Banking Woes: Erik Voorhees Says Chase Closed His Credit Card Account

Highlighting the fact that trusted third parties in the traditional world of finance are literally only trust deep, ShapeShift CEO and long-time bitcoiner Erik Voorhees revealed on Twitter that Chase Bank — a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co., its own CEO being crypto-detractor Jamie Dimon — has shuttered his credit card account with “No warning. No explanation.”

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Voorhees: ‘You [Will] Slide Into Stagnancy’

There’s been a spate of frictional banking episodes as of late that highlight why anti-banking sentiments are so high in the cryptoverse, where it’s often touted one can “become your own bank.”

If you facilitate financial services through a trusted third party, you will always be at the mercy of that party’s whims, however well-intended, unjust, or arbitrary those whims may be. ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees has been smacked over the head with this reality once more via Chase’s fresh closure of his credit card account.

Voorhees pictured.

Voorhees declared as much in a furious Twitter salvo:

Chase just closed my credit card account. No warning. No explanation of any kind. Won’t tell me why. No wonder people hate that company. Fuck you Jamie Dimon and fuck you @Chase Enjoy the next decade as you slide into stagnancy and decay. I’m aware of nobody who will miss you.

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) May 2, 2018

I queried Mr. Voorhees through tweet as to whether he thought the closure had anything to do with his affiliation to the crypto space, though he did not immediately respond. In the absence of an explanation from Chase, we’re all left to speculate for now as to the why.

Digging In

Alluding to his earlier representation of Chase as a “company,” Voorhees quickly fired off another tweet arguing that such a characterization wasn’t apt, insofar as he said the bank was more like a “Soviet-style state-appendage” that thrives off cronyism:

Sorry, I shouldn’t have used the word “company.” Company refers to a market-based organization that has to bring a product to market and compete openly. More akin to a Soviet-style state-appendage that wraps itself in regulatory cronyism than a company.

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) May 2, 2018

Now, reasonable people inside and beyond the cryptoverse can debate Voorhees’ description here. But the takeaway as I see it is that there is Kafkaesque senselessness — whether it be derived from arbitrariness or nefariousness — in traditional finance’s status quo, and this status quo poses very practical and material pains against the people it claims to serve.

And it’s such pains that the cryptoverse may contain the solutions for. And it may be these solutions that bring in Chase’s “stagnancy and decay,” as Voorhees put it.

What’s your take? Do you think it’s wrong for financial accounts to be shuttered without explanation or recourse? Let us know what you think in the comments below. 

Images via CNBC, Hustler Money Blog

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