The narrative of the sudden death of U.S. banks Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, and most recently Signature Bank sounds like a complicated conspiracy story written by John Grisham, Ken Follet, or John Le Carre. The main character is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). He allegedly intentionally triggered the collapse of the Terra-Luna stablecoin scheme in 2022 and, with it, the implosion of the worldwide crypto scene, which finally also swept the banking scene, forcing states and regulators to intervene.
The big players in the global crypto scene are waging war against each other. New York-based hedge fund Fir Tree Capital Management is suing Grayscale Investments for information to investigate potential mismanagement and conflicts of interest at its $10.7 billion Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), Bloomberg reports. GBTC is trading at a 43% discount to the value of the Bitcoin it holds, partly because the firm issued many shares in the past few years and didn’t redeem any of them.
Genesis Global Capital, the troubled crypto lender, has hired the investment bank Moelis & Company to explore options, including a potential bankruptcy, the New York Times reports. Insiders told the NYT that no final decisions had been made and that it was still possible for the company to avert a bankruptcy filing. Genesis was a trading partner with FTX and said that $175 million of its assets were stuck at FTX when the exchange froze accounts shortly before filing for bankruptcy this month.
The New York-based digital asset brokerage and crypto lender Genesis Global Trading Inc. (www.genesistrading.com) announced that CEO Michael Moro is stepping down. Genesis COO Derar Islim will take over as interim CEO. Furthermore, WSJ reports that the company plans to fire 20% of its workforce. During the 2021 crypto bull run, the company's loan originations surged more than sevenfold to $131 billion, and the company increased its headcount by 22% to 260. A cut of 20% equates to the loss of about 52 jobs.
The BTC is currently oscillating around $37,000 with a resulting market cap of around $680B. ETH is holding at over $1,200 with a market cap of around $140B. No surprise that new crypto-related financial instruments are emerging, such as Greg King's Osprey Bitcoin Trust (www.ospreyfunds.io), whose shares started to trade on the OTC market in New York a few days ago. This has given competition to Barry Silbert's Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and may drive additional demand for BTC.
More and more traditional investors, and especially institutional investors, want to diversify into crypto assets without getting involved in crypto exchanges or OTC themselves. They invest in exchange-traded securities that have a direct crypto connection. In the U.S., the market leader is Grayscale Investments with several crypto-related products, and in Europe, Germany's ETC Group is one of the market leaders. Trading in crypto-related products exploded in early 2021.
The crypto bull-run happened amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Bitcoin (BTC) finished 2020 just shy of $30,000 with a market cap of around $530 billion. A year ago, the price had been $7,100. 2020 was the year of institutional investors and PayPal's entry. With the crypto explosion, the digital Assets Under Management (AUM) of Barry Silbert's pioneering Grayscale Investments crypto trusts have surpassed the $20 billion mark. That's quite something, isn't it?