Signature Bank announced in December that it was seeking to reduce its exposure to crypto firms

and flag that this would mean shedding up to $10 billion in deposits. So the logical conclusion

is that this news forms part of Signature's plans to sever its ties with the crypto industry.

Now, while this news doesn't represent the worst-case scenario that it seemed to initially,

only two U.S. banks, signature and Silvergate,

provide the vast majority of banking services to the industry. In other words, there's very little redundancy available to crypto firms. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me,

NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, January 23rd, and today we are asking whether

crypto has a banking problem. Before we dive into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown,

please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper

into the conversation, come join the breakers discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go

to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, welcome back to another week of the breakdown,

and there was a pretty good cluster of news there at the very end of last

week heading into the weekend, to say nothing of over the weekend, so today we're going to go

over what we missed and see where it leaves us heading into this final week of January.

Let's start on Saturday morning, where we had some fairly sensational reporting before

things calmed down a bit. On Saturday, a headline from the publication

Asia Markets sent a shockwave through crypto Twitter. The headline was Swift Payments Network

access cut to crypto exchanges, which, if it were what the headline suggested, would be a

pretty big deal. So what it was actually about was changes to policies affecting Binance. These changes

would prevent customers from processing transactions to and from the exchange in amounts

...