A retraction demand, examined

Shortly after the U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing on debanking in February 2025, Nathan McCauley—CEO of Anchorage Digital and, on faith and belief, CEO of a federally chartered bank—publicly requested a retraction of my December 2024 essay, Debanking (and Debunking?). The request alleged inaccuracies, misleading statements, omitted key facts, and other improprieties. I took it seriously, reviewed his points, consulted external advisors, and declined.

The original piece examines the constraints on banks, their incentive structures, the way AML regulation sometimes harms innocent entrepreneurs, the history of Operation Choke Point, and the closure of two crypto-affiliated banks. It also assesses what the crypto industry hopes to gain through its press and advocacy campaign.

For context: that essay drew praise from both a crypto VC who helped coin the term “Choke Point 2.0” and a former federal banking regulator. I am a crypto skeptic by reputation, but the piece was intended as a balanced treatment of a phenomenon larger than crypto—and it credited advocates where their points were simply true.

The bar for retraction is high

Retractions are reserved for the worst offenses in professional writing: plagiarism, fabrication, libel. They are not a venue for disputes over emphasis or interpretation. My preference is strongly toward corrections rather than retractions—I have never unpublished a piece, but I would if it were warranted.

Anchorage Digital’s PR team did not respond to my request for comment, despite three emails and a timeline exceeding one business day. The company had tagged McCauley’s account the day before his Senate testimony, which I treat as confirmation that his account was not compromised. I assume the professionalism and competence of a tech unicorn founder and bank CEO.

To be charitable: a tech founder and bank CEO does not necessarily speak for the startup or the bank itself. Anchorage Digital knows my email address if they would like to clarify that or any other point. Meanwhile, I find the allegations lack merit, and I decline to retract.

Retraction request, reviewed

When Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage Digital, requested a retraction of our piece on debanking, we asked a straightforward question: what specifically did he believe was inaccurate? The invitation was open for him to reframe his request, for example as an indelicately phrased personal opinion. He did not walk it back. Instead, he replied with what he presents as a list of improprieties. We address his numbered subpoints in turn.

1. “A few areas were incorrect and misleading”

McCauley's first claim addresses two points about Silvergate: that it was "trivially solvent" and that our implication it was doomed due to Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) findings "doesn't comport with any regulatory practice." We did not allege insolvency. That would be a serious charge and we made no such statement. Reviewing the roughly 4,300 words written about Silvergate, there is no statement that can reasonably be read as alleging insolvency. In fact, the piece states Silvergate "voluntarily liquidated in the wake of the FTX implosion" in a "mostly orderly fashion" — a description that presupposes a solvent institution. We stand by the analysis of Silvergate's BSA/AML deficiencies, including the conclusion that "Silvergate was not a competently run institution." That conclusion was not reached lightly.

McCauley should be familiar with the stakes of BSA/AML non-compliance. Anchorage Digital Bank, National Association is a signatory to a 2022 consent order with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The order states, quoting directly:

As of 2021, the Bank failed to adopt and implement a compliance program that adequately covers the required BSA/AML program elements, including, in particular, internal controls for customer due diligence and procedures for monitoring suspicious activity, BSA officer and staff, and training.

We gave McCauley and Anchorage Digital's press team days of advance notice of our intention to mention the consent order and offered them the opportunity to comment. Neither offered a comment.

Closing a bank is an extraordinary remedy, but it is on the table. For context, consider the following cases:

McCauley has not identified a single incorrect factual allegation. At most, he disagrees with our analysis. He is welcome to articulate that view in his own spaces, the bank's spaces, or the halls of the Senate. A difference of opinion does not constitute grounds for retraction.

2. “Lots of omission of key facts”

McCauley's second claim is that we failed to mention regulators' public communications indicating that crypto businesses are "highly unlikely to be compatible with safe and sound banking practices," specifically citing the joint letter of January 2023, OCC Interpretive Letter 1179, and the rescinding of the Fair Access to Financial Services rule.

