Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin struck a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday that will see him serve no more than 24 months behind bars for his role in what prosecutors described as a “wide-ranging conspiracy” to manipulate token prices for paying clients.
Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Portugal last month and charged with two counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud – charges which carry a maximum combined sentence of 25 years in prison. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Andriunin pleaded guilty to all three counts. He also agreed to forfeit approximately $23 million in stablecoins tied to his crimes. The government is not seeking any other fine.
In their indictment last October, prosecutors alleged that Gotbit was basically a market manipulator for hire, offering wash-trading services to paying crypto projects who wanted to artificially inflate the volume and price of their tokens.
Andriunin’s guilty plea is not entirely surprising: he was never coy about Gotbit’s business activities. In a 2019 interview with CoinDesk, Andriunin – then a 20-year-old college sophomore at Moscow State University – admitted that his business was “not entirely ethical” and detailed how he used bot trading to create enough artificial trade volume for a project to be listed on CoinMarketCap.
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Gotbit is not the only market maker offering these services. At the same time that Andriunin and his company were charged, along with two other employees, U.S. prosecutors charged a handful of other firms, including CLS Global, MyTrade and ZMQuant, as well as several of the companies’ employees and promoters, with similarly offering for-hire market manipulation services.
Andriunin’s sentencing date has not yet been set.