Category: Cryptocurrency

In May 2025, former Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to fraud, marking a culmination of the immense controversy with Celsius. The company, which once managed billions in customer deposits, collapsed spectacularly due to gross mismanagement, market manipulation, and undisclosed risks. This article explores the fraudulent practices that led to the crypto lender's downfall and the devastating consequences for its customers.

While the term 'ripple' is commonly associated with the XRP cryptocurrency, it also refers to water-soluble THC products and a pharmaceutical company, meaning its 'side effects' depend heavily on the context. For example, the December 2020 SEC lawsuit against Ripple Labs caused XRP's value to plummet by over 50%, a significant financial side effect.

According to blockchain analytics firm EigenPhi, sandwich attacks ranked as the second most popular MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) activity in early 2024, with transactions totaling billions of dollars in volume. This statistic reveals the significant threat posed by these invisible market manipulations in decentralized finance (DeFi), where sophisticated bots exploit transaction ordering to profit at a user's expense.

As of mid-2025, Ripple's XRP token has surged significantly, fueled by renewed investor optimism and positive legal developments. Evaluating the overall health of Ripple requires looking beyond price action and into its utility, regulatory clarity, and network growth.

In July 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Celsius Network and its founder for the unregistered offer and sale of securities, highlighting the significant regulatory gray areas in which the company operated. This regulatory action, alongside other federal and state interventions, reveals the complex reality: is Celsius regulated? The answer is far from straightforward, especially for everyday investors who lost billions.

Launched in 2023, the MNT protocol, powering the Mantle Network, is an Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution designed to drastically reduce transaction costs and increase throughput. This network uses an innovative modular architecture to improve performance for decentralized applications (dApps) and DeFi.

In July 2022, cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, holding approximately $4.7 billion in digital assets belonging to its 1.7 million registered users. This came after the company abruptly froze all customer withdrawals, trapping billions of dollars in funds. The primary issue with Celsius was a deeply flawed business model built on false promises, undisclosed risks, and eventual fraudulent activity by its leadership.

The NEM (New Economy Movement) project was born from a desire to create a more equitable and efficient blockchain than its predecessors. Launched in 2015 with its codebase written from scratch, NEM pioneered novel concepts to address perceived flaws in first-generation cryptocurrencies. Today, its core function revolves around a comprehensive platform for building decentralized applications, managing custom digital assets, and providing business-focused blockchain solutions.