Meet the serial entrepreneur who created Celsius, the DeFi lender that’s adding to crypto crash chaos

Along with the general crypto crash, one fiasco stood out:

Crypto lending protocol Celsius announced Sunday it would halt withdrawals, swaps, and transfers of all cryptocurrency on its platform for an unspecified amount of time, citing “extreme market conditions.”

Celsius claims to have 1.7 million customers, offering its customers yields of 18%. When users deposit their crypto with Celsius, it is loaned out to institutions and investors for a fee. Those returns are supposed to be passed on to Celsius customers, but that just came to a screeching halt.

The company raised $750 million in funding late last year, and was valued at $3.5 billion following the raise, according to CoinTelegraph. The company had $11.8 billion in assets as of May 17, according to its website.

Celsius was cofounded by Alex Mashinsky and S. Daniel Leon, and Mashinsky is now the CEO.  The pair drew up the idea for Celsius on a coffee shop napkin in the summer of 2017, according to the company’s website, and they launched the company’s initial coin offering of its CEL cryptocurrency less than a year later in March 2018. 

Here’s what you need to know about the founder of a company at the center of the current crypto meltdown. 

Serial entrepreneur

Mashinsky, the CEO of Celsius was born in Ukraine but moved to Israel as a child. He moved to the U.S. in 1989. His personal website says that he “was born into communism, reared under socialism, and is currently thriving under capitalism.” 

The 56-year-old has a bachelor’s in engineering from the Open University of Israel, and an economics degree from Tel Aviv University, according to his LinkedIn page. 

Mashinsky holds over 35 patents and was one of the inventors of “voice over internet protocol” (VoIP) that enables people to place and receive calls over the internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission. 

Mashinsky started Celsius in 2017, but he is a serial entrepreneur who has created several companies in the telecommunications space. He took his telecommunications company Arbinet public in 2004 with a market capitalization of $750 million, according to Celsius’ website. Another one of his companies, Transit Wireless, provides connectivity services for the New York City subway. Transit Wireless was valued at $1.2 billion when Mashinsky exited the company in 2016, according to Celsius’ website. 

The entrepreneur has won multiple awards including the Albert Einstein Technology Medal in 2000 and was named a top entrepreneur by business publication Crain’s in 2010, according to his personal website.