Celsius co-founders Shlomi Daniel Leon and Hanoch Goldstein have been ordered to pay more than $6 million to resolve Federal Trade Commission allegations that they misled customers about the safety of the crypto lending platform before its collapse.
Goldstein, who served as Celsius’ chief technology officer, was ordered to pay $2.014 million under an order signed Monday by US District Judge Denise Cote. Leon, the company’s former chief strategy officer, was ordered to pay $4.1 million under a separate order entered on June 29. The two settlements widen the legal consequences of Celsius’ 2022 failure beyond former chief executive Alex Mashinsky.
At its peak, Celsius said it held about $25 billion in assets. When it filed for bankruptcy in July 2022, the company said it owed users $4.7 billion. The FTC said the co-founders helped promote claims that the platform had enough reserves to meet withdrawal requests, carried a $750 million insurance policy covering customer deposits and did not make unsecured loans.
According to the agency, those assurances were false, and senior executives continued to describe customer deposits as safe only days before the firm entered bankruptcy. The agency said Leon is now barred from marketing or selling products or services that can be used to deposit, exchange, invest or withdraw assets. Goldstein has also accepted a restriction preventing him from marketing or selling retail products or services tied to cryptocurrency transactions.
The payments from Leon and Goldstein will be credited against a larger $4.72 billion judgment tied to consumer harm alleged by the FTC. In April, Mashinsky separately agreed to pay $10 million and accepted a permanent ban on promoting asset-related products as part of his own settlement with the agency.
Mashinsky was later sentenced in May 2025 to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to commodities and securities fraud charges. Prosecutors said he had misled Celsius customers about the company’s profitability, the risks of its investments and the safety of customer funds. The latest orders mark another significant step in the effort to hold Celsius executives accountable for the platform’s collapse.The Reserve Bank of New Zealand reported that its Sectoral Factor Model Inflation gauge held steady at 2.7% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, unchanged from the first quarter. The reading followed the release of New Zealand’s official Consumer Price Index data on Tuesday and remains within the central bank’s 1% to 3% inflation target range.
The gauge is one of the Reserve Bank’s preferred measures of underlying price pressures. It is designed to strip out short-term noise and capture broader inflation trends by examining how prices move across sectors. The model looks at both tradable goods, which are exposed to international competition or imported, and non-tradable goods, which are produced domestically and are less affected by overseas price changes.
For policymakers, the report suggests that inflation dynamics are stabilizing rather than accelerating. That matters because the Reserve Bank is focused on keeping price growth contained without undermining economic activity. A reading in the middle of the target band typically gives the central bank more room to assess whether current monetary settings remain appropriate.
The New Zealand dollar was softer after the data, although it remained higher on the day. NZD/USD eased from a recent seven-week high near 0.5874 and last traded at 0.5858, up 0.36% on the session. The move suggested that traders viewed the inflation update as broadly reassuring, but not strong enough to drive a sustained advance in the currency.
Inflation data is closely watched in foreign exchange markets because it can influence interest-rate expectations. When inflation is elevated, central banks are more likely to keep rates higher for longer, which can support a currency by attracting capital. When inflation is subdued, the opposite often occurs.
The same mechanism also affects gold . Higher rates tend to weigh on the metal because they increase the appeal of interest-bearing assets, while lower rates can make gold relatively more attractive.
