount:
ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Defendant Alex Mashinsky shall pay to the State of New York a monetary judgment of $10,000,000 (Ten Million Dollars) … provided that this obligation shall be deemed satisfied upon completion by Defendant Alex Mashinsky of service of his criminal sentence of imprisonment
Read those two paragraphs together. If the $10,000,000 goes to the Department of Justice under the federal forfeiture order, and the criminal sentence is served as written, then both obligations are deemed satisfied and New York receives nothing under this order. The $35,000,000 is what is owed if neither condition is met.
The figure in the press release, and the two conditional amounts that are actually in the filed document
He does admit things, and that is unusual enough to state plainly. This is not a no-admission settlement. Paragraph 4 reads:
Mashinsky admits that he violated the Martin Act and Executive Law § 63(12) by making false and materially misleading statements and omissions to investors concerning Celsius’s approval by regulators as alleged in Paragraphs 112-115 of the Complaint; by making material misstatements and omissions about Mashinsky’s sales of CEL token; and that Mashinsky pled guilty to Counts Two and Five of the Indictment.
Those admissions are narrower than the recital a few paragraphs above them, where the Attorney General’s office states its own determination that he “engaged in a scheme to defraud”. An agency determination is not a court finding, and the admitted conduct is two specific categories of statement, not the whole complaint.
The order is not shown as signed. On page 17, above the line “HON. ANAR RATHOD PATEL, AJSC”, the document reads:
Dated: _____________________________
That blank is in the copy the Attorney General’s own office publishes. The stipulation says at paragraph 9 that the order “shall be entered against Mashinsky without further notice”, which is a promise about entry, not entry. The “FILED” stamp on every page is the county clerk recording the document; it is not a judge’s signature. We could not confirm from public sources whether a judge has signed since 8 October, and we are not asserting that one has not.
What the evidence supports and does not
It supports: that Mashinsky pled guilty to two counts, including commodities fraud specified as a scheme to induce investors into the Earn Program by making false and misleading statements about Celsius’s financial condition; that he was sentenced to 144 months; that he agreed to forfeit $48,393,446; and that he has now admitted two categories of false statement in a civil stipulation. All of this is recited in the filed document.
It does not support: the sentence “secured up to $35 million” as a description of money changing hands. The document describes two obligations, each of which evaporates on a condition. We take no view on how likely either condition is.
The press mostly did not read the document. Of four pieces we examined, none links any court filing, none mentions the admissions, and none says whether a judge has signed. The Block reported “up to $35 million” with no split and no triggers. Decrypt was the one outlet that stated the payments are conditional and gave both triggers. CoinDesk’s visible headline says “secures up to $35 million”, but the HTML title tag, which is the string a search engine and Google News display, says “hit with $35M penalty and permanent ban”. “Penalty” is not a word the document uses; it says “damages” and “monetary judgment”.
The same blur runs through the Attorney General’s own release. Its headline says “Bans” in the present tense. Its body says he “will be permanently barred”, in the future tense. The release contains the words “admit”, “alleged”, “entered”, “signed” and “approved” exactly zero times.
Cause of death
Not the press release, and not the stipulation. The pitch died on 12 June 2022, when Celsius froze withdrawals, and formally on 13 July 2022 when it filed for bankruptcy. The complaint alleges that in four of the six weeks before the freeze, Celsius “paid more in interest to its EIA investors than it generated through investments of their cryptocurrency”, and quotes its own chief financial officer telling a creditors’ meeting: “We paid out over a hundred percent of the yield that we took in from deployments.”
The mechanism named in paragraph 38 of the complaint is the one worth carrying away from this, because it is the shape every “sleep to earn” product shares when the yield is not real:
To increase assets available for investment and for liquidity, Celsius needed a continuous supply of new investors and new deposits. And the more losses Celsius sustained through risky investment of existing deposits, the more it needed the new deposits to plug holes in its balance sheet.
That is an allegation. The guilty plea on Count Two is not.
What would change this verdict
Four things, in descending order of how much they would move it.
- An entered consent order. If a signed copy appears on the docket, the sentences above about the blank signature line stop being true, and we will correct them with the date.
- The DOJ forfeiture order. It is Docket No. 109 in 23-CR-347 and we did not open it. Paragraph 11 of that order is what the $10,000,000 condition points at, and reading it would settle what is actually payable.
- Any record of money moving. The consent order routes relief “to OAG by wire transfer”. We found no clause in it sending any of this to Celsius depositors, and we are not claiming none exists elsewhere.
- A correction from any of the outlets above. We will note it here if one appears.
One thing that would not change it: a successful appeal. Paragraph 3 lists the ways the sentence condition can fail, including a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, compassionate release, good-time credits and First Step Act release. If any of those shortens the sentence, the $10,000,000 becomes payable rather than the verdict changing.
Method note. Every quotation and figure above was taken from the primary PDFs, downloaded and text-extracted by us on 12 October 2026, not from any summary. Nobody was contacted for comment and no one declined to comment. The complaint is from 2023 and was amended in March 2023; the amended version is cited inside the stipulation and we did not open it, so paragraph numbers here refer to the original. We did not open the criminal docket, the DOJ forfeiture order, the FTC order or the bankruptcy docket, so the $16.5 million FTC figure and the $3.4 billion creditor-distribution figure in the Attorney General’s release are not repeated here as facts.
Frequently asked questions
Did the New York Attorney General secure $35 million from Mashinsky?
On 9 October 2026 the Attorney General announced she had "secured up to $35 million". The filed stipulation contains no $35 million figure, and its three dollar amounts are $25,000,000, $10,000,000 and $48,393,446. The $35 million is the sum of the first two.
Are the amounts in the consent order conditional?
Yes. If the $10,000,000 goes to the Department of Justice under the federal forfeiture order and the criminal sentence is served as written, both obligations are deemed satisfied and New York receives nothing under this order.
What has a court found against Mashinsky?
A court adjudged him guilty on two counts in December 2024, one of them a scheme to induce investors into the Earn Program by false and misleading statements about Celsius's financial condition. He was sentenced to 144 months and agreed to forfeit $48,393,446.
Has a judge signed the consent order?
In the copy the Attorney General publishes, the judge's signature line is blank. The post could not confirm whether the order has been signed since the copy it read was filed.
What did the original complaint allege about the pitch?
The complaint filed on 5 January 2023 alleges Mashinsky described the model as "sleep to earn" and that Celsius advertised yields of up to 17% per year. These are allegations from the original complaint and appear nowhere in the 2026 stipulation.