Francis Coppola

Dear friends, this is my last post on this site. Coppola Comment has moved to Substack. You can find the new site here. Why the move? Well, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to use. The code generator is buggy and I constantly have to mess around with the HTML to make posts look half decent. I don't have the time for this nonsense. I just need a nice straightforward CMS that doesn't make my life difficult. Also, those of you who subscribed by email will know that for some time now...

This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023.  The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the last year is a crisis of fractional reserve banking. Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank NY were fractional reserve banks. So too were Celsius Network, Voyager, BlockFi, Babel Finance and FTX. And still standing are the crypto fractional reserve banks Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, Nexo, MakerDAO, Tether,...

As the world reeled in shock at the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another bank quietly went under. On Sunday 12th March, the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC announced that all SVB depositors, whether insured or not, would have access to their funds from Monday. And then they added:  We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority.Signature Bank NY's state chartering...

The last week or so has seen some of the worst bank communications since 2007, when the Bank of England started a bank run by leaking news of Northern Rock's emergency liquidity request to the journalist Robert Peston. Then as now, awful communications have frightened the horses, triggered stampedes and caused banks to fail. Three banks in particular have shown an extraordinary insensitivity to popular fears: Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, and Wells Fargo. Two of these have paid a heavy...

Silvergate Bank died yesterday. Its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, posted an obituary notice (click for larger image):Silvergate Bank bled to death after announcing significant delay to its 10-K full-year accounts and warning that it might not be able to continue as a going concern. We will never know whether it could have recovered from the bank run after the failure of FTX. The bank run after the announcement was far, far worse. The exit of its major crypto customers sealed...

This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms would be a nice little earner, while completely failing to understand the extraordinary risks involved with such a venture. On 1st March, Silvergate Capital Corporation announced that filing of its audited full-year accounts would be significantly delayed, and warned that its financial position had...

I haven't written a post about WASPI for a very long time. I felt I had said everything I wanted to say, and it had become evident that the WASPI campaign and its offshoots had neither the widespread support nor the legal arguments that they claimed. Labour's proposed £58bn payment to WASPI women contributed to its disastrous defeat at the 2019 General Election. And in 2020, the hardline Back to 60 group's bid to overturn their state pension age rises failed in the Court of Appeal. The...

Proof of reserves is all the rage on crypto platforms. The idea is that if the platform can prove to its customers' satisfaction that their deposits are fully matched by equivalent assets on the platform, their deposits are safe. And if the mechanism they use to prove this uses crypto technology, that's even better.  Crypto tech solutions have surely got to be much more reliable than traditional financial accounts and audits - after all, FTX passed a U.S. GAAP audit. No, they aren't. Proof...

Yesterday, the SEC issued a Wells notice to the stablecoin issuer Paxos, warning it that the SEC intended to take legal action against it for issuing an unregistered security. The security in question is the fully-reserved stablecoin BUSD (Binance USD), which Paxos issues expressly for use on the Binance crypto exchange. The Wells notice doesn't apply to Paxos's other fully-reserved stablecoin, USDP, which it issues for use on its own platform.  A few hours later, the New York Department of...

Celsius Network was never a real business. It did not have a viable business model. Really, it was a momentum trading scheme that relied on the premise that crypto prices would always rise. And when they didn't, it resorted to fake valuations and market manipulation to escape insolvency. It was fraudulent from the start.  This is the conclusion I've reached after studying the U.S. Examiner's final report (yes, I've read all 476 pages of it) and Celsius's audited reports and accounts up to...