Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

Prior to the technological innovations explored by Licklider and his ARPA colleagues, data communication – at this time, mainly voice via telephone lines – were based on circuit switching, in which each telephone call would be manually connected by a switch operator to establish a dedicated, end-to-end analog electrical connection between the two parties. The RAND Corporation’s Paul Baran, and later ARPA itself, would begin to work on methods to allow formidable data communication in the event of a partial disconnection, such as from a nuclear event or other act of war, leading to a distributed network of unmanned nodes that would compartmentalize the desired information into smaller blocks of data – today referred to as packets – before routing them separately, only to be rejoined once received at the desired destination.

While certainly unbeknownst to the technologists at the time, this achievement of both distributed routing and global information settlement via data packets created an entirely new commodity – digital data.

A Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence

Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict. One well-known yet early example occurred during the Napoleonic wars in the 19^th century, when the banking stalwart Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and horseback couriers to gain an information settlement edge related to battle outcomes, while speedily communicating with their traders back in London. These animal-driven technological exploits allowed Rothschild-affiliated brokers to place well-informed bets on the outcome of France’s warmongering to position themselves on the winning sides of large currency and commodity bets. This similar but modernized technique would later be employed by figures like commodity trader (and Mossad asset) Marc Rich in the 1980s, who used satellite phones and optical imagery techniques to track and relay oil tanker flows between nations, giving his trades an asymmetric advantage when dealing within the active petrodollar system. Similarly, Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital achieved 86% gains in its first year largely due to correctly anticipating Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait due to astute intelligence sharing from military sources, and correctly going long on oil prices while shorting stocks.

As the front of modern warfare slowly evolved from direct military action into weaponized financial speculation, the market for data became just as valuable as the defense budget itself. It is for this reason that the necessity of sound data emerged as the foremost issue of national security, leading to a proliferation of advanced data brokers coming out of DARPA and the intelligence community, akin to the 21^st century’s Manhattan Project.

The San Jose Project: Google, Facebook, and PayPal

Exemplified by the creation of the CIA’s venture firm, In-Q-Tel, and the proliferation of Silicon Valley-based venture firms coalescing on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA, the financialization of a new crop of American data brokers was complete. The first firm to grace Sand Hill Road was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, better known as KPCB, which participated in funding internet pioneers Amazon, AOL, and Compaq, while also directly seeding Netscape and Google. KPCB partners have included such government stalwarts as former Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Ted Schlein – the latter being a board member of In-Q-Tel and member of the NSA’s advisory board. KPCB also had an intimate connection with internet networking pioneer Sun Microsystems, best known for building out the majority of network switches and other infrastructure needed for a modern broadband economy.

Outside of the obvious need for network infrastructure for a data economy, an early Sun employee and eventual KPCB partner Bill Joy patented a widely-used distributed file system software known as NFS, or Network File System. Sun also established a public-sector focused subsidiary known as Sun Federal at the start of the 1990s. By 1991, Sun Federal was responsible for more than half of the workstations ordered by local, state and federal governments in the country. Perhaps the world’s most famous data broker, Google, whose founders both came out of Stanford University, was seeded by former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his partner at the Ethernet switching company Granite Systems (later acquired by Cisco), David Cheriton, with Google’s most iconic CEO, Eric Schmidt, being the former CTO of Sun Microsystems.

The emergence of Silicon Valley out of the academic circuit in Northern California was no accident, and in fact was directly influenced by an unclassified program known as the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project. The MDDS was created with direct participation from the CIA, NSA, and DARPA itself within the computer science programs at Stanford and CalTech, alongside MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. According to reporting from Quartz, this research, with clear national security implications, would be largely “funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF (the National Science Foundation) allowing “the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector” in an attempt “to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.” The MDDS white paper was released in 1993, and over a few years, more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each were distributed via the NSF in order to capture the most promising efforts, ensuring that those efforts would become intellectual property controlled by the United States regulatory regime.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” reads the MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

The first unclassified briefing for scientists was titled “birds of a feather briefing” and was formalized during a 1995 conference in San Jose, CA, which was titled the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems.” That same year, one of the first MDDS grants was awarded to Stanford University, which was already a decade deep in working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was to “query optimization of very complex queries,” with a closely-followed second grant that aimed to build a massive digital library on the internet. These two grants funded research by then-Stanford graduate students and future Google cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Two intelligence-community managers regularly met with Brin while he was still at Stanford and completing the research that would lead to the incorporation of Google, all paid for by grants provided by the NSA and CIA via MDDS.

While often not discussed when describing Google’s origin story, the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” wrote Jeffrey Ullman. Furthering this concept, Stanford’s Infolab website explains that “the development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford.”

Google would certainly set the standard for success during the first Dot Com bubble. Yet, shortly following their incorporation, two similar Silicon Valley companies with significant ties to the intelligence community would also emerge from colleges affiliated with the MDDS – PayPal and Facebook.

PayPal was launched in December 1998 as Confinity Inc. by founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, alongside Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The company sought to provide financial institutions with the technological ability to make mobile and online economic transactions secure using cryptography – technology at the time heavily regulated by the United States. Thiel had graduated from Stanford Law School in 1992, and then had a brief stint at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell – a legal practice long known for its ties to the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Early on, Confinity Inc. operated out of 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA at, a building that had previously housed Google during their “formative years,” after previously sharing an office with Elon Musk’s X.com.

It was also during these formative years that the PayPal team worked closely with the intelligence community. Levchin later stated in an interview with Charlie Rose that: “I think the government working with a private sector is a great thing. When we were working on security and anti-fraud measures at PayPal, we collaborated with every imaginable three and four-letter agency and those were some of the best, most productive relationships I’ve had as a business person…I think if the private sector can help them, we should.” Due to an unprecedented viral growth of their user base, PayPal engineers spent much of the formation period of the company building software to help identify fraudulent transactions to mitigate the growing costs of rampant fraud in the ecosystem, eventually developing an adaptive algorithm named “Igor” after a Russian criminal that would frequently taunt PayPal’s fraud department.

In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: “Why not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?” Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir’s co-founders consulted with John Poindexter during his tenure as head of DARPA’s then-embattled Total Information Awareness in efforts to privatize the controversial surveillance program. In 2020, Intelligencer spoke with a former intelligence official who was involved in the investment who claimed the CIA had hoped that “tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley” would allow it to “integrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format.”

As of 2013, Palantir’s client list included “the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS” with around “50% of its business” coming from public sector contracts. Palantir is closely connected to the U.S. government, but its financial spin-off, Palantir Metropolis, is focused on providing “analytical tools” for “hedge funds, banks and financial services firms” to outsmart each other. As The Guardian reports: “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.”

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog’s architect and project manager at DARPA has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some have even directly involved Google and Palantir.

An unspoken outcome of the global proliferation of Facebook was the sly, roundabout creation of the first digital ID system – a necessity for the coming digital economy. Users would set up their profiles by feeding the social network with a plethora of personal information, with Facebook being able to use this data to generate large webs of connectivity between otherwise unknown social groups. There is even evidence that Facebook generated placeholder accounts for individuals that appeared in user data but did not have a profile of their own. Both Google and PayPal would also use similar digital identification methods to allow users to sign into other websites, creating interoperable identification systems that could permeate the internet.

A similar evolution is occurring in the financial sector, as data broker social networks – including Facebook and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) – are posturing themselves as the future of financial service companies. This idea makes more sense when you consider that money itself is a communication technology, and can easily be built into existing communication platforms – especially ones driven by user data and identity systems. We are simultaneously seeing financial services, such as the largest dollar stablecoin issuer Tether – with excessive ties to PayPal – spending millions on investments in next generation data broker technology. Tether has recently funded the Earth observation/Satellite-as-a-service company Satellogic, the brain chip company Blackrock Neurotech, AI-computation firm Northern Data, and even Rumble, a Thiel-funded competitor to Google’s YouTube.

From Public-Private, to Private-Public

As outlined above, it is clear that the public sector’s intelligence community used the veil of the private sector to establish financial incentives and commercial applications to build out the modern data economy. A simple glance at the seven largest stocks in the American economy demonstrate this concept, with Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and Amazon – with founder Jeff Bezos being the grandson of ARPA founder Lawrence Preston Gise – leading the software side, and Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and Tesla leading the hardware component. While many of these companies have egregious ties to the intelligence community and the public sector during their incubation, now these private sector companies are driving the globalization and national security interests of the public sector.

The future of the American data economy is firmly situated between two pillars – artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. With the incoming Trump administration’s close advisory ties to PayPal, Tether, Facebook, Palantir, Tesla and SpaceX, it is clear that the data brokers have returned to roost at Pennsylvania Avenue. AI requires massive amounts of sound data to be of any use for the technologists, and the data provided by these private sector stalwarts is poised to feed their learning modules – surely after securing hefty government contracts. Private companies using public blockchains to issue their tokens generates not only significant opportunities for the United States to address its debt problem, but simultaneously serves as a “boon in surveillance”, as stated by a former CIA director.

Within the Trump administration’s embracing of the blockchain – itself the final iteration of the public-private commercialization of data, despite its libertarian posturing – reveals the culmination of a decades-long technocratic dialectic trojan horse. Nearly all of the foundational technology needed to push the world into this new financial system was cultivated in the shadows by the military and intelligence community of the world’s largest empire. While technology can surely offer solutions for greater efficiency and economic prosperity, the very same tools can also be used to further enslave the citizens of the world.

What once appeared as a guiding light beckoning us towards free speech and financial freedom has revealed itself to be nothing but the shine of Uncle Sam’s boot making its next step.

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker.

Whitney joined Before Skool to discuss digital blackmail, AI surveillance, anti-humanism and propaganda.

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One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

Before Skool.

The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”

This will apparently be achieved via mass interagency data sharing between the DoD, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the private sector. In other words, the military and intelligence communities, as well as the public and private sector elements of the US healthcare system, are working closely with Big Tech to “predict” diseases and treat them before they occur (and even before symptoms are felt) for the purported purpose of improving civilian and military healthcare.

This cross-sector team plans to deliver this transformation of the healthcare system by first utilizing and sharing the DoD’s healthcare dataset, which is the most “comprehensive…in the world.” It seems, however, based on the programs that already utilize this predictive approach and the necessity for “machine learning” in the development of AI technology, that this partnership would also massively expand the breadth of this healthcare dataset through an array of technologies, methods and sources.

Yet, if the actors and institutions involved in lobbying for and implementing this system indicate anything, it appears that another—if not primary—purpose of this push towards a predictive AI-healthcare infrastructure is the resurrection of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-managed and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-supported program that Congress officially “shelved” decades ago. That program, Total Information Awareness (TIA), was a post 9/11 “pre-crime” operation which sought to use mass surveillance to stop terrorists before they committed any crimes through collaborative data mining efforts between the public and private sector.

While the “pre-crime” aspect of TIA is the best known component of the program, it also included a component that sought to use public and private health and financial data to “predict” bioterror events and pandemics before they emerge. This was TIA’s “Bio-Surveillance” program, which aimed to develop “necessary information technologies and a resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.” Its architects argued it would achieve this by “monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.” While ostensibly created to thwart “bioterror” events, the program also sought to create algorithms for identifying “normal” disease outbreaks, essentially seeking to automate the early detection of either biological attacks or natural pathogen outbreaks, ranging from pandemics to presumably other, less severe disease events.

As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, after TIA was terminated by Congress, it largely survived by privatizing its projects into the company known as Palantir, founded by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and some of his associates from his time at Stanford University. Notably, the initial software used to create Palantir’s first product was Paypal’s anti-fraud algorithm. While Palantir, for most of its history, has not overtly sought to resurrect the TIA Bio-surveillance program, that has now changed in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

In late 2022, Palantir announced that it and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would continue their ongoing work to “plan, manage and respond to future outbreaks and public health incidents” by streamlining its existing biosurveillance programs “into a singular, efficient vehicle” to support the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture.” This “Common Operating Picture” aims to secure “strong collaboration across the federal government, jurisdictional health departments, private sector entities, and other key health partners.”

The CDC and Palantir publicized this partnership just months after the CDC announced the creation of the its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA). This office now plans to expand biosurveillance infrastructure via public-private partnerships across the country to ensure that local communities constantly supply federal agencies with a steady stream of bio-data to develop AI-generated pandemic “forecasts,” or viral outbreak predictions, that will inform pandemic policy measures during pandemics and before they even occur, theoretically before even a single person dies of a particular contagion.

On the surface level, such a mission might sound as though it would serve public health; if government and private institutions can collaborate to prevent pandemics before they happen, well then, why not? Yet, again, the origins of Palantir demonstrate that these “healthcare” surveillance policy measures actually work completely in tandem with the deeper, aforementioned “pre-crime” national security goal of TIA, which powerful forces have been slowly implementing for decades. The ultimate goal it seems, is to usher in a new, even more invasive surveillance paradigm where both the external environment and the public’s internal environment (i.e. our bodies) are monitored for “errant” signals.

Palantir’s founder and largest shareholder, Peter Thiel, incorporated the company in the immediate aftermath of Total Information Awareness’s (TIA) shut down—which resulted from prominent media and political criticism—with significant funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, as well as direct guidance from the CIA on its product development. As Unlimited Hangout detailed in its investigation into Donald Trump’s 2024 running-mate J.D. Vance and his rise to MAGA stardom, Thiel and Palantir co-founder Alex Karp met with the head of TIA at DARPA, John Poindexter, shortly after Palantir’s incorporation.

The middleman between the tech entrepreneurs and Poindexter was Poindexter’s old pal and key architect of the Iraq War, Richard Perle, who called the TIA-head to tell him that he wanted him to meet “a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company.” Poindexter, according to a report in New York Magazine, “was precisely the person” with whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon [that is, TIA], and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.” Since then, Palantir has been implementing the “pre-crime” initiatives of TIA under the cover of the “free market,” enabled by its position as a private company.

This story, along with the CIA’s intimate collaboration in developing Palantir’s early software, the CIA’s unique status as Palantir’s only client for its first several years as a company and Palantir co-founders’ statements about the company’s original intent (e.g. Alex Karp – CIA analysts were always the intended clients of Palantir), demonstrate that the company was founded to privatize the TIA programs in collaboration with the military and intelligence communities to which Palantir is a major contractor. Notably, TIA’s survival was actually enabled by its alleged killer, the US Congress, as lawmakers included a classified annex that preserved funding for TIA’s programs in the same bill that ostensibly “killed” the operation.

Yet while it appears that the national security apparatus plans to use the coming AI healthcare system for “pre-crime” and mass surveillance of American citizens, this “predictive” approach to healthcare will also inform significant policy shifts for the next pandemic. Specifically, the next pandemic will likely utilize the currently expanding biosurveillance infrastructure and AI disease forecasting software to develop “targeted” policy measures for specific communities and potentially individuals during future pandemics.

While Palantir stands at the forefront of this technocratic transformation of healthcare, the national security apparatus in collaboration with Big Healthcare and Big Tech at large are all contributing to weaving this lesser known “bioterror” component of TIA into private business schemes that covertly carry on the duties of the officially “shelved” program. This network of institutions consistently and conveniently omits the origins of its predictive biosurveillance healthcare approach — but the special interests tied to their efforts, as well as the striking similarities between their alleged public health solutions, and the decades-old biowarfare responses / surveillance programs of the Pentagon, reveal the ulterior motive of this public-private collaboration.

This investigation will examine how the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) signifies a major step towards the “AI-driven healthcare system,” how Palantir’s management of the program’s data strongly suggests that this partnership is the latest multi-sector implementation of the “pre-crime” agenda of TIA and what frightening possibilities the “AI-driven healthcare system” could enable in a future pandemic and healthcare in general. This revolutionary system ultimately pushes society further into the sights of a digital panopticon that seeks surveillance and control of all that the makes up the average citizen—from outside their bodies, to within.

What Does the CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) do? 

The CFA demonstrates that the AI healthcare and pandemic prevention industry is being materially (and quietly) implemented into public life in a significant way. Its policy measures massively expand invasive surveillance measures and, through sweeping biodata collection, will transform the way that public health policy policy is developed and enacted during pandemics and healthcare in general.

Based on the CFA and related developments in the public sector and amongst government contractors, American public health agencies are poised to utilize the mass collection of biosurveillance data to fuel: 1) targeted vaccine development and distribution of pathogens with “pandemic potential,” 2) curated policy and targeted lockdowns of specific communities and/or groups based on their “risk levels” and 3) medical prioritization of patients based on their AI-determined “needs” and AI hospital management.

The CFA’s mission is to “advance U.S. forecasting, outbreak analytics, and surveillance capacities related to disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics to support public health response and preparedness.” It plans to achieve this mission through multiple methods, but the data aggregation accumulated via Palantir programs within the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture”, and the way this data will manifest into policy, bind all these strategies together.

I. Your Data For All

Crucial to this effort is the CFA’s goal (arguably its primary goal) of creating a concrete digital infrastructure that will provide multiple sectors and jurisdictions of government with the ability to share, access and implement the biodata they collect. One duty assigned to the program’s Office of Director summarizes this strategy succinctly; it is tasked with guiding “the facilitation and coordination” of all biosurveillance activities, ranging from disease modeling to viral forecasting and the data extraction and collection necessary to support these activities—from the local to federal levels of government and healthcare entities. In simpler terms, the Office of Director will ensure that the institutions that make up the CFA (and partner with it) see that the program’s intention to create multi-sector, interagency, collaborative data sharing infrastructure is carried out.

Several other codified aims of the program make clear how crucial this element of mass data sharing is to the overall mission of CFA. For example, the Inform Division is tasked with sharing “timely, actionable” data with the federal government, local leaders, the public and even international leaders. It also coordinates real-time surveillance activities between CDC experts and US government agencies, and maintains “liaison” with CDC officials and staff, other US government departments and private sector partners.

Similarly, the Predict Division will develop “scientific collaborations to harmonize analytic approaches and develop tools,” which likely implies the importance of interoperability in collecting/sharing this data. Interoperability, or “harmonized” analytical approaches and tools, is a necessary component of creating the multi-sector collaborative data mining infrastructure that the CFA aims to cultivate. Through making data and its collection tools interoperable, different vendors and institutions gain the ability to seamlessly work together by enabling the exchange of data between different sources, whether they be military, hospitals, academic centers or anything else. In essence, interoperability centralizes a seemingly decentralized network of different vendors and institutions, all of whom are collecting and analyzing data plucked from various sources.

Likewise, the Office of the Director is tasked with maintaining “strategic relationships with academic, private sector, and interagency partners” as well as procuring “opportunities with industry partners.” And finally, the Innovate Branch will collaborate “with academic, private sector, and interagency partners” as part of its goal to create “products, tools and enterprise enhancements” in order to make pandemic data analysis “flexible, fast, and scalable for CFA customers including federal, state, tribal, local, or territorial authorities” (emphasis added). In other words, the Innovate Branch will engage in cross-sector collaboration for the direct purpose of creating and improving technology that makes mass data sharing more vast, rapid and simple for both government authorities and “customers.”

In fact, in 2023 this goal materialized with the creation of the CFA’s Insight Net. It contains more than “100 total network participants” and spans “24 states and 35 public health departments.” Its vast network has expanded the CFA’s reach to influence “many critical public health decisions” made at the state and local levels, and it boasts that its network is integrated and unifying, “leveraging connections with state, local, private, public, and academic partners to create a consortium of collaborators.” This collaboration that Insight Net facilitates between the public and private sector manifests in the lives of citizens through the policy it informs—a central part of the program.

II. When Data Becomes Policy 

The CFA plans to utilize this vast array of data to inform real-time policy decisions related to future pandemic planning and response. Multiple divisions within the CFA will contribute to this strategy of creating policy through the implementation of data into policy decision making.

The Office of the Director will oversee the general direction of this aim, as it defines “goals and objectives for policy formation, scientific oversight, and guidance in program planning and development…” The Office of Policy and Communications will then presumably work to implement these objectives into concrete policies and regulations, as it is responsible for “review[ing], coordinat[ing], and prepar[ing] legislation, briefing documents, Congressional testimony, and other legislative matters” as well as coordinating the “development, review, and approval of federal regulations,” presumably surrounding pandemic policy, surveillance, data and response efforts.

The Predict Division will play a crucial role in informing the specifics of these policies, as it generates “forecasts and analyses to support outbreak preparedness and response efforts”, and collaborates with partners from the local to federal to international level “on performing analytics to support decision-making.” It will also perform tabletop simulations to “match policies and resources with [its AI-generated] forecasts,” leaving the fate of communities, relating to their freedom as well as access to medical care, in the hands of algorithms and datasets.

Importantly, the CFA will not only utilize this data in long-term preparation or research, but in critical, high-pressure moments. Specifically, the Predict Division’s data sets and models will be used “to address questions that arise with short latency.”

During outbreaks, such questions that may arise with “short latency” would likely relate to containment efforts, and thus, lockdown policy. The Analytics Response Branch of the CFA, which uses its “analytical tools” to aid “decision making for key partners” both during a potential or ongoing outbreak, is also responsible for analyzing “disease spread through existing data sources to identify key populations/settings at highest risk” and correspondingly providing “essential information to key partners in decisions surrounding community migration” (emphasis added).

This sentence, though somewhat vague, suggests that AI-informed policy will subject certain communities/individuals to an extraordinary level of intrusion. Specifically, beyond more general, overarching pandemic policy, it appears that AI-generated forecasts and “risk levels” will dictate policy on the local, or perhaps even individual, level—directly controlling the movement, or “migration,” of communities.

Indeed, the CFA’s cooperative agreement states that the ability to apply data-driven, “mathematical” methods to tackle health equity problems in the face of disease outbreaks is “of great interest to the CFA.” Key to this objective is the collection of data “on the social determinants of health” to utilize in disease forecasting.  These “social determinants” include “geography (rural/urban), household crowding, employment status, occupation, income, and mobility/access to transportation,” as well as race, so long as race is not recognized as an “independent exposure variable” but instead is seen as a “proxy” for other social determinants. 

While on the surface level, this “targeted” approach may seem to provide a solution to the previously implemented universal pandemic policy, the digitization of lockdowns still raises the potential to seriously threaten individual and communal autonomy—only this time, under the auspices of “objective” data, accumulated and interpreted by AI technology.

Who’s Behind the AI-Healthcare Push? 

The tentacles of the biosecurity apparatus spread across multiple sectors of government and business, transcending the heavily blurred and essentially illusory lines between the public and private sector and Big Tech and Big Pharma. Military officials, tech operatives and global public health institutions all play a significant role in the lobbying for and implementation of this emerging healthcare industry. 

I. The Military

While the idea of developing preemptive vaccines to treat novel infectious pathogens dates back to the Reagan-era, these ideas initially focused on developing preemptive vaccines for diseases that emerged in a human population via a bioweapon, making the strategy rooted in national security as opposed to traditional disease response. Yet in the modern era, this militarized approach to public health has become the dominant ideology in establishment public health sectors—demonstrated by the core ideology that the CFA is built on.

The CFA’s Office of the Director ensures that “the CFA strategy is executed by the Predict Division and aligned with overall CDC goals” (emphasis added). While the vagueness of this passage omits the exact intentions of the referenced “CDC goals”—the CDC’s national biosurveillance strategy for human health, however, sheds light on the hidden agenda here.

The strategy is cemented in “U.S. laws and Presidential Directives, including Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21 (HSPD-21), ‘Public Health and Medical Preparedness.’” HSPD-21 is a Bush-era Department of Homeland Security directive made to “guide…efforts to defend a bioterrorist attack” that are also “applicable to a broad array of natural and manmade public health and medical challenges.” The directive aimed to predict disease outbreaks—natural or bioweapon-induced—via “early warning” and “early detection” of “health events.” Strikingly similar to the TIA “Bio-Surveillance” objectives, these values appear to have been placed in good hands at the CFA, as the Center’s director, Dylan George, previously served as vice-president of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

A recent trip that US Army officials made to Silicon Valley illustrates how the ideology behind this strategy has manifested through the relationship between Silicon Valley, academia and the Pentagon. In this “pivotal visit” to the San Francisco Bay Area in Aug. 2024, the US Army’s surgeon general, Mary K. Izaguirre, met with scientists at Stanford University and Google to further “the Army’s efforts to integrate cutting-edge technology and build stronger ties with civilian sectors.” Izaguirre rendezvoused with Civilian Aides to the Secretary of the Army (CASAs) and Army Reserve Ambassadors to discuss “their efforts to bridge the gap between the Army and the civilian community.”

