Silvergate ex-CEO blames Biden pressure for bank’s 2023 wind-down

Alan Lane, the former CEO of Silvergate Capital, is pointing the finger squarely at the Biden White House for his bank’s demise. In remarks dated September 8, 2026, Lane described what he called a “coordinated attack” by the Biden administration against the crypto industry, one that he says made Silvergate’s continued operation untenable and ultimately forced the bank into voluntary liquidation.

The twist? Silvergate had already survived the worst of it. The bank weathered a roughly $8 billion deposit run triggered by FTX’s implosion in late 2022, repaid every single depositor in full, and did so without costing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation a dime. By most survival metrics, the bank should have had a shot at recovery. Instead, it announced its wind-down on March 8, 2023.

The timeline of a slow-motion collapse

Silvergate was, for a stretch, the financial backbone of the US crypto industry. Its Silvergate Exchange Network, or SEN, was the plumbing that let crypto firms and institutional players move dollars around the clock, including on weekends and holidays. When FTX collapsed in November 2022, the resulting panic sent depositors sprinting for the exits.

The bank lost approximately 70% of its deposits in what amounted to a classic bank run, accelerated by the unique speed at which crypto capital moves. But Lane and his team managed to honor every withdrawal. No depositor lost money. The FDIC’s insurance fund stayed untouched.

By March 2023, Silvergate made the call to wind down voluntarily. The bank formally surrendered its banking charter in July 2024. And in a final chapter, Silvergate Capital went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, ultimately emerging on March 31, 2026 with its common equity reinstated under a liquidation plan.

$63 million in settlements and SEC charges

The regulatory fallout was not just existential. It was expensive. In July 2024, Silvergate Capital, Lane himself, and former Chief Risk Officer Kathleen Fraher settled charges brought by the SEC. The total price tag across various regulatory bodies came to $63 million, stemming from compliance violations related to the bank’s operations.

Lane personally faced individual charges from the SEC, a rare escalation that signaled regulators viewed leadership failures as central to the bank’s problems.

Lane’s framing pushes back on that interpretation. In his telling, the bank did the hard thing correctly by making depositors whole during a crisis, and then was punished anyway through relentless regulatory pressure that had less to do with Silvergate’s specific conduct and more to do with the administration’s posture toward the entire crypto sector.

The broader ‘debanking’ debate

Lane’s claims don’t exist in a vacuum. They echo a grievance that has become a central talking point across the crypto industry: that the Biden administration conducted an unofficial campaign to cut digital asset companies off from the traditional banking system. Critics have called this effort “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” drawing a parallel to an Obama-era initiative that pressured banks to sever ties with legal but politically disfavored industries like payday lenders and firearms dealers.

Silvergate’s closure, along with the failures of Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank in the same month of March 2023, left the US crypto industry with dramatically fewer banking options almost overnight. Signature Bank, another major crypto-friendly institution, was seized by regulators on March 12, 2023, just days after Silvergate’s announcement. Critics noted that Signature’s crypto-facing business lines were shut down even as the bank was sold to New York Community Bancorp’s Flagstar subsidiary.

Multiple FDIC communications later surfaced through Freedom of Information Act requests, showing that the agency had sent “pause letters” to banks exploring crypto-related services, effectively telling them to halt those plans pending further review. For Lane and others, those letters were evidence of a deliberate strategy to isolate the crypto industry from the banking system.

The question Lane’s claims ultimately raise is whether Silvergate’s liquidation was the inevitable result of poor risk management and compliance failures, or whether a viable bank was effectively regulated out of existence for political reasons. The $63 million settlement suggests the compliance issues were real. The fact that every depositor was made whole suggests the bank was not fundamentally insolvent.