One of its subsidiaries, Genesis, froze customer withdrawals in November, leading to the latest meltdown of the industry.
The company is trying to avoid a bankruptcy, but investors fear that it will cause the collapse of other companies and projects.
Here is what we know about the many companies that Digital Currency Group owns:
In 2016 DCG acquired CoinDesk, a news site that was previously invested in the outlet. TechCrunch viewed the deal at the time as worth $500,000 to $600,000.
In November, CoinDesk released a leaked balance sheet of Alameda Research, a trading firm founded by Sam Bankman- Fried. Industry observers cited the report as the catalyst for the downfall of Alameda and Bankman- Fried's FTX, which filed for bankruptcy less than two weeks later.
Genesis Trading was originally the digital currency trading division of DCG Chief Executive Barry Silbert's SecondMarket, but was relaunched with its new name as a subsidiary of DCG when Silbert started the venture firm in 2015.
Genesis Global Capital, the lending arm, said in November it would stop making new loans and blocking customers from withdrawing funds because of the market dislocation caused by the collapse of FTX.
Genesis Global Capital has partnered with a number of other companies, including Gemini, to offer a lending product. Gemini says its customers are owed $900 million from Genesis.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Genesis owes more than $3 billion to its creditors, including Gemini.
According to a November letter from Silbert to shareholders, DCG owes $1.675 billion to Genesis's lending arm. After the collapse of Singapore-based criptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, a $1.1 billion promissory note appears to have been attached to the liabilities DCG assumed from Genesis.
Silbert started Grayscale Investments in 2013 after stepping down as CEO of SecondMarket. After selling SecondMarket to Nasdaq Inc in 2015, he founded DCG, with Grayscale as one of the firm's subsidiaries.
Grayscale's flagship Grayscale Bitcoin Trust GBTC is the world's largest bitcoin fund, one that the company hopes will be converted into an exchange-traded fund someday.
Since early 2021, the price of the underlying asset, GBTC, has not traded at a premium. In order to reduce the discount in 2021, DCG announced a plan to spend up to $1 billion to purchase GBTC shares.
The troubles at Genesis' lending business did not affect DCG and its subsidiaries, DCG said in November, while Grayscale said its underlying assets were unaffected.
DCG has acquired 28 of its 160 companies listed on its website, which makes it a prolific venture capital investor. There are subsidiaries of the crypto exchange Luno and the staking firm Foundry.
DCG is an investor in the U.S. coinbase and Kraken, and its other holdings include the U.S. firm Circle, which runs the stable coinUSDC, and blockchain analytics companies Chainalysis, Dune Analytics, Elliptic and Etherscan.