When she met with Stanford scientists, who have “a long history of collaboration with the military, particularly through research initiatives that contribute to national defense and public health,” the scientists briefed her on advancements made in AI allegedly capable of “[revolutionizing] emergency medicine.” This tech was part of Stanford’s, and presumably the military’s and Big Tech’s, “broader mission to integrate AI into various aspects of health care…”

From there, Izaguirre traveled to Google’s headquarters where she and the tech experts discussed how Google’s “AI, machine learning, and cloud computing capabilities” could assist the Army’s healthcare ambitions. She also thanked Google for helping veterans “find their footing” after their time in the military, acknowledging the role that the company’s “SkillBridge” program plays in aiding soldiers in their transitions “into civilian careers”—which provides a convenient funnel from the military into Silicon Valley for lucky servicemen. The article concluded by remarking that through its collaboration with “leaders in academia and technology, the Army aims to equip its soldiers with the best tools and support for the challenges ahead.” Notably Google also shares a $9 billion cloud computing contract, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Oracle, with the Pentagon for the military’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability system (JWCC).

This meeting, along with the ever-growing partnerships between Big Tech and the Pentagon, obviously do not occur in a vacuum, but instead represent a natural culmination of years-long industry plans to merge Silicon Valley data with military data. In March 2019, for example, co-authors Dr. Ryan Kappedal, a former intelligence officer whose job pedigree summarily includes — lead product manager for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), data scientist at Johnson & Johnson, and currently a lead manager at Google — and Dr. Niels Olson, a US Navy Commander and the Laboratory Director at US Naval Hospital Guam, wrote an article for the Pentagon-funded neoconservative think tank, Center for New American Security (CNAS), titled “Predictive Medicine: Where the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Could Build a Bridge in Artificial Intelligence,” in which they fantasized about the merging of these industries that Kappedal hails from:

“[With] the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system, the federal government has the largest healthcare system in the world. In the era of machine learning, this translates to the most comprehensive healthcare dataset in the world. The vastness of the DoD’s dataset combined with the department’s commitment to basic biological surveillance yields a unique opportunity to create the best artificial intelligence–driven healthcare system in the world. (emphasis added)”

While the CNAS authors claim that the Pentagon and Silicon Valley merely aim to improve civilian and military healthcare through this AI healthcare system, this technocratic evolution of healthcare importantly presents a mutually beneficial opportunity for each of these institutions. For the private sector, as the CNAS article states, the DoD possesses a plethora of data with “intrinsic commercial value.” For the Pentagon, such a relationship with Silicon Valley would expand its data mining efforts into the body, allowing for a wider array of valuable data to use for national security purposes.

Further, implementing a predictive medicine infrastructure provides both sectors with the pretext to amass more health data, and to continuously do so, in order to train the predictive AI technology. This has already granted the Pentagon the pretext to increase data-collection efforts in the name of creating this AI healthcare system, potentially explaining the creation of predictive health programs such as ARPA-H and AI forecasting infrastructure like the CDC’s CFA. Importantly, the biosurveillance field’s biggest advocates also have a long history of stressing the importance of mass interagency data sharing, including between the public and private sectors — highlighting again the cross-sectoral commitment to utilizing this data for both profit and national security.

II. Big Pharma

While the CNAS authors wrote their “Predictive Medicine” article before the Covid-19 pandemic, the most prominent institutions in the pandemic preparedness / biosurveillance field have already begun selling the “predictive” approach to public health as the solution to the “next pandemic.” One of the most prominent aspects of predictive health involves using biosurveillance data to fuel the research and distribution of medical countermeasures—a policy that the CDC’s CFA is pursuing:

“[The Analytics Response Branch] works with key partners to inform decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak.”

This policy unsurprisingly has the backing of the industry that most clearly stands to gain the most from it—Big Pharma. In 2023, scientists from Pfizer’s mRNA Commercial Strategy & Innovation department (one of whom hails from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) wrote an article titled “Outlook of pandemic preparedness in a post-COVID-19 world” in which they pushed for the utilization of predictive AI technology to inform real-time policy during the “next pandemic.” The scientists pitched AI-informed policy decisions as the solution to the downsides of universal pandemic policies, specifically through a more “targeted” approach to pandemic policy.

The paper advocates for the development of  preemptive vaccines, which are vaccines developed for viruses that do not yet spread prominently in human populations. Surveillance data of pathogens with pandemic potential fuels this research, as the paper notes that vaccination benefits have “continued to progress” due to the power of constant biosurveillance and accelerated manufacturing, demonstrated by the development of “updated vaccines for evolving variants of SARS-CoV-2.”

Similarly, the authors tout the abilities of these preemptive vaccines to be quickly dispersed to protect populations from outbreaks of pathogens with pandemic potential if the pathogen “closely aligns” with a preemptively developed vaccine stockpile. These preemptive vaccines, however, would only offer temporary protection until “more tailored interventions” were developed, if deemed necessary.

This echoes the long calls of other global health institutions to develop preemptive vaccines. As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation reported, the WHO’s 2014 CEPI-partnered program, Research and Development Blueprint for Emerging Pathogens (R&D Blueprint) aims to “reduce the time” that vaccines can get to market after the declaration of a pandemic. It does this, however, not only through conducting R&D on pathogens that already reach pandemic status, but also by conducting R&D on diseases that “are likely to cause epidemics in the future.” CEPI itself—started with investments from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust—was founded to develop “vaccines against known infectious disease threats that could be deployed rapidly to contain outbreaks, before they become global health emergencies.”

CEPI is currently assisting in building up an apparatus of research and private companies pursuing predictive vaccine development, who may up end being some of the “key partners” that the CFA plans to work with to “inform decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak,” given CEPI’s close partnership with the Gates Foundation via the Gates Foundation’s Gavi, the Gates Foundation’s history of funding the CDC and Gates’ potential influence within CFA (demonstrated later in this article). CEPI made these investments to further its “100 Days Mission” that aims to “accelerate the time taken to develop safe, effective, globally accessible vaccines against emerging disease outbreaks to within 100 days.”

Interestingly, CEPI claims that the construction of a “Global Vaccine Library” is crucial to the success of its 100 Days Mission. The Library plans to utilize AI technology to predict how “viral threats could mutate to evade our immune systems” in order to identify specific “vaccine targets.” Richard Hatchett, the CEO of CEPI (formerly of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)) stated that building the Global Vaccine Library will require “coordinated investments in countermeasure development and, in outbreak situations, rapid data sharing.” Perhaps the datasets that the CFA will utilize and expand could assist in creating this Global Vaccine Library by making possible the “rapid data sharing” that CEPI requires.

III. Building on Tiberius

Another element of informing medical countermeasure policy through data is distribution—something that Palantir gained direct experience with during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CFA now plans to utilize its data and analytical tools to inform its “key partners” on “decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak.”

During COVID-19, the Pentagon–run Operation Warp Speed initiated its vaccine distribution policy in direct collaboration with Palantir through the Palantir program “Tiberius,” which the CDC has since pledged to unite with other Palantir biosurveillance programs as part of its “Common Operating Picture.” Tiberius uses a Palantir software product called Gotham that also manages another Palantir-run government program called Health and Human Services (HHS) Protect, “a secretive database that hoards information related to the spread of COVID-19 gathered from ‘more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.’” The database notably includes protected health information, which led Democratic senators and representatives to warn of the program’s “serious privacy concerns”:

“Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this PHI, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.” 

During the pandemic, Tiberius drew on this health data so that it could “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.” Tiberius identified the risk levels of these populations in order to develop “[vaccine] delivery timetables and locations” to prioritize vaccines in specific “at risk” populations. Most often these populations were minority communities and notably, the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with an excess risk of serious adverse effects, and can cause fatal myocarditis.

Further, as noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles and New Orleans police departments, also use Gotham for “predictive policing,” or pre-crime initiatives which disproportionately affect minority communities (ICE also used Palantir’s digital profiling tech to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants). The US Army Research Laboratory also found Gotham useful, as evidenced by its $91 million contract with Palantir “‘to accelerate and enhance’ the Army’s research work.” More recently, Palantir teamed up with Microsoft to provide national security leaders with an opportunity to exploit a “first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology,” including its Gotham software, among other products, for “mission-planning” purposes (the military also uses Gotham for “targeting enemies” through its “AI-powered kill chain”). These lucrative contracts with the intelligence/military state highlight the dual-use nature of the technology behind the “AI-healthcare” revolution, and thus raise the question: will Palantir and other government agencies utilize the health data that CFA can access for “dual-use,” national security purposes?

The Digitization of Healthcare: Kinsa, Palantir and the ‘Targeted’ Nature of Future Pandemic Response

Notably, some prominent institutions within the biosecurity apparatus have already begun pitching “targeted” pandemic policy as a solution to the now widely recognized failings of the more universal non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) policies of COVID-19, such as lockdowns, social distancing and school closures, which unleashed economic devastation, physical death and mental health decline upon many populations.

For instance, the Pfizer paper, “Outlook of pandemic preparedness in a post-COVID-19 world”, mentioned earlier, surmises that the negative effects of NPIs such as school closures, lockdowns and hospital policies may be felt years into the future and even be shown to increase in severity with further studies. Lockdowns in particular, the authors note, “resulted in significant economic, social, and health costs,” and they even state that “the effect of social distancing on the mental health of children and adolescents [continues] to be difficult to measure.” From a bureaucratic perspective, the paper also admits that consistent and long-term use of NPIs can be “challenging because people grow tired and apathetic toward them.”

The solution that the Pfizer scientists offer is “early action” being used to “leverage all available interventions as soon as possible in pandemic response,” and importantly, “geographically specific and informed NPI policies.” It appears that at least one of the solutions the paper puts forth, to both implement “early action” and “geographically specific” policies, is to “have a gradient of warnings that separate dangerous pandemics from more manageable outbreaks…” This proposed policy recalls the CFA measure that analyzes “disease spread through existing data sources to identify key populations/settings at highest risk” (emphasis added).

The paper goes on:

“In healthcare settings, an artificial intelligence platform could help prioritize patients based on their medical needs, effectively managing resources during triage situations. Similarly, a gradient-based warning system for pandemics could initiate appropriate responses at different levels of threat, with each level tied to specific actions. An early warning or Level 1 may involve increased surveillance and information sharing, while higher levels could trigger more drastic measures like regional shutdowns or global travel restrictions.” (emphasis added)

A system of surveillance this vast, importantly, could only be achieved through the “the facilitation and coordination” of all biosurveillance activities—from the local to federal levels of government and healthcare entities— that the CFA will carry out.

Other Pharma-backed organizations have also called for targeted pandemic response policy, such as the Committee to Unleash Prosperity which stated “identifying the most vulnerable groups and focusing resources on their protection will always be critical to any sensible crisis response.” The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is funded by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, whose members include Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Glaxosmithkline, Merck,and Sanofi among other Big Pharma companies. The group was also notably co-founded by Larry Kudlow, formerly one of Trump’s top economic advisors and directors of the National Economic Council during his first term, who—during Covid-19—was part of the group that decided to effectively outsource the U.S. fiscal reponse to the crisis to Larry Fink’s BlackRock.

The push for such “targeted” measures are furthermore indicative of an even greater systemic transformation taking place in the healthcare system. The calls to “help prioritize patients based on their medical needs” in order to “effectively manage resources during triage situations” allude to the industry effort to digitize hospital management, resource allocation and patient care, and, in doing so, expand the health datasets of the biosecurity apparatus. Private companies including Palantir, among others, it turns out, are already playing crucial roles in this AI-hospital revolution.

Meanwhile, the CFA codifies the push towards this AI-system through multiple policies:

“[The Predict Division] assists with tabletop exercises to match policies and resources with forecasts”

“[The Office of Management Services] provides direction, strategy, analysis, and operational support in all aspects of human capital management, including workforce and career development and human resources operations”

The first company involved in this shift worth noting is Kinsa Health—a company that “uses internet-connected thermometers to predict the spread of the flu”—which is carrying out the kind of data mining that would enable this kind of predictive and targeted pandemic policy that CFA seeks to carry out. According to the The New York Times, Kinsa is “uniquely positioned to identify unusual clusters of fever because they have years of data for expected flu cases in each ZIP code.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinsa was allegedly able to forecast which locations would become “COVID-19 epicenters” before more traditional surveillance systems could.

The thermometers supply data by connecting “to a cellphone app that instantly transmits their readings to the company.” Interestingly, “Users can also enter other symptoms they feel. The app then gives them general advice on when to seek medical attention.”

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinsa has emerged as a rising star within the predictive health industry, as it has secured a significant deal with healthcare company Highmark Health to “predict health care utilization, recognize staffing needs, and plan emergency department and ICU bed capacity when infectious diseases like COVID-19 and influenza spike.” The initiative is “the first health delivery system to utilize Kinsa’s early warning system to model staffing needs and bed capacity”—signifying Kinsa’s increasing role in this healthcare shift.

This preceded health technology company Healthy Together’s 2024 acquisition of Kinsa, which marked a significant step for the thermometer company, as the acquisition signifies the expansion of Kinsa’s predictive powers and datasets into the public sector. The announcement proclaimed that “the synergy between the two companies will empower pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, Medicaid agencies, insurance companies, and public health departments with AI-driven tools to proactively respond to and address illness.” The bold vision here is perhaps unsurprising—that is, only when Healthy Together’s peculiar ties to government and Thiel-connected figures, and its larger vision, are understood.

Healthy Together is a Software as a Service (SaaS), or a service that “allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet.” It prides itself on unifying “the objectives of government programs and the needs of residents into a single platform.” The way it does this is through its “One Door” approach, or rather—its mission to make available one’s health records and immunization history “all in one place,” that place being their proprietary app. Indeed, Healthy Together has already partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Lighthouse program to access veteran’s health data ranging from immunization records, “test results, allergy records, clinical vitals, medical conditions and appointment records.” This connectivity was achieved via the VA’s application programming interface (API), as veterans using the Healthy Together app access their medical records through the VA API, which connects different computer programs together. This serves as a small-scale example of the growing harmonization between military and Big Tech data.

In addition to health data, the company also aims to link welfare data and access to its app—a particularly concerning feature given that some US health experts tied to the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and official government Covid-19 response policy previously pitched linking welfare benefits to vaccination status during the Covid-19 crisis.

When Healthy Together partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to join its AWS Partner Network (APN), it created a program that achieves this linkage of welfare data with its app. It was called the “Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Management Information System (MIS),” or Luna MIS. WIC is a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) federal assistance program that provides low-income pregnant women and children under the age of five with services such as EBT cards to help them afford food. Luna MIS apparently streamlines “the management of WIC benefits, from application and enrollment to benefit issuance and redemption,” meaning it transfers users’ entire interaction with WIC benefits, from registration to allocation, into the Healthy Together app. The company further supports this “One Door” approach for eligibility, enrollment and recertification for other social programs such as “Medicaid, SNAP, TANF…as well as behavioral health, disease surveillance, vital records, child welfare and more.”

Whether or not data collected via technology such as Kinsa thermometers or health records, such as immunization status, might informs one’s eligibility or enrollment for social programs in the future remains to be seen. Either way, the company already works directly on welfare benefits with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services , the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, Missouri Department of Social Services, Maryland Market Money and Maryland Department of Agriculture and more. Given that the company already collects vast amounts of medical data, including vaccination records, linking such data to welfare benefits would likely prove an easy task for the company.

While there is not much public information available about Healthy Together’s board or funding, it appears that the “One Door” service was born out of another app—which is no longer available—called Twenty (as a significant number of Healthy Together’s co-founders/CEOs apparently still work at Twenty, and hold the exact same positions at each company).

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Healthy Together was developed in the early days of the pandemic when the state of Utah “contracted with mobile app developer Twenty to launch Healthy Together” in order to track the residents of Utah’s “movements” and, for those that fell ill, equip public health workers with a digital contact tracing tool to discover “where they crossed paths with other users.” The Tribune reported that Utah provided Twenty with a $1.75 million contract, along with an additional “$1 million to further develop [Healthy Together].” In other words, Healthy Together was built as a public-private “contact tracing” (i.e. surveillance) app.

Twenty, according to its LinkedIn, was an app that aimed “to drive more human connection” by making it easier for friends to meet up and make plans. It does this, however, by allowing users to see the locations of nearby friends, even cluing them into their friends’ later plans and pinning events for people to meet up at. While Healthy Together and Twenty are separate apps, it appears that the seemingly social location-based tracking technology used for Twenty was swiftly repurposed to create the contact-tracing and health-focused app Healthy Together, as the co-founder and co-CEO of Twenty and Healthy Together, Jared Allgood, stated:

“…at the start of the pandemic, we were contacted by some state governments who are interested in using some of the mobile platform technology that we had built previously, to create a link between the health department and residents in their state…” (emphasis added)

The Salt Lake Tribune explained the contact tracing process that the repurposed technology of Healthy Together helped the state achieve:

“the app uses Bluetooth and location tracing services to record when its users are in close proximity. When a user begins to feel ill, he or she can enter symptoms on the app, which provides directions for testing.”

“State epidemiologist Angela Dunn further explained the process…‘So if you choose to share your data with our contact tracers’ by using the app, she said, ‘they’ll be able to know about the places that you’ve been while you were infectious, and it’ll also provide our contact tracers with a snapshot of other app users who you had significant contact with and potentially exposed with COVID-19 as well’…. ‘that will allow contact tracers to follow up directly with those people and provide them information about how to protect themselves and others,’ she said.”

Now, the goals and functions of Healthy Together seem to have expanded into AI viral forecasting and hospital management with its acquisition of Kinsa, making the private company a potential asset for the CDC CFA, as its experience in working with health data would seemingly make it a fitting “existing data source” for the program.

The people behind these companies too, however, make Kinsa and Healthy Together not too far removed from CFA’s other private sector partners. Healthy Together was funded by SV Angel, the venture capital firm founded by “The Godfather of Silicon Valley,” Ron Conway, who was an early investor in the Elon Musk-and-Peter Thiel-founded Paypal and also in the Peter Thiel-backed Facebook (Thiel and Conway were among the earliest backers of the social network).

Another co-founder and co-CEO of Healthy Together and Twenty, Diesel Peltz, boasts interesting ties to the incoming Trump administration via his father, billionaire and chairman emeritus of the Wendy’s Company, Nelson Peltz. Nelson Peltz claims responsibility for re-connecting Elon Musk and Trump, which led to Musk financially and very publicly back the 2024 Trump campaign. Since the election, Musk’s outsized role in setting incoming government policy has become both obvious and controversial. Variety reported the following about the Peltz family role in uniting Musk with Trump:

“[Peltz] said Musk, together with Peltz’s son Diesel…‘had a breakfast at the house, we invited Donald for breakfast, and they [Musk and Trump] sort of reunited again… I hope it’s good, you know. I was a matchmaker.’” (emphasis added)

Importantly, both Thiel and Musk played critical roles in successfully lobbying for the appointment of Thiel protege JD Vance as Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Now, Musk is set to head Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory group, along with the founder of the biotech company Roivant (which has created subsidiary biotech companies with Pfizer, and has invested deeply in mRNA technology), Vivek Ramaswamy, to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

The meeting between the two Peltz men, Musk and the President Elect took place in the late Spring, and it was only a few months later that Palantir and Wendy’s Supply Chain Co-op announced a partnership to “bring [the co-op] towards a fully integrated Supply Chain Network with opportunities for AI-driven, automated workflows,” by moving its supply chain onto Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform. The platform is, familiarly, “designed to connect disparate data sources into a single common operating picture…” Wendy’s will eventually use Palantir to manage its supply chain and waste prevention, including through “Demand Deviation and Allocation.” All of this will push the fast-food company with an otherwise folksy aesthetic, personified through its ginger-haired freckled mascot, Wendy, towards the increasingly technocratic new age—and the Peltz family closer to the Thiel-verse.

Also worth noting is Arianna Huffington’s seat on the board of Twenty. Huffington’s appointment warrants mentioning only because of her relationship with another protege of Peter Thiel, CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. The media mogul and tech entrepreneur recently teamed up to create the fitness app Thrive AI Health, which gives users a “hyper-personalized” AI health coach.

Thiel has been described as Altman’s “longtime mentor,” and apparently at the beginning of Altman’s career, “Thiel…saw in Altman a magentic figure who could expand the tech sector’s approach across the world.” Thiel’s rosy view of the OpenAI CEO is evidenced by the mutually beneficial relationship that matured between the two after Altman sold his company Loopt, and Thiel raised the bulk of the $21 million dollars that Altman later gathered for his own venture capital firm, Hydrazine Capital, according to the The Washington Post. Soon after, “Altman’s bond with Thiel blossomed: He helped Thiel’s venture firm, Founder’s Fund, get access to hot start-ups, and the men sometimes traveled together to speak at events.”

Recently, Palantir and another Thiel-backed company, Anduril, have partnered on behalf of the Pentagon to “unlock the full potential of AI for national security,” specifically by retaining data at the “tactical edge” of the battlefield, data that is usually “never retained.” Apparently, this new partnership will make the collection of this “tactical edge” data possible, and be used to train AI models and “deliver the U.S. an advantage over adversaries.” It will also enable “collaboration with leading AI developers, including [Sam Altman’s] OpenAI” (emphasis added). 

It now seems that Thiel, through the aforementioned relationships, is not too distant in proximity from (though not directly intertwined with) Healthy Together and Kinsa, all while Palantir further entrenches its relationship with the CDC (as well as the DoD) and positions itself as a health data empire.

Kinsa’s Connections to Bill Gates

Notably, the CEO and founder of Kinsa, Inder Singh, hails from the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) where he formerly served as the Executive Vice President. CHAI was controversially created with significant involvement from Jeffrey Epstein, the now infamous pedophile, sex trafficker and intelligence asset, and Epstein was simultaneously involved with Bill Gates during that same period, including the Gates’ family philanthropy (Epstein was notably an advocate for transhumanism and eugenics, which informed much of his “philanthropic” activities and funding of prominent scientists). Unsuprisingly, CHAI has been funded by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of tens of millions of dollars (see here and here), and also shares a nearly identical goal of vaccinating “as many children as possible” with its partner Bill Gates’ Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, by “creating dramatic and sustainable improvements to vaccine markets and national immunization programs.” The Gates Foundation notably envisions AI as central to its global health objectives, as it funded a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—an organization that often acts as a CIA front—effort to push for the global implementation of AI in healthcare.

As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation noted, Gavi’s stated goal is to create “‘healthy markets’ for vaccines by ‘encourag[ing] manufacturers to lower vaccine prices for the poorest countries in return for long-term, high-volume and predictable demand for those countries.’”

And to bring these relationships full circle once again, Palantir joined “The Trinity Challenge” in 2020, “a global coalition of prominent academic institutions and foundations as well as leading technology, health and insurance companies with the aim of increasing the world’s resilience against the pandemics of the future by harnessing the power of data, analytics.” Its members included Google, Microsoft, Facebook, McKinsey & Company and—the Gates Foundation. The Trinity Challenge has been criticized for framing invasive surveillance and neo-Malthusian policies as “solutions” to the “next” pandemic and as beneficial for global public health.

Indeed, the influence of Gates may have navigated its way into CFA itself, with the CFA director, Dylan George, previously serving as vice-president of biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks. Ginkgo Bioworks, a partner of the World Economic Forum, was heavily funded by Cascade Investment when the company went public, an investment firm controlled by Bill Gates. By utilizing a “constellation” of shell companies that all connect back to Cascade, Gates also accumulated enough property to make himself the largest farmland owner in the United States during the Covid-era. Cascade is still the largest shareholder of Ginkgo Bioworks.

It should also be noted that Gates supports the United Nation’s (UN) efforts to implement a universal Digital ID as a “human right,” or in reality, a pre-condition for accessing other human rights, for the entire global population by 2030 through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9. Previously, the EU Digital Covid Certificate enabled governments to, as the Pfizer “Outlook” paper advocates, “restrict global travel” based on a form of digital ID, that importantly had health data attached to it (in this case, only COVID-19 immunization status, testing results and records of previous infections.). Multiple groups seeking to impose digital ID infrastructure globally were intimately involved in digital vaccine passport production during the Covid-19 crisis.

It is important to remember that local travel restrictions, or “decisions surrounding community migration,” during the COVID-19 pandemic were enforced using both physical and digital proof-of-vaccination—a form of ID that attaches “health data” to the ID, with that “health data” then being utilized to determine one’s accessibility to certain human rights (such as entry into certain businesses/events or job access).

Gates’ funding of the CDC, as well as his connection to the CFA and the program’s stated policy aims of analyzing disease spread to identify the “highest risk” key populations and utilizing data to influence “community migration” rights raises an important question: will CFA data be attached to a digital ID, and how might that data be used to determine one’s human rights (such as community migration, for example) during a declared, or anticipated, public heath crisis?

