Srinivasan in mid-March stated he expected a banking turmoil to spark a considerable decline of the U.S. dollar, hyperinflation and a jump in bitcoin to $1mln by mid-June

Balaji Srinivasan on Tuesday stated his $1mln bet on bitcoin has been completed ahead of time, and he has donated $1.5mln ($500k more than needed) to three separate entities as settlement.

The ex-CTO at crypto exchange Coinbase and a former partner at VC company Andreessen Horowitz, Srinivasan in mid-March – soon after the failures in short order of Silvergate Bank, Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – stated he expected a banking turmoil to spark a considerable decline of the U.S. dollar, hyperinflation and a jump in bitcoin to $1mln by mid-June. He put up $1mln to support his forecast.

I just burned a million to tell you they are printing trillions, Srinivasan stated in a tweet Tuesday. I spent my own money to send a provably costly signal that there is something wrong with the economy, and that it is not going to be a ‘soft landing’ like (Fed Chair Jerome) Powell commits – but something much worse.

Srinivasan noted that current U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was at the Federal Reserve prior to the 2008 global financial crisis and failed to warn, nor did the then Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Today’s leaders, including Powell, are likewise in denial, he contended.

Crises, Srinivasan reminded, can move much more rapidly than anyone supposes. He insisted that it took two days for the Fed to print $300bln after the SVB failure, two weeks for $500bln to leave the banking system, two months to go from “patient zero” to national lockdown during the pandemic, two quarters to go from mild recession to financial crisis in 2008 and two years for the Soviet Union to go from superpower to collapse in 1991.

Others have a different opinion about the $300mln growth in the Fed’s balance sheet following SVB failure. Economist and ex Fed staffer Danielle DiMartino Booth contended at the time that the rapid rise was not money printing, but rather a jump in Federal Reserve discount window and other borrowings by the country’s banks.

In concluding his $1mln bet, Srinivasan made three donations worth $500k each, one to fund Bitcoin Core development at Chaincode Labs, one to Give Directly and one to pseudonymous Twitter user James Medlock, who in March offered to bet $1mln that the U.S. would not face hyperinflation.