A small community money-lender in San Diego, by the name of Silvergate Bank, received a lot of attention during this year’s Consensus. According to reports, the bank has played a crucial part in crypto exchanges and several enterprises with which the Wall Street banks refused deal.
A small bank with a large impact
Although banks and financial institutions have lately started to consider working with cryptos, this was not always the situation and digital currencies have struggled to survive. However, in that difficult period, one bank decided to open its doors to cryptos and crypto exchanges as early as 2014.
The Silvergate Bank from San Diego was a tiny community bank, which decided to trust cryptos, despite accusations that the currencies were being used for illegal activities like money laundering. In only a few years, the bank’s increased to $1.9 billion, and it currently has over 250 clients from around the world.
The bank has been operating for around 30 years and has branches throughout California. The CEO of Silvergate, Alan Lane, stated that he saw an opportunity in opening the bank’s doors to crypto exchanges and he realized that cryptos might disrupt banking in the long run. However, the companies still needed banks, and he was happy to lend them a hand.
Lane even invested in Bitcoin himself, then quickly realized that everyone who started working with cryptos soon lost all privileges from banks on Wall Street. With a situation like that, Lane realized that opening up to cryptos could mean some serious profit for Silvergate.
The bank changed its business to help out exchanges
After talking to the exchanges back in 2013, Lane understood what they needed and how Silvergate could help them. He also realized that the bank would have to start conducting their business in a different way, as a state-chartered bank. Naturally, this meant that Silvergate needed California State Banking Department’s certification, as well as the one from San Francisco’s Federal Reserve Bank.
Despite the fact that this move was very risky at the time, Silvergate decided to go through with it anyway. They did not care about bucking the trend across the rest of the States, and the bank soon became a clearinghouse and facility for exchanges’ transactions in real time. The number of their customers increased, and the bank has been on the rise ever since.