AI Hospitals

While Palantir’s recent transition into AI hospital management is not an exact illustration of life with digital ID, some of its features suggest what a future managed by constant surveillance and AI decision-making might look like—not only in healthcare, but the workplace in general.

According to its website’s “Hospitals for Palantir” page, Palantir is already “powering nurse scheduling, nurse staffing, transfer center optimization, discharge management, and other critical workflows” for more than 15% of US hospitals. Palantir’s “healthcare engineers” work “directly alongside caregivers and hospital operators to build and tailor workflows — prioritizing speed, effectiveness, and usability.”

The tech company has “deployed a first of its kind application that takes into account nurse preferences, granular patient demand forecasts, staff competencies, and existing staff information to automatically generate AI-driven, optimal nursing schedules,” a seemingly innocent project. Yet, the degree of influence that this “first of its kind” application already appears to wield in American hospitals spells a troubling precedent for humanity in the workplace—specifically, by dehumanizing the logistical and bureaucratic nature of hospitals through AI substitutes under the auspices of “objective” machine decision-making.

Palantir’s Foundry is already forecasting “the patient census for a hospital based on data from the emergency department, operating rooms, transfers, discharges, and more.” The tech systems also keep track of the skills and information for every nurse in a hospital, “including (but not limited to) competencies, languages, skills, certifications, tenure, and other talent profile information.” Both kinds of data apparently generate the prime nursing schedule for the entire hospital, down to any given “unit, floor, department, [or] facility.”

While these systems project the image of an altruistic product aimed at providing a more seamless experience for patients and hospital workers alike, critical media scholar Dr. Nolan Higdon, co-author of the book “Surveillance Education” which explores the invasive nature of surveillance technologies in schools (as well as the intersection between Big Tech and the military industrial complex), told Unlimited Hangout that Big Tech companies recycle this altruism-pitch time and time again as a way to mask their ulterior motives:

“Whenever these companies employ data collection mechanisms under the auspices of improving the lives of customers, it ultimately ends up being a scheme to make more money, and at the expense of labor and the customer.

What we’ve seen consistently over and over again is whatever readout they get of the data ends up being an excuse to cut jobs, to overwork individuals, to minimize services and access to services as a way to cut costs…So it’s: if we collect data, how much more work can we throw on the back of this nurse? Can we throw enough work on the back of this nurse where patients will complain and we can cut another job or two? Those are the kind of questions that this data is trying to help folks make.”

Yet Higdon fears that this goal of increasing profits could also enable even more vicious price gouging of patients that the healthcare industry already engages in with little transparency. Palantir claims that its tech can recommend in real time where a hospital should place incoming patients based on “patient-specific criteria” and “current and upcoming [hospital] capacity,” which obviously would require access to a breadth of patient data. Higdon wonders whether or not insurance providers might weaponize this data against patients by raising their premiums based on life decisions of the patient:

“Not everybody is totally honest with their insurer about maybe how much they sleep or how much they drink or how much they party or whatever, right? These tools can be a way to surveil people to find that information out to set premiums that are aimed at maximizing the amount of money you get from customers and save the amount of money for the insurance company.

The more they know about your life, the more justifications they can make about setting premiums. Maybe in their algorithmic counts, if you sleep six hours a night instead of eight hours a night, you’re more likely to have these health outcomes. So they’re going to charge you more money now until your sleep patterns change. Or maybe you eat X amount of processed food and that’s been associated with this outcome. So they’re going to charge more on this premium.

There’s so [much] ‘in the weeds’ evidence that can be used against folks, and you don’t have any recourse. Because again, they go back to, ‘well the objective algorithm has given us this readout.’”

While Palantir vows that it keeps “patient privacy and information governance a top priority,” promises like these simply provide tech companies smokescreens to obfuscate the vast amount of data sharing they engage in. Higdon claims that while many companies, like Palantir, promise users that they do not sell client data, those companies still share it between institutions they’ve entered agreements with. On Palantir’s Medium Blog, for example, it vows to readers that it does not sell or share its data with other customers…that is, “except where those specific clients have entered into an agreement with each other.”

However, whether or not this applies specifically to Palantir’s first and longest-running client, the CIA, remains doubtful. Many tech companies, particularly social media giants and search engines, were revealed in past years to illegally share user data with US intelligence to facilitate vast, post-9/11 surveillance programs of dubious legality. Importantly, at Palantir’s origins its founders collaborated with the intelligence state to resurrect a DARPA-CIA surveillance program that sought to merge existing databases into one “virtual, centralized, grand database.” Given this, it seems more than plausible that Palantir allows US intelligence to access more of the data the company handles than they publicly acknowledge.

Palantir also creates profiles of American citizens for the CIA based on their online activities (and other activities that are surveillable). If Higdon’s concerns of data sharing do indeed apply to Palantir, then Palantir could easily fold its trove of American health data into such profiles. In fact, the CFA requires organizations applying to become partners of the program to describe how they plan to leverage novel data sources “to create new analytic products.” An example they provide for applicants involves using “data fusion techniques” to merge data extracted from the internet with “existing public health data streams” in order to create detailed forecasts of present (or future) events that “reduce latency.”

This is particularly troubling given Palantir’s role in implementing “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, in the United States and that law enforcement and intelligence agencies could weaponize mental health data in particular in the context of preventing crimes before they occur. While some may deem this scenario far-fetched, it is worth considering that the previous Trump administration closely considered a policy to use AI to analyze innocent Americans’ social media profiles for posts that could indicate “early warning signs of neuro-psychiatric violence” as a means of preventing mass shootings before they occur. Per that program, the government would subject Americans flagged by the AI to various mandated mental health interventions or preventive house arrest. A scenario in which law enforcement utilizes mental health data from healthcare settings tied to Palantir in lieu of, or in combination with, social media posts is not difficult to envision.

Further, while Palantir claims to make patient privacy a “top priority,” regulatory bodies have yet to enact any meaningful oversight of the company to prevent it from sharing this data with other organizations, much less itself and thus the other branches of government it actively works with. This lack of transparency creates a “hall of mirrors” that blurs the lines between organizations, and therefore who owns what data, covertly eliminating any rights to privacy while at the same time enabling the corporate construction of a digitized global consciousness made up of the data of unknowing civilians—in this case, all in the name of “public health.”

The Hall of Mirrors

The CDC CFA’s alleged commitment to utilize groundbreaking methods to better public health remains to be seen. Yet, what this article definitively illustrates is that the CFA further entrenches both the public and private wings of the public health apparatus into the “hall of mirrors” of intelligence agency-connected corporations and public institutions. Behind these organizations sit some of the most influential kingmakers of Washington, hailing from Silicon Valley, seemingly committed to utilizing any industry or catastrophe to expand their surveillance of human bodies, equipping them with the capital to become the robber barons of the digital age.

Importantly, however, the CFA does not signify a shift in public health policy, but rather a firm step forward in a years-long effort to drive the entire public health apparatus into the hands of hawkish national security ideologues and their oligarchic, technocratic benefactors. For normal people, the implications of such policy pursuits may be significant. During the “future pandemics” that this entire industry is already spending billions of dollars preparing for—with expected returns in mind—the CFA’s surveillance may dictate the average civilians’ global travel rights, even their ability to traverse their own communities, what medicines they take/have access to and whether they are deemed “high risk” or not.

The actors behind this system are unsurprisingly the same ones that planned, directed and carried out the COVID-19, halfway-digitized, iterations of similar biosecurity policy. The fingerprints of figures like Gates, with the head of the CFA hailing from the Gates-funded Gingko Bioworks, and those of Big Pharma and the Pentagon are plastered all over the program’s doctrine.

Critically, the program’s existence should be considered within the context of the coming Trump administration, which boasts deep ties to its most prominent figures. The Thiel-verse have exerted their influence over D.C. politics wisely, demonstrated not only by the plethora of government contracts won by Thiel-connected companies across agencies, but by the infiltration of Thiel proxies like Founders Fund alumnus J.D. Vance into Trump’s cabinet.

As Stavroula Pabst recently noted in Responsible Statecraft, Thiel “bankrolled fellow venture capitalist and now-VP elect J.D. Vance’s successful 2022 Senate Campaign in Ohio to the tune of $15 million — the most anyone has given to a Senate candidate. Thiel and Vance are in fact long term associates, where Thiel previously assisted Vance’s own venture capital career.” While Trump ended up picking the billionaire national security contractor billionaire Stephen Feinberg as his Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was eyeballing Trae Stephens for the position, formerly of Palantir and a “longtime partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman at Anduril,” further demonstrating that the relationship between Thiel and Trump continues to endure. In addition, another Thiel proxy – Jim O’Neill, who boasts deep ties to mRNA tech – has been nominated to be the No. 2 at HHS and will likely serve as HHS Secretary if the Senate rejects the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. O’Neill’s upcoming role at HHS heralds not only a continuation but a likely deepening of Palantir’s involvement at HHS sub-agencies like the CDC.

Companies such as Kinsa and Healthy Together stand as well-positioned potential benefactors of this Thiel-friendly relationship with the coming Trump administration, not only because of the connections Diesel Peltz boasts to PayPal Mafia member Elon Musk, Trump himself and early PayPal investor Ron Conway, but because its products have made it a prominent data-miner at the intersection of healthcare and Big Tech. From this perspective, a myriad of other companies including defense contractors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, sit in a similar position.

Exactly which companies will be tasked to fulfill certain responsibilities remains to be seen, but the agenda-at-large remains the same; massively increase the surveillance powers of this biosurveillance apparatus, and then utilize these powers to influence public policy, increase control of civilian movement and access to rights, secure deregulated markets for biotechnology and, most importantly, make everything about the individual civilian subject to the surveillance, and scrutiny, of the shadowy organizations occupying the watchtower of the digital panopticon.

The privatization, and thus on-the-surface “decentralization” of this program grants it the appearance of the natural evolution of the free market. Yet Palantir’s origins in the DARPA/CIA Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, as well as the merging of all three of these sectors and the clear gains all stand to achieve, suggest a more organized and cynical pursuit of the policies that CFA appears to be making reality. Together, these industries form a technocratic iteration of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Playing specified tunes to targeted audiences, whether they be the altruistic notions of public health, the frightening potentials of unchecked domestic terrorism or bioterrorism, the catastrophe of global pandemics or even simple workplace efficiency, each melody this apparatus plays serves to manufacture consent for their ability to conduct ever-expanding surveillance of everyone. This obviously makes the declared “public health” purposes of the biosurveillance apparatus at large highly questionable.

After all, the AI-healthcare system promises a more efficient, convenient and effective healthcare system—yet the means by which this system is meant to lead the public to a predictive-health utopia involve the elimination of privacy and the dehumanization of healthcare itself. Left to algorithms controlled by corporate sharks and national security hawks, profits, surveillance and top-down influence are an all but guaranteed outcome, but what will the digitization of care do to the physical, mental and spiritual health of everyone else? Perhaps those people—beyond the data that corporations can extract from them—are an afterthought of those behind the AI-healthcare revolution.

The CDC, Palantir and the AI-Healthcare Revolution .

For some time, there have been efforts to facelift the Malthusian-transhumanist bent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with a patina of New Age spirituality through a belief in “conscious evolution,” such as that propagated by futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard. Yet, notwithstanding Hubbard’s lofty invocation of “Christ consciousness,” her faith in conscious evolution holds that, in order to mitigate overpopulation crises, natural resources must be rationed through “sustainable development” economics while human resources must be neo-eugenically culled and biotechnologically engineered into a new transhuman species. In fact, with the blessings of Rockefeller philanthropy, Hubbard, who promoted sustainable development at the United Nations (UN) and collaborated with known Malthusians from groups like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Club of Rome, was one of the most radical advocates of population reduction in the name of spiritual evolution.

Across the internet, there has been wide circulation of an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript in which Hubbard declared that “one-fourth” of humanity will need to be culled in order to usher in a utopian New Age Order:

“[o]ut of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is elected to transcend . . . One-fourth is destructive.  . . . They are defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a ‘natural death.’  . . .

Now, as we approach the quantum shift from the creature-human to the co-creative human—the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers—the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body.  . . . 

Fortunately, you are not responsible for this act. We are. We are in charge of God’s selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.” 

In my previous article in this series on Barbara Marx Hubbard, I had been unable to trace the provenance of the unpublished manuscript. Since then, I conducted some further sleuthing, and I was able to track down a copy of the manuscript in the possession of attorney Constance Cumbey, who is the acclaimed author of the The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism. Cumbey purchased several copies of the manuscript on multiple occasions, including once from Hubbard personally and once from Rama Vernon, who orchestrated a series of Soviet-American Citizens Summits that Hubbard attended along with Doug Coe, who was the figurehead of the Christian Fellowship Foundation, and Paul Temple, who funded the Fellowship and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences where Hubbard preached her Malthusian gospel of “conscious” transhuman evolution. For the full backstory on Cumbey’s exposé of Hubbard’s manuscript, watch the interview Courtenay Turner and I conducted at Cumbey’s estate.

Now that Hubbard’s infamous manuscript has been verified, it deserves an explication in this series. Henceforth, this article will examine how the manuscript, which is titled “The Revelation: Alternative to Armageddon (From the Book of Co-Creation: An Evolutionary Interpretation of the New Testament),” reveals further evidence of Hubbard’s Malthusian-transhumanist vision of the future. Moreover, this article will explicate how Hubbard’s “Alternative to Armageddon” preaches a gospel of Malthusian “crisis” evolution that was inspired by her spiritual idol, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; shared by her kindred evolutionary, Jonas Salk; and bankrolled by her beloved benefactor, Laurance Rockefeller. Furthermore, this article will show how Hubbard’s gospel of crisis evolution is being resounded by the WEF to push Malthusian policies under the banner of “sustainable development” to further the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution. Additionally, this article will document how the legacies of Salk and Rockefeller continue to propel Malthusian “sustainable development” and transhuman evolution through the Salk Institute, Venrock, the UN, and the World Wildlife Fund. 

In the next and final article in this series, I will reveal how Hubbard’s affiliations with the World Future Society, the Human Potential Movement, and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution were connected to networks of alleged pedophiles and sexual abuse cults.

Baptism by Teilhard de Chardin’s Malthusian-Eugenic Crisis of Noetic Birth

In “Barbara Marx Hubbard: Godmother of Transhumanism and Synthetic Spirituality,” which was the first article in this series, I historicized how Hubbard’s vision of “conscious” transhuman evolution was inspired by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A Malthusian-eugenicist and Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin pontificated that overpopulation is fomenting an ecological tipping point culminating in a “crisis of birth,” which will bring about the noetic evolution of human consciousness. According to Teilhard de Chardin, the “noosphere,” or noetic “mind sphere,” of the universe is a cosmic “intelligence,” or “consciousness,” that evolves through human consciousness and, by extension, technology, which is spurred by Malthusian crises.

Not only was Hubbard’s transhumanism rooted in Teilhard de Chardin’s gospel of cosmic “crisis” evolution through the noetic “mind sphere” of the universe. But Hubbard’s Malthusian outlook on population growth and sustainable development, which has influenced UN Agenda 2030 and the WEF’s Great Reset, was likewise inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, who believed human overpopulation should be eugenically culled in order to save the Earth from ecological “crises” that threaten the “birth” of evolutionary progress.

In a 1936 letter that was published in Letters to Léontine Zanta, Teilhard de Chardin asserted that, “at one and the same time there should be official recognition of: 1. The priority/primacy of the earth; 2. The inequality of peoples and races” (298). Similarly, in a posthumously published book titled Toward the Future, he pontificated that the “evolution” of the “noosphere” is predicated upon (1) the global “maintenance . . . of the natural resources available in the continents, which feed man’s individual and social body”; and (2)the “effective control, both in quantity and quality, of reproduction in order to avoid over-population of the earth or its invasion by a less satisfactory ethnic group” (299). In brief, in both his private letters and public writings, Teilhard de Chardin advocated the Malthusian-eugenic control of the world’s natural and human resources through the eugenic control of population quality and the Neo-Malthusian control of population quantity in tandem with Malthusian conservation of limited environmental resources.

In another book titled The Future of Man,Teilhard de Chardin posited that, in order to avert “famine” and other ecological catastrophes from overpopulation, the human species would need to cull its own population down to a “maximum” size while eugenically engineering the appropriate ratios and proportions of a “racial hygienic” caste hierarchy ranked according to “different ethnic types.” In a chapter titled “The Directions and Conditions of the Future,” which resounded the alarm of “Mr. [Henry] Fairfield Osborn [Jr.’s]” Malthusian treatise, Our Plundered Planet,Teilhard de Chardin postulated how: 

“earth’s population began to shoot up in an alarming fashion.  . . . Now we suddenly see the saturation point ahead of us, and approaching at a dizzying speed. How are we to prevent this compression of Mankind on the closed surface of the planet . . . from passing that critical point beyond which any increase in numbers will mean famine and suffocation? Above all, how are we to assure that the maximum population, when it is reached, shall be composed only of elements harmonious in themselves and blended as harmoniously as possible together? Individual eugenics (breeding and education designed to produce only the best individual types) and racial eugenics (the grouping or intermixing of different ethnic types being not left to chance but effected as a controlled process in the proportions most beneficial to humanity as a whole) both, as I well know, come up against apparently insuperable difficulties, from the point of view of technical organisation and from that of psychological resistance. But this does not alter the fact that the problem of building a healthy Mankind already stares us in the face and is growing more acute every day” (295).

To put it another way, for Teilhard de Chardin, the collective noetic evolution of the planetary ecosystem and the human species requires that the Earth’s limited resources be stewarded by a eugenically engineered elite who must enforce Malthusian birth control policies aimed at culling “unprogressive ethnical groups” from the human population so that those “unfit” races do not squander the planet’s natural resources. 

In yet another book titled Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin professed, “[n]ow eugenics does not confine itself to a simple control of births. All sorts of related questions . . . are attached to it. What fundamental attitude, for example, should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity?” These rhetorical questions insinuate that “unprogressive,” or “lesser,” races should be the primary targets of population control in order to prevent such “unfit” races from consuming the eugenic elite’s share of the Earth’s limited natural resources. In The Future of Man, Teilhard de Chardin indicated that the “unprogressive” hominids, who are essentially synonymous with the “unfit,” are those who balk at the “super-humanisation” and “planetisation of Mankind” which is necessary to consciously plan the collective noetic evolution of the human species and planet Earth.

To be sure, Hubbard did not overtly avow “race hygiene” eugenics. Nevertheless, echoing Teilhard de Chardin, Hubbard did envision that human population would need to be culled, and that the expendable populations would inevitably be those who are not spiritually “fit” to “progress,” or “evolve,” their consciousnesses toward noetic transhumanization and collective sustainable development. In “The Revelation: Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard referred to “one-fourth of humanity” who are “defective seeds” and therefore “must be eliminated from the social body.” Hubbard declared that “[i]t is a case of the destruction of the whole planet, or the elimination of the ego-driven, godless one-fourth who, at this time of planetary birth, can, if allowed to live on to reproduce their defective disconnection, destroy forever the opportunity of Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, heirs of God.” In brief, although Hubbard did not explicitly espouse old school “race hygiene” eugenics, she did believe in the cosmic necessity of a “spiritual,” or “conscious,” Malthusian-eugenics that decrees the culling of a quarter of the population in order to save the planet and harness the noetic transhuman evolution of homo universalis.  

In the official publication of The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth,Hubbard, like Teilhard de Chardin, postulated the Malthusian crisis of the “limits to growth” crisis and the “population crisis” as a “crisis of our planetary birth” [1]. Similarly, in Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin declared, 

“[t]oo much iron, too much wheat, too many automobiles . . . and even too many children.  . . . [W]e must ask what this excess production means. Is the world condemned, as it grows, to automatic death by stifling beneath its own excessive weight? Not at all, we would answer. It is in course of gathering to itself a new higher body. At this crisis of birth, everything depends on the prompt emergence of a soul which by merely appearing will come to organize, lighten, and vitalize this mass of stagnant and confused matter.  . . . The resources at our disposal today, the powers that we have released, could not possibly be absorbed by the narrow system of individual or national units which the architects of the human earth have hitherto used.  . . . The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the earth.“

In short, Teilhard de Chardin believed that the overpopulation of the human species and the over-commoditization of the Earth’s natural resources are triggering a Malthusian “crisis” that will spark the “birth” of a newly evolved system of global governance over all the environmental resources across “the human earth.” 

Mirroring Teilhard de Chardin in her 1998 Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, Hubbard warned that there is an urgent “crisis” which can only be averted by the “birth” of a “planetary system” designed to control human population growth, natural resource consumption, and environmental pollution [2]. In a chapter titled “Our Crisis Is a Birth,” which is also the subtitle to the official publication of The Revelation [1], Hubbard asserted that: 

“[w]e must shift to renewable, nonpolluting sources of energy. We feel the pangs of hunger increasing as population escalates and more and more of us are hungry. All around us our old life-support systems are breaking down. What worked before has become destructive. We do not have much time to change.  . . . 

Yet, despite our fear and ignorance, we are learning to manage a planetary system.  . . .

Our crisis is a birth. We are one living system and we have come to the limit of one phase of natural growth on a finite planet.  . . .

[W]e may see ourselves as planetary midwives helping to deliver ourselves as a planetary system toward our next stage of life.” [2]

Similarly, in her 2012 book, Birth 2012 and Beyond, Hubbard professed that Malthusian ecological calamities resulting from overpopulation, overconsumption, and pollution are catalyzing a global “birthing crisis”: “[i]f you look at planet Earth as a whole system, it’s obvious that we’re overpopulating, [sic] we’re polluting, and we’re running out of resources. Like an infant that is reaching the ‘due date’ of its birth, we’re overgrowing ‘the womb’ of the Earth. Our ‘birthing’ crisis is inflicting pain and suffering for millions, as well as the possible destruction of our life support system” [3]. 

According to Hubbard, this “crisis” will “birth” the collective-conscious evolution of a new transhuman: species in tandem with a new world order: 

“The urgency of our global crisis is causing people to wake up all over the planet.  . . . What is now being born is transforming the old situation with the prospect of new solutions; and . . . it is helping to create a new world . . . 

And so, I believe . . . our crisis is potentially the birth of a more co-evolving, cocreative [sic] humanity.  . . .

[A] new type of human is emerging in the face of our shared global crisis. I call these pioneers ‘universal humans’ . . . This new person is moving toward cosmic consciousness and an ever-deepening spirituality.” [3]

In “Alternative to Armageddon,” alluding to the Club of Rome’s Malthusian treatise, Limits to Growth, Hubbard described this global “crisis of birth” as a Malthusian “meta-crisis of limits” that is midwifing the human species through a noetic “birth canal,” which will beget a “born again” transhuman species that can circumvent the “limits to growth” through evolutionary technologies, including “cybernetics,” “robotics,” and genetic engineering:

“[w]e entered the ‘birth canal.’ The meta-crisis of limits began. Resource shortage, over-population, pollution, alienation, confusion, malaise about the future, disconnection with the past. Experts with a womb-perspective advocated a ‘return’ to the simpler past, an adaptation to limits, a program of maximum conservation, and no growth. Futurists wrote of a paradigm shift from self-centered to whole-centered. Evolutionaries evangelized the extended gospel of Christ-capacities for all. Simultaneously these capacities turned on. These were the ‘post-natal’ technologies, developed within the womb of Earth for use after birth in the universal environment beyond the biospheric womb of Earth: astronautics, genetics, longevity, cybernetics, robotics.”

It is keen to note here that, in “Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard professed that the “universal woman,” or homo universalis, “gives birth to the first natural Christ,” and that “[t]his first natural Christ is transhuman, supra-human.” In other words, according to Hubbard, “Christ-capacities,” which are “turned on” through “‘post-natal’ technologies,” are “transhuman” capacities that are noetically “birthed” through the “meta-crisis of limits” to population growth and resource consumption.

