{"id":24714,"date":"2023-02-01T23:08:04","date_gmt":"2023-02-01T23:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=24714"},"modified":"2023-02-02T13:56:17","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T13:56:17","slug":"celsius-network-final-report-from-the-examiner-lies-incompetence-and-ponzi-schemes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2023\/02\/01\/celsius-network-final-report-from-the-examiner-lies-incompetence-and-ponzi-schemes\/","title":{"rendered":"Celsius Network: Final report from the examiner \u2014 lies, incompetence and Ponzi schemes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>By <\/i><b><i>Amy Castor<\/i><\/b><i> and <\/i><b><i>David Gerard<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">We read huge legal filings so you don\u2019t have to. Send us money! Here\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/amycastor\">Amy\u2019s Patreon<\/a>, and here\u2019s<a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/davidgerard\/overview\"> David\u2019s<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Shoba Pillay, the court-appointed examiner in the bankruptcy of Celsius Network, filed her final report in the early hours of January 31 \u2014 with 476 pages of the report itself and over 200 pages of appendices. [<a href=\"https:\/\/cases.stretto.com\/public\/x191\/11749\/PLEADINGS\/1174901312380000000039.pdf\"><i>Examiner Report<\/i><\/a><i>, PDF<\/i>]<\/p>\n<p>Pillay\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/amycastor.com\/2022\/11\/21\/crypto-collapse-celsiuss-interim-examiner-report\/\">interim report<\/a> in November 2022, on who owned cryptos in Custody or Earn accounts and under what conditions, was wild enough. And that was before Pillay looked into whether Celsius was operating as a Ponzi scheme.<\/p>\n<p>We recommend you read at least the 30-page executive summary of this report. It reads like a criminal indictment. It isn\u2019t one, but Pillay, a former federal prosecutor, knew exactly what sort of document was needed.<\/p>\n<p>Pillay got access to Celsius\u2019 documents, accounts \u2014 such as they were \u2014 and internal email and Slack archives. But Celsius employees also spilled their guts to her. Even Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky was sure he could talk his way through this one.<\/p>\n<p>So many blatant crimes were confessed. It leaves Sam Bankman-Fried\u2019s recent \u201cmy crimes\u201d press tour in the shade.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius was not just fraudulent. It was an utterly incompetent investment business. <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/05\/21\/your-guide-to-the-crypto-crash-terra-ust-bitcoin-and-el-salvador\/\">The collapse of Terra-Luna<\/a> was the death blow, but the company had never been healthy, profitable, functional, or even solvent at any point.<\/p>\n<p>We were 100% correct when <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/12\/31\/your-100-reliable-guide-to-the-future-of-crypto-in-2023\/\">we predicted<\/a> that Celsius would be worse than anyone imagined. Though to be fair, this was like predicting 4 from 2+2, or\u00a0 &#8220;Ponzi&#8221; from &#8220;Alex Mashinsky.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mashinksy ignored everything his well-meaning employees told him, overruled all warnings, and blatantly lied to customers. This guy belongs in a cell.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2023\/02\/01\/celsius-network-final-report-from-the-examiner-lies-incompetence-and-ponzi-schemes\/go-directly-to-jail\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-24715\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-24715\" src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/go-directly-to-jail.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"315\" srcset=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/go-directly-to-jail.png 680w, https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/go-directly-to-jail-300x185.png 300w, https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/go-directly-to-jail-348x215.png 348w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>History of a scam<\/h3>\n<p>Celsius was founded in 2017 by\u00a0 Alex Mashinsky, Daniel Leon, and Nuke Goldstein. The original idea was to start a peer-to-peer crypto lender, but they pivoted to an investment scheme. Customers would deposit crypto and Celsius would invest it and pay the customers interest \u2014\u00a0up to 18%.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky told Pillay how he came up with his crypto business:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Mr. Mashinsky was a technology sector entrepreneur without experience or formal training in the financial industry and to whom crypto was a \u201ctotally new field.\u201d Mr. Mashinsky said that, as he formed Celsius, he relied on his self-described \u201cunique skill\u201d to \u201cproject into the future and imagine what the world is going to be like.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In 2018, Celsius told customers that they had raised $50 million by selling their CEL token in an initial coin offering. They didn\u2019t \u2014 they only raised $32 million. But they didn\u2019t want to shake investor confidence. That was Celsius\u2019 first lie, and possibly its smallest.<\/p>\n<p>Including its ICO, Celsius raised $741 million from investors\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0and it spent a good deal of those equity funds buying CEL tokens.