The Joint Statement on Crypto-Asset Risks to Banking Organizations was indeed an important milestone — and we cited it as such. It was linked in the discussion of how banking regulators weigh in on proposed banking products. The piece extensively argued that the publication of extensive written guidance militates against concerns of "opaque [and] unfair" regulatory action, quoting McCauley's own testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.

Regarding SAB 121, McCauley has a particular interest as the CEO of a custody business. The piece identified changing SAB 121 as a policy goal of the crypto industry and accurately credited it as "boring accounting." It did not discuss the "meta message" of SAB 121 at length because we judged it of tangential interest to most readers. McCauley alleges no inaccuracy here, only an omission of emphasis, which is not a reasonable basis for retraction.

3. “Missing the point about what we mean by debanking”

McCauley's third claim is that debanking was about being "comprehensively unable to get bank accounts" after the closure of crypto-friendly banks, not just losing settlement services like SEN or Signet. He describes a June 2023 call in which his bank closed its account in thirty days, followed by over forty banks rejecting Anchorage Digital over a seven-month period.

The piece did not deny that crypto companies experienced banking friction — it discussed it extensively. What it pointed out was a strategic conflation: advocates elide user-centric debanking (individuals and firms losing access to transaction accounts) with regulatory decisions regarding bank supervision. It also highlighted that Anchorage Digital eventually did find a banking partner.

The piece also offered an explanation for this friction that crypto advocates tend to resist: even a legitimate, compliant crypto business can be a risky bank client. The worked example of Metropolitan Commercial Bank and Voyager Digital is instructive. Metropolitan primarily provided cash management services to Voyager, a publicly traded, seemingly well-capitalized platform. Voyager's "best-in-class" risk program led to a single-name exposure of $666 million — approximately 60% of its loan book and 30% of all assets. When Voyager collapsed, Metropolitan faced credit losses large enough to imperil its crypto banking practice, which represented about a quarter of deposits. Metropolitan was dragged into the bankruptcy and sued over its conduct.

One wonders whether Metropolitan, in hindsight, considers providing cash management services to an "upstanding" crypto platform to have been low-risk. The bank decided to exit crypto banking entirely, attributing the move to "the strategic assessment of the business case" along with the regulatory environment.

McCauley's assertion that the piece ignores a constellation of regulatory activity is unsupported. The piece analyzed that activity extensively, along with the other reasons the banking industry updated negatively on crypto.

Concluding remarks

McCauley closes by characterizing the piece's thesis as "nothing to see here, regulators gonna regulate and banks gonna bank." That misreads the piece, which stated its thesis explicitly near the top:

"It's not a conspiracy theory if people really are out to get you." sums up part of my reaction to [the claims of crypto advocates], but only part. There exists some amount of conflation between what private actors are doing, what state actors have de facto or de jure commanded that they do, and which particular state and political actors have their fingers on the keyboard.

We disagree with the characterization of readers moved by the piece as "passive observers unfamiliar with the details." Many readers work in finance, financial technology, bank supervision, federal policy, or the cryptocurrency industry itself. They are not passive observers; they are professionally invested in these topics.

McCauley has failed to identify a single incorrect fact or any other malfeasance in the piece. Differences of opinion and preferences in emphasis are not grounds for retraction.

Request denied.

A CEO’s Demand for a Retraction Is a Serious Statement

It is worth emphasizing just how unusual it is for a bank CEO to personally demand a retraction. Banks typically operate through measured, professional channels—legal teams, PR departments, quiet outreach. Public demands of this nature are a rare departure. When they happen, they are not a casual provocation but a declaration that the demanding party believes it has suffered serious malfeasance.

That framing matters. Most writers are employed by institutions. When a bank threatens a libel suit, that suit targets the employer, not the individual writer. And a publication, naturally sensitive to the expense and distraction of litigation, will weigh every word about a prickly institution very carefully. This dynamic inherently chills reporting. A writer’s resources are almost never a match for a sizable financial institution.