To sum up, Hubbard carried the torch for Teilhard de Chardin’s Malthusian-eugenic “crisis” gospel as she prophesied that Malthusian “crises” would give “birth” to a noetic “Christ consciousness” which would technocratically engineer the sustainable evolution of a new transhuman species. Today, the WEF has adopted a “crisis of birth” ethos to drive the Great Reset by exploiting the COVID-19 “crisis” as an opportunity to accelerate the “birth” of a sustainable transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution. In a WEF “Sustainable Development” article published in 2020 and titled, “Now Is the Time for a ‘Great Reset,'” WEF Founder and Chairman, Klaus Schwab, proclaimed that “[t]he COVID-19 crisis is affecting every facet of people’s lives in every corner of the world.  . . . [T]he pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future” by “Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Hubbard and Salk: Kindred Consciousnesses, Malthusian Evolutionaries

Hubbard’s Malthusian-eugenic crisis cosmogeny was also shared by her “kindred spirit,” Jonas Salk [1], who was also influenced by Teilhard de Chardin. Best known as the acclaimed virologist who developed the first widely administered polio vaccine, Salk, who was hired by the UN to compile a report on overpopulation, advocated for Malthusian population control as a necessary condition of conscious evolution. Salk’s legacy continues on through the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which was formed with the help of Hubbard. Today, the Salk Institute, which has ties to the WEF, is promoting aspects of the “sustainable development” agenda, while also advancing conscious transhuman evolution through research and development projects specializing in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) for “computational neurobiology.” 

In 1964, Hubbard met Jacob Bronowski, who informed her that he was working with Jonas Salk to establish the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. According to Hubbard’s autobiography, she became excited about the prospects of the Salk Institute, and Bronowski put her in touch with the publisher of the Scientific American, Gerry Piel, who “was forming a society for the [Salk] institute” [4]. In turn, Hubbard proposed to Piel that the Salk Institute establish a “‘Theatre for Humanity’ to dramatize emerging values based on our knowledge of the evolution of life” [4]. These “emerging values” would serve as a cultural medium that could steer the evolution of human consciousness toward compatibility with the technological evolution of human biology and human civilization.

Piel prompted her to write up her proposal, which she drafted into a letter that she sent to the Salk Institute where Jonas himself read it. In the Book of Co-Creation: Our Crisis Is a Birth, Hubbard recalls how Salk telephoned her back to say, “You have expressed my dream . . . You have stated my vision far more clearly than I could . . . [W]e must be two peas in the same pod! May I take you out to lunch?” Immediately thereafter, according to Hubbard’s autobiography, she and Salk referred to each other as “kindred spirits” [1].

Accompanied by Warren Weaver, who was the Chairman of the Board of the Salk Institute, Jonas rendezvoused with Hubbard. In The Hunger of Eve: One Woman’s Odyssey Toward the Future, Hubbard compared this experience to “Eve stepping out of the garden” and “eating of the Tree of Life. It meant learning how to become a conscious participant in the designing process of life, discovering the laws of the universe, . . . and learning to cooperate with ‘the gods’—or the process of evolution” [4]. During this encounter, Hubbard asked, “Jonas, so you believe Teilhard was right about humankind uniting into one body, a new organism progressing toward an unknown future?” [4]. Salk responded, “Yes, of course, that’s natural” [4].

Later that same day, Hubbard professed, “Jonas, I want to help bring forth in the arts a new image of humanity commensurate with our capacity to shape the future” [4]. Salk replied: 

“Barbara, . . . You and I are scooped out of the same genetic material.  . . . We’re psychological mutants . . . Every now and then evolution produces precisely the right type of person for the needs of the time. You’re such a person: a bearer of evolution. It’s all in you. You’ve got the script inside, the attraction for the future, the desire to be responsible for the whole, your willingness to learn, to connect separate disciplines and people. You’re a bi-valent bonding mechanism. You’ve got hooks at both ends!” [4].

In Conscious Evolution, Hubbard narrates how she asked Salk “what was ‘wrong’ with me — my love of the future and my desire to connect with everything. He smiled and said, ‘Barbara, these are not faults, [sic] these are exactly the characteristics needed by evolution. You are a mutant’” [2].

According to Hubbard’s biography, she would later meet up at the Salk Institute with Jonas, “Jerry Hardy, the publisher of LIFE,” and “another ‘scoop’ of the same genetic material, Al Rosenfeld, science editor of LIFE magazine” [4]. Hubbard relays that “Jonas wanted to bring the finest molecular biologists from the world to the institute to do research into the basic knowledge of life; then the humanists and the artists were to follow. But he had not finished the buildings, and already I was designing the first play on the stage of the Theatre of Humanity. I was ahead of what could be done” [4].

This impasse would end Hubbard’s involvement with the Salk Institute, but she and Salk would continue to share common commitments to spreading the “emerging values” of conscious evolution. In three books, Man Unfolding, Survival of the Wisest, and Population and Human Values, Salk, like Hubbard, propagated Malthusian praxis as a cultural primer for conscious evolution.

In his 1972 book, Man Unfolding, Salk advocated that humankind must “unlearn” its traditional “philosophies” while “consciously” evolving “new” systems of “values” and “rules” that will “bring about a measure of control over growth both of population and of greed in man, excesses of each of which might be thought of as cancers of man.” In a chapter titled “Health as Wholeness,” Salk posited that, in order to avert ecological “damage that may be irreparable,” the cancers of overpopulation and overconsumption must be excised by pushing the human species to “move consciously to form an organism of mankind as part of an eco-system related to a purpose.  . . . [T]he kind of exclusiveness and competitiveness that have pre-vailed, which tend to exhaust rather than conserve resources, . . . will, in time and of necessity, have to be abated.” Stated differently, Salk postulated that Malthusian ecological catastrophes can be prevented through the superorganic evolution of collective-conscious “values” and “rules” for controlling overpopulation and sustaining “limited resources.”

To consciously evolve a Malthusian culture of population control and proto-sustainable development, according to Salk, the “genetic-somatic” evolution of human biology must be augmented by the “culture-induced evolution” of human consciousness. Salk hypothesized that human evolution is driven by the dialectical “mechanisms” of ecology, biology, and consciousness, including the dialectics “of organism and environment, of genes and soma, and of intuition and intellect,” respectively. In turn, Salk resolved that the “new man,” whom Hubbard referred to as “homo universalis,” or the “universal human,” must harness conscious evolution to steer the ecological dialectic between the human organism and the natural environment by applying his “intellect” and “intuition” to progressively invent new technological and cultural methods of stewarding natural and human resources. As a result, the “new man,” according to Salk, will consciously “bring about consonance between his outer environment and his inner self.” 

In “Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard mirrors Salk’s call for Malthusian population control as an essential element of collective-conscious evolution:

“[t]hey had reached a limit to growth: pollution, stagnation, over-population.  . . . 

In the late period of the biosphere, human beings have reached a point where they can no longer continue to reproduce themselves. You have reached a limit to growth on planet Earth. To reproduce yourselves you are transcending yourselves. You have discovered the pattern of synergistic self-organization. Synergizing humans working to overcome limits become the pattern in which the co-creative human emerges.”

Hubbard added that “[t]he advance through nature means the conscious evolution of yourselves as a god-like species, stewarding this Earth and all life on it.” Stated differently, Hubbard, like Salk, believed that Malthusian limits to population growth would catalyze the conscious evolution of a new “co-creative human,” which would synergistically steward the planet’s natural and human resources.

In his 1973 Survival of the Wisest,Salk expanded on his theory of how Malthusian overpopulation crises instigate the genesis of evolutionary epochs during which consciousness and genetics coevolve. Borrowing from Lamarckean epigenetics and Maslow’s psychology of being, Salk postulated that conscious evolution, which steers biological evolution, is driven by the dialectic between “BEING” and “EGO,” while biological evolution is fueled by the dialectic between genetics and somatics. 

According to Salk, as the bioevolutionary drive of genetic reproduction culminates in overpopulation, ecological crises threaten the survival of BEING, which is the teleological kernel with which consciousness is endowed by the “Cosmos.” Consequently, these ecological crises spark a revolution in consciousness that redirects EGO, which functions as the cognitive intermediary between the consciousness of BEING and the natural environment, toward collectively regulating population growth and resource consumption by scientifically and technologically reorganizing sociocultural and political-economic systems. It is worth noting here that Salk’s notion of BEING as consciousness is an invocation of Abraham Maslow’s transhumanist “psychology of being” [5]. Maslow, who was Hubbard’s mentor, set up the Eupsychian Network where Hubbard collaborated with figureheads of the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement along with other conscious “transhumanistic” evolutionaries dedicated to pastoring “all societies and all peoples . . . toward becoming one world and one species” [5].

To illustrate Salk’s Malthusian theory of conscious evolution, Survival of the Wisest examined charts that quantify the overpopulation predictions of Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the Population Bomband Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, both of which consider sterilization, abortion, and food rationing policies as bulwarks against ecological catastrophes caused by overpopulation. In Survival of the Wisest, Salk compared the Malthusian forecasts projected by Ehrlich with population data calculated by eugenicist Raymond Pearl. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Pearl, who was a participant in the League of Nations World Population Conference, charted fruit fly population growth, which was graphed as sigmoid curve data. Salk analyzed Pearl’s fruit fly population curve in contrast with lemming and human population curves in order to estimate whether the population growth curve of the human species, which is hitting its Malthusian inflection point, will prove to mirror the fruit fly sigmoid curve, which levels out, or the lemming curve, which cycles through “periodic catastrophe . . . with enormous loss of life.” In brief, Salk posed the question: will humanity consciously stop itself from bringing about overpopulation catastrophes, or will the dire predictions of Ehrlich’s Population Bomb come true? The answer to this question, according to Salk, depends on whether human consciousness can “metabiologically” evolve new “values” that cultivate Malthusian control of population growth and resource consumption.

Although Salk speculated that the “future population growth in Man will tend to stabilize at an optimal level described by an S-shaped curve,” he nonetheless warned that “[a] major threat to the species is attributed to the increasing size of the human population” and that the “diagrams” explicated in Survival of the Wisest “also show that former attitudes in respect to growth in population can no longer continue. Now self-imposed restrictions of freedom in this respect will be necessary not only to preserve other freedoms but to keep the quality of life from falling to a level that would soon become intolerable.” To be sure, Salk postulated that “the sigmoid curve of population growth . . . reveals that survival depends upon the development of means for the adjustment of the behavior of individuals appropriate to protection from autodestruction.” In order to “protect” the human species from “autodestruction,” Salk posited that imperative “self-imposed restrictions” must include “controlling births.”

According to Salk, as the human population growth curve hits its potential sigmoid “inflection point,” there is a shift from “Epoch A” to “Epoch B.” During Epoch B, the human species will either be decimated as a result of ecological catastrophes, or humankind will consciously evolve new cultural “attitudes and values” into a new “set of principles of metabiology” that will “guide the development of the BEING and EGO of Man” through Malthusian policies, including population control and resource conservation, which will “bring Man’s agenda and Nature’s agenda into closer harmony.” Similarly, in “Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard forecasted that humankind must consciously evolve “along with planetary shifts which are occurring at a metasystem level” in order to harness “co-creative technologies” that can save “a closed-system Earth” from the ecological “breakdown” of “growing population” and “pollution.” 

Eight years after the publication of Survival of the Wisest, the sigmoid curve data and the “epochal change” theory in that book were rehashed in another book, Population and Human Values: A New Reality, which was co-authored in 1981 by Salk and his son, who were commissioned by the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) to compose the book as “a report” analyzing UN “projections of population growth.” In compiling Population and Human Values,the Salks collaborated with the UN Chief of the Estimates and Projections Division, Shunichi Inoue. The Salks also consulted with “Rafael Salas, Tarzie Vittachi, and T. N. Krishnan of the UNFPA” along with Carl Haub of the Malthusian-eugenic Population Reference Bureau. It is worth noting here that Hubbard also collaborated with the UN where she gave a speech promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which affirm the Neo-Malthusian population policies of the UN International Conference on Population and Development. 

In Population and Human Values, the Salks analyzed “demographic data [that] provide a basis on which to discuss the relationship between changes in population growth patterns and changes in human attitudes, values, and behavior.” Based on the data, the Salks estimated that “we can expect the human population growth curve to follow a sigmoid pattern. The level of the plateau [of the sigmoid curve] is still uncertain, however, and is subject to human influence. In the years to come, we face the challenge of understanding and facilitating a slowing of human population growth and, ultimately, of adapting to the conditions associated with a relatively constant population size.” Nevertheless, the Salks asserted that, “[a]lthough we have turned a corner and the rate of world population growth is presently decreasing, world population size is still rapidly increasing and will continue to do so for many decades to come. The further slowing of growth will require expansion of family planning programs and a general increase in availability of social, health, and educational services.” Failing to institute such population control policies, according to the Salks, could lead to “a total collapse of the human population.” 

Echoing the Salks’ “epochal change” theory of conscious Malthusian evolution, Hubbard envisioned “a time of quantum transformation” when overpopulation and resource depletion would be offset by family planning and euthanasia policies while, at the same time, “advanced medical technologies” would be harnessed to “extend life” and “build new bodies” for the new “universal life” of a transhuman homo universalis. In a passage from “The Revelation: Alternative to Armageddon,” which is reprinted almost verbatim in The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth [1], Hubbard wrote: 

“at a time of quantum transformation, . . . ‘[b]e fruitful and multiply’ goes too far and becomes over-population. ‘Preserve all life’ goes too far and results in undesirable technological prolongation of animal/human existence. ‘Give food and shelter to the people’ becomes the over-industrialization, pollution, inflation, and resource depletion by the developed world.  . . .

The feedback from the environment is rapidly informing you to stop doing in the future what was necessary in the past.

‘Be fruitful and multiply’ becomes ‘consciously conceive chosen children who will be given the opportunity of optimum development.’ 

‘Preserve all life’ becomes ‘the opportunity for chosen death, and chosen extended life.’ Thanatology and gerontology enter the scene. Death can be chosen by those who have finished their work on Earth. The purpose of advanced medical technologies is not to maintain animal/human bodies in a semi-vegetative state. It is to be used by the minds motivated to do new work in the new environments of outer space, to extend life, change bodies, and eventually build new bodies accustomed to the new conditions of universal life.”

Today, Hubbard’s futurist prescriptions for Malthusian population control and conscious transhuman evolution are being advanced by the Salk Institute. Even though Hubbard parted ways with the Salk Institute during its incubation period, her Malthusian vision of conscious transhuman evolution, which was shared by Salk, is reflected in the research and development projects of the Salk Institute, which has been contributing to sustainable development while engineering the building blocks for the new transhuman bodies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

In fact, the Salk Institute, which experimented with “RNA-targeting CRISPR-Cas technology to destroy the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ RNA” in 2020, has conducted extensive research advancing “genetic engineering,” including “CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing,” “gene editing-based stem cell therapies,” and “a new Salk tool, called CasRx,” which can “target . . . RNA.” At the same time, members of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and the Salk Institute’s Systems Neurobiology Laboratory, with the help of the United States Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), have been enhancing transhuman AI consciousness by “teaching artificial intelligence to . . . ‘think’ like humans” through “computational model[s]” that “simulate . . . how the brain’s prefrontal cortex . . .  control[s] the flow of information between different areas of neurons.” It is worth noting here that Nicola Allen, who is an Associate Professor of Molecular Neurobiology at the Salk Institute, is a member of the WEF, which is one of the key groups at the helm of pushing transhumanism and Malthusian sustainable development as the cornerstones of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset.

Hubbard and the Sustainable-Malthusian Globalism of the Rockefeller Dynasty

Hubbard’s Malthusian outlook toward conscious evolution was shared not only by Salk, but also by her “beloved patron,” Laurance S. Rockefeller [2], who bankrolled her Foundation for Conscious Evolution, which calls for “radical evolutionary technologies” to be bolstered as remedies for “a complex series of crises, most especially environmental . . . crises, [which] are acting as evolutionary drivers pressuring us to innovate and transform.” Rockefeller, whose Venrock venture capital firm has bankrolled transhumanist science and technologies, including biotech, nanotech, and AI, is praised by Hubbard in five of her books over a span of 22 years between 1993 and 2015 [1] [2] [6] [7] [8]. Not only did the transhumanist interests of Rockefeller and Hubbard converge, but they also shared the common belief that Malthusian ecological crises must be met with global “sustainable development” policies entailing human population control and environmental conservation.  

According to a biography titled Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, Laurance championed the Malthusian ecological philosophy of “his brother JDR [John D. Rockefeller] 3rd, whose interest in population control he shared.” The Malthusian philanthropies of Laurance and John D. III, the latter of whom was the chairman of the US Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, were inspired by their father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who funded Nazi eugenics programs through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. The Malthusianism of Laurance and John D. III was also inspired by John D. Jr.’s crony, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. The son of Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr., who was a co-founder of the American Eugenics Society (AES), Osborn Jr. was also the cousin of Frederick Osborn, who was both a director of the AES and a co-founder of John D. III’s Population Council. It was Frederick Osborn who professed that eugenic goals could be more effectively attained through “crypto-eugenics” under the guise of “family planning” and Malthusian ecology, the latter of which is a pillar of Hubbard’s transhumanist schema for “conscious evolution.” 

In Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, Laurance’s biographer records how “the young LSR [Laurance S. Rockefeller] learned from him [Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr.] quite early about the world’s growing problem with overpopulation — an interest shared with JDR 3rd . . . Above all, LSR recalled, Osborn helped him to understand ‘participating in doing,’ not simply . . . in passive philanthropy, but in playing an active role within his philanthropic interests.” Laurance was so inspired by Osborn Jr. that he beamed about how he “felt they shared an ‘interrelated energy field’; years after they met, Osborn recognized the younger man’s similar curiosity, sending him a portrait inscribed, ‘from one rogue to another.’” Not only was Osborn Jr. a muse for Laurance’s Malthusian ecological philanthropy, but “[o]ver the years Osborn and LSR worked together on many projects, from the goals of Save-the-Redwoods to the development of the Bronx Zoo into a Wildlife Conservation Society.” In 1972, honoring the legacy of his deceased Malthusian mentor, Laurance wrote a Reader’s Digest article on “The Most Unforgettable Person I Ever Met,” which lauded “Osborn’s dynamism, . . . his writings on the post-war population explosion, and his sense of global responsibility.'”

About a decade after Laurance’s death, he was similarly eulogized by Hubbard in the dedication to her 2015 Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation [7]. As I document in “Barbara Malthusian Hubbard: From Limits to Growth to Agenda 2030,” out of the five books in which Hubbard lauds Rockefeller, four of them advance Hubbard’s calls for population control and sustainable development in order to avert Malthusian crises [1] [2] [6] [8]. In addition to spreading Hubbard’s Malthusian crisis gospel by bankrolling her books, Laurance also financed a Rockefeller Brothers Fund “Environmental Program” that “conduct[ed] scientific anticipatory analysis” of “the way in which population, resources, food, capital, pollution, and values interact.”

On top of funding Malthusian crisis propaganda and Malthusian environmental programs, Hubbard’s Rockefeller benefactor founded the Conservation Foundation, which was later merged with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The WWF had been set up by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; and Julian Huxley:

• A former Nazi storm trooper, Prince Bernhard, who was also a founder of the Bilderberg Group, was the “honorary sponsor” of the Third Annual Meeting of the WEF. At this 1973 Annual Meeting, Club of Rome co-founder, Aurelio Peccei, who met personally with Hubbard in 1972, preached the Malthusian gospel of Limits to Growth, which would lay the groundwork for the sustainable development initiatives of UN Agenda 2030 and the WEF’s Great Reset. The Limits to Growth thesis was resounded by Hubbard in several of her books, including Conscious Evolution[2]; Birth 2012 and Beyond[3]; Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence[8],and the published and unpublished versions of the “Book of Co-Creation” [1] [6].

• Prince Philip, who was kin to Prince Bernhard and several other members of Hitler’s Nazi Party, was the father of the current King of the United Kingdom, Charles III, who launched the WEF’s Great Reset and the Terra Carta mandate of the Sustainable Markets Initiative. In an anthology titled If I Were an Animal, which donated sales royalties to the WWF, Prince Philip confessed that he was “tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus” to cull the “population explosion” of the “human species” and, in turn, protect “endangered species.”

• The president of the British Eugenics Society and the first Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley coined the term “transhumanism” in his 1957 book, New Bottles for New Wine. In UNESCO’s 1946 mission statement, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, Huxleycalled for a global eugenics program and a global population control policy:

“[t]he recognition of the idea of an optimum population-size [sic] (of course relative to technological and social conditions) is an indispensable first step towards that planned control of populations which is necessary if man’s blind reproductive urges are not to wreck his ideals and his plans for material and spiritual betterment. The recognition of the fact that the wild life [sic] of the world is irreplaceable, but that it is being rapidly destroyed, is necessary if we are to realise in time that areas must be set aside where, in the ultimate interests of mankind as a whole, the spread of man must take second place to the conservation of other species.”

Not only was the World Wildlife Fund set up by these prominent Malthusians with the help of Russell E. Train, who was a Rockefeller Brothers Fund trustee. But the WWF, which advances UN Agenda 2030 through the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, has explicitly advocated for Malthusian family planning programs. In brief, for the WWF, wildlife conservation and human population control are interlinked elements of sustainable Malthusian development. It is worth noting here that, in a 2020 WWF video, Sir David Attenborough, who is a WEF member, called for “stabilis[ing] the human population as low as we fairly can.” It is also worth noting that numerous other WEF members are also WWF officials, including Shi Wang, David Dao, Andreas Follér, Jim Sano, David Miller, Emilio Tenuta, Yuan Jiakai, Julia Novy, Carter Roberts, Mei Dewen, William Smith Stubbs, Rasmus Helveg Petersen, David Hoyle, Victoria Fuentes, Oscar Soria, Razan Al Mubarak, Jayesh Ranjan, Frances Seymour, Erin Simon, and Bubba Cook.

Wildlife conservation and population control are similarly hitched together by Hubbard in “Alternative to Armageddon,” which asserts that, in order to save “animals” from “killers,” a planetary “tribulation” must ensue so that “[t]he killers must not survive to become universal humans”:

“[h]uman history has been a difficult and as yet incomplete effort to overcome the mammalian defect programmed in our genes—killing animals and each other. We are heading toward the birth canal with this defect uncorrected . . . [H]undreds of millions are still killing animals and each other. 

This is why tribulations must be so severe on your planet. The killers must not survive to become universal humans.”

Ironically, Hubbard’s remedy for the killing of wildlife is the selective culling of human beings. It can be inferred that the “killers” who “must not survive” belong to the “one-fourth” of the “defective seeds” who must be “destroyed” in order to midwife humankind through its cosmic Malthusian birth crisis into a new transhuman species. Notice here that this passage reinvokes Hubbard’s “birth crisis” eschatology through the imagery of “heading toward the birth canal.” Notice also that this passage echoes Huxley’s decree that “man must take second place to the conservation of other species.” 

Hubbard also collaborated with WWF trustee Maurice Strong, who served alongside her on the Global Advisory Board of the World Future Society. According to Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, Laurance had “conversations with and high regard for such individuals as Maurice Strong from the United Nations.” In fact, Laurance was a member of the US delegation to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, which was led by Strong, who later set up the 1992 UN Earth Summit Conference where the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of UN Agenda 21 were established as the precursors to the SDGs of UN Agenda 2030. Meanwhile, Laurance financed a battery of “sustainable development” projects as trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It is keen to note here that SDG 5.6 affirms the Neo-Malthusian “family planning” tenets of the Program of Action of the UN’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. 

The godfather of the SDGs, Strong was a WEF Foundation Board member who also crossed paths with Hubbard at the State of the World Forum (SWF), which was orchestrated by the first and only president of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Gorbachev, who was also a member of the Malthusian Club of Rome. The SWF also brought together an array of Hubbard’s New Age “allies” along with key WWF officials, including the WWF Senior Program Officer, Jaime Cavelier, and the WWF Chair, Ruud Lubbers, who was also the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. At the same time, the SWF also included several members of the WEF and the Club of Rome along with Laurance’s nephew, Steven C. Rockefeller, who was the Chair of the International Drafting Committee of Earth Charter, which Gorbachev co-created with Strong as a UN Agenda 21 proxy through a merger of Gorbachev’s Green Cross International and Strong’s Earth Council. According to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund website, Steven Rockefeller “became an RBF trustee in 1977 and joined Laurance and several like-minded cousins in embracing spiritually grounded approaches to a new ecological ethos.”

It is worth noting here that the Rockefeller dynasty not only purchased and donated the land upon which the UN headquarters were built. But the house of Rockefeller also financed some of the UN World and International Population Conferences that paved the way for the Neo-Malthusian population policies that are embedded into the SDGs of UN Agenda 2030, which Hubbard endorsed during her 2016 address to the UN High-Level Forum on the Culture of Peace. It is also worth noting that Laurance’s Rockefeller Brothers Fund and his venture capital firm, Venrock, have financed “sustainable development” technologies since 1980, and they continue to invest in “sustainability” enterprises today.

