The Celsius co-founders FTC settlement is now complete across all three executives named in the regulator’s 2023 case, with Shlomi Daniel Leon and Hanoch “Nuke” Goldstein agreeing to pay a combined $6.5 million to resolve charges that they misled customers about the safety and availability of their deposited assets.
Leon, Celsius’ former chief strategy officer, will pay $4.1 million under an order entered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote on 29 June. Goldstein, the former chief technology officer, will pay $2.4 million under a separate court order, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Both orders also carry a suspended judgment of $4.72 billion against each man, mirroring the structure applied to former CEO Alex Mashinsky. The FTC’s stipulated court order for Goldstein confirms the $4,720,000,000 figure explicitly, a detail the initial filings left ambiguous.
Combined with Mashinsky’s $10 million agreement reached in April, the three co-founders will collectively pay $16.5 million to close the FTC’s civil enforcement actions.
Executives Withdrew Their Own Crypto Before the Collapse
The FTC’s original 2023 case alleged that while lying to customers to prevent withdrawals, Leon, Goldstein, and Mashinsky were quietly pulling their own cryptocurrency from the platform, doing so approximately two months before Celsius filed for bankruptcy.
The regulator alleged Celsius told customers they could withdraw deposits at any time, claimed a $750 million insurance policy covered customer funds, and said it held sufficient reserves while making no unsecured loans. In practice, the FTC alleged, Celsius had made $1.2 billion in unsecured loans by April 2022 and lacked the advertised insurance policy entirely.
Executives “continued to claim that customers’ deposits were safe days before the company filed for bankruptcy.” Celsius suspended withdrawals in June 2022 and filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers with roughly $4.7 billion in inaccessible assets, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Celsius Co-Founders FTC Settlement Terms: Business Activity Bans
The orders impose permanent limits on future commercial activity. Leon and Mashinsky face identical bans: neither can market or sell any service used to deposit, exchange, invest, or withdraw assets. Goldstein’s restriction is narrower in wording but equivalent in effect, covering retail crypto products used to buy, sell, deposit, withdraw, distribute, or trade digital assets.
Both Leon and Goldstein are also prohibited from making false statements about products or services and from obtaining customer financial information through fraudulent means under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Leon faces additional constraints on sharing consumers’ non-public personal information without informed consent.
At the corporate level, the 2023 settlement with Celsius Network and its affiliates carried a parallel $4.7 billion suspended judgment on the companies themselves, with enforcement suspended to allow the remaining assets to be returned to consumers through the bankruptcy process.
Mashinsky’s Criminal Sentence and the Creditor Recovery
The FTC settlements are civil. On the criminal side, a federal judge sentenced Mashinsky to 12 years in prison in May 2025 after he pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and securities fraud. The court ordered him to forfeit more than $48 million. A separate agreement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) permanently barred him from trading in CFTC-overseen markets.
Celsius held about $25 billion in assets at its peak. Creditor recoveries have been ongoing through the bankruptcy estate, with a third distribution of approximately $220.6 million launching in August 2025 and bringing total recoveries to nearly 65% of eligible claims at that point.
Another former executive, Roni Cohen-Pavon, avoided additional prison time after cooperating with prosecutors in the Mashinsky case.
With the Leon and Goldstein orders entered, the FTC has closed its civil cases against all three co-founders named in the 2023 action. The remaining question is whether the suspended $4.72 billion judgments against each executive ever get activated: that depends entirely on whether either man is found to have misrepresented his finances to the regulator.
