Skip to content

Comment on Silvergate Bank to begin voluntary liquidation

Comments

Necessary context: Silvergate Bank was a major (by crypto standards) bank underpinning crypto companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvergate_Bank

More to the point, Silvergate was one of exactly two banks serving crypto companies in the US. The other, Signature Bank, is also under a lot of regulatory pressure and it has already cut off eg. Binance and Kraken.

There will be other banks and onramps. There was a time before those two banks. And there are many more institutions open to the business now.

And there are many more institutions open to the business now.

Is that really true? I got the impression the cryptocurrency industry was shrinking these days, with lots of companies that had previously announced involvement now exiting.

What about recent events would suggest more institutions wanting to get a piece of this action? I'm not being snarky, I'm trying to figure out where banking is going to come from now. Cobbled together small players, is that what it looks like?

Plenty of banks want billions of dollars of business. Smaller banks jump at 100 million of deposits here and there for some niche market. The properly run crypto organizations are still banked fine, USDC - a stablecoin that isn't considered controversial - has $40bn on deposit at BNY Mellon. There are also many financial institutions under state charters and other concoctions that are or seek to operate better for the crypto industry. And crypto organizations have undergone more serious stress tests and banking isolation before.

Silvergate's stress came from holding normal super boring bonds and needing to liquidate those, it needed to liquidate because of the mismanaged crypto organizations, but its ability to liquidate came from its own portfolio choices during a coincidental macroeconomic environment and not crypto.

Not in the United States. Too much regulatory pressure right now.

Yeah, I was going off to link something similar. I was lost as to relevance.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/08/silvergate-shutting-down-ope...

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.