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky talked up Celsius\u2019 profits and benefits to customers \u2014 helped by crypto \u201cjournalists\u201d who did their bit to pump an <i>incredibly obvious fraud.<\/i> Interest rates of 18% can\u2019t possibly be real, and Mashinsky\u2019s refusal to tell anyone how he invested their money was a huge red flag. But the crypto press didn\u2019t care. [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.coindesk.com\/markets\/2018\/10\/05\/voip-pioneer-says-new-startup-is-paying-users-interest-on-millions-in-crypto\/\"><i>CoinDesk<\/i><\/a><i>, 2018; <\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.coindesk.com\/markets\/2019\/09\/07\/how-celsius-turned-its-crypto-ico-into-a-billion-dollar-lending-business\/\"><i>CoinDesk<\/i><\/a><i>, 2019<\/i>]<\/p>\n<p>In fact, Celsius was never profitable at any point \u2014 and if you don\u2019t count the value they claimed for their own CEL tokens, the company was insolvent for its entire existence.<\/p>\n<p>In the two days before <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/06\/13\/celsius-goes-fahrenheit-451-and-number-goes-down\/\">Celsius froze withdrawals<\/a> on June 12, 2022, it had $428 million in withdrawal requests and its liquidity had run dry \u2014 due in part to a crash in its CEL token.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius filed for bankruptcy on July 13, 2022, with a $1.2 billion hole in its books. They currently owe clients and creditors $5.5 billion.<\/p>\n<h3>CEL and the flywheel<\/h3>\n<p>CEL was Celsius\u2019 own made-up token \u2014 even Mashinsky described CEL to Pillay as \u201cairline miles.\u201d It was how Mashinsky and other insiders made their millions. After the ICO, they held substantial amounts of CEL.<\/p>\n<p>Manipulating the CEL token was Celsius\u2019 main business, and that\u2019s what the company spent all its time and money on. There was no organic market demand for CEL. Celsius was the only substantial buyer of CEL at any time.<\/p>\n<p>If you <i>must<\/i> talk about your company doing something illegal, you do it behind closed doors. You don\u2019t put it into company emails or text chat, which can be used as evidence against you. But Celsius employees did this routinely.<\/p>\n<p>Former Celsius CFO Harumi Urata-Thompson wrote on Slack: \u201cwe are talking about becoming a regulated entity and we are doing something possibly illegal and definitely not compliant.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Another employee said on Slack:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIf anyone ever found out our position and how much our founders took in USD could be a very very bad look &#8230; We are using users USDC to pay for employees worthless CEL &#8230; All because the company is the one inflating the price to get the valuations to be able to sell back to the company.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Starting in 2020, Celsius used a scheme called the \u201cOTC flywheel\u201d to push-start a market for its CEL token into existing. The company bought CEL on exchanges and sold it in private over-the-counter sales to boost the price.<\/p>\n<p>How brazen is Mashinsky? He thought it would be a good idea to lie about the CEL market directly to Pillay:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Mr. Mashinsky reiterated this flywheel concept to the Examiner. After the ICO, Mr. Mashinsky explained, CEL was trading on exchanges, and its value was \u201cwhatever it was trading at, that\u2019s what the community agrees its value is, market price.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In total, Celsius spent $558 million buying CEL. Pillay wrote: \u201cIn effect, Celsius bought every CEL token in the market at least one time and in some instances, twice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Celsius\u2019 balance sheet was only in the black if you counted CEL at mark-to-market \u2014 though employees in 2022 called CEL \u201cworthless\u201d and thought its price \u201cshould be 0.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky himself made a total of $68.7 million selling his personal holdings of CEL tokens. Leon made $9.7 million. As one Celsius employee said:\u00a0 \u201cwe spent all our cash paying execs and trying to prop up alexs [sic] net worth in CEL token.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Page 504 of the report is an appendix summarizing Mashinsky\u2019s personal on-chain CEL activity.<\/p>\n<h3>Just telling people how you feel<\/h3>\n<p>Celsius and Mashinsky knowingly lied to customers, over and over. Mashinsky\u2019s lies are documented repeatedly throughout the report.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinky regularly did AMA video streams promoting Celsius and pumping CEL \u2014 \u201cAsk Mashinsky Anything.\u201d He promised customers that they owned their deposited crypto (false), that Celsius did not invest in unsecured loans (hugely false), or that the CEL flywheel scheme was working as planned (it never did).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Mr. Mashinsky told the Examiner, \u201cI just went on a show for an hour once a week to tell people how I feel.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Celsius employees even edited some of the later YouTube versions of Mashinsky\u2019s streams to remove the most egregious misstatements, over Mashinsky\u2019s objections \u2014 and \u201cinternal documents suggest that Celsius employees hoped viewers would not notice the discrepancies that had been edited from the videos.