I am an unusual case. I have deep domain expertise in what I write. I have the resources and authority of an independent business owner. And I would take a certain kind of perverse satisfaction in being sued by a crypto company. But most writers cannot say that. They operate under a legal department’s cautious eye, which means a CEO’s demanding a retraction is reasonably interpreted as a threat backed by financial and legal consequences.

Regardless of the setting, a statement made on the Internet is no less real than one made in a boardroom. The Internet is not a lesser venue. It is where the statement landed, and it must be treated as seriously as any other public communication.

I take my responsibilities seriously. The state of Nevada, my mortgage holder, the IRS, and my insurance company are all clear that I run a business, and I manage that business’s legal and reputational risks accordingly. I am not new to this. To borrow a phrase from a U.S. District Court judge: welcome to the NFL.

The perverse irony is that these demands are unwarranted and unprofessional. But they are also highly informative. They reveal that the parties involved believe they have been hit with a significant, damaging, and true claim. A claim as simple as: a federally chartered bank cannot wire its customers’ money.

Why a Bank Might Need a Bank

The Senate testimony from Anchorage Digital’s CEO was dramatic. The notion that a federally chartered bank could be debanked is, at first glance, absurd. It is also a point that misses the structure of the industry.

A fun fact: there are banks that you cannot bank at. Anchorage Digital Bank, National Association is one. The fine print on its own website clarifies that “Anchorage Digital” refers to services from Anchor Labs, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Anchor Labs is a tech company. It has a relationship with the bank—it gets paid for services—but it is not the bank itself. The bank operates under an OCC agreement, and a key clause of that agreement limits it to the operations of a trust company. This includes a hard line against taking deposits or making loans.

Trust companies run custody businesses. A custodian holds assets, manages their operational control, and returns them on demand. You, the reader, are likely a beneficial owner of assets held at a custodian right now, especially if you hold traditional financial assets. A brokerage does this on your behalf. Custody is the unglamorous work under the bundle of services you see.

A Cautionary Tale in Crypto Custody

Crypto custody is a risky business. Prime Trust, a Nevada-chartered trust company, is a case study. It lost client assets due to gross technical incompetence—wrote private key seed phrases on a piece of metal and then lost the metal. It then misappropriated other client assets to cover the losses, and, per its bankruptcy filing, concealed the resulting insolvency through intentional fraud. Regulators closed it in June 2023.

That was the same month Anchorage Digital lost its banking partner. The timing is not irrelevant. A competitor’s spectacular, fraud-induced collapse is precisely the kind of signal that would make any compliance officer cautious about taking on risk in a new industry. That context is a legitimate, serious factor in explaining bankers’ reticence. Washington has a phrase for a well-executed acknowledgment of this kind of reality.

The Anchorage CEO’s testimony argued for strict rule-following. He described himself as “a bit of a square.” But his company’s actual track record, including its history with regulators, tells a more complicated story. The failure to adapt has a cost.

The Wire Transfer Problem

Anchorage executives say they lack the ability to send customer wires to third parties—a basic banking service. This is not a technical problem. It is a risk management choice made by its sub-custodian bank. And crypto executives’ frustration over it is met with a cold response from compliance officers.

The sub-custodian knows that crypto firms have a poor track record. As Nic Carter has reported, a Silvergate executive admitted—anonymously—that his bank was “not as buttoned up as we should have been” with FTX and Alameda clients. A bank than once got burned will not happily sign up to run wires for a digital asset company’s clients without significant guardrails. No one wants to wake up to headlines that they, again, failed to piece together what was happening.

The future of financial infrastructure will be debated on its merits, not its hype. The reality is what it is. I will continue to write about that reality, and about the actual shape of the financial systems we have built and are trying to rebuild. When the people running those systems disappoint, the facts and the record should remain available for all to see. They are on the record.