A couple months back, Genesis Trading announced that it needed at least a $1 billion cash infusion to avoid bankruptcy – this after it was determined that the company had $175 million tied up in an FTX trading account. Parent company DCG initially gave Genesis $140 million while talks surfaced of a possible investment from crypto exchange Binance – though nothing ever materialized on that front.
Meanwhile, Genesis Global Capital in November froze customer withdrawals citing "unprecedented market dislocation" following the collapse of FTX.
"When a financial institution halts the ability of its customers to withdraw their assets it is either caused by malinvestment or a 'run' on the institution (think the Bedford Falls S & L in 'It's a Wonderful Life')," writes Stan Szymanski for Encouraging Angels.
(Related: Will the unleashing of CBDC lead to the formation of digital concentration camps for non-compliers?)
Just this week, Genesis decided to lay off 30 percent of its staff and is still considering bankruptcy.
As all of this is happening, another cryptocurrency bank, Silvergate Capital Corp., is reportedly having to sell off assets "at a steep loss to cover some $8.1 billion in withdrawals."
In the company's fourth quarter, crypto-related deposits plunged 68 percent, which prompted Silvergate to liquidate debt to the tune of $718 million – this amount far exceeding the bank's total profits since at least 2013, according to reports.
Meanwhile, fund manager Kathy Wood of ARK Fintech Innovation ETF sold more than 400,000 shares of Silvergate this week in a vote of no confidence.
Szymanski says the repercussions of all this calamity in the crypto market is, and will continue, to affect the traditional stock market as well. Keep in mind that Silvergate has ties to all sorts of other businesses including not just FTX but also Coinbase, Paxos, Crypto.com, Gemini, Kracken, Bitstamp, and Circle.
In his view, the "ripple" effect of all these dominoes falling in the capital market "looks exponential" – and the party has only just begun.
Recall the Tether scandal from last year when it was revealed that the crypto coin was not a "stablecoin" after all. It turns out that Tether was manipulated and used to prop up Bitcoin's price, which lost a lot of value last year after reaching an all-time-high in late 2021.
Researchers who looked into Tether and how it is used in the crypto-sphere discovered that Tether is used as a manipulation tool to hike up the prices of the most popular cryptos, i.e., Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin.
"When we see the collapses in Silverbank, Genesis Trading and FTX what hypothesis can we draw? In my estimation, the crypto marketplace is built on an erratic, capricious and precarious premise that a unit of account that cost them nothing to produce can be touted as a currency and all the while a small apparatchik of crypto exchanges and coin issuers have the ability to manipulate the markets," Szymanski warns.
"Deceit, hoax and graft do not for a stable market make. And an unstable market can lead to crisis."
This crisis, Szymanski says, will be used as the excuse to phase out fiat currency and replace it with CBDC, which is set for potential rollout this year.
As the global economy collapses in real time, you can keep up with the latest news at Collapse.news.
Sources for this article include: