Gotbit market maker founder Aleksei Andriunin has been extradited to the United States

He had been in custody in Portugal since last October

27.02.2025 - 12:30

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What’s new? The founder and CEO of crypto market maker Gotbit, 26-year-old Russian Aleksei Andriunin, has been extradited from Portugal to the United States to face charges of market manipulation and conspiracy to commit fraud. The businessman had been in custody since October 8, 2024.

US Department of Justice statement

What else is known? According to court documents, Gotbit, as a major market maker in the crypto industry, provided market manipulation services and artificially inflated trading volumes for several crypto companies, including those based in the United States, between 2018 and 2024.

It is noted that in a 2019 interview, Andriunin himself described the fictitious trading code he developed to inflate trading volumes to add tokens to crypto market data aggregator CoinMarketCap and list on major exchanges.

Andriunin, along with his colleagues, sales director Qawi Jalili, and market making director Fedor Kedrov, who are also defendants in the criminal case, advertised the wash trading tactics to potential customers.

Among other things, they claimed that Gotbit used multiple accounts to hide wash trades on the public blockchain.

The company conducted wash transactions worth millions of dollars on behalf of clients and received tens of millions in fees. It is alleged that Andriunin transferred Gotbit’s profits to his personal account on the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance.

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