As a kid in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Barry Silbert traded baseball cards. A Stanford case study on his company says that hobby taught him more about illiquid assets and inefficient markets than any job he held in banking.
He was born there in 1976 and told a House committee in 2011 that he was born and raised in the town. He earned a business degree at Emory's Goizueta school in 1998, then spent about five and a half years as an investment banker. By his own account it was a good experience and not enough. 'I really wanted to go try to build something,' he told Emory Business. His parents and childhood do not appear in the interviews and profiles I could read, so the personal layer is thin; the documented through-line is the card trader who grew into a market maker.
'I really wanted to go try to build something,' he told Emory Business.
In 2004 he founded SecondMarket, a marketplace for shares in private companies. It was valued at $200 million in 2011 and sold to Nasdaq in 2015. He ran it for nearly eleven years, and Fortune named him to its 40 Under 40 in 2013.
What almost nobody connects is that he began buying bitcoin in 2012, years before most of his peers took it seriously. Digital Currency Group followed in 2015. It grew by owning pieces of the industry: Grayscale's bitcoin trust, the lender Genesis, the mining firm Foundry, the news site CoinDesk. By November 2021 it had made more than 200 investments, moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and a $700 million secondary sale valued it at $10 billion, with Silbert holding almost 40 percent.
Then the structure he built turned on him. Genesis had lent to Three Arrows Capital and Babel Finance, and when they fell, it took heavy losses. DCG took on debts to keep it afloat. On November 16, 2022, Genesis halted withdrawals days after FTX collapsed, and about 10 percent of DCG staff were already gone. In January 2023 Genesis filed for Chapter 11, and in October the New York Attorney General sued DCG, Gemini and Genesis, alleging fraud on more than 230,000 investors. DCG denied the claims.
It survived by selling and repairing: CoinDesk went to Bullish for $125 million, Genesis completed a restructuring in August 2024 with about $4 billion returned to creditors, and Grayscale's bitcoin fund became a spot ETF in January 2024. In November 2024 Silbert launched Yuma, an AI company on the Bittensor blockchain. No valuation newer than the 2021 figure was found.
A card trader learns early that anything is worth what someone will pay. It is a useful instinct when you are the one holding the lender, the fund and the miner.