In sum, Laurance Rockefeller and Barbara Marx Hubbard shared a common Malthusian vision of conscious transhuman evolution. Through collaborations with the UN, both Laurance and Barbara advanced the Malthusian population policies that undergird the SDGs of Agenda 2030, which was spawned by their mutual comrade, Maurice Strong. By proxy, Gorbachev’s SWF brought together Strong, Hubbard, and Laurance’s nephew along with top officials from the UN, the WEF, the Club of Rome, and the WWF, all of which are pivotal institutions driving the Malthusian SDG initiatives of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In short, Hubbard’s liaison with Laurance Rockefeller intersected through momentous positions at the Malthusian nexus of world governance institutions, such as the UN; globalist Round Table NGOs, such as the WEF, the SWF, and the Club of Rome; and non-profit environmentalist foundations, such as the WWF.

Crisis, Reaction, Solution

Altogether, Hubbard’s gospel of Malthusian-transhumanist crisis evolution was inspired by her noetic muse, Tielhard de Chardin, shared by her “kindred spirit,” Jonas Salk [1], and bankrolled by her “beloved patron,” Laurance Rockefeller [2]. While Salk compiled Malthusian population reports for the UN, Rockefeller helped shape the formation of the WWF and participated in Maurice Strong’s UN Conference on the Human Environment, which laid the groundwork for Agenda 2030 and the Neo-Malthusian SDGs that Hubbard endorsed at the UN High-Level Forum on the Culture of Peace. Today, Jonas’s Salk Institute and Laurance’s Venrock, along with his Rockefeller Brothers Fund, are advancing “sustainable development” initiatives and transhumanist biotechnologies that align with their previously stated views. Meanwhile, as the Great Reset is barreling forward, Hubbard’s crisis collectivism has been assimilated by the WEF, which has been stoking fears of environmental crises and public health crises in an effort to goad populations into submitting to the biotech mandates and “sustainable development” overhauls of the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Ostensibly, these alarms of global crises could be tabulated as evidence validating Hubbard’s evolutionary crisis prophecy. Nonetheless, these crises could be contrived, exaggerated, or intentionally mismanaged in order to foment the ostensive emergencies necessary to coerce people into capitulating to the “sustainable” transhumanist technocracy of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. At a 1975 Lindisfarne Fellows conference titled “Conscious Evolution and the Evolution of Consciousness,” Salk gave a presentation that was contextualized within the prospects of a technocratic elite manipulating Malthusian crises in order to impose draconian systems of totalitarian control under the pretense of “crisis management.” William Irwin Thompson, the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which was funded by Laurance Rockefeller, prefaced Salk’s lecture with the premise that “we are living in one of the greatest historical crises” which could pose “absolutely no other future ahead of us but a kind of authoritarian convergence of the military-industrial complex and the multinational corporations creating a form of crisis management by which a kind of new elite, possibly a computer scientist elite, will use the crises to gain new controls and manage society to take over.”  

Whether organic or astroturfed, environmental crises and public health crises are being leveraged by the technocratic globalist elites of the WEF and the UN in order to accelerate the sustainable transhumanist development overhauls of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is perhaps moot to quibble over whether the global elite sincerely intend to save the planet and evolve the human species, or whether they surreptitiously intend to “take over” the world. In either case, it remains incumbent upon conscientious free thinkers to balk when globalist elite technocrats, such as Klaus Schwab, or New Age gurus, such as Barbara Marx Hubbard, offer Malthusian-transhumanist “solutions” that are arguably worse than the crises themselves.

In the next and final article in this series, I finally will unveil how Hubbard’s affiliations with the World Future Society, the Human Potential Movement, and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution were connected to networks of alleged pedophiles and sexual abuse cults.

References:

[1]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth (The Book of Co-Creation) (Sonoma, CA: Foundation for Conscious Evolution, 1993).

[2]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1998).

[3]  Barbara Marx Hubbard and The Welcoming Committee, Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution (USA: Shift Books, 2012).

[4]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Hunger of Eve: One Woman’s Odyssey Toward the Future (Eastsound, WA: Island Pacific NW, 1989).

[5]  Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 2^nd ed. (New York, NY: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1968).

[6]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium (Mill Valley, CA: Nataraj Publishing, 1995).

[7]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation: The Promise Will Be Kept (Los Angeles, CA: Muse Harbor, 2015).

[8]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence (10 Steps to the Universal Human) (Charlottesville, VA: Walsch Books, 2001).

Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Malthusian-Transhumanist Riders of the Pale Horse.

Whitney joined The Jimmy Dore Show to discuss Silicon Valley’s plans for techno-feudalism.

Available on Odysee. YouTube clips – Solutions | Trump

Links discussed:

• Breaking (Down) The Chain: An Investigation Post-mortem
• The Chain
• Secretive HHS AI Platform to Predict US Covid-19 Outbreaks Weeks in Advance
• A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction
• Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
• The Man Behind Trump’s VP Pick: It’s Worse Than You Think
• Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall”
• Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America?
• How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein Network” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare
• In Israel the Push to Destroy Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque Goes Mainstream
• Epstein – Investigative Series
• The Going Direct Reset – Going Direct
• Plundering the Crisis Economy with John Titus
• Howard Lutnick and the Commandeering of the Department of Commerce

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One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

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Whitney Webb joined James Corbett to discuss being digitally repersoned.

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One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

The Corbett Report.

On November 19, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of his transition team, would be his nominee for Commerce Secretary. Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries are multinational in scope, promote the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (which have major implications for debt politics and economic activity), and are even directly partnered with foreign state-owned firms that recently came under scrutiny following the release of the contents of the laptop of the current (and recently pardoned) First Son, Hunter Biden.

Lutnick had previously been angling for a job as incoming Treasury Secretary, an unsurprising ambition given Cantor Fitzgerald’s outsized role in the U.S. Treasury market (i.e. the U.S. government debt market) and its relationship to dollar stablecoins, which are rapidly becoming one of the main purchasers of U.S. debt. It is unknown currently why Lutnick was passed over for Treasury, despite endorsement for the position from Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and appointed to Commerce instead. However, Trump’s previous Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was widely believed to have been given the role to repay a past favor of major significance. In Ross’s case, it was his assistance in rescuing Trump from bankruptcy in the early 1990s. At the time, Ross worked for Rothschild Inc., and when clarifying why the European banking dynasty had bailed out the future President, Ross stated “the Trump name is still very much an asset.” Shortly before, Rothschild Inc. had been bankrolling the entry of Robert Maxwell, intelligence asset for Israel and arguably the Soviet Union, into the American economy, with a specific focus on New York City.

During and following the campaign, Lutnick has been a major supporter of Trump’s prospective plan to implement an extensive tariff regime in lieu of income tax. If confirmed, Lutnick will also oversee the approval of the export of sensitive technology of national security interest abroad, negotiate free trade agreements, and oversee the patents office, among other roles. While mainstream reports on his appointment have noted his “hawkish” trade stance with China and his connections to the cryptocurrency agency, much has been left out about Lutnick, his current business entanglements and historical connections to intelligence networks that have sought to undermine the Commerce Department specifically to facilitate the transfer of sensitive U.S. military technology to ostensible adversary states, like China.

Satellogic: Observation is Preservation

In exploring these issues, it is useful to look at one company now closely tied to Lutnick – Satellogic. Lutnick sits on Satellogic’s board, as does former Treasury Secretary from the previous Trump administration Steve Mnuchin and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, General Joe Dunford. Mnuchin and Dunford invested heavily in Satellogic through the private equity they now work for, Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchin has led that firm since its founding. Liberty Strategic Capital’s first investment was in a controversial Israeli intelligence-linked cybersecurity firm called Cybereason. Cybereason’s co-founder and CEO Lior Div has described Cybereason as a continuation of his work in Israeli intelligence outfit Unit 8200, where Div worked on offensive cyber attacks targeting foreign nations. The firm became controversial in the lead-up to the 2020 election for simulating, along with U.S. security agencies like DHS, the necessary threshold of cyberattacks that would induce the cancellation of a U.S. presidential election and the imposition of martial law. Lutnick himself has significant ties to Israel and is a well-known billionaire mega-donor to Israeli and Zionist causes (discussed in detail later in this article).

Satellogic, for its part, employs a former Israeli intelligence officer, Aviv Cohen, as its head of “special projects.” Cohen previously co-founded Fraud Sciences Corp. with Unit 8200 alum Saar Wilf, which was later sold to PayPal and now forms the “back-bone” of its anti-fraud algorithm. Prior to that, Cohen worked for Core Security Technologies, the firm previously co-founded by Satellogic’s co-founders that contracted for numerous U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Since we reported on Cohen’s ties to Satellogic earlier this year in April, Satellogic has made Aviv Cohen’s biography on the company website private.

In an interview with Bloomberg in January 2022, Lutnick and Mnuchin expressed the reasoning behind their venture into Satellogic via Liberty Strategic and CF Acquisition Group V, a subsidiary of Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald. “We felt that space and the satellites in particular is really the next coming gigantic market for data,” explained Lutnick. “I mean, to have images of the whole Earth – data on the whole Earth – the amount of decisions that will unlock, and the ability and the economics of how that will unlock, was extraordinary.” Lutnick furthered that their proprietary lens technology allows customers of Satellogic to “count the containers on the ships,” “count the cars,” “count the trees,” or “count the number of [panels] working and what’s not working in a solar farm,” which “unlocks a vast, vast sea of opportunity in marketplaces.”

In the same interview, Mnuchin expressed similar excitement about the opportunities downstream of such detailed Earth observational technology, but with a telling insight on how said data, when paired with artificial intelligence, can advance the interests of the national security state and increase government-led markets. “We’re very focused on investments where not only can we bring capital but we can bring our expertise. And we’re particularly focused on the technology area, national security, and other forms where we can add a lot of value,” Mnuchin articulated. “So what we liked about this is great technology, very scalable, very affordable, and the combination of having a lot of data with a lot of AI really will enable both very big government markets, and more importantly, very big commercial markets.”

Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald, one of 24 primary dealers of the New York Federal Reserve, is no stranger to participating in the financing of the data broker industry, having given $100 million in equity financing to Near Intelligence Holdings’ effort to go public in May 2022. Near was founded by Idealab’s Bill Gross, the first institutional investor in PayPal, and currently boasts being “the world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products.” An October 2023 report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Near had “provided data to the U.S. military via a maze of obscure marketing companies, cutouts, and conduits to defense contractors.”

While Near business model operates in the shadows, feeding off data scraped from clever advertising mechanisms and unread user agreements behind mobile applications, Satellogic is directly attacking the billions of potential revenue from “creat[ing] all new types of markets” downstream of “scalable, affordable imagery,” according to Mnuchin. Lutnick, in the same conversation with Bloomberg, boasted that Satellogic can “take a video from space of more than a minute of an airport and tell you the brand of plane that is taking off,” in his argument that “this kind of data is such a big market.” Lutnick added that “imagery from satellites” is “one of the world’s great marketplaces.” Echoing that same line of thinking, the former Treasury Secretary stated that he views Satellogic “as more of a data company than necessarily just a space company,” which can leverage “vast amounts of data” in order to “really analyze climate issues, energy supply, food security,” and “supply chains.”

In regards to climate issues, Lutnick claims that Satellogic’s technology will “finally end the concept of climate change” by “literally remap[ing] the Earth every day.” The death of the specific concept of climate change alluded to by Lutnick seemingly refers to the popularized “left wing” modeling of the climate emergency, versus the likely incoming “right wing” carbon market, as articulated in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout. An unspoken wrinkle in the pricing of carbon, as proposed independently by Lutnick and fellow-Trump advisor Elon Musk, is the dollar denomination and thus the implications on the sale of United States’ Treasuries. In an idea to be explored later in this article, a carbon market denominated in dollars may not solve the “climate crisis,” but it just might help solve the ever-looming debt crisis.

This position has already been taken by Lutnick’s Tether, as the purchasing of government bonds by the stablecoin issuer continually increases in volume and remains poised to become systemically important, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout. While Lutnick’s immense connection to the Treasury market – whether through Cantor Fitzgerald itself or its custodial relationship and investment in Tether – led many to believe he was in position to become Treasury Secretary, Trump picked him for Commerce Secretary, and thus placed him in a management position over many public sector entities directly related to his private-sector activities such as Satellogic.

The “very strong, patentable technology” built by Satellogic, as explained by Mnuchin, takes on a new meaning with the appointment of Lutnick to the Department of Commerce (DOC), due to the DOC management of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This is far from the only conflict of interest within Lutnick’s venture into the public sector, as the DOC manages many bureaus directly impacted by the proliferation of a U.S.-based, private-sector Earth observation company such as Satellogic. Some of the dozen bureaus under the DOC relevant to Satellogic – not to mention Lutnick’s position within the digital asset space via Cantor’s relationship with Tether – include the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the International Trade Administration (ITA), the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), not to mention the aforementioned NOAA, and USPTO.

Interestingly, the DOC also established the U.S. AI Safety Institute dedicated to upholding the asks within the October 2023 Biden-Harris executive order on “the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” In October 2024, the Biden-Harris administration issued the first ever national security memorandum on AI, empowering the DOC to “harness power of AI for U.S. national security.” Previous U.S. government-sponsored commissions, such as the National Security Commission on AI, had concluded that it was necessary to ensure U.S. military and economic hegemony by forcing American consumers off of “legacy systems” and onto AI-powered alternatives, lest American AI companies lag behind their Chinese counterparts, particularly in the fields of e-commerce and finance. They also made the case for increased, AI-powered mass surveillance – such as that facilitated by Satellogic – as a means of advancing this cause.

In August 2021, the Lutnick-linked Tether, via its subsidiary Northern Data, purchased over 223,000 GPUs (graphical processing units) used in AI computing from the cryptocurrency firm block.one, which was founded by Tether co-founder Brock Pierce. A month later, the stablecoin issuer spent nearly half a billion dollars purchasing Bitcoin miners from block.one in a deal facilitated by Christian Angermeyer, a long-time friend of Palantir’s Peter Thiel. Palantir, which has long-standing and very close ties to the CIA, is a Satellogic partner and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale donated heavily to Trump (as did Palantir itself) while Thiel has extremely close ties with the incoming Vice President J.D. Vance.

Since Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald helped take Satellogic public via SPAC, Satellogic – founded in Argentina and previously based in Uruguay – has now redomiciled in the United States in an effort to obtain lucrative government contracts. The company’s move to Delaware was prompted by Satellogic’s poor financials after going public. However, government contracts have been slow to appear for the firm, with Satellogic securing its first government contract with NASA just this past September. However, a Lutnick-run Commerce Department could alter Satellogic’s chances in securing future contracts. This conflict of interest between Lutnick’s private sector dealings with his newfound government appointment was noted by Politico in October 2024, which claimed that Lutnick was “improperly mixing his business interested with his duties standing up a potential administration.” According to the report, Lutnick took meetings on Capitol Hill under the guise of transition team matters, then “allegedly us[ed] the opportunity to talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald,” which also included “high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business.”

This conflict of interest is notable in part because some of the bureaus Lutnick will oversee as Commerce Secretary, such as the NOAA, are targets of Satellogic’s contracting ambitions. For instance, Satellogic markets itself as able to measure carbon emissions from space and has promoted its recent NASA contract as part of the government effort to target climate change. NOAA and other agencies housed under the Commerce Department collect climate data for the U.S. government. As will be noted again shortly, Lutnick was an early pioneer of electronic carbon emissions trading and his company is a major advocate for the implementation of the UN’S SDGs, part of an over-arching UN-supported plan that includes using space satellites to measure carbon emissions.

Last year, the NOAA granted Satellogic a remote sensing license, helping secure “Satellogic’s strategy to capitalize on high-value opportunities in the U.S.,” specifically as it relates to U.S. government contracts. The license grants Satellogic NOAA oversight and the ability to secure contracts with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, a major goal of the company per Satellogic president Matt Tirman.

Satellogic was co-founded in 2010 by CEO Emiliano Kargieman and CTO Gerardo Richarte after spending “some time” at the NASA Ames Campus in Mountain View, CA. Both Kargieman and Richarte previously worked for Core Security Technologies, which was co-founded by Kargieman and boasted national security state clients such as Homeland Security, NSA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and DARPA. In 1998, Core Security was recognized as an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation, whereas Satellogic’s eventual seed round raise was funded by Endeavor’s Santiago Pinto Escalier, in addition to Ariel Arrieta and NXTP Ventures, and the Kargieman-advised Starlight Ventures. Kargieman later founded Aconcagua Ventures in a joint venture with Craig Cogut’s Pegasus Capital, and served as a Member of the Special Projects Group at the World Bank. Pegasus Capital became the main funder of Satellogic-partner CC35, a group seeking to impose a fraudulent carbon market on much of Latin America, as covered in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout.

Another Core Security Technologies employee that migrated to Satellogic with Kargieman and Richarte is Aviv Cohen, the aforementioned ex-Israeli intelligence officer who is now Satellogic’s head of “special projects.” Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns a significant stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla, also invested in Satellogic’s Series A, as did Endeavor Catalyst, which is run by LinkedIn/PayPal’s Reid Hoffman, and Valor Capital, whose partners include figures tied to U.S. military and intelligence activities in Latin America, a former CEO of PayPal, as well as CBDC development on the continent. Valor is also advised by Brian Brooks. Brooks was a former employee at OneWest Bank alongside Mnuchin, and was made Acting Comptroller of the Currency in May 2020 via Mnuchin’s designation, where he introduced “regulatory initiatives that provided banks with the green light to offer cryptocurrency custody services and stablecoin payment systems.”

In February 2022, Palantir – a private sector intelligence firm led by PayPal-founder Peter Thiel and created with CIA funds to replace a controversial DARPA mass surveillance and data-mining program – committed to a five year strategic partnership with Satellogic. Satellogic’s partnership with Palantir enables its “government and commercial customers”, which include the CIA and J.P. Morgan, access to Satellogic’s Aleph platform APIs to feed raw satellite imagery to Palantir’s MetaConstellation and Edge AI. This partnership builds on a previous collaboration between Satellogic and Palantir to “field unique AI capabilities to the orbital edge,” including “live upgrades to the satellite’s onboard AI” that enables “an ultra-low-latency maritime use-case.” Palantir and Satellogic customers, which include the Pentagon’s Space Systems Command, Space Force, SpaceX, the government of India, and others, will soon have access to the Edge AI platform running on Satellogic satellites “to offer customers tailored AI insights.” This is expected to increase Satellogic’s business of “data products, streamline pipeline management, and further scale customer delivery required for weekly and daily world remaps.” Some of their customers, like the government/military of Ukraine, have been applying both Palantir and Satellogic “insights” directly to the battlefield for over two years. This underscores that Satellogic’s technology is clearly intended for use in both civilian and military settings.

Epstein Entanglements

In 2022, Satellogic signed a far-reaching agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, itself a major U.S. military and intelligence contractor. SpaceX remains Satellogic’s “preferred launch provider” for launching its satellites into near-Earth orbit. During the campaign and since the election, Lutnick and Musk have collaborated extensively, with Musk even endorsing Lutnick for his preferred nomination as Trump’s incoming Treasury Secretary.

Notably, Musk’s SpaceX was allegedly infiltrated by Lutnick’s former next-door neighbor, intelligence asset, pedophile and sexual blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein reportedly introduced a member of his “entourage” to Musk’s brother Kimbal, then on the board of SpaceX. That young woman, who had previously “dated” Epstein and lived at the 301 66^th St East apartment complex now known to have housed women Epstein trafficked, then dated Kimbal Musk from 2011 to 2012. As a consequence, the relationship with Kimbal “brought Epstein into contact with the Musk family and its businesses.” This allegedly culminated in Epstein touring SpaceX facilities in 2012, a claim a SpaceX attorney very belatedly denied after the incident was first reported by Business Insider. Kimbal Musk is also on the board of another of his brother’s companies – Tesla – and, prior to his 2019 arrest, Epstein confirmed claims from sources that he was privately advising Tesla in 2018 to journalist James Stewart. After Epstein was infamous, Musk denied the claims. Per Stewart, Epstein was apparently part of the attempted deal to take Tesla private with Saudi money in 2018. Epstein was also a very close advisor at that time to the then and current de facto leader Muhammad bin Salman. Since then, an Epstein associate turned venture capitalist, Nicole Junkermann, has become a significant investor in SpaceX.

In addition, Elon Musk himself was subpoenaed as part of the now-shuttered USVI lawsuit against the bank JP Morgan for its role in facilitating Epstein’s crimes and is known to have socialized with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on several occasions prior to Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death later that same year. In one such meeting, brokered by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Musk was reported to have introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta. Musk also attended the Edge Foundation’s “billionaire dinners,” which courted top figures in Silicon Valley and operated as a de facto front for an Epstein-run influence operation for several years, coinciding with the genesis of the “billionaire dinners.” Furthermore, Richard Sorkin, the CEO of Elon and Kimbal Musk’s first company Zip2, joined an Israeli intelligence-linked tech company headed by Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister Isabel Maxwell shortly after the sale of Zip2 to Compaq in 1999.

In addition, Musk shares some business links to Epstein associates. For instance, a major supplier to Tesla, LS Power (via its subsidiary EVgo), and its affiliated hedge fund Luminus Management are closely linked to Jonathan Barrett, who was a managing director of LS Power and has led Luminus Management since 2011. Barrett also held several other senior roles at LS Power between 2003 and 2008. Barrett is a former protégé of Jeffrey Epstein’s who started his career working at Epstein’s firm J. Epstein & Co. and also became the CFO and Vice President of Ossa Properties, the real estate firm run by Epstein’s brother Mark and co-founded by Barrett’s brother Anthony. Barrett listed his legal address for many years as being 301 66 St East in Manhattan, an apartment complex that is majority owned by Ossa that housed many of the women actively being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and which was frequented by Epstein’s associates, including several who stayed overnight, like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

LS Power, where Barrett was a top executive, has been investigated “for fraudulent conveyance of assets” in several bankruptcy cases. In addition, LS Power’s founder, Mike Segal – whose son Paul is now the firm’s CEO, did business with the Bufalino crime family. Luminus Management was also the largest shareholder in Valaris, which sold $650 million in oil rigs to Musk’s SpaceX in 2020. In addition, another firm closely linked to Luminus – Luminus Capital Management and the Luminus Capital Partners Master Fund – counts Alex Erskine as a director. Erskine was previously a director for the Jeffrey Epstein-chaired financial vehicle Liquid Funding, which was partially owned by Bear Stearns before its collapse during the 2008 financial crisis.

As recently noted, Howard Lutnick was the long-time next-door neighbor of Epstein’s now infamous New York townhouse at 9 E. 71^st St. Lesser known perhaps, is Epstein’s long history with that property and that connection of the entity that ultimately sold the home to Lutnick. Lutnick’s address, 11 E. 71^st St., was first purchased by a Leslie Wexner-controlled entity called SAM Conversion Corp in 1988, a year before the Nine East 71^st Street Corp. (of which Epstein was president) bought the neighboring home. In 1992, SAM Conversion Corp. – with Epstein now its Vice President – sold the 11 E 71^st St property to the 11 East 71st Street Trust – where Epstein was a trustee – for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration paid by the party of the second part,” according to Crain’s New York. During this time, Leslie Wexner “refurbished” the property at 9 E. 71^st St. for tens of millions of dollars, which included adding an unusual “security system” reportedly later used to record videos, allegedly for the purposes of blackmail, once Epstein inhabited the residence. It is unknown if similar “refurbishments” were made to the neighboring house later bought by Lutnick that was also under Epstein/Wexner control at the same time.

In 1996, with Epstein already inhabiting 9 E. 71^st St. for at least a year, the neighboring home at 11 E. 71^st St. was sold to Comet Trust for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration.” Some reports have suggested the price paid for the home was around $6.2 million. The trustee of Comet involved in the sale was Guido Goldman, the son of famous Zionist Nahum Goldman, a very close friend of Henry Kissinger and founder of the German Marshall Fund, which later spawned the controversial Alliance for Securing Democracy. Goldman was also the apparent liaison between the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the CIA. At the time the sale was made to Goldman and the Comet Trust, Epstein was also part of the CFR and, according to a 2001 report in the UK’s Evening Standard, told people that he had once worked for the CIA.

The Comet Trust was one of three trusts established “for the benefit of descendants of the late Minda de Gunzberg,” who was born Minda Bronfman and was the sister to Charles and Edgar Bronfman. Their father, Sam Bronfman, built the family liquor empire in large part to his ties to organized crime elements during the American Prohibition era. Charles Bronfman co-founded the “Mega Group” with Leslie Wexner in 1991, which spawned Birthright Israel, an organization that counts the Lutnicks as among their top donors. In addition, Edgar Bronfman was arguably the main player in the insider trading scandal that allegedly resulted in Epstein leaving Bear Stearns in 1981. Edgar’s son, Edgar Jr., also appears in Epstein’s black book of contacts and Edgar’s daughters, Sara and Clare, were central figures in the NXIVM sex cult scandal. The Comet Trust later sold the home to Howard Lutnick, again for “10 dollars and other valuable consideration” and Lutnick took out a $4 million mortgage on the property the same day the sale was made. Lutnick has never publicly commented on his property’s history or any information regarding his relationship with his former next-door neighbor.