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Celsius represented itself as superior to traditional \u201cbig banks.\u201d Its customers could \u201cunbank\u201d themselves and reach \u201cfinancial freedom.\u201d Celsius insisted that it put \u201cits community first\u201d with a business \u201cbuilt on trust\u201d and \u201ctransparency\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Can we really bring unprecedented financial freedom, economic opportunity and income equality to everyone in the world? We are Celsius. We dream big.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We\u2019re sure at least one guy at Celsius did dream big.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky also claimed on several occasions that Celsius, in contrast to its competitors, had registered with the SEC \u2014 which it never did \u2014 and that CEL was a \u201cregistered\u201d token \u2014 whatever that was supposed to mean. \u201cWe registered with the SEC in 2018 so we won\u2019t have the issues others have.\u201d He told <i>Barron\u2019s<\/i> that \u201c the regulators looked into us and said these guys know what they&#8217;re doing.\u201d Every detail of these claims was false.<\/p>\n<h3>Ponzinomics<\/h3>\n<p>Pillay <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/11\/02\/celsius-network-bankruptcy-hearing-1-november-2022-stablecoins-kerps-and-ponzis\/\">was asked by Judge Martin Glenn<\/a> to examine \u201cclaims that Celsius\u2019s business operations amounted to a Ponzi scheme.\u201d Specifically:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>whether \u201cthe Debtors used new deposits being made by customers to make payments or otherwise meet obligations to existing customers at a time when the Debtors had no other sources (whether liquid or which could have been monetized) from which to make such payments or meet such obligations;\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Pillay doesn\u2019t say the word \u201cPonzi\u201d in the report herself. Instead, she establishes this behavior \u2014 and quotes Celsius employees using the P-word:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In April 2022, Celsius\u2019s Coin Deployment Specialist described Celsius\u2019s practice of \u201cusing customer stable coins\u201d and \u201cgrowing short in customer coins\u201d to buy CEL as \u201cvery ponzi like.\u201d A few weeks later when Celsius made another push to prop up the price of CEL, Celsius\u2019s former Vice President of Treasury asked where the cash was coming from to make the CEL purchases and Celsius\u2019s Coin Deployment Specialist replied, \u201cusers like always.\u201d This same employee explained that at the time he made this statement, Celsius had \u201cnegative equity\u201d and therefore necessarily was using customer funds when it made these purchases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Celsius was never profitable. \u201cCelsius Network on a stand-alone basis has been insolvent since inception.\u201d In fact, Celsius was functionally a Ponzi from the beginning:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Celsius persistently struggled to pay the rewards it promised to its customers. Celsius\u2019s net revenue exceeded reward obligations to customers by approximately $34 million from 2018 through 2020. But Celsius\u2019s reward obligations to customers in 2021 ($582 million) exceeded net revenue by approximately $1 billion in 2021 (net revenue was negative $433 million before rewards), and by $380 million in the first half of 2022. Cumulatively, from 2018 through June 30, 2022, Celsius accrued reward obligations to customers of $1.36 billion more than the net revenue it generated from customer deposits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Celsius paid more in interest to depositors \u2014 mostly in CEL, not anything liquid \u2014 than it collected from loaning cryptos out. Mashinsky demanded that Celsius had to offer higher interest rates than anyone else\u2019s, regardless of the actual earnings.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius fell into unmistakable Ponzi territory in 2022, just before it froze withdrawals. Per Pillay: \u201dbetween June 9 and June 12, Celsius did directly use new customer deposits to fund customer withdrawal requests.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Stablecoins for BTC and ETH<\/h3>\n<p>In early 2021, Celsius found itself staring at a gaping hole in its balance sheet \u2014 it did not earn enough on its lending and business lines to make good on the ridiculously high interest rates it promised customers.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky filled the hole by using $300 million in stablecoins to buy and borrow BTC and ETH to match the amount of those tokens it owed to customers.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cnet deficit\u201d between what Celsius customers had deposited and what Celsius actually held grew over time to more than $1 billion in crypto.