Signature Bank

It's interesting as I think about this, there was a confluence of events a few years back where rates were going up.

We had this mini financial crisis, I'll call it, with a run on a couple of banks like Silicon Valley, Signature Bank, and suddenly deposit taking became prevalent.

as significant in the industry as the lending.

In fact, I think it became more important than lending there for a while.

The system that everyone assumed was stable revealed itself to be built on leverage and risk.

or look at the regional bank failures in 2023, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, gone in a matter of days, depositors with millions in accounts suddenly couldn't access their funds.

And if you had a credit line with one of those banks, It vanished the moment the FDIC took over.

Here's the lesson.

So all things that we have been talking about for weeks, for months.

One speaker from Rialta said borrowers in the acquired Signature Bank portfolio had sought extensions when lenders had expected refinancing at lower rates.

So he described notices of forthcoming rate increases prompting some borrowers to repay.

So that was an interesting one, where basically they sent letters out to borrowers saying, "Hey, rates are gonna be higher," and what ended up happening was a prepay wave or just a, a pull forward on prepayments or refinancings.

Circle was caught up in that.

We had Signature and Silvergate.

But you guys did quite well out of that situation.

You're a very different capitalized bank.

Um, I got interested in crypto in 2013.

I founded Signature Bank, um, prior to that, and got Signature into the whole crypto arena, um, where I was the creator of something called Signet.

Uh, that was the first blockchain-enabled 24/7 money transfer system.

Enormously successful.

but there was nobody.

Yep.

Then Signature Bank was murdered-

Yep