Who is Aleksei Andriunin, Russian founder of Gotbit, who is extradited to the US?

Aleksei Andriunin, a Russian national and founder of Gotbit, was extradited by United States authorities because of his alleged activities within an extensive cryptocurrency market manipulation conspiracy for his client cryptocurrency organizations.

The Portuguese authorities arrested Aleksei Andriunin on October 8, 2024 when he was 26 years old and then he was transferred to the United States on February 25, 2025. The authorities brought Andriunin to Boston federal court where he received jail detention until a future court date is set.

Andriunin received his federal indictment through a Boston-based grand jury on October 31, 2024 on two counts of wire fraud alongside one count of conspiracy to manipulate markets and commit wire fraud. The legal charges against Gotbit include two directors of Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili alongside the company itself.

Court documents show Gotbit operated as a prominent market maker within the cryptocurrency domain. Gotbit operated as an artificial trading service provider that delivered fabricated market volume to various cryptocurrency companies during 2018-2024 which included companies present in the United States.

Gotbit had Aleksei Andriunin serving as both its President and Chief Executive Officer. The interview transcript from 2019 reveals Andriunin describing how he wrote code to conduct “wash trading” of cryptocurrencies in order to generate artificial trading volume which allowed cryptocurrencies to appear on CoinMarketCap and larger cryptocurrency exchanges.

The Gotbit employees as well as Andriunin pitched the wash trading methods to new clients through Jalili while Kedrov provided instructions on how Gotbit conducted trade operations to evade blockchain Gotbit provides its clients with wash trading services worth millions of dollars which generated proceeds exceeding tens of millions of dollars. 

Andriunin is accused of transferring numerous millions of dollars from Gotbit into his Binance account which he controlled personally.