Tl;dr: In recent weeks, some firms have struggled to remain solvent due to insufficient risk controls. See how Coinbase implements secure and comprehensive risk management practices that enable institutions to successfully navigate the cryptoeconomy.

By Brett Tejpaul, Head of Coinbase Institutional, Matt Boyd, Head of Prime Finance, and Caroline Tarnok, Head of Credit and Market Risk

The shocks to the crypto credit environment over the last few weeks are likely to be a major inflection point for the industry. Solvency concerns surrounding entities like Celsius, Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Voyager, and other similar counterparties were a reflection of insufficient risk controls, and reports of additional struggling firms are fast becoming stories of bankruptcy, restructuring, and failure. Notably, the issues here were foreseeable and actually credit specific, not crypto specific in nature. Many of these firms were overleveraged with short term liabilities mismatched against longer duration illiquid assets.

We believe these market participants were caught up in the frenzy of a crypto bull market and forgot the basics of risk management. Unhedged bets, huge investments in the Terra ecosystem, and massive leverage provided to and deployed by 3AC meant that risk was too high and too concentrated. These events are, unfortunately, more common in traditional financial markets than we would hope. We are reminded frequently of Long Term Capital Management in the 1990s, Lehman Brothers in the 2000s, and even Archegos Capital Management in 2021.

Coinbase had no financing exposure to…