Barry Silbert | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1976 (age 49–50) Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States |
| Education | Emory University (BBA) |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Known for | Early investor in Bitcoin |
Barry Silbert (born 1976) is an American entrepreneur and investor, the founder and chief executive officer of Digital Currency Group (DCG).
Silbert founded the trading platform SecondMarket in 2004 and sold it to Nasdaq in 2015. He began buying bitcoin in 2012 and founded DCG in October 2015. He launched the decentralized artificial intelligence company Yuma in November 2024, and in August 2025 became chairman of DCG's subsidiary Grayscale Investments.
Since the 2022 collapse of DCG's lending subsidiary Genesis Global Capital, Silbert has been named personally in a civil fraud suit brought by the New York attorney general and in a federal investor class action, both of which survived motions to dismiss. DCG and former Genesis chief executive Michael Moro settled related charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2025 without admitting or denying the findings.
In 2004, Silbert founded SecondMarket, an online marketplace for shares in private technology companies. It was valued at $200 million in 2011 and was acquired by Nasdaq in 2015.
Silbert began buying bitcoin in 2012 and founded Digital Currency Group in October 2015. In November 2024 he announced the launch of Yuma, a decentralized artificial intelligence company. He has served as chairman of the board of Grayscale Investments, a DCG subsidiary, since August 2025, having previously held the role from February 2020 to December 2023.
In June 2022, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, one of the largest borrowers of DCG's lending subsidiary Genesis Global Capital, defaulted on its loans, leaving Genesis with losses of more than $1.1 billion. DCG absorbed Genesis's losses through a $1.1 billion promissory note payable over ten years at 1 percent interest. Critics have alleged that Genesis carried the note at face value ($1.1 billion) as a current asset when its actual present value was approximately $300 million, characterizing this as accounting fraud. Genesis halted customer withdrawals in November 2022 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2023. At the time of the halt, Genesis held roughly $900 million in assets from about 340,000 customers of a lending program launched in February 2021.
On October 19, 2023, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit against Genesis and DCG, naming Silbert and former Genesis chief executive Soichiro "Michael" Moro personally. The complaint alleged that they worked together to conceal Genesis's insolvency from investors and the public, including through the promissory note and a June 2022 statement describing the company's balance sheet as strong and its business as operating normally. The suit sought restitution, disgorgement and a ban on the defendants from the securities and commodities business in New York.
Genesis settled with the attorney general's office on February 8, 2024, while DCG and Silbert continued to face personal liability. The following day James filed an amended complaint raising the alleged investor losses from more than $1 billion to $3 billion, saying additional investors had come forward. The Genesis settlement, valued at $2 billion, was finalized in May 2024.
On April 9, 2025, Justice Melissa A. Crane of the New York Supreme Court denied the motions in most respects, sustaining the Martin Act and Executive Law fraud claims against DCG, Silbert and Moro while dismissing as duplicative two claims premised on violations of the New York Penal Law.
On January 17, 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that DCG and Moro would pay a combined $38.5 million in civil penalties to settle charges that they misled investors about Genesis's financial condition after the Three Arrows default, in violation of the Securities Act of 1933. The SEC said the two had understated the impact of the loss in social media posts and presented a misleadingly favorable picture of the company's finances. DCG and Moro settled without admitting or denying the findings. The SEC settlement did not resolve allegations that DCG had used customer funds from Genesis for its own purposes.
Investors who had lent digital assets to Genesis through its Genesis Yield program brought a proposed securities class action against DCG, Silbert and other executives in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
On February 24, 2026, Judge Stefan R. Underhill largely denied the defendants' motion to dismiss, finding that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged that Genesis Yield offered investments rather than ordinary commercial loans, bringing them within the scope of federal securities law, and that they had adequately supported claims for selling unregistered securities and for securities fraud.
Forbes estimated Silbert's net worth at $3.2 billion in 2022. He subsequently dropped off the magazine's billionaire rankings amid rising debts at DCG.