BlockFi

Crypto lendingUSA

New to Unitard

💀 Dead / Bankrupt

Peak $3 BillionToday

~-100%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
Mar 2021
📈
Peak valuation
$3 Billion ’21
💔
Became a Unitard
Nov 2022
💸
Last valuation
Wiped out

Capital raised

$1.26B

Total raised

$643K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 5.4 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: Wikipedia / CB Insights

Current status

Chapter 11 (Nov 2022)

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2017–2023

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2017

Founded

Zac Prince and Flori Marquez start lending against crypto: deposit coins, earn yield, borrow dollars.

Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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