Barry Silbert | |
---|---|
Born | 1976 (age 47–48) |
Education | Goizueta Business School |
Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Known for | Early investor in Bitcoin |
Spouse | Lori Silbert |
Barry Silbert is an American entrepreneur and investor who is the CEO of the Digital Currency Group. [1] [2] [3] As of 2022, he was estimated to have a net worth of $3.2 billion. [4] In 2023 he was accused of exploiting the bankruptcy laws to take funds for himself after the crypto company he controlled went bankrupt. [5]
Silbert was born Gaithersburg, Maryland and was reported to have earned his first $1,000 by selling baseball cards to students at his high school. At 17, he passed the series 7 stockbroker exam. In 1998, he graduated from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, receiving a bachelor's degree in finance.
In 2004, Silbert founded SecondMarket, an online marketplace for shares in private technology companies. It was valued at $200 million in 2011. [6] It was acquired by Nasdaq in 2015. [7]
In October 2015, Silbert founded Digital Currency Group. [8]
In November 2024, Silbert announced that he was launching Yuma, a decentralized artificial intelligence company. [9]
A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.
Nasdaq Private Market (NPM) provides a secondary market trading venue for issuers, brokers, shareholders, and prospective investors of private company stock. Since inception, NPM has facilitated more than $40 billion in transactional volume and has worked with 400+ private companies and 100,000+ employees, stakeholders, and investors. NPM offers private company and investors different solutions including tender offers, auctions, block trades, and custom company marketplaces. In 2021, NPM spun-off of Nasdaq to become its own, independent company receiving strategic investments from Silicon Valley Bank, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Allen and Co.
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan, the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$3 billion in January 2024. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
Gemini Trust Company, LLC (Gemini) is an American cryptocurrency exchange and custodian bank. It was founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Digital Currency Group Inc. (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.
Tether is a cryptocurrency stablecoin launched by Tether Limited Inc. in 2014.
A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.
Alexander Mashinsky is a Soviet-born Israeli-American entrepreneur, business executive and fraudster. He is a cofounder and former CEO of Celsius Network, a bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform.
USD Coin (USDC) is a cryptocurrency stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar. With $41 billion in assets under management, USDC is issued by Circle and is distinct from a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
FTX Trading Ltd., commonly known as FTX, is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang and collapsed in 2022 after massive fraud perpetrated by Bankman-Fried and his partner Caroline Ellison forced the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange company based in Singapore that offers various financial services, including an app, exchange, and noncustodial DeFi wallet, NFT marketplace, and direct payment service in cryptocurrency. As of June 2023, the company reportedly had 100 million customers and 4,000 employees.
Celsius Network LLC was a cryptocurrency company. Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, Celsius maintained offices in four countries and operated globally. Users could deposit a range of cryptocurrency digital assets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, into a Celsius wallet to earn a percentage yield, and could take out loans by pledging their cryptocurrencies as security. As of May 2022, the company had lent out $8 billion to clients and had almost $12 billion in assets under management.
Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm, co-founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara MacAulay. In November 2022, FTX, Alameda's sister cryptocurrency exchange, experienced a solvency crisis, and both FTX and Alameda filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That same month, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that FTX had lent more than half of its customers' funds to Alameda, which was explicitly forbidden by FTX's terms-of-service.
Three Arrows Capital was a Singapore-based cryptocurrency hedge fund which was ordered to liquidate on 27 June 2022 by a court in the British Virgin Islands. It was founded in 2012 by Kyle Davies and Su Zhu. The company borrowed billions of dollars to fund its trading, and according to July 2022 bankruptcy filings, faces $3.5 billion in creditors' claims. The fund appears to have lost in excess of $3 billion over 2021 and 2022, making its collapse one of the largest hedge-fund trading losses of all time.
Grayscale Investments, LLC is an American digital currency asset management company and subsidiary of Digital Currency Group founded in 2013 and based in Stamford, Connecticut.
Voyager Digital was a cryptocurrency brokerage company.
The bankruptcy of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, began in November 2022. The collapse of FTX, caused by a spike in customer withdrawals that exposed an $8 billion hole in FTX's accounts, served as the impetus for its bankruptcy. Prior to its collapse, FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and had over one million users.
Genesis is a cryptocurrency intermediary for institutional investors, with Digital Currency Group (DCG) as its parent company.