Notably, Edgar Bronfman Jr. heavily funds and chairs the start-up accelerator network, Endeavor, which backs Satellogic, among other companies. Another major backer of Endeavor is Pierre Omidyar, a major donor to Clinton and Obama with a long history of collaborating with U.S. intelligence. (Lutnick himself was a major donor to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has long backed a variety of Democrats before deciding to back Trump relatively recently.)

In addition, alongside Lutnick on Satellogic’s board is Marcos Galperin, Argentina’s richest man, who is considered Endeavor’s earliest success story and who maintains close ties to the organization. Endeavor targets emerging market start-ups specifically and is also very closely connected to a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Another major figure in the Endeavor network is Eduardo Elzstain, an Argentine oligarch who – like many other Argentines connected to Endeavor – has cultivated close ties to current president of Argentina Javier Milei. Elzstain, a long-time associate of George Soros, hosts the Argentine equivalent of Bilderberg – the annual, closed-to-the-public Llao Llao Forum which is frequented by members of Endeavor Argentina. Elzstain is also on the board of the WJC – whose long-time president was Edgar Bronfman Sr. Elzstain also boasts close ties to the apocalyptic-messianic Chabad Lubavitch movement, which has significant ties to Donald Trump, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and also to Howard Lutnick.

Lutnick and the Search for Dollar Debt Sinks

In addition to being backed by Endeavor, Satellogic is now also backed by Tether, which boasts important ties to Lutnick. Cantor, which is “majority-owned by its CEO Lutnick,” was recently revealed to be a 5% owner of Tether after a $600 million investment, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The assumed largest shareholder of Tether, co-founder Giancarlo Devasini, reportedly told the paper that “Lutnick will use his political clout to try to defuse threats facing Tether.”

While already pegged for Commerce Secretary and verbally committed to stepping down as CEO at Cantor upon Senate confirmation, Lutnick is currently working closely with Trump by “vetting candidates for other top government jobs that could involve supervising Tether.” While naturally the regulation on stablecoin issuers would have profound implications for Tether and its minority-owner Cantor, the importance of this blossoming industry as a net-buyer of government bonds in an era of high inflation (and $36 trillion in already-issued debt) pegs Tether and its ilk as systemically important to the United States government’s survival.

In order for an incoming Trump administration to successfully meet the demands of their congressional budget, while also servicing our compounding trillions in debt already owed, the Treasury needs to find a willing buyer for that newly issued debt. In the past 18 months, a new high volume net buyer of this debt has appeared in the form of stablecoin issuers, such as Tether or Circle, which have purchased over $150 billion of U.S. debt in the form of securities issued by the Treasury in order to “back” the issuance of their dollar-pegged tokens with a dollar-denominated asset. For some perspective, China and Japan, historically the U.S.’ largest creditors, hold just under and just over $1 trillion, respectively, in these same debt instruments. Despite only existing for a decade, and only surpassing a $10 billion market cap in 2020 – the same year Trump’s OCC passed a bulletin allowing U.S. banks to hold stablecoins – Tether is already earmarked for over 10% the Treasuries held by either of the U.S.’ largest nation-state creditors. As previously mentioned, Tether’s impressive stash of Treasuries are custodied by Lutnick’s Cantor.

Using stablecoins as a method to mitigate the U.S. debt problem has been circulating among Republicans for some time, including former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who articulated this exact sentiment in a recent op-ed with The Wall Street Journal titled “Crypto Could Stave Off a U.S. Debt Crisis.” Ryan claims that “stablecoins backed by dollars provide demand for U.S. public debt” and thus “a way to keep up with China.” He speculated that “the [debt] crisis is likely to start with a failed Treasury auction,” which in turn leads to “an ugly surgery on the budget.” The former Speaker predicted that “the dollar will suffer a major confidence shock” and as a result asks, “What can be done?” His answer is to “start by taking stablecoins seriously.” Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino echoed this sentiment, referring to Tether as “the best friend of the U.S. government,” due to “hold[ing] more U.S. Treasury securities than Germany, much more than any other competitor or any other financial institution in the world.” Tether also notably is partnered with U.S. agencies like the FBI and Secret Service.

Dollar-backed stablecoins are arriving as “an important net purchaser of U.S. government debt,” Ryan notes, with stablecoin issuers now the 18th largest holder of U.S. Debt. Ryan goes on to say that “if fiat-backed dollar stablecoin issuers were a country,” that nation “would sit just outside the top 10 in countries holding Treasurys,” still less than Hong Kong but “larger than Saudi Arabia,” the U.S.’ former partner in the petrodollar system. Ardoino articulated that Tether is “happy to decentralize the ownership of the U.S. debt, making the U.S. much more resilient.”

Satellogic, and thus Tether and Cantor, are also involved in the development of carbon markets and predatory climate finance endeavors. Cantor was a pioneer of electronic carbon emissions trading and continues to promote climate finance as well as implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Satellogic positions itself as able to measure carbon emissions from space, a policy supported in the UN document “Our Common Agenda” and has begun to attempt to do this via GREEN+, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout.

NOAA, which granted Satellogic a license and which Lutnick will oversee, collects climate data for the government and the Commerce Department in general would play a major role in establishing any form of “carbon pricing,” whether a carbon market, as Satellogic is helping to build, or a carbon tax, a policy long supported by prominent Trump backers like Elon Musk. Naturally, the promotion of a carbon tax –tellingly proposed by one of the world’s richest men who also happens to own the largest EV company in the world – would simply further the class divide that currently exists in the United States, with the rich having no problems upgrading to emission-free vehicles nor meeting the expenses brought on by such a tax system. The actual enforcement, and thus the successful creation, of such a proposal requires exactly the type of data provided by an Earth observation company – a field in which Satellogic stands somewhat alone.

Carbon pricing is simply not possible without government-vetted, accurate measurements of carbon molecule density, and thus the market for reliable data service providers has quietly been dominated by Satellogic. As the debt instruments of the private sector evolve alongside the proliferation of blockchain technology, the data that makes these smart contracts execute to eventually settle no longer goes to a human arbitrator, but rather a consciousness-free protocol that reduces a pair of potential outcomes to a single output. This oracle and settlement protocol is seemingly poised to be the blockchain, at least that is the argument made in this piece, and exemplified by many of the affiliates and partners of Satellogic, including Lutnick. These novel green finance instruments can be upheld and paid out by blockchains and smart contracts, including the Bitcoin-sidechain Rootstock, which was listed on documents as being another partner of GREEN+ alongside Satellogic and CC35.

Additionally, such as in the case of Satellogic partner O.N.E. Amazon, entities can create entirely new blockchain protocols to issue and uphold settlement of tokenized “real world assets,” known as RWAs. O.N.E. Amazon is chaired by Peter Knez, who oversaw the creation of ETFs (exchange traded funds) while heading Barclay’s iShares division. iShares is now owned by BlackRock after being purchased in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and features the fastest growing ETF in history, the iShares IBIT Bitcoin ETF.

O.N.E. Amazon aims to create “sustainable impact for the environment and investors by using next-generation technology to bring innovation to conservation.” The “innovation” O.N.E. Amazon offers is related to its issuance of a capped-supply of “regulated O.N.E. Amazon Digital Asset Securit[ies].” Per Knez, “each security will represent the perceived value of one hectare of biome in the Amazon rainforest, backed by a 30-year preservation agreement over that land,” capped at 750 million, “corresponding to the hectarage of the rainforest.” In other words, each security issued represents one hectare of the Amazon. O.N.E Amazon asserts that “investors will benefit from the potential capital appreciation of the security” in large part due to “the finite size” of the rainforest it is tokenizing.

Knez co-authored a paper with Mysten Labs – founded by former Facebook/Meta employees who helped develop their stablecoin project, Libra/Diem, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout – titled “Preserving Nature’s Ledger: Blockchains in Biodiversity Conservation,” which promotes a framework that focuses on “tokenization strategies for biodiversity species and for IoT [internet of things] solutions, such as sensors, drones, and satellites to monitor and record data related to species and ecosystems.” Satellogic isn’t the only concerning firm partnered with O.N.E. Amazon, for instance, Aecom, – the successor to the CIA-linked Ashland Oil – currently contracts extensively with USAID, which is widely believed to be a CIA front organization. Interestingly, Knez’ co-founder, Rodrigo Veloso, played a significant role in the efforts to take Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) public, the parent company of the Trump-centric social network Truth Social.

With the carbon credit market and tokenized RWAs presenting themselves as the preferred debt instruments of the modern era, Lutnick’s Satellogic finds itself ready to act as a crucial pillar of the encroaching new financial system, assuming the U.S. can get other nations to participate in these new technology spheres. This is the role that the Department of Commerce has previously and controversially played, and thus worth investigating the recent history of the DOC as Lutnick prepares to commandeer it.

The Commerce Department and the Legacy of “Chinagate”

Though Lutnick’s aforementioned ties to the Epstein-Wexner-Bronfman network are circumstantial, Lutnick’s ties to the government of Israel (which had a significant relationship with Epstein) and Zionist causes are numerous. Indeed, Lutnick has said that his main reason for deciding to work with the Trump campaign was because of Trump’s extreme pro-Israel stance, with Trump having personally told Lutnick’s wife Alison that “I will be the best President for Israel.”

In that past year, Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, has donated heavily to support Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip in addition to $7 million the fund gave “to support those impacted by the way in Israel.” A portion of this went to the Israeli volunteer-based emergency services organization, United Hatzalah, which is itself a member of the World Economic Forum and whose founder Eli Beer, an Israeli real estate mogul, has been a WEF Young Global Leader and award recipient from Klaus Schwab’s Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Lutnick and his wife chaired United Hatzalah’s United Hatzalah annual fundraising gala earlier this year. United Hatzalah became infamous in some circles last year for fabricating claims of Hamas brutality on October 7^th, including claims of a baby burnt in an oven, that the organization later admitted were untrue.

Lutnick’s appointment to be Commerce Secretary is significant in light of the fact of his ties to Israel, Zionist organizations and his circumstantial ties to the Epstein nework, as Israel – and Epstein specifically – were part of a major, largely forgotten scandal of the Clinton era that culminated with the apparent murder of Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and many employees of the Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) office. Commerce and ITA had been targeted by figures tied to both the Chinese government and Israel with the goal of transferring sensitive U.S. military technology, mainly satellites, to China in exchange for the covert arms smuggling of banned Chinese weapons into urban centers in the U.S. West Coast. At the time, those urban centers were also being targeted with a CIA-manufactured crack cocaine epidemic, as reported by the late Gary Webb. The smuggling of arms into these areas was obviously meant to be aggravate a multi-pronged effort by what was essentially the Iran-Contra network (of which Bill Clinton had been part) to decimate minority communities in West Coast urban centers, with the apparent goal of facilitating the growth of the private prison industry and the prison labor pool.

As detailed in the book One Nation Under Blackmail, the Commerce Department – and the ITA specifically – deals with the export of non-agricultural U.S. products abroad, and was apparently the main target of what is now remembered as a “campaign finance scandal” often referred to as “Chinagate.” However, the scandal – though intimately involving Chinese government-owned firms – is significantly larger than China in scope and should be seen as a continuation of the CIA-Israeli intelligence nexus responsible for illegal operations that harmed American national security, such as those that formed the bulk of the Iran-Contra scandal under the Reagan and Bush administrations. Bill Clinton had been intimately involved with the Iran-Contra nexus while he was governor of Arkansas, which was partially facilitated by his long-time connection to his political benefactor Jackson Stephens, who was also tied to Iran-Contra. Ultimately, this is where the group responsible for the genesis of Chinagate can be found.

Stephens and his business partners, the Riady family, were largely responsible for the hiring of main Chinagate figures like Johnny Huang to the Commerce Department’s ITA. Shortly before Chinagate began, the Riadys became business partners of the Chinese government. Other central figures in Chinagate, like Mark Middleton and C. Joseph Giroir, were connected to and later employed by the Riady family directly as the scandal unfolded. Middleton, notably, was the main person whom Jeffrey Epstein would visit at the Clinton White House. Most of those visits were made in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election, the election around which the “campaign finance scandal” aspect of Chinagate took place.

The campaign finance aspect of Chinagate ultimately served to grant non-American citizens, like the Riadys and their allies, unprecedented access mainly to Ron Brown, then head of Commerce. The Riadys and their associates used several “strawmen” to mask illegal campaign contributions to Clinton’s re-election campaign. There were also American businessman who sought special access to Brown, like Bernard Schwartz of Loral, who had been the biggest donor to the DNC for the 1996 election and used his access to Brown to secure meetings with major Chinese politicians and businessmen in charge of state-owned enterprises. A separate probe into Loral was opened as Chinagate began to be investigated, as Loral-produced satellites were discovered in the hands of Chinese military-linked firms and because of apparent evidence that Loral had facilitated “an unauthorized transfer of missile technology” to China. Schwartz had previously used his influence to lobby the Clinton administration to move approvals for satellite exports abroad from the State Department, to Brown’s Commerce Department.

Meanwhile, other figures in Chinagate successfully pushed Clinton to ban Chinese weapons imports (the U.S. was then their largest market for guns) in order to secure Congressional approval of “most favored nation” trade status for China. However, figures brought into close contact with Clinton by the Chinagate nexus, like China’s “top weapons dealer” Wang Jun, were later involved in efforts to illegally smuggle very large amounts of those banned weapons into the U.S. Those smuggling efforts were later partially foiled by the FBI in what is now referred to as Operation Dragon Fire. However, the top operatives – including those linked to Wang Jun – that were involved in the smuggling effort were tipped off and managed to escape the U.S., with only their underlings ultimately taking the blame.

Yet, there is also the possibility that the Iran-Contra era airline that had previously been involved in arms smuggling and drug trafficking in the Reagan/Bush era may have played a role in keeping it going. An American billionaire with close ties to both China and Israel, Leslie Wexner, and his close associate Jeffrey Epstein were involved with the re-location of that CIA-linked airline, Southern Air Transport, from Miami to Ohio and shifted its main routes from between North, Central and South America to between Ohio and Hong Kong. Ohio officials at the time suspected that the change in route and Wexner’s acquisition of the airline was linked to organized crime and, just years prior, Ohio law enforcement had produced documentation (which was later heavily censored) linking Wexner directly to organized crime interests. Meanwhile, Epstein cultivated close ties with key figures in Chinagate simultaneously, particularly with Mark Middleton – who was later killed in a murder made to look like a suicide after Epstein’s extensive visits with him at the Clinton White House were made public.

Middleton was not the only figure in Chinagate to suffer a grisly fate. Just as “Chinagate” was beginning to come to light, Ron Brown and much of the top brass at the ITA were “asked unexpectedly to travel to Croatia.” The “unexpected” travel offer was made shortly after Brown agreed to a plea deal where he would have testified in probes that would have exposed a significant part of the “Chinagate” nexus if he had been able to testify. The Croatia trip, however, ended in tragedy when the plane carrying Brown and top Commerce personnel crashed, killing everyone on board. President Clinton publicly said the crash was due to “a peculiar mix of circumstances” and, three days after the crash, the head of navigation at the Croatian airport allegedly “responsible” for the crash was found dead, shot in the chest. His death was quickly ruled a “suicide.” At the crash site, strange anomalies were found by the U.S. military investigators who responded to the scene, who identified an apparent gunshot wound in Brown’s skull that, obviously, would not have caused by the crash itself.

Ultimately, proximity to Epstein and the state of Israel is complicated when one considers the long-running and documented history of Israel passing sensitive American security technology shared with “our greatest ally,” a phenomenon that preceded and continued after the “Chinagate” scandal. Thus, Howard Lutnick’s ties not only to Israel and his circumstantial yet proximal relationship to Epstein should be scrutinized as should Lutnick’s business ties to China. For instance, the BGC Group, which Lutnick controls, has a joint venture with the Chinese state-owned China Credit Trust. China Credit Trust is the largest shareholder in Harvest Fund Management, which created BHR Partners alongside the Hunter Biden-linked firm Rosemont Seneca and the Thornton Group, headed by James Bulger, nephew of the infamous mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.

Notably, another figure in Trump’s sphere (though not poised to serve a formal or informal role in his next administration) – Blackwater founder Erik Prince – is closely financially connected to one of the main Chinese firms that had been involved in Chinagate, CITIC, which is the largest shareholder in Prince’s Frontier Services Group.

Lutnick, The Dollar and Financial Control

The reason behind exploring the role the Department of Commerce has played in the Chinagate and Iran-Contra scandals is not to falsely associate the incoming Lutnick-led DOC with historical corruption – seeing as how Lutnick has plenty of his own controversial connections and conflicts of interest, as detailed above – but rather to demonstrate the decades-long technology transfer as a necessity for imperial economic hegemony.

While the United States has been history’s most recent empire of choice for imposing a unilateral economic paradigm on much of the world in the post-World War II era, the groups that have long dominated the American establishment – or more appropriately the Anglo-American establishment – have been working for over a century to create “a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” Per historian Caroll Quigley, this system would be controlled in “feudalistic fashion” by principally bankers, who hammer out secret agreements at frequent private meetings and conferences.

Samuel Pisar, a prominent lawyer for major U.S.-based corporations, stepfather to current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and one of the closest friends and confidants of Robert Maxwell, openly told Congress in 1971 that this global system of financial control in private hands had already arrived. Pisar spoke of this system as the rise of the “transideological corporation,” where the firms of the “capitalist” West were merging and/ or forging significant agreements or joint ventures with the state-owned businesses of the “communist” East. The result, per Pisar, was that “all conventional tools of national policy” had become “anachronistic” and that nation states were no longer “dependable economic entit[ies].” Pisar, who declined to condemn this phenomenon, noted that the two main vehicles driving the rise of this global system of financial control in private (or semi-private) hands are the rise of the multinational corporation, technology transfer and the dominance of the US dollar outside of American domestic markets, e.g. the Eurodollar market. Now, with much of this global financial control system well-established and entrenched, the world can be more easily on-boarded onto a single, hegemonic currency controlled by entities that ultimately answer to the now hegemonic “transideological corporation.”

The successful proliferation of a new financial system across the globe with digital dollars native to the internet is innately reliant on broadband internet, cellular network providers, readily-available smartphones powered by economical microprocessors, and wide-spread operational knowledge of every pillar upholding blockchain technology. The technological infrastructure needed to issue digital securities, “decentralize” government debt, tokenize parcels of the rain forest, or to uphold a carbon market, bring about many surveillance concerns that come downstream of the realities of a completely digital economy.

The technology transfer – led in no small part by various iterations of the DOC – has enabled a globalized, internet dollar and thus severely neutered the ability of non-U.S. central banks and governments to retain capital within their border. Interestingly, the infrastructure upholding the national security interests of the United States is dominated by private sector, U.S.-based FinTech stalwarts, including the owners of the fiber optic cables running beneath our oceans and Satellogic’s satellites-as-a-service orbiting our skies. This legal or Constitutional barrier between the public sectors interests and the private sector that builds the technology actualizing said interests allows the data brokers that glean information directly from these technological spigots to package and sell user data to both private and public entities alike. In few industries is this concept more dangerous for the freedom and privacy of global citizens than it is within the purely digital economy perpetuated by Lutnick’s Tether, and the e-carbon market regime made possible by Lutnick’s Satellogic.

Despite the populist momentum present in U.S. political rhetoric since the dominating election night display put on by the incoming Trump administration, the country finds itself in a perilous position. Well, it certainly would be if not for the technology-driven financial revolution waiting in the (West?) wings. With the nation nearly $40 trillion dollars in the hole, and with defense spending now outpaced by simply servicing the interest on said debt, if it wasn’t for the private sector rescue unit – led in no small part by companies affiliated with Lutnick – the incoming Red-branches of American power would be facing a serious crisis. Thankfully, the global technology transfer needed to facilitate the dollarized panopticon has long been completed, and the hegemonic-weakening leaks in the proverbial dyke have been plugged by the likes of Tether and Satellogic, whose few competitive predators – be it fellow American FinTech companies or international intelligence affiliates – now find themselves at the whim of a Department of Commerce and executive branch all-but-ready to play king-maker via regulation and enforcement.

At the end of the day, the government is no different from a corporation, with a budget needing to be serviced alongside personnel and hiring requirements – both of which demand high quantities of high fidelity data. This data will be sequestered, distributed, and parsed via the fiber optic cables, the microprocessors, the blockchains and the satellites the U.S. produces. It is thus certainly fitting then that the next phase of American empire will once again be upheld by private companies and the likes of our new Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Howard Lutnick and the Commandeering of the Department of Commerce.

Whitney joined Bad Faith podcast to discuss the recent Trump cabinet picks, the dominant role tech CEOs & the deep state are playing in American “democracy,” Jeffery Epstein and Israel’s grip on American politics and more.

Links discussed:

• The Man Behind Trump’s VP Pick: It’s Worse Than You Think
• Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
• Silencing the Whistle: The Intercept Shutters Snowden Archive, Citing Cost
• The Intercept’s Bad Track Record Gets Worse as New Whistleblower Outed
• AG William Barr Formally Announces Orwellian Pre-Crime Program
• This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
• Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal

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One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

Bad Faith Podcast.

Months of research and 82,000 words later, The Chain series has concluded – at least in its current online form. What began as a simple investigation into the stablecoin issuer Tether quickly unraveled into a decades-long web of figures, companies, investors, and technological mechanisms that conspire to build what is referred to as “The Bitcoin-Dollar” system. This financial instrument consists of two main components; the first being Bitcoin itself, a distributed digital asset boasting deflationary monetary policy and trustless settlement on a transparent ledger; while the second is privately-issued tokenized government debt that operates on public blockchains, known as dollar stablecoins.

These two elements could not be further separated in regards to the publicly-stated ethos of their champions. Bitcoin will circumnavigate the government, and separate money from the State, while stablecoins aim to strengthen the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, provide much needed demand for government-issued debt reserves, and further perpetuate the U.S. dollar as the de facto medium of exchange to the unbanked citizens of the globe. At the surface, Bitcoin and the digital dollar appear as if oil and water, unable to co-exist in the same space, and molecularly opposed.

And yet, collectively, the dollar and Bitcoin are to form the backbone for an entirely new financial system, a yin and yang construction that allows an entirely new commodity class to co-exist with a hyper-dollarized world. It was my opinion before embarking on this research vein – see 2021’s The Birth of The Bitcoin-Dollar – that the coincidence of this structure emerging at the onset of the U.S. government’s greatest-yet threat of a debt crisis was likely not an accident. Upon further investigation of the primordial Bitcoin community, and the ensuing class of stablecoin issuers – not to mention the cross-section of these parties – I must unfortunately now conclude that the emergence of this system immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent phase-shifting adoption of Bitcoin by the institutional authors and beneficiaries of the pandemic’s financial stimulus, was the work of a modern intelligence community that has merged with the Silicon Valley technology meridian since at least the 1980s, but unabashedly since the formation of the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel just before the turn of the millennium.

While not a popular opinion in many circles, the patterns are visible of the now-merged intelligence, organized crime, bankers, venture firms, and technologists within the story of The Chain, and thus the formative incubation of Bitcoin itself. Take for example, Brock Pierce, an early pioneer of virtual assets who worked with Goldman Sachs’ Steve Bannon and modern economists to trial monetary policy experiments in online video games, and whose fellow co-founders of the Digital Entertainment Network – Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley – were both found to be sexual criminals with large stashes of underage pornography. As an early Bitcoin evangelist with his hands in the venture pie of nearly every important exchange and software company within the early blockchain space, the former Disney star Pierce reeks of a private-sector, blackmailed agent of the currency speculator stalwarts that have run the public sector in the shadows. Pierce tellingly commented that “if the government were knocking off people in this field, I would know,” upon the drowning of stablecoin developer Nikolai Mushegian just days after Mushegian stated that the CIA, the Mossad, and the “pedo elite” were going to kill him.

Operation Underworld, one of the earliest unions between organized crime and the early U.S. intelligence apparatus (dominated by Wall Street bankers and lawyers), demonstrated the need for the intelligence state to partner with mob affiliates for better data on ports of the U.S.’ east coast during the second World War, and thus this merger – as outlined eloquently and prudently at the onset of Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail – perfectly exemplifies the reasoning for the mafia and the State to work together – networks, information, and money. In the 1940s, the networks were smaller and slower, the information lossy and hard to transmit, and the money was greenbacks – paper bills that, while serialized, were quite hard to track.

