A member of Silvergate’s board resigned on Thursday, the crypto-friendly bank revealed in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Rebecca Rettig, who first joined Silvergate’s board last March, notified the company that she would be stepping down yesterday. She graduated from Columbia Law School and previously served as general counsel at Aave Companies, the group behind the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Aave.
Silvergate pronounced in archiving that Rettig has decided to leave the company because she “has accepted a management position in another company” and wants to focus on her new responsibilities, adding that it “was not the result of any dispute or disagreement”.
Rettig tweeted Thursday that she would be moving on to Polygon Labs to serve as the company’s first chief policy officer. Silvergate or Rettig responded immediately Decryptits request for comment.
“I searched a bit about the industry and how to build a future I believe in,” she wrote. “I kept coming back to the same idea: the most important thing right now is to get crypto policy right.”
Silvergate has recently come under the microscope from the Department of Justice, which is investigating the La Jolla-based bank’s handling of bank accounts linked to the bankruptcy rate of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and Alameda Research — the trading firm owned by the exchange’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
When Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire crumbled and triggered an industry-wide contagion last November, Silvergate’s crypto-related deposits were shaken. The bank revealed that it had seen its crypto deposits fall by $8.1 billion in the last fiscal quarter last year.
At the same time, Silvergate said it took out a $4.3 billion loan from the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) to meet the flow of withdrawals, as well as selling about $5.2 billion in debt securities.
US lawmakers, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and John Kennedy (R-La), have criticized the bank for introducing “cryptomarket risk into the traditional banking system,” pushing Silvergate CEO Alan Lane in a letter.
“Congress and the public need and deserve the information necessary to understand Silvergate’s role in FTX’s fraudulent collapse, particularly given the fact that Silvergate turned to the Federal Home Loan Bank as its last lender in 2022,” the officials wrote.
The bank was originally launched in 1988, but has become increasingly involved in the digital asset industry over time. Early in 2022, that bought assets from Meta related to the failed $200 million Diem stablecoin project.
Silvergate said during its latest earnings conference call that it took $196 million write-down fee on the intellectual property and technology that it had acquired – a loss of 98%. Citing the current crypto environment, Lane said it would be difficult to bring the planned stablecoin to market “any time soon.”
“Given the significant changes in the digital asset landscape, this fee reflects the company’s belief that the launch of a blockchain-based payment solution from Silvergate is no longer imminent,” Silvergate said.
Silvergate’s share price fell 9% Thursday before the close and fell another 2% to $15.44 a share in after-hours trading. The price represented a 93% decline from the all-time high of $222.13, set in November 2021.
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