<\/p>\n<h3>A sinking ship without a plan<\/h3>\n<p>Mashinsky and Celsius lied to customers incessantly. But it\u2019s also important to note that Mashinsky was incredibly bad at running an investment business, even while the 2021 bitcoin bubble was in full swing and making other idiots look like geniuses:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Mr. Mashinsky and others in leadership frequently made significant decisions on an ad hoc basis, without any formal procedures, controls, or sufficient financial data to inform decisions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Celsius lost hundreds of millions in bad investments and loans. The most damage came from Equities First Holdings, Grayscale GBTC, KeyFi, and Stakehound.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius lost $288 million when it borrowed from Equities First \u2014 Celsius repaid the loans, then Equities First said it couldn\u2019t return the collateral! So Celsius had to accept a promissory note at a significant loss.<\/p>\n<p>Patrick Holert, then Celsius\u2019 financial risk officer didn\u2019t find out about the loan from Equities First until months later. Holert later decided the loans were a good idea \u2014 Celsius needed the money both for operational expenses and to supply money they could loan to customers. And Equities First was one of the few companies that would lend actual dollars to a crypto company at all.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius got into GBTC to take advantage of the GBTC arbitrage that <a href=\"https:\/\/amycastor.com\/2022\/04\/19\/welcome-to-grayscales-hotel-california\/\">Amy has discussed at length.<\/a> They bought into GBTC in July 2020. In December, Celsius increased its GBTC holdings to 30% of its deployed assets \u2014 Mashinsky said that the GBTC premium was \u201cnot going away soon.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The premium disappeared by February 2021, and GBTC has since traded at a discount to bitcoin. Celsius didn\u2019t sell because it didn\u2019t want to realize the GBTC loss \u2014 and Mashinsky thought the discount meant GBTC was underpriced, so he wanted to buy even more of it.<\/p>\n<p>KeyFi was the company that Celsius bought to do its DeFi trading for it. Mashinsky did the deal to buy KeyFi because he knew founder Jason Stone (the DeFi whale known as \u201c0x_b1\u201d) personally. <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/08\/28\/crypto-collapse-celsius-sues-keyfi-blockfis-ftx-deal-scaramuccis-skybridge-voyager-suit-3ac-going-to-jail\/\">Mashinsky claims<\/a> Stone got Celsius funds liquidated repeatedly and stole Celsius\u2019 money. <a href=\"https:\/\/amycastor.com\/2022\/07\/09\/crypto-collapse-3ac-voyager-celsius-and-other-defi-casualties\/\">Stone claims<\/a> Celsius interfered with the investment process, ran as a Ponzi scheme, and didn\u2019t pay him. These claims are the subject of a suit being dealt with in the bankruptcy.<\/p>\n<p>Stakehound is an <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/08\/20\/proof-of-stake-is-better-than-proof-of-work-but-ethereums-merge-wont-fix-any-other-problem-with-cryptocurrency\/\">Ethereum staking<\/a> platform. Celsius put 35,000 ETH into Stakehound \u2014 and on May 3, 2021, Stakehound and Fireblocks told Celsius that the validator keys had been lost! Celsius lost $105 million of staked ether.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky had no idea what he was doing, but he didn\u2019t let that or any mere Celsius employees stand in his way:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Mr. Alisie\u2019s team undertook a CeFi review because Mr. Mashinsky had \u201ccircumvented some controls and processes under stressful market conditions,\u201d and then went \u201cover the head\u201d of Finance and Risk leadership to direct trades inconsistent with Celsius\u2019s directionally-neutral strategy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>By 2021, Celsius was running out of even slightly safe investments to fund its eye-popping reward rates. It started getting into hilariously unsafe investments with high yields.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius also accepted exchange tokens like FTX\u2019s FTT and Serum as collateral for loans \u2014 even though these were internal \u201cairline miles\u201d like CEL was.<\/p>\n<p>In the search for yield, Celsius got into bitcoin mining \u2014 even though US-based bitcoin mining could only make a profit if it was run as an <a href=\"https:\/\/amycastor.com\/2022\/08\/04\/bitcoin-mining-in-the-crypto-crash-the-mining-companies-creative-accounting\/\">exit scam on na\u00efve institutional investors.<\/a> Celsius lost piles of cash in its mining business because it did everything incompetently.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius set credit limits for its borrowers, but Alameda, Tether, 3AC, and others exceeded those limits. Tether&#8217;s peak borrowing from Celsius was $2 billion and was considered an &#8220;existential risk&#8221; internally at Celsius.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, Pillay\u2019s report reveals that Tether did in fact buy Chinese commercial paper. Tether has <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2021\/10\/31\/tethers-bad-month-cftc-bloomberg-reggie-fowler\/\">vehemently denied<\/a> backing its reserves with Chinese commercial paper \u2014 maybe they just bought it on the side!<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky didn\u2019t let bad news like the Terra-Luna collapse worry him:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Throughout May 2022, as Celsius\u2019s employees openly expressed the view that Celsius was a \u201csinking ship\u201d without a plan, Mr. Mashinsky continued to assure customers that all was well at Celsius. On May 11, 2022, both Celsius and Mr. Mashinsky posted on Twitter that \u201cAll user funds are safe.