Former Silvergate Bank chief executive Alan Lane has broken his silence on the collapse of the crypto-focused lender, arguing that political and regulatory pressure from the Biden administration — not insolvency — drove the bank’s voluntary wind-down in 2023.
In an inaugural post on his personal Substack published Tuesday, Lane said Silvergate could have kept operating after satisfying withdrawals equivalent to 70 percent of its demand deposits during the fourth quarter of 2022. He described the bank’s eventual liquidation as a choice made “in the face of political pressure” and characterized the episode as a “coordinated attack by the Biden Administration” on a bank that served digital asset clients.
The anatomy of a bank run
Lane’s account reconstructs the brutal final quarter of 2022, when the collapse of FTX triggered a stampede of withdrawals from the crypto-friendly bank. According to a January 2023 business update cited in his post, Silvergate’s digital asset deposits fell 68 percent during the quarter, tumbling from 11.9 billion USD to 3.8 billion USD.
To meet the outflows, the bank sold 5.2 billion USD of debt securities and recorded a 718 million USD loss on those sales. Even after that punishing quarter, Silvergate reported 4.6 billion USD in cash and equivalents at year-end — a buffer Lane says proves the institution remained liquid and solvent. He emphasized that the bank had deliberately held assets that could be sold or pledged as collateral during periods of heavy withdrawals.
In other words, Lane’s argument is that Silvergate absorbed one of the fastest deposit runs in banking history and still kept the doors open — and that it was politics, not balance-sheet math, that ended the bank’s 35-year history.
A very different official record
Lane’s narrative, however, sits uncomfortably next to the federal government’s findings. A September 2023 review by the Federal Reserve Board’s Office of Inspector General attributed Silvergate’s liquidation to its concentrated deposit base, rapid growth, and multilayered funding risks. The review also flagged significant weaknesses in corporate governance and risk management, while conceding that examiners could have acted more aggressively and decisively in the run-up to the failure.
Then there is the enforcement record. In July 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Silvergate Capital, Lane personally, and former chief risk officer Kathleen Fraher with misleading investors about the bank’s anti-money laundering program and its monitoring of crypto customers. The SEC alleged that Silvergate’s automated monitoring system failed to cover more than 1 trillion USD in transactions, and that the bank failed to detect nearly 9 billion USD in suspicious transfers among FTX entities.
Lane settled those charges without admitting or denying the allegations, agreeing to a 1 million USD penalty and a five-year officer-and-director bar. Separately, the Federal Reserve fined Silvergate 43 million USD over transaction-monitoring deficiencies. In his post, Lane maintained that no regulator ever proven that the bank’s AML controls actually failed.
Operation Chokepoint 2.0, in his telling
Lane also pointed to the interagency crypto-risk statements issued in early 2023, which urged banks to take a highly cautious approach to crypto-related activities. To crypto industry observers, those statements became emblematic of what critics dubbed “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” — an alleged informal effort to sever crypto companies from the US banking system. The Federal Reserve insisted at the time that institutions were neither prohibited nor discouraged from serving any specific customer class.
Notably, in April 2025, US government agencies formally withdrew those statements — a reversal that coincided with a broader regulatory thaw under the current administration and a rush of crypto firms seeking national trust bank charters of their own.
Why it matters now
Lane’s firsthand account adds a prominent voice to an unresolved debate: did US agencies deliberately squeeze crypto’s banking rails, or did Silvergate simply fail on its own merits? The distinction matters for an industry that is once again courting federal regulators, with firms now applying for OCC trust charters as the political winds have shifted.
Skeptics will note that Lane has obvious incentives to rehabilitate his legacy after settling SEC charges, and that the Fed’s post-mortem identified real deficiencies in governance and monitoring that no political pressure campaign can explain away. Supporters will counter that a solvent bank absorbing a 68 percent deposit decline without a bailout — and then choosing voluntary liquidation — was not a typical failure pattern.
What is beyond dispute is the aftermath. Silvergate’s exit left a hole in crypto’s banking infrastructure that took years to fill, and the de-banking debate it ignited is now central to ongoing legislative fights in Washington. As bitcoin trades near 78,300 USD at the time of writing, an industry that once struggled to find a single willing bank partner now counts federally chartered digital asset institutions among its service providers.
Whether Lane’s version of history or the regulators’ becomes the accepted one, the Silvergate saga remains the defining case study in what happens when crypto and the traditional banking system collide under political pressure.
Lane blaming Biden admin pressure three years later is convenient timing. SEN was already bleeding crypto partners after FTX, that part was plain market forces
silvergate was the bank for alameda long before any examiner showed up. the substack version skips that due diligence was optional at best
exactly. lane frames 70 percent of demand deposits walking out the door as proof of solvency. i read it as proof the run already happened
the pressure was real though, fed examiners were basically living in their books by early 2023. both things can be true, the bank was shaky AND washington wanted it gone
fed examiners camping in their books had reasons. millions in sen withdrawals per hour will do that to a compliance team
SEN moving millions an hour with no real time monitoring is what invited the examiners in the first place. political pressure is just the convenient half of the story
both things true is the right frame, but the political pressure angle also sells subscriptions now. timing the substack launch with the rebrand says plenty
examiners in the books was symptom not cause. FTX going down made the sen pipeline radioactive and every big client ran at once. lane blaming biden skips that his own concentration risk built the bomb
Lane claiming they could have survived after covering 70% of demand deposits is doing a lot of work in that argument. Technically true and still a catastrophic run. A bank that loses 70% of deposits in a quarter is not a going concern no matter who was in office.
70 percent of demand deposits gone in days is a bank run any way you slice it. calling it survivable is hindsight cosplay
70 percent coverage of demand deposits is technically true and totally meaningless. no correspondent bank underwrites a second week of that outflow
no correspondent bank touching them after that quarter is the real death sentence. once sen volume dried up the institutional deposits were never coming back regardless of who was in office
Blaming the Biden administration three years later on a personal Substack is quite the rebrand. Silvergate had FTX exposure questions long before any political pressure showed up.
Both things can be true though. The run was fatal on its own AND regulators were circling crypto banks at the same time. His version just leaves out the first part.
coordinated attack is a hell of a rewrite. the bank ran SEN withdrawals for alameda around the clock, examiners showing up was the response, not the plot
A substack as the venue for a three year old defense tells you the regulators stopped listening long ago. The 70 percent deposit flight math speaks louder than Lane.
a 68 percent deposit flight from 11.9 billion to 3.8 billion in one quarter is a bank run, not a policy choice. selling 5.2 billion of bonds at a 718 million loss did the rest. the substack reframes survival math as sabotage