On March 8th, 203, a financial entity called Silvergate Capital announced that its bank, Silvergate Bank,

would wind down operations and voluntarily liquidate its assets.

This was not a complete surprise for those in the know as Silvergate, the parent company

and its bank, was a fintech first entity, which in this context meant it was a crypto-first

entity.

And crypto assets, ranging from Bitcoin to Ethereum to dollar-pegged tokens like Tether,

have been under increased pressure and scrutiny of late, following a fairly mixed 2020,

which culminated with the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November

of that year, a collapse that has sparked an investigation into the excesses and illegal

activities of the company's founder Sam Bankman-Fried and some of his associates.

That investigation has shown, among other things things that many of the folks atop

these companies are knowingly and intentionally doing crimes of various sorts, and that many

of these entities are tied together in a fairly fundamental root system-like fashion.

Weakness in one often represents increased risk for another, and the collapse of one often leads to the collapse of several of its neighbors.

Thus, the implosion and picking apart of FTX and its associated entities like Alameda Research has been a slow-motion disaster for the wider crypto space, some of which was heavily reliant

on FTX and its resources, some of which is only tangentially connected to the exchange,

if at all, and some of which has merely had the bad fortune to be operating in an industry

that was already on somewhat precarious footing, especially regulatoryly, but which now is attempting to operate on an active,

fairly violent, economic, cultural, and legal fault line.

Leading up to, but especially following, the collapse and FTX and those behind it, a slew of

other crypto-world pillars have fallen, and Silvergate, a bank that

focused on providing intermediary services to crypto companies, essentially allowing them to

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