Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Crypto Bank Had a Boring Collapse

Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.

Silvergate

You can, with hindsight, do some dumb math about Silvergate Capital Corp., the crypto-friendly bank that melted this month. At the end of September, various crypto companies had about $12 billion of deposits at Silvergate. Silvergate’s interest expense on those deposits was $0.00 per year: Those were non-interest-bearing demand deposits; crypto firms kept their money at Silvergate for transactional and convenience reasons, not to earn interest, and they didn’t. (We talked last week about Silvergate, and its Silvergate Exchange Network for crypto transactions.) Silvergate did have some other expenses; ...