Co-founder and a16z general partner Marc Andreessen discussed debanking in the crypto industry on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, prompting widespread reactions to Operation Choke Point 2.0 and a preference cascade among crypto and fintech founders, who — many for the first time — shared details of their experiences being debanked by the Biden regime.

“[Operation Choke Point 2.0] was one of the most unethical and un-American things that happened in the Biden administration, and my guess is we’ll find Elizabeth Warren’s fingerprints all over it (Biden himself was probably unaware)... Warren and Gensler tried to unlawfully kill our entire industry,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted.

“[For years] Choke Point 2.0 was dismissed as magical thinking from wackos. It’s one example of how [the government] has (for many years) systematically earned the institutional distrust that is now being openly aired,” wrote Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis.

“Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is a coordinated conspiracy by government officials to persecute their political opponents by debanking them,” Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss posted. “This is a federal crime that is ongoing and should be prosecuted.”

At the center of Andreessen’s claims on Rogan — buffed by personal anecdotes from Andreessen’s perch at a16z, which invests in crypto startups — was a scandal VC firm Castle Island founder Nic Carter broke in a series of Pirate Wires articles that we began publishing nearly two years ago. Each piece in the series details sensational evidence and analysis of a covert campaign by the Biden administration to kill the crypto industry by denying companies banking services by proxy, and publicly executing Silvergate, which was one of the biggest — and last — banks that supported the crypto sector.

• In his first piece, titled Operation Choke Point 2.0 is Underway, and Crypto Is In Its Crosshairs, Nic showed how agencies like the Fed, FDIC, OCC, and DOJ issued guidance discouraging banks from engaging with crypto, effectively isolating the sector from traditional finance, and likened the campaign to “Operation Choke Point,” an Obama-era program that weaponized banks against disfavored industries like cannabis, adult entertainment, and guns. The crackdown, the piece argued, was part of a widespread, sustained campaign by the Biden regime to quietly kill crypto by using private banks to enforce de facto bans on crypto companies.

• Six weeks after we published the Choke Point 2.0 piece, a regional banking crisis in the US took down several regional banks. By the end of the crisis, the last-remaining crypto-friendly bank, Signature, was shut down under circumstances then-unclear, and for some reason largely unreported. In a follow-up to the Choke Point 2.0 article called Did The Government Start A Global Financial Crisis In An Attempt To Destroy Crypto?, Nic made a case for how the Biden administration exploited the crisis in an attempt to kill off the crypto sector for good, highlighting the abrupt collapses of Silvergate and Signature Bank, which exacerbated the crises, and which he described as politically motivated takedowns rather than market-driven failures.

• Over a year later, Nic got his hands on new information suggesting that Biden admin regulators did in fact deliberately kill off Silvergate. In a piece called Inside the Biden Admin’s Plot to Destroy Silvergate and Debank Crypto for Good, he presented evidence that suggested a covert 15 percent cap on crypto-related deposits, enforced by verbal mandates from regulators, crippled Silvergate’s ability to operate. He further implicated Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose public accusations and alleged pressure on the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB) accelerated Silvergate’s demise. After all that, Silvergate was still solvent and recovering. Nevertheless, the bank was shut down, suggesting that it hadn’t failed — it had been executed.

The OCP 2.0 series had an impact. In April 2023, the Republican controlled House Financial Services committee demanded information about Choke Point 2.0 from Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chair and Choke Point architect Martin J. Gruenberg, and Acting Comptroller Michael Hsu.

Around that time, the law firm Cooper & Kirk — the firm that successfully challenged the first, Obama-era Choke Point — published a 37-page document alleging Choke Point 2.0 was unconstitutional. Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty began to speak out about OCP 2.0, defining it as “the coordinated effort by the Biden administration’s financial regulators to suffocate our domestic crypto economy by de-banking the industry and severing entrepreneurs from the capital necessary to invest here in America.”

And in July of this year, President elect Donald Trump vowed to end OCP 2.0, fire SEC chief Gary Gensler, create a Presidential Crypto Advisory Council, and establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

Apart from Trump’s July statements, which he gave at a crypto conference, in retrospect, Carter’s series never seemed to reach outside the somewhat insular crypto information environment. “We shared [Nic’s] outstanding research on debanking — and the experiences of many in our community — with various news outlets and none seemed to find it newsworthy,” Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer, posted last week.

But after Andreessen’s appearance on Rogan, the stories from crypto founders corroborating our reporting were were many, and detailed. Former Meta employee David Marcus posted a thorough account of how Janet Yellen killed the company’s stablecoin Libra. Gemini CEO Cameron Winklevoss backed Marcus up: “Can confirm. @Gemini worked closely with David and his team at @Meta to help launch Libra (fka Diem). We were on the one-yard line when Federal regulators murdered this project. It was all politics, no basis in law.” Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, Founders Found’s Joey Krug, and other big names in crypto shared their debanking stories.

“With a GOP trifecta next year, we will be able to halt, reverse, and investigate Operation Choke Point 2.0,” said U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Vice Chairman representative French Hill.

“The federal government’s unfettered powers of de-banking represents an insidious threat to civil liberties in America,” member of the Financial Services Committee congressman Ritchie Torres posted.

With his OCP 2.0 series, Nic updated the crypto narrative nearly two years before it caught fire, and you still haven’t read it, you’re operating on an old version of the conversation. Pirate Wires will continue to publish investigative reporting and cultural commentary that’s canonical to the discourse — stay tuned.

— Brandon Gorrell

P.S.: Check out Nic’s response to all the new OCP 2.0 discourse, titled Marc Andreessen and the CFPB: Debunking the Debanking Debunkers, which we published earlier this week.