A former chief financial officer from Washington has been convicted on multiple federal charges after secretly diverting $35 million in company funds into his own crypto venture—an illicit gamble that collapsed almost overnight during the market turmoil of 2022. Nevin Shetty, 41, was found guilty on four counts of wire fraud after a Seattle jury deliberated for 10 hours, concluding that he knowingly misused company assets and concealed the scheme while attempting to profit from high-risk decentralised finance platforms.
Prosecutors said Shetty quietly transferred the money while still serving as CFO of a private software company. Ironically, he had authored the firm’s conservative investment policy, which explicitly required corporate funds to remain in low-risk, FDIC-insured accounts. Despite that, he began moving the company’s money into his own crypto startup, HighTower Treasury, just weeks after learning he would be dismissed for poor performance. According to trial evidence, he then deployed the funds across a range of high-yield DeFi lending protocols, aiming to generate outsized returns before his departure.
For a brief moment, his plan appeared to work. In the early weeks of April 2022, Shetty and a business partner pocketed more than $133,000 in profits as the protocols delivered the high returns they promised. But the brief success was no match for the broader instability building in the crypto market. In early May, the collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin triggered a chain reaction that erased some $60 billion in value and sent shockwaves across the digital-asset ecosystem. Within days, the company funds that Shetty had staked plummeted from $35 million to effectively nothing.
By mid-May, the money was gone. Prosecutors said that on May 13, 2022, the investment had sunk to nearly zero, leaving the company facing catastrophic losses. After realising the funds had evaporated, Shetty eventually confessed to two colleagues, prompting his immediate termination and later federal charges. Investigators argued that his attempt to hide the transfers, paired with the deliberate breach of company policy, made the fraud unmistakable.
The conviction adds to a growing list of criminal cases linked to the speculative frenzy of the last major crypto cycle, highlighting how quickly high-risk strategies can unravel when markets turn volatile. Shetty now faces a potential prison sentence of up to 20 years, with formal sentencing scheduled for February. The case underscores the expanding focus of federal authorities on misconduct involving digital assets, particularly when corporate funds and investor capital are involved.
