When First Citizens Bank agreed over the weekend to buy most of what is left of Silicon Valley Bank, there was one thing it absolutely did not want.
Though SVB, whose March 10 failure shook the global banking sector, was best known for serving venture capitalists and techies, First Citizens’ purchase agreement went out of its way to exclude cryptocurrencies and loans backed by crypto from the deal.
The North Carolina lender is not alone in its aversion to digital assets. New York Community Bank, which snapped up the remnants of Signature, the lender that failed right after SVB, refused to touch Signature’s substantial digital banking arm. The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is having to return $4bn in deposits directly to those customers.