Two days ago Silvergate Bank was the largest US bank failure since 2008. That has now been surpassed by the shutdown of what was earlier-in-the-week the 16th-largest US bank, Silicon Valley Bank.
Sam Bankman-Fried on Silvergate’s website: “Life as a crypto firm can be divided up into before Silvergate and after Silvergate. It’s hard to overstate how much it revolutionized banking for blockchain companies.”
Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin was put online in 2009, and still today no one knows who this guy is, or where all that Mt Gox bitcoin went. But today there are now two distinct eras in the history of post-Mt Gox crypto– FTX and post-FTX. Silvergate was the key crypto bank for the entire US industry and it just died Wednesday evening, March 8, 2023. It died from a malignant case of FTX.
Now Silicon Valley Bank has been shuttered by California state regulators due to mass discrepancies between what they can prove they have, and what they claim they have, etc. Stablecoin issuer Circle said late Friday that $3.3 billion in cash deposits remained at Silicon Valley Bank. According to Circle, this sum represents ~8% of the total reserves ($40 billion) backing Circle’s stablecoin USDC.
Stablecoins attempt to peg their market value to fiat currency 1:1. This means one US dollar (Euro, etc) ALWAYS equals one stablecoin. Tether is the top stablecoin, while Circle’s USDC is the second-largest stablecoin on the market. Stablecoins are now considered to be fundamental elements of the crypto ecosystem.
But the validity of stablecoins has been seriously called into question, especially since the Terra/Luna collapse in May 2022. Binance is also a big stablecoin issuer, and they have been forced to admit that their BUSD token hasn’t always maintained its 1:1 peg, like it’s supposed to be for people to trust. Where does the money go?
The Federal Reserve has sought to stifle worker wage increase demands by inducing a recession through its policy of raising interest rates. Note that this only increases inflation, which the ruling class is purportedly fighting. The Fed’s fight against “inflation” is actually a corporate-mandated attack on workers’ wages. It’s another example of Orwellian doublespeak in the fake media.
Unfortunately for the Federal Reserve Bank, this raising of interest rates has collapsed the crypto industry which relies on free money. Venture capitalists, hedge funds, blank check companies, and FDIC-banks have thrown trillions dollars into crypto which is now going bankrupt everywhere because it is expensive, wasteful & useless.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, a Canadian citizen living somewhere in the far East, has been avoiding & deflecting accusations contained in investigative reports from Forbes and The Wall Street Journal recently, claiming that Binance’s math is fuzzy and their books don’t balance. CZ’s Twitter responses were more rhetoric about FUD, fake media attacks, etc, providing no evidence to contradict investigator claims.
It’s comparable to when Seymour Hersh published his Nord Stream bombshell, and no one in the US political establishment (or fake media) could mount a serious response to refute his claims. Eventually, most thinking people took that to mean that Seymour Hersh was correct and that the terrorist US government is lying again.
Somehow, all these realities, facts & nuances get lost in translation through the filters of fake news. Big crypto is secretly negotiating their next bailout with US officials. That is how the White House has been “monitoring the situation” in crypto since the Silvergate Bank collapse.
Crypto is one big hustle & dodge that is running out of time & money. Bitcoin is now under intense pressure, as the latest CoinDesk headlines reads, “Bitcoin Regains $20K After $200M in Crypto Liquidations; Some Traders signaling strength for [Circle’s] USD Coin, citing its treasury backing in U.S.-issued bonds.”
These are clear signals to elite Traders to bet that US taxpayers will pay for any crypto-connected bank bailouts, etc. As far as market manipulators go, crypto whale Elon Musk is having to burn through a lot of bitcoin these days to keep its price inflated at $20K. Musk is running out of Tesla stock to sell and companies to destroy. If Elon Musk doesn’t get a big bailout soon, the richest person in the world will go bankrupt.
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