Alex Mashinsky is the former CEO of Celsius Network. The famous entrepreneur, originally of Jewish origin, is thought to have sold a total of $44 million worth of CEL coins through exchanges.
Alex Mashinsky Life
Alex Mashinsky is an entrepreneur and business executive born on October 5, 1965. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency lending platform that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 13, 2022. Mashinsky is also a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by the New York Attorney General.
In the early 1990s Mashinsky founded VoiceSmart, one of the first companies to offer telecommunications switches to handle ordinary voice as well as Voice-over-IP call routing. Mashinsky founded GroundLink in 2004 to book on-demand limousine and car services from a computer or smartphone. He was also the founder of Q-Wireless, which later became part of Transit Wireless. From 2014 to 2015, Mashinsky served as Novatel’s CEO.
Mashinsky was born in Ukraine in 1965 to a Jewish family. His family got permission to leave the country in the 1970s and later moved to Israel. From an early age, he was a mechanic like his father and used and used public telephone lines in Israel. As a teenager, he bought goods confiscated at auction from Ben Gurion Airport and resold them for profit.
Mashinsky attended several different universities where he studied electrical engineering but did not graduate. He served in the Israeli Army from 1984 to 1987, where he trained as a pilot and served in the Golani Brigade. He left Israel in 1988 and moved to the United States.
In 2017, he founded Celsius Network, a borrowing and lending platform for digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. It encouraged its customers to “leave the bank” and offered high interest rates of up to 18.6 percent on cryptocurrency deposits.
As CEO, he hosted “Ask Mashinsky Anything,” a weekly YouTube livestream where he answers questions about Celsius. He became known for wearing T-shirts that read “Banks are not your friends”, critical comments about failed businesses (including his own) and publicity stunts such as an attempt to damage a branch of Chase Bank.
In January 2022, Mashinsky took control of Celsius’s trading strategy. Some insiders reported that he personally managed large individual cryptocurrency trades, overriding managers with significant financial experience.
It withdrew $10 million from Celsius in May 2022. According to a report published in October 2022, withdrawals took place as customers pulled large amounts of assets as the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. Arkham Intelligence estimates that Mashinsky has sold a total of $44 million worth of CEL tokens through exchanges.
On July 13, 2022, one month after customers paused their withdrawals, Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. “The company made decisions that, in retrospect, turned out to be some poor asset allocation decisions,” Mashinsky said. said.
Mashinsky resigned as Celsius CEO on September 27, 2022. Chris Ferraro, former CFO of Celsius, has been appointed interim CEO to replace him. The Unsecured Claims Committee, made up of depositors, described the change of directors as a “positive step” towards resolving cases against Celsius.
