Celsius Network

Crypto lendingUSA

New to Unitard

💀 Dead / Bankrupt

Peak $3 BillionToday

~-100%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
~Nov 2021
📈
Peak valuation
$3 Billion ’21
💔
Became a Unitard
Jul 2022
💸
Last valuation
Wiped out

Capital raised

$860M

Total raised

$467K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 5.0 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: Crunchbase via Wikipedia

Current status

Chapter 11 (2022); wound down

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2017–2025

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2017

Founded

Alex Mashinsky's pitch to 'unbank yourself': deposit crypto, earn double-digit yield.

Wikipedia

2021

The peak: ~$3B — joins the club at the top$3B

A late-2021 round caps roughly $860M raised, as billions in customer deposits chase yields too good to last.

Wikipedia

Jun 2022

Withdrawals frozen

Citing 'extreme market conditions', Celsius halts all withdrawals — and customers can't get their money out.

CNBC

2021–22

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–22

Glassdoor reviews described growth-at-all-costs with risk controls sidelined — reviewers, including from the risk team, flagged how opaque the risks were well before the freeze. Staff paid partly in the company's CEL token watched that slice of their pay collapse as it cratered.

Jul 2022

Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔

A month after the freeze, the yield machine files for bankruptcy on a risky, illiquid balance sheet, then winds down.

Court filing

2023

Founder charged with fraud

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charge Mashinsky over how the platform's safety and yields were sold.

DOJ

2025

Twelve years for the founder

Mashinsky pleads guilty and is sentenced to 12 years for fraud.

DOJ

$3Bof peak value erased · 5 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Celsius Network was a US crypto lending and yield platform valued at about $3B in 2021. It promised high returns on crypto deposits but ran a risky, illiquid balance sheet; amid the 2022 downturn it froze withdrawals and filed for Chapter 11 in July 2022, then wound down. Its founder was later sentenced to 12 years for fraud.

Source: DOJ SDNY; Mashinsky pleaded guilty, sentenced 12 yrs (2025)

Where they went

Alex Mashinsky
co-founder & CEO
Not on record
Daniel Leon
co-founder & chief strategy officer
Group CEO at K Verse (formerly K Logic Group)
LinkedIn ↗
Nuke Goldstein
co-founder & CTO
Co-Founder, investor at RAVER
LinkedIn ↗

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.

Disclosed investors (8)

Historical funding participation; lists may be incomplete and do not establish current ownership or investor losses.

* Lead in a funding round · Crunchbase ↗ · 2026-10-13 · Methodology · Leaderboard