Operation Chokepoint 2.0 saw banking regulators pressure banks to close accounts for legal crypto businesses. Signature Bank and Silvergate — the two most crypto-friendly banks — were shut down in 2023 under controversial circumstances. Meanwhile, BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF was approved and accumulated $86B. The SEC sued Coinbase and Binance while allowing JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to launch crypto custody services. Former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo admitted the 2017-18 Bitcoin futures were launched specifically to 'pop the bubble.' Senator Cynthia Lummis alleged FDIC directed banks to 'debank' crypto companies.
“They shut down the crypto banks, sued the exchanges, then approved Wall Street's version. This isn't regulation — it's elimination of competition.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When Signature Bank collapsed in March 2023, mainstream media framed it as a cautionary tale about crypto exposure gone wrong. But a closer examination of what actually happened reveals a more deliberate pattern: regulators appeared to be systematically squeezing out the banks willing to serve the cryptocurrency industry while simultaneously greenlighting crypto ventures from Wall Street's largest institutions.
The claim isn't new. For years, cryptocurrency advocates have alleged that federal banking regulators were engaging in what critics call "Operation Chokepoint 2.0"—a coordinated effort to choke off financial services to legal crypto businesses. What changed was the evidence. By 2023, the pattern had become too visible to ignore.
Signature Bank and Silvergate Bank weren't random failures. Both had deliberately positioned themselves as crypto-friendly institutions, offering banking services to exchanges, custody providers, and blockchain companies that traditional banks wouldn't touch. When regulators began pressuring banks to close accounts belonging to legal crypto businesses, these two institutions absorbed much of that business. Then, almost simultaneously, both banks were shut down under controversial regulatory action.
The official response dismissed these concerns as conspiracy thinking. Regulators maintained they were simply enforcing prudent banking standards and preventing money laundering. The collapses, they suggested, resulted from poor risk management and overexposure to a volatile sector—legitimate banking supervision doing its job.
But the evidence painted a different picture. Senator Cynthia Lummis publicly alleged that the FDIC had directed banks to "de-bank" crypto companies, a claim she made based on conversations with banking executives and firsthand accounts. More significantly, former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo revealed in interviews that the 2017-2018 Bitcoin futures contracts were explicitly designed to "pop the bubble"—suggesting regulatory intent went beyond passive oversight into active market manipulation.
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The contrast became impossible to rationalize once BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF sailed through SEC approval in January 2024, accumulating $86 billion in assets within weeks. Simultaneously, the SEC filed enforcement actions against Coinbase and Binance, the largest decentralized exchange platforms. Yet JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs faced no such obstacles in launching their own cryptocurrency custody services. The message was unmistakable: crypto was acceptable if controlled by established financial institutions, but not if it operated independently.
Nic Carter's detailed analysis, "Operation Chokepoint 2.0: The Federal Campaign Against Crypto," documented the regulatory pressure campaign methodically. The timing, the selective enforcement, and the differential treatment of bank-owned versus independent crypto services suggested something more coordinated than incidental supervision.
Why does this matter? Trust in financial regulation depends on the assumption that rules are applied consistently and in good faith. If regulatory agencies are using their authority to protect incumbent financial interests rather than consumer welfare, that trust becomes meaningless. The claim wasn't that regulators were wrong to enforce banking standards—it was that they were doing so selectively, in ways that served existing power structures while eliminating competition.
The partially verified status reflects an important reality: we have strong evidence of the pattern, statements from government officials, and documented differential treatment. What remains harder to prove is the explicit conspiracy—the smoking gun meeting where someone said "shut down the crypto banks." But in examining regulatory behavior, outcomes often speak louder than intentions. The question regulators should answer isn't whether they intended to protect banking monopolies, but why the outcome looks exactly as if they did.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.1% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~100Network
Secret kept
3.2 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
