New York Attorney General Letitia James said Friday she has secured up to $35 million from Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of collapsed crypto lender Celsius, along with a permanent ban prohibiting him from working in the securities, commodities and cryptocurrency industries.

The settlement resolves the civil case James filed in 2023, which accused Mashinsky of misleading hundreds of thousands of investors, including more than 26,000 New Yorkers, about the safety of their Celsius deposits, according to a press release from the attorney general's office.

Mashinsky is currently serving a 12-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to securities and commodities fraud. In June, he was also permanently barred from commodities activity by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), in what the regulator framed as the final resolution of its case against him.

The New York settlement is the latest in a series of legal reckonings for Mashinsky, who has faced parallel criminal and regulatory proceedings since Celsius's collapse, spanning a federal criminal case, a federal regulatory ban and now a state civil enforcement action.

Under the terms of the agreement, Mashinsky must pay the state $25 million if he does not forfeit $10 million in ill-gotten gains to the federal government. He faces an additional $10 million payment if he fails to serve his full prison sentence, according to the attorney general's office. The conditional structure means how much New York ultimately collects depends on the outcome of the federal forfeiture and on whether Mashinsky serves his full term.

James said Mashinsky had promoted Celsius as safer than a bank while the company put customer assets to work in risky strategies and concealed losses.

"I will not allow scammers to use cryptocurrencies to prey on unsuspecting New Yorkers," James said.

Celsius froze customer withdrawals in June 2022 and filed for bankruptcy a month later, in one of the highest-profile collapses of the last crypto market downturn. The platform's implosion came amid a broader shakeout that year in which other major crypto lenders, including Voyager Digital and BlockFi, also filed for bankruptcy. Mashinsky co-founded the platform in 2017, and it grew into one of the industry's largest lenders by paying customers interest on their deposited crypto. Its failure left hundreds of thousands of users unable to access their holdings.

Customers and creditors have received more than $3.4 billion through the bankruptcy proceeding as of August, the attorney general said. When Celsius emerged from bankruptcy in 2024, the company planned to distribute roughly $3 billion in crypto and cash to creditors, using Coinbase and PayPal to process the payments. The money Mashinsky owes under Friday's settlement goes to the state, separate from the repayments creditors have received through the bankruptcy process.