Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin sentenced to 8 months following wash trading scheme

Gotbit founder and CEO Aleksei Andriunin was sentenced on Friday to eight months in prison after prosecutors say the market maker conducted wash trades that were worth millions of dollars.

Andriunin, 26, of Russia and Portugal, was sentenced by a U.S. District Court in Massachusetts along with an additional year of supervised release, according to a statement released by prosecutors.

Andriunin signed a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts in March in connection with wire fraud and crypto market manipulation charges. He was arrested in Portugal in October 2024 and later extradited to the U.S. in February. Around the time of Andriunin's arrest, prosecutors alleged several individuals created crypto firms, lied about their cryptocurrencies, and then carried out wash trades to create the illusion of trading activity and increase the price of certain tokens.

Also on Friday, Gotbit was sentenced to five years' probation, meaning that it will cease operations during that time, prosecutors said. Gotbit was a market maker that "provided market manipulation services to create artificial trading volume for multiple cryptocurrency companies" from 2018 to 2024, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say Andriunin described in a 2019 interview how he created a code to "wash trade" digital assets to then inflate trading volume artificially to get them listed on CoinMarketCap and onto larger crypto exchanges.

"Andriunin and Gotbit’s employees marketed these wash trading tactics to prospective clients and explained how Gotbit used multiple accounts to avoid detection of the wash trades on the public blockchain," prosecutors said Friday. "Gotbit made wash trades worth millions of dollars on behalf of clients and received tens of millions of dollars in payments from clients."