\u201d That same day, Mr. Mashinsky posted that \u201cCelsius has not experienced any significant losses and all funds are safe.\u201d At the beginning of the May 13, 2022 AMA, he stated \u201cCelsius is stronger than ever.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h3>The Mashinsky Method for accounting<\/h3>\n<p>Some Celsius accounting was done in QuickBooks \u2014 the small-business accounting program of choice for the crypto industry, apparently \u2014 and NetSuite.<\/p>\n<p>Nobody was keeping track of how Celsius\u2019 investments were going. Celsius said themselves: \u201cAbsolutely pathetic systems of record \u2014 We do not do a good job of knowing anything about how our assets are actually performing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So a \u201cTask Force\u201d assembled the \u201cFreeze Report\u201d: a Google spreadsheet (the other accounting tool of choice for crypto) that did API calls. Celsius employees themselves called the spreadsheet \u201cone band-aid on top of another.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The API data was known to be inaccurate. But Celsius just assumed they could trust the <i>direction<\/i> the known-inaccurate information was pointing in. They vaguely planned to fix it at some point, though.<\/p>\n<p>Celsius thought it was profitable, maybe? But they weren\u2019t really sure:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>some Celsius employees (especially in Treasury) were concerned that Celsius\u2019s method of calculation did not account for the cost of its liabilities and resulted in an overstated NIM [<i>net interest margin<\/i>] that made Celsius appear profitable, when in fact it was not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Celsius did not employ any sort of tax professional until June 2021. They\u2019re still sorting out the mess. Celsius Mining owes between $16 million and $22 million in taxes. Celsius Network UK owes over $1 million in VAT (sales tax). Lior Koren, Celsius\u2019 tax guy, said it was \u201cunknown\u201d to him how or why Celsius Mining failed to apply for use tax exemptions.<\/p>\n<h3>What the report means<\/h3>\n<p>Celsius was a crime scene from its first day. Interest rates as high as 18% don\u2019t exist! If you see an interest rate like that, it\u2019s a Ponzi! Magic doesn\u2019t happen!<\/p>\n<p>Celsius was never profitable. They were paying rewards to old customers with deposits from new customers.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky was a terrible businessman. He had no clue what he was doing. His \u201cunique skills\u201d were telling people what they wanted to hear and manipulating the truth. Whether it\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/amycastor.com\/2019\/02\/12\/how-the-hell-did-we-get-here-a-timeline-of-quadrigacx-events\/\">Gerald Cotten<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2022\/12\/13\/crypto-collapse-regulatory-altruism-at-ftx-sam-bankman-fried-arrested\/\">Sam Bankman-Fried,<\/a> crypto is a bunch of dumb crook stories. This is yet another.<\/p>\n<p>All crypto firms are <a href=\"https:\/\/amycastor.com\/2019\/02\/12\/how-the-hell-did-we-get-here-a-timeline-of-quadrigacx-events\/\">Quadriga.<\/a> It\u2019s just that some haven\u2019t exploded yet.<\/p>\n<p>Mashinsky told customers Celsius was the future of banking and finance. Crypto claims that technology means everything is different now. This is always just a lie.<\/p>\n<p>We fully expect to see an indictment for Mashinsky and other Celsius executives soon with the following charges: commodities and\/or securities fraud, manipulation of commodity or securities prices, and wire fraud &#8230; the only one we didn\u2019t see in the report was money laundering.<\/p>\n<p>This report is long, but extremely readable \u2014 for example, by senior bureaucrats or political staff. The executive summary will correctly inform them precisely how crypto works and what to expect of it.<\/p>\n<p>This report isn\u2019t just bad for Celsius. It\u2019s bad for all of crypto. Good.<\/p>\n<br><br><div align=\"center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\"><img src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/become_a_patron_button.svg\" alt=\"Become a Patron!\" title=\"Become a Patron!\" width=217 height=51><\/a><br><p style=\"align:center;\" class=\"patreon-badge\"><i>Your subscriptions keep this site going. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\">Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The secret ingredient is crime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2493,460,916,3274,1552,3095,3093,1799,3422,3193,3195,3424,3421,3423,3266,2357,39],"class_list":["post-24714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-alex-mashinsky","tag-amy-castor","tag-celsius","tag-daniel-leon","tag-defi","tag-equitiesfirst","tag-gbtc","tag-grayscale","tag-harumi-urata-thompson","tag-jason-stone","tag-keyfi","tag-lior-koren","tag-nuke-goldstein","tag-patrick-holert","tag-shoba-pillay","tag-stakehound","tag-tether"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/go-directly-to-jail.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24714"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24722,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24714\/revisions\/24722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}