Nov 26, 2022
One of the surprises on the first day of FTX in bankruptcy court is that FTX owned a teeny bank in a town of 146 people in the middle of nowhere. The Farmington bank was the 26th smallest in the United States. The bank's name is Moonstone, an odd name for a bank in a farming village. Before the FTX acquisition, Farmington's deposits had been steady at about $10 million for a decade. But in the third quarter of this year, the bank's deposits jumped nearly 600% to $84 million. According to FDIC data, nearly all that increase, $71 million, came from just four new accounts. The Story Farmington, in the rural farming region of Whitman County, Washington, was described as "no-frills" by the local newspaper The Spokesman-Review in 2010. Its then-president, John Widman, told the newspaper that it had stopped making mortgage loans because the paperwork was too much effort. Moonstone changed the name shortly before FTX bought it. It's single branch had three employees