BlockFi
Crypto lendingUSA
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $3 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
- 🦄Became a unicornMar 2021
- 📈Peak valuation$3 Billion ’21
- 💔Became a UnitardNov 2022
- 💸Last valuationWiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$1.26B
Total raised
$643K/day
Burned · 5.4y alive
Funding: Wikipedia / CB Insights
Current status
Chapter 11 (Nov 2022)
The rise & fall
7 moments · 2017–2023The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
2017
2017
Founded
Zac Prince and Flori Marquez start lending against crypto: deposit coins, earn yield, borrow dollars.
Wikipedia
Mar 2021
Mar 2021
The peak: $3B — joins the club at the top$3B
A Series D crowns a roughly $1.3B fundraising run, with interest accounts paying yields no bank could match.
Blockworks
Feb 2022
Feb 2022
Regulators land first
BlockFi agrees to pay $100M to the SEC and state regulators over those interest accounts — a record crypto penalty at the time.
SEC filing
2022
2022
FTX throws a $400M lifeline
Battered by the 2022 crypto crash, BlockFi takes a credit line from FTX — lashing itself to the ship that will sink it.
CNBC
2021–22
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–22
Employees saw the cracks early: Glassdoor reviews flagged 2022's repeated layoffs as a warning and said leadership brushed aside risk concerns as exposure to FTX and Alameda grew. By autumn, staff were openly predicting the rumored FTX rescue would be its undoing.
Nov 2022
Nov 2022
Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔
FTX implodes, and within weeks BlockFi halts withdrawals and files for bankruptcy, essentially all of its value erased.
Blockworks
2023
2023
Wind-down begins
The estate starts returning crypto to customers as the platform shuts for good.
Court filing
$3Bof peak value erased · 5 years
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
BlockFi was a US crypto lending platform offering interest-bearing accounts and crypto-backed loans, which raised about $1.3B and was valued near $3B in 2021. Regulatory scrutiny and heavy exposure to the collapse of FTX and its affiliates pushed it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2022, erasing essentially all of its value.
Source: Blockworks/Cleary Gottlieb
Where they went
- Zac Princeco-founder & CEOManaging Director - Head of GalaxyOne at Galaxy
- Flori Gilroyco-founder & COOSVP Crypto at SoFi
Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.
