Hashmasks × Banks Are Zeros

Clown Banks

Traditional finance became the joke. These are the Hashmasks that wear it.

134 Hashmasks wear a clown mask and carry the name of a bank, a central bank, a Wall Street firm or one of finance's other disasters, written on the Ethereum blockchain by their owners. 15 of them have since failed, been rescued or been swallowed whole.

  • 134 clowns
  • 15 fallen
  • 21 money printers
Get your own clown bank

The clowns that fell

SVB and Credit Suisse were on this wall when it went up in 2021. Both are gone now, and so are Signature, Silvergate and First Republic.

  1. RIP 2024 Evergrande The world's most indebted property developer, ordered into liquidation by a Hong Kong court in January 2024.
  2. RIP 2023 Credit Suisse Taken over by UBS in a government-brokered emergency deal, March 2023.
  3. RIP 2023 CS First Boston Credit Suisse's investment bank, swallowed by UBS along with the rest of it in 2023.
  4. RIP 2023 First Republic Bank Seized and sold to JPMorgan Chase, May 2023.
  5. RIP 2023 Signature Bank Closed by New York regulators two days after SVB, March 2023.
  6. RIP 2023 Silicon Valley Bank Seized by the FDIC after a bank run, March 2023.
  7. RIP 2023 Silvergate Bank Crypto's favourite bank, until it announced its own wind-down in March 2023.
  8. RIP 2022 Sam Bankman Fraud FTX's founder. The exchange collapsed in November 2022; he was convicted of fraud in 2023 and sentenced to 25 years.
  9. RIP 2008 Bear Stearns Collapsed in March 2008 and was sold to JPMorgan in a Fed-backed rescue.
  10. Bailed out 2008 Fannie Mae Taken into US government conservatorship, September 2008.
  11. Bailed out 2008 Freddie Mac Taken into US government conservatorship, September 2008.
  12. Rescued 2008 Merrill Lynch Sold to Bank of America the weekend Lehman Brothers failed, September 2008.
  13. Rescued 2008 Wachovia Sold to Wells Fargo at the height of the 2008 crisis.
  14. RIP 2003 Salomon Brothers The bond desk of Liar's Poker fame, absorbed into Citigroup, which retired the name in 2003.
  15. RIP 1996 Stratton Oakmont The Wolf of Wall Street's boiler room, expelled by regulators in 1996.

The wall

Names read from Ethereum block 26,404,967 on 13 November 2026.

134 clowns

Get your own clown bank

  1. Find a clown

    Browse Hashmasks on OpenSea for one wearing a clown mask, and buy it.

  2. Name it after a bank

    Rename it on thehashmasks.com. A rename costs 1,830 NCT, and no two masks can share a name, so if your bank is taken, find another clown bank.

  3. Tell the world

    Post it with #BanksAreZeros so it can go up on the wall.

What is all this?

Banks Are Zeros

Clown Banks grew out of the Banks Are Zeros meme from BowTiedBull, formerly of Wall Street Playboys, who now writes at bowtiedbull.io and on X. Its high point was Clownhattan: a crowd in clown masks in Times Square in May 2021.

Hashmasks

16,384 digital portraits by more than 70 artists, released by Suum Cuique Labs in 2021. Every mask's name lives on the Ethereum blockchain, and whoever owns the mask can change it.

NCT, the Name Changing Token

Renaming a Hashmask costs 1,830 NCT. Names are unique across the whole collection, so there is only ever one clown called Goldman Sachs.

TradFi and DeFi

Traditional finance is the century-old banks, the central banks and the firms around them. Decentralized finance swaps those middlemen for smart contracts on public blockchains. This wall tells a joke about the first, written on the second.

View on Hashmasks OpenSea