Interestingly enough, it was likely the emergence of more advanced surveillance techniques by the Treasury, the IRS, and their law enforcement partners, that led to the arrest of many figureheads of the 20^th century crime syndicate. But these arrests did little to stop the flow of goods from drug runners, bootleggers, and human traffickers, among the many other trades of the blackmarket. In fact, it appears that the intelligence apparatus simply stepped into the void left from the controlled take down of the mob, leading to further consolidation within the centralization of the off-shore dollar market. Off-shore markets are essential to the modern intelligence state, which fights to service the budgets of its black-book operations using clever accounting schemes to launder payments, while also investing via private-brokers into private companies built to privatize projects that were once fully-siloed within the national security state’s jurisdiction.

Take, for example, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a CIA-cut out that developed as the private-sector iteration of DARPA’s TIA, or Total Information Awareness, which was founded after advisement from the CIA’s Alan Wade and the architect of TIA, John Poindexter. Today, Palantir feeds off of billions in government contracts to satisfy the brokering of data needs of both the public and private sectors. Their first customer was the CIA, who also provided the seed money for the founding of the firm, and they were subsequently funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. They even accept Bitcoin. But before Palantir was officially incorporated, it began as the anti-fraud algorithm at PayPal, known as “Igor.” PayPal’s first institutional investor was the California tech incubator Idealab, whose founder Bill Gross would later go on to start Near Intelligence Holdings, the “world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products.” Gross’ GoTo.com/Overture holds the patent that upholds Google’s AdWords – the backbone of Google’s monetization, which remains critical to the U.S. economy. Palantir itself holds 160 patents for their global surveillance network that all reference patents held by Gross.

Even PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister was a Vice President at Gross’ Idealab, who lent his Palo Alto couch to PayPal’s cryptographer and CTO Max Levchin the week he first met Peter Thiel. The aforementioned Brock Pierce ran the Clearstone Global Gaming Fund formed out of the Idealab facility Clearstone Ventures, which was co-founded by Bill Elkus, a trustee of Jeffrey Epstein’s J. Epstein Foundation. Steve Bannon, Pierce’s “right hand man,” filmed Epstein for 15 hours as part of a failed effort to rebrand Epstein after arrests for sex crimes, and Howard Lutnick – the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald which holds the Treasuries backing Tether’s USDT stablecoin – bought the home neighboring Epstein’s own (which was previously owned by Epstein) for “$10 and other valuable consideration.” Lutnick, the current co-chair of Trump’s transition team, also sits on the board of the Tether-funded, Earth observation satellite firm Satellogic alongside former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which aims to provide anyone with the funds to gather human movement data and commodity surveillance from their fleet of cameras orbiting the planet.

All this is to say, it can be hard to know where the lines between the mob and the intelligence state are drawn. But make no mistake, The Chain‘s construction was not intended to be as transparent as the blockchains they manage. Nor was it built in a day. Ironically, it was likely our government’s own want to circumnavigate their own legislation that pushed the intelligence state firmly into the private sector.

When bureaucratic red tape – see: The Constitution – prevents the acquisition of certain personal data of citizens from government-funded data brokers, the private sector becomes available as an enabling environment for otherwise unconstitutional surveillance. Many of the defenders of the free market, which are certainly rooted in well-read intentions, miss that the regulation and deregulation via the public sector leads to a further lack of competition in the formation of king-made networks and market monopolies, which often lead to further customer restrictions on speech, all within the framework of supposed free markets. The internet and Bitcoin’s blockchain take a similar misdirection dialectic, but via a differing philosophy – decentralization. Bitcoin is less decentralized in nature than it is distributed, with its consensus mechanism standing across rungs of infrastructure that uphold our internet, and the panopticon leviathan living inside its fiber optic cables. No longer will the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional Fed banks decide monetary policy or limit reserve settlement to those within their regulatory regime, but the energy generators, the chip manufacturers, and the internet service providers – at both the software and hardware level – become the new industries of consensus. The neo-banks, likely to emerge from FinTech-integrated social networks – an industry pioneered by Peter Thiel at PayPal and Facebook– are ready to embrace the oncoming regulation presumed to be imposed at the onset of Trump’s second term.

There were millions in campaign financing waiting for a candidate to so brazenly champion the blockchain industry, and thus Trump’s campaign pivot on Bitcoin should be of no surprise. It his affinity for stablecoins however – no better exemplified than his appointment of Howard Lutnick as co-chair of his transition team, whose firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds billions in government debt for Brock Pierce’s Tether (not to mention hundreds of millions in Bitcoin) – that offer a quiet-part-out-loud insight into his plans to service our ballooning debt via the sale of securities to the blossoming stablecoin industry.

Trump would even go on to announce his own blockchain project, World Liberty Financial, with a stated mission to extend dollar hegemony via tokenized dollars, with the co-founder of Paxos, Bill Teo, chosen to lead its stablecoin component. Paxos was the former partner of Facebook’s stablecoin project, Libra/Diem, and currently issues PayPal’s own dollar stablecoin, PYUSD. While these stablecoin issuers might offer a way out of massively irresponsible fiscal policy, and certainly remain mission critical to the “tether”-ing of Bitcoin’s price appreciation to the U.S. dollar system, luckily they do not retain any direct control over Bitcoin’s blockchain. Yet, with the proliferation of investment into Bitcoin mining firms and computation farms, and an amassed fortune of Bitcoin the asset, those surrounding the neo-money printers of the Digital Federal Reserve are set to capture any ground the Bitcoin community cedes in their supposed fight with the State.

It is, of course, important to note that who made Bitcoin is significantly less important than who stands to benefit from it, in no small part due to its distributed and decentralized nature limiting any singular body from perverting its monetary policy and diluting the capped supply. This is a state change of money, and demands an honest introspective investigation of the net benefits of a capped monetary supply in neutering the State’s ability to debt pardon en masse. It is only upon a deep distilling of the commentary coming out of the mouths and think pieces from the affiliates of The Chain that one can begin to visualize the mechanisms being built to allow the United States government to, in fact, use Bitcoin and stablecoins to debt pardon – at least, crucially, one more time. Regardless of the success of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve now being proposed by Senators adjacent to the incoming second Trump administration, the freedom derived from blockchain-native assets likely remains strictly economic for a select few, while the programmability and surveillability downsides of privately-issued stablecoins on public blockchains remain as fear-worthy as the CBDCs we have learned to reject.

So what solutions are available to combat the effects of the careful, discrete construction of The Chain system? For starters, the rejection of all dollar instruments native to the Bitcoin blockchain itself. Bitcoiners should learn from the dollarization of Ethereum, and how the proliferation of stablecoins centralized consensus and opened entirely new cans of regulatory concerns. In addition to the simple prohibition of tokenized government debt on chain, Bitcoiners would be smart to optimize consensus today to encourage and enable self-custody and transactional settlement for not only the many billions of world citizens that do not current hold bitcoin the asset, but also the billions not yet born. Stablecoins are not an appropriate scaling mechanism for a new financial system – it is simply a worse implementation of the current debt-based monetary system, with privacy, programmability and surveillance concerns. The beauty left in Bitcoin is that, while its monetary policy can never be perverted, its consensus remains malleable by nature of being software, and thus can be enhanced to service a global economy of those wanting to opt out of the current system. This lever should be explored at great length and with great haste by the technologists and dissidents still active in the Bitcoin industry.

The main flaw in the thesis presented in The Chain, according to its author, is why exactly would the PayPal Mafia and its ilk perpetuate tokenized dollars pegged directly to U.S. government debt, while simultaneously building tools to privatize monetary issuance, allowing real world assets to back exchangeable digital twin counterparts on blockchains? This question poses many follow-up threads for discussion, but perhaps can be answered by a need for U.S.-based stalwarts – cartels, for lack of a better word – to preserve the public-sector as a legislative body and regulatory regime due to its role as an enabling environment for their de facto monopolies. As Thiel said, due to know-your-customer regulation that appeared after the events of September 11, 2001, perhaps a company like PayPal could not have virally grown in the manner that it did prior to that world-altering event.

The power structures of the United States government actually prevent newcomers from gaining serious marketshare over their king-made platforms, such as Facebook and PayPal, via the enforcement of copyright and patent law, not to mention domestic and international sanctions. Want to play ball in the largest buyer economy in the world? You best respect the IRS, the SEC, the CFTC and the regulations and executive orders they strive to uphold. Unfortunately, as we have seen with the current stablecoin bill referencing the controlled collapse of FTX and Terra-LUNA, the games – crimes, for lack of a better word – of the private sector can have serious implications on the language of legislation, and purposefully be used to king-make their chosen companies and Neo-financial institutions.

The critics of the warnings outlined in The Chain are quick to point to the Trojan Horse meme, which proposes that the synergy between the monetary policy of the State with Bitcoin’s decentralized nature will progressively diminish the State’s control over our lives, limiting the manipulation of interest rates and the issuance of money itself. The intention of The Chain was never to dissuade participation in what remains a very alive game, nor was it to express doubts upon Bitcoin’s imminent appreciation. In fact, upon deeper examination, it is quite the opposite, and Bitcoin must appreciate greatly for this debt swap to play out favorable for the United States. There is clearly plenty of opportunity within the Bitcoin-Dollar’s birth – an opportunity we hope many builders and problem solvers take. The risk we broach is not of whether or not monetization occurs, but instead the issues that arise from that exact occurrence, from Bitcoin’s appreciation itself – mainly, the extension of U.S. empire and the “boon for surveillance” provided by public blockchains as described by a former CIA Director.

Bitcoin, like money itself, is simply a technological tool. This tool has many differing properties depending on whether it is wielded by an individual or the State itself. Ultimately, it is simply irrelevant if the State or cypherpunks published the Bitcoin software. However, if the proliferation of tokenized government debt settled on public blockchains occurs alongside the adoption of an increasingly difficult-to-spend digital commodity like Bitcoin – especially when held in large quantities by government-affiliated entities – and these strange bedfellows become the determining factor in the fate of our country’s debt problem, then maybe the cypherpunks have inadvertently solved the largest empire’s most pressing problem.

Or perhaps it was us, the dissident economists and technologists, that were tricked, and the United States has once again kicked the world reserve currency can down the road another thousand years, conveniently at the onset of the deflationary age they most likely dawned.

Breaking (Down) The Chain: An Investigation Post-mortem.

Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin join Marty Bent to discuss some of Trump’s recent cabinet picks and concerns and reasons for skepticism regarding the incoming administration.

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One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

TFTC #555.

While many Republicans for years have railed against the official narrative around climate change and many of the solutions promoted to mitigate it, climate finance is poised to make a comeback over the next 4 years, despite Republicans taking both the White House and the legislature by a significant margin. This is because many of the most influential names in the incoming Trump administration, as well as the previous one, have become intimately involved in creating carbon markets in recent years, while others have a long-standing track record of pushing carbon taxes and other forms of “carbon pricing.”

Chief among these is Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team who has stated that he is tasked with finding the “talent” for the incoming administration. Lutnick is the long-time and current head of Cantor Fitzgerald, which was one of the earliest players in emission trading and has since become a global leader in ESG investing, “sustainable infrastructure” financing and green bonds. For example, Cantor’s sustainable infrastructure fund is expressly committed to “digital transformation, decarbonization and the improvement and modernization of aging infrastructure,” while “a primary focus for the Fund will be to invest in issuers that are helping to address certain United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through their products and services.” In addition, the top constituent of another Cantor infrastructure fund is Invenergy, a renewable energy company that has received a significant amount of subsidies from the Biden’s controversial Inflation Reduction Act and is run by the country’s first “wind billionaire” Michael Polsky.

Lutnick also servers on the board of a satellite surveillance company called Satellogic. In addition to Lutnick, former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin chairs its board and also on the board is Joe Dunford, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military under Trump. Satellogic is an integral part of a consortium attempting to use opaque contractual agreements at the municipal level to impose a massive, blockchain-based carbon market on Latin America. That carbon market, operating under the name GREEN+, is poised to be built on a Bitcoin side-chain and, as previously reported, its carbon credit scheme is deeply inequitable for Latin American communities. For instance, the only money communities could make from the scheme would be only available for GREEN+-approved “sustainable” projects while GREEN+ members would reap the bulk of the profits. The program would also subject communities to Satellogic’s satellite surveillance apparatus (tied to the U.S. government and Israeli intelligence) without their consent.

In addition, GREEN+ is notably tied to figures close to Trump’s allies in the region. For example, a major figure in Nayib Bukele’s political party – San Salvador mayor Mario Durán – is a vice president of one of the main groups orchestrating the GREEN+ scheme while the Endeavor Argentina network, which has very close ties to Argentina’s Javier Milei, is also very closely linked to Satellogic. For instance, Satellogic itself is an Endeavor-backed company while Endeavor’s first billionaire entrepreneur, Marcos Galperín of MercadoLibre, serves on Satellogic’s board. In addition, a major investor in Satellogic, the dollar stablecoin issuer Tether, is also closely connected to Howard Lutnick. Lutnick is a long-time major advocate of Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald custodies the bulk of Tether’s U.S. Treasuries that back up their stablecoin and its peg to the U.S. dollar.

In addition to Lutnick, prominent Trump backer and donor Elon Musk, who has pledged to work with Lutnick to usher in an unprecedented age of government “efficiency,” has invested heavily in carbon removal technology and even created a $100 million prize to spur new carbon removal methods. Musk also previously broke ties with Trump during his previous administration after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017. He is also a long-time advocate for carbon taxes. Musk previously lobbied the Biden administration on implementing a carbon tax, a policy supported by Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Yet, under the Trump administration, the push for a carbon tax was led by Republicans, reflecting the policy’s bipartisan support. That Trump-era proposal, known as the Baker-Shultz plan, called to repeal emissions regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and a roll-back of some Obama-era climate policies in exchange for replacing them with a carbon tax. The plan was framed as a way to “let the market decide” how to price carbon as opposed to government. Something similar could be deployed by the next Trump administration as a “compromise” that would see the Biden-era climate policies that Trump campaigned against rolled back in exchange for the implementation of some form of “carbon pricing,” like a carbon tax.

The Baker-Schultz plan is named for James Baker and George Schultz, two Republicans who served in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. This is notable as it was during the Bush Sr. administration that emissions trading was first created with government support. The father of emissions trading, first for sulphur dioxide and then again for carbon, is Richard Sandor, a former executive at the scandal-ridden, corrupt Drexel Burnham Lambert (Drexel’s most notorious criminal – Michael Milken – was pardoned by Trump during his previous term). Drexel was a key figure in the financial scandals of the 1980s, including the Savings & Loans crisis which had intimate ties to James Baker and the Bush family as well as the CIA and organized crime.

Sandor is also considered the father of financial derivatives and helped draft the cap and trade component of the Kyoto Protocol. He did so in direct collusion with Maurice Strong, the architect of Agenda 21 – the pre-cursor to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Strong was also a long-time associate of David Rockefeller, an oil magnate and a notoriously corrupt UN official who later had to flee North America to China due to his involvement to the UN’s oil-for-food scandal. Sandor subsequently was a major influence on Obama-era climate policies, but also has close ties to Trump-era figures, like J. Christopher Giancarlo – who was made chair of the CFTC by Trump in 2017. Giancarlo, a major advocate of turning the U.S. dollar into a programmable, surveillable private sector digital currency, has called Sandor “one of the true visionary developers of new financial products.”

Ultimately, emissions trading itself was originally a Republican policy and has since been promoted in bipartisan fashion for several decades. While Trump did pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement, the out-sized role of Lutnick and Musk (who cut ties with Trump last time over climate policy) in shaping his next administration’s policies and cabinet picks suggests that Trump has now softened his stance on “market-based” climate solutions. For anyone that has followed Trump’s policy record from his first term, it was quite clear that Trump – like any American politician – is usually willing to give Wall Street what it wants. Some examples of him doing this include giving Larry Fink, the veritable king of ESG, near complete control over U.S. fiscal policy during Covid, resulting in a massive wealth transfer, and Trump also deregulated the banking industry despite campaigning in 2015-2016 on reinstating Glass Steagall and other regulations on the biggest banks. (Other industries whose products have major environmental and public health consequences, such as GMO crops, were also heavily deregulated during the first Trump administration.)

Though it’s certainly true that Republicans in the legislature have largely rejected carbon taxes and markets earlier this year, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with climate finance advocates and the fact that Wall Street needs climate finance to unlock an entire new asset class to fuel their casino (lest it collapse) are strong indicators that some sort of “carbon pricing” is in the works. Even prominent figures in the “MAHA” “unity” movement, like former RFK Jr. VP pick Nicole Shanahan have advocated for using tokenized carbon credits to facilitate U.S. government money printing (i.e. “quantitative easing”) and U.S. debt management. With a U.S. debt crisis in the cards and Howard Lutnick, one of the biggest traders of U.S. government debt, at the helm of choosing Trump’s next cabinet, the likelihood of a carbon market has never been higher, despite the recent Republican victory.

Featured Image: Elon Musk (right) speaks at an October 2024 Trump campaign rally alongside Howard Lutnick (left)

Get Ready for the Republican Carbon Market.

Key Takeaways

• A monetary network’s success is dependent on the size and volume of its active user base.
• The former lead of Facebook’s Libra project, David Marcus, is the former President of PayPal. PayPal’s founding mission, and subsequent T-shirt motto, was to create “A New World Currency.”
• Marcus built Facebook’s stablecoin project after concluding that Bitcoin lacked the qualities to be a successful medium of exchange.
• In order to appear decentralized, Libra formed the Libra Association, but included many very inter-connected businesses and people, as noted elsewhere in The Chain series.
• Government regulators, fearing Facebook’s immense active user base, quickly called the Libra team to testify before Congress, and eventually pressed the project to fold before launching.
• Libra had previously stated in their S-1 filings that regulatory pressure and uncertainty could lead the project to never launch. Other evidence suggests the entire goal of Libra was to perfect the public-private partnership for the future implementation of the U.S. government’s preferred digital currency project.
• Jared Kushner sent an email to Steve Mnuchin in May 2019 regarding a Sam Altman post on stablecoins titled “US Digital Currency.”
• Mnuchin’s Treasury then held a March 2020 meeting after inviting many figures mentioned in The Chain series, including Wences Casares and Peter Thiel.
• Libra announced partnerships with Fireblocks, Silvergate Bank, and Paxos in order to expedite their stablecoin project, but none materialized.
• After being shutdown by regulators, Libra sold off its assets to Silvergate Bank in January 2022.
• Silvergate facilitated Bitcoin-collateralized loans with MicroStrategy and Marathon Digital, and were partially owned by Block.One, BlackRock, State Street and Citadel Securites.
• Silvergate Bank, whose SEN product serviced a substantial amount of firms mentioned in The Chain series, was then liquidated by regulators in March 2023.
• Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which failed two days after Silvergate, banked a significant amount of the companies and venture capital in the cryptocurrency industry.
• The day before the SVB collapse, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund pulled out funds, and advised clients to do the same, triggering deposit flight.
• 10 customers alone had $13 billion in deposits at SVB, and $42 billion left the bank in 6 hours. In other words, SVB collapsed due to an acute liquidity crisis that was spawned by very few people.
• The Trump administration’s deregulation of the banking industry in 2018 loosened capital and reporting requirements, leading to many of the issues seen in the banking crisis in 2023.
• Circle’s USDC stablecoin, which had $3.3 billion of reserves at SVB, would “depeg” to 86 cents during the crisis.
• Six months after the banking crisis, and two weeks after the U.S. House Financial Services committee advanced their first stablecoin bill, Paxos and PayPal launched PYUSD.
• The Gillibrand-Lummis Stablecoin Bill was directly influenced by the Terra-LUNA collapse, which resembles more of a controlled demolition than an organic collapse. As a result, the bill bans algorithmic alternatives in pursuit of preserving the dual banking system. Both Senator Gillibrand and Senator Lummis have significant donor ties to many of the firms mentioned in The Chain series.
• Large lobbying groups, such as Coin Center and the Digital Chamber of Commerce, were formed to help guide legislation as it relates to stablecoins and digital assets. Both of these lobbying groups have advisory ties to stablecoin issuers and many firms and people mentioned thus far in The Chain series.
• Multiple parties mentioned in this piece, from the Libra team to lobbyists, have echoed the sentiment that USD stablecoins can help retain the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
• Many of the companies formed after the dissolving of Libra carry on the work of building a new financial system based on stablecoins and public blockchains.
• According to national security state members, Bitcoin and stablecoins can provide a “boon for surveillance” in addition to helping grow the economy.
• The Bitcoin-Dollar system, as described in The Chain series, is the actualization of PayPal’s founding intention to create a “new world currency”, and it was carefully constructed to appear as an organic phenomenon when it is not.

The initial trio of pieces in The Chain series have focused on the three essential pillars for creating a new digital monetary system. The first, The Chain of Custody, examined the construction of novel custodial infrastructure to enable the secure holding of billions of dollars worth of digital assets after the proliferation of Bitcoin as a new financial class. The second, The Chain of Issuance, investigated the primordial roots of digital payments fortifying data brokers and information bankers within the global surveillance network. It also noted how stablecoin issuers are the modern day analogue to the influence that the major infrastructural titans of the Industrial Age had on the formation of The Federal Reserve in the first half of the 20^th century. The third, The Chain of Consensus, focused on the currency speculators and intelligence-connected developers behind the monetary policy and consensus infrastructure of privately-issued money and the blockchain revolution during the infancy of the Deflationary Age brought about by Bitcoin and the subsequent, dollarized iterations of its underlying database technology.

In summary, a new financial system cannot be built without the ability to custody assets, issue new assets, and uphold the settlement and monetary policy of said assets via a governing consensus. Yet, even with the successful formation of this necessary trifecta, the construction of a monetary network is simply fruitless without the acquisition of the last remaining pillar: a network of active users. This concept is well understood by both the private sector companies that have been mentioned throughout this series, in addition to the public sector that currently acts as the enabling environment for the rules and regulations of nation-state monetary systems upheld by central banks across the world. None of these public issuers of money, however, have the global impact of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury system, which provides immense privileges that come downstream from their issuance of the notes and reserves backing the world reserve currency, the U.S. dollar. With 66 countries worldwide listing the dollar as an official currency, the vast number of users utilizing these instruments makes the dollar system the largest financial network in the world.

Even within this monopoly, there is a fractured set of settlement networks, such as PayPal, and private banks, such as J.P. Morgan, issuing said dollars in users’ checking accounts. This balkanization presents a unique opportunity for further consolidation and, with that consolidation, the ability to acquire even more users. For example, PayPal acquired millions of global users via their purchases of Venmo and Xoom, while J.P. Morgan assumed the deposits of the failed First Republic Bank after the onset of the regional banking crisis in 2023.

Money itself is but a technology that enables agreeable and predictable outcomes between two bartering parties. This axiom requires money that simultaneously acts as a unit of account, a store of value, and a medium of exchange. While all of these properties can be met by a multitude of currently circulating currencies – and even commodities – their usefulness for settlement across both time and space is determined nearly entirely by the number of users within their respective networks. The dollar system is the most liquid monetary network in the world, and has held this position for nearly a century. Historically, the world’s reserve currency has held its dominant status for roughly this same duration of time. With U.S. debt levels now growing at uncontrollable and exponential rates, the formation of proposed alternatives to the dollar’s monopoly are popping up across the globe. The world economy is a finite pie consisting of finite users, and with the dollar network appearing truly weak for the first time in decades, competitors are posturing for a piece. However, with the global broadband internet dissolving some of the control that nation states have over their own citizens’ monetary choices, the world is actually dollarizing faster than ever.

As the internet age enters its third decade, the stakes for creating the internet of money have never been higher. For now, the proliferation of dollarized blockchains seemingly aims to fortify the dollar’s hold over global finance, not dissolve it. Regardless of the dollar’s domination of denomination, the upstart issuers of these tokenized assets have hemorrhaged away enough users that it now threatens many of the privileges the legacy system once enjoyed, mainly the available profits found by selling their data and leveraging their deposits.

The understanding that social networks are communication platforms, and that money itself is just a ledger upholding the communicative expression between users, led the social media giant Facebook to experiment with adding financial instruments to their vastly popular Messenger app. While Bitcoin and alternatives had been around for nearly a decade before Facebook’s Libra was proposed, this was “the shot heard ’round the world” for central bankers and regulators to sit up straight and take a novel payments system proposed by the world’s largest social network seriously.

