Debanked Horrors

Governments around the world have been illegally pressuring banks and financial institutions to debank politically unfavored individuals, such as those working in cryptocurrency.

Now, these very people are speaking up.

Got a submission? DM us on Twitter or ping our squad in Discord.

Unfamiliar with WTF is going on? Read Nic Carter's article on Pirate Wires.

Is this being collected anywhere? We've all told stories but impact requires organization.
— 0xAllen 🛡️🦇🔊 (@0xAllen_) November 30, 2024

STORIES

Got approved (not preapproved) for a mortgage on a house by my primary bank. Get a call after contract is signed that their head of risk has decided to revoke the approval because I work for @SolanaFndn and we "do crypto selling"

Explained we are not an exchange or issuer. We're… https://t.co/TMg4BCfcRa pic.twitter.com/fPLvBhGxCW
— Austin Federa | IBRL | 🇺🇸 (@Austin_Federa) November 30, 2024

Got Debanked for accepting crypto payments. No due process or anything, just closing your account but at least allowed me to get the funds out. Being a tech founder and especially crypto and building in open has lots of challenges when interacting with mainstream financial… pic.twitter.com/8mkF9bSCMO
— Robin I Building Tevaera (@tevanrobin) November 30, 2024

I'm not even a founder, just a regular guy.

But when I lived in NYC I went to a credit union bc I had heard they were friendlier towards crypto (turned out not to be the case), and when I said that yes I would be receiving some payments via crypto, they pretty much ended the…
— Juan (@juanaxyz00) November 30, 2024

How Libra Was Killed.

I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this.

As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a…
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) November 30, 2024

I've been unable to secure a bank account for Amplify Solutions because I work in Web3. The business account rep at Bank of America showed me the internal criteria and basically if your business or any of your customers deal with crypto in any way, they won't give you an…
— Mike @ Amplify Solutions 🎈🐱 (@Amplify_Mike) November 30, 2024

The amazing thing about the Choke Point 2.0 discourse is that I had thought it was happening only to people I knew, mainly in crypto, including some of my clients.

Turns out it was absolutely everywhere and they were doing it to huge companies like Facebook as well.
— Preston Byrne (@prestonjbyrne) November 30, 2024

I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son an opportunity to open a new one.

I was denied a mortgage with Chase and Key Bank in 2022 because of working in crypto. I am shocked people think this wasn’t real.
— Ryan Wyatt (@Fwiz) December 6, 2024

1/ Operation Choke Point 2.0 has entered the mainstream discussion and as the former CTO of Silvergate, I want to provide my personal view

First, the Silvergate SEN network was a core piece of infrastructure in the cryptocurrency economy

As someone who was there when it…
— Chris Lane (@D_CentralBanker) December 6, 2024

I’ve had a bank call me to harass me because I bought some BTC on @coinbase once and they said they’d shutdown my account if I ever did it again. I’ve had multiple personal accounts closed. I’ve had many accounts refused to be opened. I’ve had multiple business accounts closed
— Joey Krug (@joeykrug) November 27, 2024

I’ve been debanked across multiple countries and denied banking access is almost a certainty at this point.
— Darshan Bathija (@darshanbathija) November 28, 2024

So in summary, we now have it on record that between 2022 and 2023 the FDIC sent out at least 25 letters asking banks to indefinitely pause or curtail:

- Bitcoin and ethereum buy/sell products for bank clients
- private blockchain settlement networks
- public blockchain…
— nic carter (@nic__carter) January 4, 2025

Thanks to @iampaulgrewal and the rest of the team at Coinbase, the FDIC has now been compelled to further un-redact their "pause letters" to banks during 2022-23. We know know what the FDIC was asking banks not to do (thread)
— nic carter (@nic__carter) January 4, 2025

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