Electric Coin Co. CEO Josh Swihart reported that his bank denied him a loan after discovering his cryptocurrency holdings, despite having approved all prior steps of the loan process. Swihart shared this information in a video posted on January 21 on X.
“I’ve never missed a payment, not one, and I went through the whole loan process: approved, approved, approved," Swihart said. "At one point, they had asked for some detail of something, and I disclosed that I own crypto, and they said, ‘We’re sorry, we cannot give you the loan.’ It was all approved, all the way up until that point. Some person somewhere in some back office that I can’t see, that I can’t talk to, decided that this guy is now risky because he holds crypto, even though everything else was fine.”
According to Swihart, the bank, where he had been a customer since high school, had previously approved loans for him without any issues. However, upon learning of his crypto holdings, the bank said that he would only be approved for the loan if he transferred six months' worth of mortgage payments from cryptocurrency into their bank. The official reason given for the denial was: "we’re just trying to be more careful because of COVID," Swihart said in the video.
Internal documents from the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) indicate coordinated federal efforts to debank individuals and companies associated with the crypto industry, referred to as Operation Chokepoint 2.0, according to Yahoo Finance.
U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis claimed that the FDIC is now "attempting to hide Operation Chokepoint 2.0," as per a January 16 post on X. She has sent a letter to the FDIC chairman requesting that all materials related to its digital assets activities be preserved for Congressional oversight purposes. Lummis added that she and Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott "will get to the bottom of it."
Swihart became CEO of Electric Coin Co. in December 2023 after serving as the company's senior vice president of growth, according to an announcement from Electric Coin Co., which was previously known as ZCash Company and was established in 2015.