Ashley Carter
Moonstone Bank, a rural Washington state bank that had an approximated investment of $11.5 million from Alameda Research - a sister firm to FTX - has declared that it will be going back to its primary purpose as a community bank and abandoning its association with the crypto sector.
The bank declared in a Jan. 18 announcement that their shift in the plan has been spurred by activities within the crypto assets field and the current legal setting related to crypto asset businesses.
The bank has declared that it is going back to its origins and has announced that it will not use the name Moonstone Bank anymore. Instead, it will be reverting to the well-known moniker of Farmington State Bank, a title familiar to the local public for the past 135 years.
The bank says that the transition to the new system should be completed in the upcoming weeks and that customers will not experience any disruption to their banking services.
It is thought that the motivation for the bank to restructure and rebrand may be related to the collapse of FTX, even though the bank did not explicitly state this.
Jean Chalopin, the Bahamas-based chairman of the FTX banking partner Deltec, is said to have acquired Moonstone Bank in 2020. It is reported that in January of 2022, Chalopin received an $11.5 million investment from Alameda Research to revamp Moonstone into a crypto-focused financial enterprise.
It appears that Farmington State Bank is one of the many banks that have been impacted by the unexpected failure of FTX.
Reports on Jan. 5 state that the FTX scandal caused a bank run on Silvergate, leading to the company having to sell its assets at a loss to cover $8.1 billion in customer withdrawals. As a consequence, Silvergate had to let go of 200 workers, comprising 40% of its staff. Furthermore, Silvergate dropped its plans to release its own digital currency.