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Silvergate Capital

Crypto banking / fintechUSA
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $6 BillionToday
~-99%
from peak
  1. 🦄
    Became a unicorn
    2021
  2. 📈
    Peak valuation
    $6 Billion ’21
  3. 💔
    Became a Unitard
    2022
  4. 💸
    Last valuation
    Wiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$40M
Total raised
$3.23K/day
Burned · 33.9y alive
Funding: Renaissance Capital / Nasdaq
Current status
Announced voluntary liquidation (March 2023) after an $8B+ deposit run; wound down the bank.

How it happened

Silvergate Capital was a California bank that reinvented itself as crypto's banking backbone, its Silvergate Exchange Network moving dollars between exchanges around the clock. Deposits ballooned from about $2B in 2020 to over $10B in 2021, lifting its value near $6B, before the 2022 collapses of Celsius, Voyager and especially FTX, a major client, triggered a run of more than $8B and a fire-sale of assets; in March 2023 it announced a voluntary liquidation that wiped out shareholders. Glassdoor reviews are strikingly mournful — staff adored the culture — yet several had flagged the concentration risk early: an all-in crypto bet the bank refused to diversify, and a workforce grown then cut within months.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.

Source: CoinDesk / CNBC / TechCrunch (peak market cap ~$6B 2021; deposits surged from ~$2B to >$10B then ran off $8B+ after FTX collapse; voluntary liquidation announced March 8 2023; later $63M in regulatory penalties)

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