SAN FRANCISCO — For once, the crisis didn’t seem to revolve around a cryptocurrency company.The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday set off panic across the technology industry. But crypto executives and investors — who have endured a year of near-constant upheaval — seized on the moment to preach and scold.Centralized banking was to blame, the crypto advocates said. Their vision of an alternate financial system, unmoored from big banks and other gatekeepers, was better. They argued that the government regulators that recently cracked down on crypto firms had sown the seeds of the bank’s implosion.“Fiat is fragile,” wrote the Bitcoin advocate Erik Voorhees, using a common shorthand for traditional currencies.“We’re seeing glitches in the machine,” said Mo Shaikh, chief executive of the crypto company Aptos Labs. “This is an opportunity to take a breath and consider the practicalities of decentralization.”But the tone quickly shifted, as a major crypto company revealed late Friday that it had billions of dollars trapped in Silicon Valley Bank. A so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a constant value of $1 suddenly dipped in price, sending shudders through the market.And the finger-pointing went in both directions. Some tech investors argued that the crypto world’s procession of bad actors and overnight collapses had conditioned people to panic at the first sign of trouble, setting the stage for the crisis at Silicon Valley Bank. In November, FTX, …
