A brokerage that acted like a bank
Voyager Digital was founded in 2018 by Stephen Ehrlich, Oscar Salazar, Philip Eytan and Gaspard de Dreuzy, pitching itself as a friendly, mobile-first on-ramp to crypto. Its app offered commission-free trading across dozens of tokens and, critically, interest-bearing accounts advertising rewards as high as 9-12% on customer deposits. The company went public in Canada, listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker VOYG and trading over-the-counter in the U.S., a rare publicly traded pure-play crypto broker. To fund those yields, Voyager re-lent customer assets to institutional borrowers, effectively running an unregulated bank without a bank's capital rules or deposit protections.
The bull-market ascent
Riding the 2020-2021 crypto boom, Voyager ballooned from roughly 120,000 users in early 2020 to about 3.5 million, with assets under management peaking near $5.9 billion. Its stock soared more than 3,600% in five months, peaking around $29.86 in April 2021, and Ehrlich sold roughly $31 million of his own shares near that high. In May 2022, even as markets wobbled, Voyager raised about $60 million in a private placement led by Alameda Research, the trading arm tied to FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried. The marketing leaned heavily on safety, repeatedly telling customers their funds were protected and, in some materials, that deposits were insured by the FDIC.