Alex Mashinsky's attempt to undo his 12-year prison sentence has run into a blunt rejection from the same prosecutors who put him there. In a filing submitted Friday in the Southern District of New York, US Attorney James McDonald and Assistant US Attorney Allison Nichols argued the former Celsius CEO's motion to vacate his conviction is unsupported by any actual evidence: "Mashinsky has not even submitted a sworn declaration in support of these baseless allegations, and his petition should be denied without a hearing."
Mashinsky, representing himself pro se, filed the motion in May 2026, nearly a year after Judge John Koeltl sentenced him to 144 months for commodities fraud and securities fraud tied to his run of the crypto lending platform. The court also ordered $48 million in forfeiture at sentencing, on top of a separate $10 million settlement Mashinsky paid the Federal Trade Commission.
What the motion actually argues
Rather than presenting new evidence, prosecutors say Mashinsky's petition largely repeats arguments already made and rejected at trial. "He presents a litany of complaints, blaming others for problems at Celsius and rehashing the evidence presented at his sentencing hearing," the filing states. Court records reviewed on CourtListener's docket for the case show the underlying prosecution has run since Mashinsky and former chief revenue officer Roni Cohen-Pavon were indicted in July 2023 on fraud and market manipulation charges tied to Celsius's collapse.
Mashinsky's petition leans heavily on claims involving Cohen-Pavon and figures connected to the collapsed FTX exchange, alleging Sam Bankman-Fried intended to "destroy Celsius" and pointing to text exchanges he says show Cohen-Pavon attempted a "hostile takeover" of the platform. The argument is complicated by the fact that Cohen-Pavon was the government's own cooperating witness: he received a time-served sentence in 2025 in exchange for what prosecutors called "substantial assistance" against Mashinsky.
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Mounting penalties beyond the prison term
The prison sentence and forfeiture order aren't the only consequences Mashinsky is facing. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission permanently banned him from commodities trading in June 2026, and settlement talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission were still ongoing as of late July. Each of those actions stands independently of the criminal case, meaning even a successful motion to vacate would leave much of Mashinsky's regulatory exposure untouched.
A familiar pattern in post-collapse litigation
Motions to vacate filed without new counsel and without sworn declarations rarely clear the bar federal courts set for reopening a conviction, and prosecutors' framing here — asking the court to deny the petition without even holding a hearing — reflects how thin they view Mashinsky's filing to be. Absent a ruling from Judge Koeltl, the case remains one of the last open threads from Celsius's 2022 collapse, a bankruptcy that erased billions in customer deposits and became one of the defining prosecutions of the last crypto lending cycle.
