Blockfi's Great Rise and Even Greater Escape

It was the country's fastest-growing private company until the crypto winter blanketed the sector. Here's how an innovative financial startup is succeeding through good, old-fashioned fundamentals.

- By Bill Saporito

Anticipation was bubbling for Collision, Toronto's annual tech-veneration fest, and it seemed the perfect stage for young fintech star Flori Marquez, co-founder of BlockFi, who was expected to be one of this year's headliners. It was the first in-person Collision in three years, during which time great leaps had been made in areas such as Web3, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cryptocurrency. Marquez filled the bill perfectly. The daughter of Argentinian immigrants, she had eschewed a traditional path to banking to dive into crypto finance, and the company she helped create in 2017 had become one of the cryptoverse's comets. But days before the conference kickoff on June 20, her name suddenly disappeared from the program. That included her spot in a session called "What to Feed a Growing Unicorn."

Perhaps because in the weeks preceding Collision, BlockFi ceased to be a unicorn-it had been valued as high as $3.8 billion in 2021-sending Marquez off the stage and into the biggest drama of her business life. In January of this year, she and her co-founder, Zac Prince, were running the fastest-growing company on the Inc. 5000. In February, they signed a consent decree with the Securities and Exchange Commission that, while it hobbled one of their most popular products, paved the way, they thought, for the regulatory oversight they'd long sought. They were going legit.

But by June, they would find themselves swimming against a tide that was dragging the entire crypto industry under. "What I love most about my job is that I get a new job [all the time]," she mused in an interview with Inc. in late July. "It used to be every six months. Now it's every month." That was just after crypto platform FTX, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, threw BlockFi the life preserver that will let it return to a growth path: a $400 million line of credit, in return for an option to buy the firm.