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While Alex Mashinsky may be caught in the eye of a crypto meltdown, his personal website shows little sign of struggles.

Alongside a biography that describes the co-founder and chief executive of crypto lender Celsius Network as "born into communism, reared under socialism and is currently thriving under capitalism'', are an array of family snaps portraying domestic idyll.

Interspersed between pictures of Mashinsky plugging business triumphs are personal shots of his wife, Krissy, and their six children. It exudes a strong effort to plump the serial entrepreneurs image as a successful cyber currency mogul.

Mashinskys reputation was cast in a less flattering light this week, however, after the millionaire became the central figure of a crypto downturn.

On Monday, Celsius halted all withdrawals from the Bitcoin 'bank' following what it described as extreme market conditions. In a blog post, the five-year-old company said it was taking "necessary action for the benefit of our entire community in order to stabilise liquidity and operations".

In other words, the accounts of its claimed 1.7m retail users - including in the US, UK and Israel - have been frozen until further notice. It has rattled the entire crypto markets.

Bitcoin, the world's biggest digital token, hit a year-and-a-half low at $20,834 (17,182) on Tuesday, having dropped a further 10pc, after cryptocurrencies already shed $100bn of their value on Monday.

The sell-off was worsened by Binance, the largest crypto exchange globally, which temporarily halted trading in Bitcoin over a so-called "technical error".

Mashinsky, 56, now faces a battle to protect the reputation of Celsius, and stop the crypto chaos spiralling further. It is not the first time he has endured tough times, or criticism.

Born in Ukraine, but raised in Israel, Mashinsky founded companies such as Transit Wireless and Arbinet to mixed success in the telecoms sector.

He also claims to have invented internet voice calling and has issued more than 50 patents for his ideas during a long road towards creating a business heavy-weight capable of disruption.

On his website, Mashinsky admits to "many failures", including a "decision to leverage two of his ventures with debt" during the 2008 financial crisis that "turned disastrous".

Despite this, Mashinky, who now lives in America, has remained focused on becoming a self-made man.

In an interview with Foundr in 2018, he said he gave up wanting to work for someone else after struggling to make ends meet as a parking enforcement officer. A chance encounter saw him come close to dishing out a fine to a potential business customer he had met days earlier.

He has even cast himself as a Robin Hood figure determined to disrupt the status quo through the decentralised systems underpinning Bitcoin.

"The barons of the internetthe Facebooks, the Googles who control the data and are basically just giant toll collectorsare squeezing so much out of the system that everybodys looking for a way to replace them," he told Foundr. "Decentralisation is the only way to replace them."

Ahead of triggering a crypto crash this week, Mashinsky exuded confidence. When asked on Twitter over the weekend why he had many enemies, he reasoned: because I am winning and giving it all to my community.

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Meet the refugee from communism whose Bitcoin 'bank' has triggered a crypto crash - The Telegraph