Yet, as Facebook soon found out, if you come at the king, you best not miss. Or at least this was the story that was told to the world: The U.S. regulatory system said “No” and that was that. However, this concluding piece to The Chain series, The Chain of Command, postulates that Libra was never intended to actually go to market as designed, but rather was meant to set the stage for clear regulation via legislation that would become the enabling environment for a decades-long attempt at creating a new world currency by the very same parties covered thus far in this series.

Libra, Diem and Facebook’s Stablecoin

Sitting on a Caribbean beach during the winter of 2017, David Marcus was struck with the idea of creating a global digital currency to run on Facebook’s Messenger. Marcus, who had sold his mobile payment provider Zong to PayPal for $240 million in 2011, and who had been introduced to Bitcoin in 2009, was certainly no spring chicken to the rapidly evolving FinTech and digital payments space. Within nine month of Zong’s acquisition by PayPal, Marcus was named PayPal’s president in April 2012. Then, in June 2014, Marcus was recruited by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to run their Messenger app. By the time the idea that would become Libra began to germinate during his 2017 vacation in the Dominican Republic, the social network’s messenger app boasted over 1.3 billion active users.

Prior to his experience with PayPal and Facebook, Marcus had founded GTN Telecom, noted as being the “first to break Switzerland’s telecommunications monopoly” in 1996. GTN Telecom was backed by the UK’s 3i, a venture capital firm founded in 1945 by the Bank of England and “a syndicate of British banks,” and was later sold in 2000 to WorldCom’s World Access just two years before WorldCom would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after excessive accounting fraud. Marcus went on to found Echovox, a “mobile monetization company focused on monetizing web and traditional media audiences” via “transaction-enabled mobile services,” shortly after the October 2000 sale of GTN. Zong was later spun off from Echovox. Bertrand Perez and Kurt Hemecker, two executives at Zong, would become part of the founding team at Libra alongside Marcus.

“In late 2009 when I first stumbled upon Bitcoin and read the white paper, I tried to play with it, but it was so cumbersome even for a geek like me. I just couldn’t get it. So I kind of put it aside, brushed it aside, and then came back to it in 2012 when a good friend of mine who’s often referred to as a Patient Zero in Silicon Valley for Bitcoin, [Xapo’s] Wences Casares, basically started telling me more about it and telling me ‘you have to actually spend time and understand this thing.’ And so I did. And then I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about this idea that you could actually be your own self-sovereign for digital value and you could move it around without any intermediary in between…

Then in 2013 at PayPal, that’s after Zong got acquired by PayPal and I was running it, I remember that Argentina asked us to actually stop the flow of money going out of the country from PayPal accounts located in Argentina. And I remember us having to comply because we were regulated entity, and seeing the price of Bitcoin rise the same day. And it was really clear that a lot of Argentines at the time were actually moving their funds into Bitcoin so that they would have control over their hard-earned money.”

David Marcus, The Block, June 27, 2023

According to reporting from Financial Times, Marcus, a close confidant of Zuckerberg, apparently “texted Zuckerberg to outline his ruminations” and after successfully convincing Facebook’s CEO, he was given a “blessing to explore the idea further.” Marcus quickly outlined his idea in an internal memo, highlighting that “Facebook’s more than two-billion-strong user base” empowered with crypto “could offer a convenient and cheap way to move money around the world,” in addition to providing “a treasure trove of data about what people spend their money on.”

For the social network, the “possible multi-billion-dollar commercial opportunities were clear,” including “user transaction data,” “more engagement,” “more e-commerce,” and “a slice of fees from transactions.” According to an unnamed regulatory official, this “was always their advantage.” Libra would “create tremendous opportunity and a lot of money for them. But if Facebook was going to be the reason it was very successful, they were also going to be the reason it would fail.”

During the months right after Libra’s announcement, Marcus updated his thoughts on Bitcoin, stating “For me, now, it’s clearer that Bitcoin serves a purpose of being digital gold, not a good medium of exchange.” It was this axiom that led Marcus to express that “this was the right time for us to start thinking about how we could address the very things that blockchain and cryptocurrency were meant to do” and that “we had real solutions to bring to the fore.” Marcus later explained his motivations for bringing publicly-issued money via tokenized dollars to the Libra experiment in an August 2023 conversation with Bankless:

“I don’t think that I’m in the camp of people who want to fully separate money from State. I feel like my own personal objective is to actually make the underlying rails really efficient, really open, really interoperable, and enable more people to have access to them. I think that the world where actually good governments cannot control their own monetary policy, etc., this world where it doesn’t exist, would be chaos.”

It is perhaps this affinity for State-controlled monetary policy that led Marcus to announce Libra to the world within the confines of The Old San Francisco Mint in June 2019. However, the project itself was started both in earnest and in secrecy by Facebook in early 2018, when Morgan Beller, a former partner of Andreessen Horowitz, joined Marcus in plotting to bring both payments and a novel currency construction to Facebook’s Messenger product. According to reporting from the Financial Times, the pair first worked “in a small, empty room” with “walls adorned with whiteboards” within “Facebook’s main campus in Menlo Park.” Shortly after, the duo “moved to a larger, more secluded building” positioned “on the outskirts of the company’s headquarters” that limited access to “only employees with particular passes” consisting of “the crypto experts, engineers and economists.” The project was codenamed Libra, and Beller was quoted as saying that the team was “paranoid about leaks” and operated “like a secret Swat operation.”

In addition to Beller, Marcus was quickly joined by Christian Catalini, a research scientist at MIT who had founded the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. While there, Catalini designed the MIT Digital Currency Research Study, which “gave access to Bitcoin to all MIT undergraduate students.” In 2013, Catalini became a member of the Technology Advisory Committee of The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) alongside his advisory board appointments to Coinbase, Algorand, Chainlink and Hivemind Capital. Catalini became essential to the development of Libra, and is noted as being a co-creator of Libra and Chief Economist of the Diem Association after Libra rebranded to Diem, in addition to his title of Head Economist at Meta FinTech.

Catalini, alongside Jai Massari – a partner in the Financial Institutions Group of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and an outside counsel to Diem – wrote a piece titled “Stablecoins and the Future of Money” which proposes that “through a sensible regulatory approach, true stablecoins can fulfill their promise without introducing new risks.” Their theory on the next evolution of money, which was demonstrated throughout the multitude of iterations of Libra, is excerpted below:

“Modern money is a combination of public and private money. Public money includes central banks-issued cash and digital claims against central banks. Private money includes deposit claims against commercial banks. While the public sector protects the stability of money, up to 95% of money in developed economies is private. Stablecoins are a form of private money. This is not a new concept — the idea of separating monetary and credit functions traces back 80 years. By lowering the cost of digital verification, blockchain technology can expand the role of both the public and private sector in the provision of money. While the public sector could attempt to connect with consumers and businesses directly, the private sector is likely to be more efficient in meeting the public’s needs and increasing choice.

Succeeding in this transformation will require the right balance between the public and private sectors. Countries that overemphasize the public approach will likely end up falling short in speed to market, competition, and innovation…The public sector may also struggle with serving citizens and businesses effectively. Given the incredibly high bar in terms of resilience and security, it will likely take years for a CBDC to be developed and adopted…This is where CBDCs and stablecoins are strong complements, not substitutes. The public sector could focus on issuing digital coins and delivering on sound money, while the private sector could build rails and applications. Competition with legacy networks would further ensure a higher degree of resilience and innovation…

The question for central banks and regulators then becomes which combination of the three approaches [“true” stablecoins, deposit coins, and CBDCs] can also improve competition, lower cost, and increase access to the financial system…A much stronger combination would be the public sector focusing on regulation of stablecoins first, and then on CBDC issuance on multiple rails later to complement potential shortcomings…Public sector guidance and standard setting can be incredibly useful in promoting the right solutions in these areas…In the case of money, the public and private sectors can play to their relative strengths, solidify their public-private partnership, and improve societal outcomes in the process.”

Catalini, Massari, and Marcus would all go on to form LightSpark – an institutional payments company focused on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network – after the dissolution of the Libra project. The pivot back towards Bitcoin and specifically the Lightning Network is perhaps best exemplified by the regulatory realities within the United States. As Marcus stated to The Block: “I just want to state that I feel like it’s a shame that we’re in this current state of uncertainty from a regulatory standpoint as a country… I think you know the reason Bitcoin is so special is because, first of all, it is the only asset out there that has been clearly defined as not a security by the SEC in the U.S.” In fact, the Libra team actually met with Lightning Labs at the onset of the project while still in the process of determining the best course of action to build Facebook’s digital currency. According to Marcus during a discussion with Bankless, “In early 2018,” the Libra team “went to see Lightning Labs team in SF and we looked at Lightning as one of the ways to actually do this.” In this interview, he further articulated his position on Lightning, bringing stablecoins to Bitcoin, and even algorithmic stablecoins:

“I’m actually all for stablecoins on top of Lightning when that becomes a thing and there are a number of work streams that are out there to make that happen. I think my problem is actually if you’re dependent on one stablecoin, or one asset, to be the native core settlement asset of a payment network, then you have a problem because the algorithmic stablecoins don’t work in my opinion. I really believe that it’ll never work and so stablecoins need to have a reserve and someone controls that reserve and if someone controls that reserve, then it’s the single point of failure of your entire payment network if you’re solely dependent on it.”

Despite the team’s interest in Bitcoin, Marcus stated that “unfortunately the tech just wasn’t ready for prime time and certainly not for scaling to the type of scale that Meta had with its Messaging apps.” This realization led Marcus and his team to “actually go build new tech and that’s what we did.”

After the Libra project was announced to the world in 2019, there were a few organizational strategies employed in order to mitigate the appearance of centralization, including the establishment of the Libra Council, the Libra Association, and the board of directors. All three of these groupings were formed during the inaugural meeting held in October 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland. The first batch of organizations that signed on as members included: “Anchorage, Andreessen Horowitz, Bison Trails Co., Breakthrough Initiatives, L.P., Novi Financial [initially known as Calibra, the company responsible for building the wallet software for Libra], Coinbase, Inc., Creative Destruction Lab, Farfetch UK Limited, Iliad, Kiva Microfunds, Lyft, Inc., Mercy Corps, PayU, Ribbit Capital, Spotify AB, Thrive Capital, Uber Technologies, Inc., Union Square Ventures, Vodafone, Women’s World Banking, [and] Xapo Holdings Limited.”

Many of the companies listed here have appeared within The Chain series, including the only OCC-chartered crypto bank Anchorage Digital, Marc Andreessen’s Andreeseen Horowitz, Coinbase, the PayPal- and Omidyar -affiliated Kiva, Meyer Malka’s Ribbit Capital, Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures, and Wences Casares’ Xapo. Others that have not been previously discussed in this series also boast ties to this same network. For instance, Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm of Joshua Kushner (Jared Kushner’s brother), raised $40 million in 2011 from investors including Peter Thiel, the Wellcome Trust, and Princeton University, while it later took an estimated $120 million from Goldman Sachs in 2021 via their Petershill Partners affiliate. The firm is advised by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and holds a “good percentage” of the online payment juggernaut, Stripe, which in 2023 raised nearly $6.5 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, Thiel’s Founders Fund and Goldman Sachs. In October 2024, Stripe would spend $1.1 billion to acquire stablecoin issuer Bridge, leading Stripe CEO Patrick Collison to refer to stablecoins as “room-temperature superconductors for financial services.”

Another example is Breakthrough Initiatives, which was formed by DST Global founder and Xapo investor Yuri Milner. Milner is perhaps best known for creating The Breakthrough Prize with Mark Zuckerberg and Anne Wojcicki, the ex-wife of Google’s Sergey Brin and current CEO of 23andMe. The Creative Destruction Lab is a non-profit that has partnered with XPRIZE, a foundation started by Singularity University’s Peter Diamandis with a board featuring Google’s Larry Page, Elon Musk, film director James Cameron, and Google’s Ray Kurzweil, who sponsored the Singularity Summit in 2006 alongside Thiel and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the latter was advised by Thiel and blockchain pioneer Jed McCaleb. McCaleb is best known for founding the first significant Bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox, in addition to Ripple Labs and Stellar, the latter of which raised funds from “Stripe and PayPal executives” and features the PayPal Mafia’s Keith Rabois, Thiel-protégé Sam Altman, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and the Idealab– and Thiel–affiliated Naval Ravikant as advisors.

In addition to the Libra Association, a technical steering committee was formed in December 2019. Five members were elected including Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Mónica, Calibra core product lead George Cabrera III, Bison Trails founder Joe Lallouz, Union Square Ventures partner Nick Grossman, and Mercy Corps emerging technology director Ric Shreves. The Libra Council also appointed a board of directors, which included Matthew Davie of Kiva Microfunds; Patrick Ellis of PayU; Katie Haun of Andreessen Horowitz; David Marcus of Novi Financial; and Wences Casares of Xapo Holdings Limited. The Libra board, once established, voted on and appointed the initial Libra Association staff, including Bertrand Perez as Chief Operating Officer and Interim Managing Director; Dante Disparte as Head of Policy and Communications; and Kurt Hemecker as Head of Business Development. In addition to other Libra team members not mentioned in the early press releases, Laura Morgan Walsh, a 13-year veteran of PayPal, was named Head of Operations.

Katie Haun, in addition to her role at Andreessen Horowitz, is the Founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, alongside Libra steering committee member Diogo Mónica. Haun, a lifetime member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), and a Coinbase board member from 2017 until 2024, began her career with a decade long stint as a federal prosecutor serving the SEC, the FBI and the Treasury, responsible for creating the U.S. government’s first cryptocurrency task force that helped lead investigations into the Mt.Gox hack and the Silk Road prosecution. Haun went to Stanford Law School, and studied with Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents, meeting the now infamous and disgraced head of FTX when he was only a child. Casares, featured in The Chain of Custody, is a long-time friend of Marcus, and joined the PayPal board in 2016, in addition to being on the board of Kiva and the executive chairman and founder of the cryptocurrency lobbying group, Coin Center.

In addition to the initial 21 companies that signed on to the Libra Association, payment stalwarts Visa, PayPal, Mastercard, Stripe and Mercado Pago all expressed interest in the project, before promptly dropping out, alongside PayPal-acquirer eBay, after pressure from U.S. regulators. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) sent letters to Visa CEO Alfred Kelly, Jr., Stripe CEO Patrick Collinson, and Mastercard CEO Ajaypal Banga “over the firms’ participation in the developing network.” “It is chilling to think what could happen if Facebook combines encrypted messaging with embedded anonymous global payments via Libra.” Schatz and Brown also suggested that participating firms “such as Visa, Stripe, and Mastercard” may see “heightened regulatory scrutiny overall” as a result of Libra Association membership when they wrote: “If you take this on, you can expect a high level of scrutiny from regulators not only on Libra-related payment activities, but on all payment activities.”

This sentiment was first initiated by Maxine Waters, the Californian congresswoman who sat as the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee during the Libra hearings, in a letter dated July 2, 2019:

“We write to request that Facebook and its partners immediately agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on Libra—its proposed cryptocurrency and Calibra—its proposed digital wallet. It appears that these products may lend themselves to an entirely new global financial system that is based out of Switzerland and intended to rival U.S. monetary policy and the dollar. This raises serious privacy, trading, national security, and monetary policy concerns for not only Facebook’s over 2 billion users, but also for investors, consumers, and the broader global economy.

On June 18, 2019, Facebook announced its plans to develop a new cryptocurrency, called Libra, and a digital wallet to store this cryptocurrency, known as Calibra…While Facebook has published a “white paper” on these projects, the scant information provided about the intent, roles, potential use, and security of the Libra and Calibra exposes the massive scale of the risks and the lack of clear regulatory protections. If products and services like these are left improperly regulated and without sufficient oversight, they could pose systemic risks that endanger U.S. and global financial stability. These vulnerabilities could be exploited and obscured by bad actors, as other cryptocurrencies, exchanges, and wallets have been in the past. Indeed, regulators around the globe have already expressed similar concerns, illustrating the need for robust oversight…

These risks are even more glaring in light of Facebook’s troubled past, where it did not always keep its users’ information safe. For example, Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm hired by the 2016 Trump campaign, had access to more than 50 million Facebook users’ private data which it used to influence voting behavior. As a result, Facebook expects to pay fines up to $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and remains under a consent order from FTC for deceiving consumers and failing to keep consumer data private…

Because Facebook is already in the hands of a over quarter of the world’s population, it is imperative that Facebook and its partners immediately cease implementation plans until regulators and Congress have an opportunity to examine these issues and take action. During this moratorium, we intend to hold public hearings on the risks and benefits of cryptocurrency-based activities and explore legislative solutions. Failure to cease implementation before we can do so, risks a new Swiss-based financial system that is too big to fail.”

Representative Waters furthered this apprehension in a letter penned the next month, August 2019, in which she stated that her “concerns remain with allowing a large tech company to create a privately controlled, alternative global currency.” David Gerard, the author of Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money, made note that “The attacks were absolutely bipartisan because both sides agree: you don’t mess with the money…This is what happens when the dreams of bitcoin bros meet reality.” In agreement with Gerard’s comment, both Waters and the Trump-nominated Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell expressed issues regarding Libra during Powell’s testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services in July 2019. Waters reiterated her concerns at the onset of the hearing, articulating that she “believe[s] that what Facebook is planning raises serious privacy, trading, national security and monetary policy concerns for consumers, investors, the US economy, and the global economy,” and further noted that “Facebook’s foray into this field should signal to all of us that our current system of regulation lacks adequate coordination safeguards and attention to crypto.” Waters even called upon Powell to “be a leader on this issue,” and that the Fed chair “should not take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to examining a financial system involving 2.4 billion people.” Powell seemed to be in agreement that Facebook’s large active user base presented problems for regulators not yet seen in other cryptocurrency experiments:

“Due to the to the possibility of quite broad adoption, Facebook has a couple billion plus users, so you have, I think, for the first time, the possibility of a very broad adoption. And if there were problems there associated with money laundering, terrorist financing – any of the things that we’re all focused on, including the company, they would immediately arise to systemically important levels just because of the mere size of the Facebook network.”

Jerome Powell, July 10, 2019, U.S. House of Representatives

Then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who initially recommended Powell to President Trump for the Fed Chair position, took a slightly more optimistic approach in commenting on Facebook’s currency plans, stating that “I’m fine if Facebook wants to create a digital currency, but they need to be fully compliant,” and “in no way can this be used for terrorist financing.” While on the topic of issuing digital currency, Mnuchin revealed that “Powell and I have discussed this – we both agree that in the near future, in the next five years, we see no need for the Fed to issue a digital currency.” In addition to discussions within the Trump administration, Powell had also confirmed that his team had “met with Facebook representatives in the months ahead of the Libra announcement,” in “part of the tech company’s global tour of meetings with financial authorities.”

According to reporting from Wired, many regulators “left those meetings unsatisfied,” and that “regulators in the UK, Japan, and Singapore have called for greater scrutiny of Libra in recent weeks.” At the time, the Bank of England expressed that “Facebook has made rounds with regulators around the world to discuss its plans [Libra], including us. There are benefits…but also risks we’re watching, and echo the statement [Bank of England] Governor Carney issued.” Then-BoE governor Mark Carney said he was “open-minded about Facebook’s Libra token,” but “warned mass adoption would force it” to “be subject to the highest standards of regulation.” Mu Changchun, the deputy director of the People’s Bank of China’s payment department told Bloomberg it “won’t be sustainable without the support and supervision of central banks.” France even set up a task force within the Group of Seven (G7) nations to discuss Libra, leading France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire to state “It is out of question” that Libra be allowed to “become a sovereign currency,” and that “it can’t and it must not happen.”

In addition to these meetings by global financial regulators, President Trump himself held a dinner with Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel at the White House in October 2019 after the Facebook CEO testified to Congress regarding Libra. It was the second time Zuckerberg had met with Trump that Fall after a September 2019 meeting in the Oval Office. A few months before, Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, Jared Kushner, had emailed Mnuchin in May 2019 regarding a blog post by Peter Thiel protégé Sam Altman titled “US Digital Currency,” in which Altman expressed a novel method for the country to attempt to adopt rather than attempt to stop cryptocurrency:

“I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror.

However, I think it’s very possible that the dominant cryptocurrency hasn’t been created yet (Google was years late to the search engine party, and Facebook came long after most people assumed the social network wars were won). And from the perspective of a nation, there are real problems with current systems, especially around pseudo-anonymity, ability to function as an actual currency, and taxability.

Although I don’t think the US government can stop cryptocurrency, I do think it could create the winner–let’s call it “USDC” for US Digital Currency–and fix some challenges that governments currently face with cryptocurrency. I think the first superpower government to do something like this will have an enviable position in the future of the world, and some power over a worldwide currency. The US government could decide to treat USDC as a second legal currency, which would be hugely powerful.”

Kushner asked Mnuchin his thoughts on a U.S. Digital Currency, and even suggested putting together a focus group to discuss: “Steven – Would you be open to me bringing a small group of people to have a brainstorm about this topic?” Kushner wrote. “My sense is it could make sense… and also be something that could ultimately change the way we pay out entitlements as well saving us a ton in waste fraud and also in transaction costs.” This email was revealed in “The Mnuchin Files,” which were obtained by CoinDesk via a FOIA request at the start of 2022. Within these files was the revelation that the Treasury had held a handful of meetings with regulators and private-sector payment companies involved in blockchain. One of these meetings was a March 2, 2020 “crypto summit” that featured prominent figures from The Chain series, including; Meyer Malka of Ribbit Capital, Joey Garcia of Isolas (in addition to positions at Xapo and RSK), Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Jerry Brito of Coin Center, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Peter Briger of Fortress (in addition to stints at Goldman Sachs, the Council of Foreign Relations, and PayPal’s Digital Advisory Board), Michael Gronager of the CIA-funded Chainalysis, Wences Casares of Xapo, and Jeffrey Yass of Susquehanna. Thiel was invited to this meeting, but was unable to attend. In addition to these private sector stalwarts, “high-ranking government officials from the Treasury, FinCEN, the FBI and other agencies” were also present.

Coinbase’s Chief Financial Officer, Alesia Haas “has a personal friendship with Secretary Mnuchin,” according to an email sent to the Treasury department. According to commentary from CoinDesk, Haas was previously CFO at OneWest, the bank Mnuchin ran during the 2008 financial crisis, that also employed former Coinbase executive Brian Brooks, who was made Acting Comptroller of the Currency in May 2020 via Mnuchin’s designation. While only at the OCC for a year, Brooks introduced “regulatory initiatives that provided banks with the green light to offer cryptocurrency custody services and stablecoin payment systems,” before leaving to re-join the private sector, including a three-month stint as CEO of Binance.US. The same month of Brooks appointment, May 2020, Haas was present during a Treasury conference call with Coinbase CEO Armstrong. Brooks allowed Anchorage Digital, a Libra Association member advised by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, to secure a national trust charter and become the nation’s first and only approved “digital asset bank,” just days before he stepped down from his role in January 2021.

Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota penned a favorable letter to Anchorage in October 2019, becoming the first elected official to “endorse” the Libra project, stating: “Technologies like Libra … have the potential to help unbanked and underbanked consumers right here at home… It would be unfortunate to shun a new solution that could connect more of the most vulnerable Americans to our financial services system… Given the length of time it will take for the Fed to finish FedNow, the Libra Association should not wait to see if recent conversations about a Fed-run digital currency come to fruition.” While Senator Rounds endorsed Facebook’s project, few members of the regulatory arms of the U.S. seemed to share these sentiments.

Facebook, facing social and political prosecution for their involvement in what is now known as the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, was dealing with a crisis of confidence from their users and regulators as the Libra project began. Notably, Cambridge Analytica involved not just one but two companies closely connected to Peter Thiel: Facebook and CIA contractor Palantir. In addition, two prominent figures in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which was key to the successful campaign of President Trump, were Steve Bannon and Brittany Nicole Kaiser, with Bannon being referred to as Tether-cofounder Brock Pierce’s “right hand man,” and Kaiser having been the campaign manager for Pierce’s failed 2020 presidential campaign. Pierce would also “pop up” in campaign finance reports as a “Trump campaign megadonor,” who once spent $100,000 for “dinner and access” to Trump and Mnuchin. Zuckerberg himself acknowledged the impact of the scandal on Facebook’s crypto prospects when he told lawmakers in 2019, “I understand we’re not the ideal messenger right now . . . I’m sure people wish it was anyone but Facebook putting this idea forward.”

This self-acknowledged affliction on Facebook’s image led the company to make choice selections while building out the second iteration of Libra’s team. In May 2020, Facebook appointed Stuart Levey – the former Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department under President Bush and President Obama, senior staff at the Department of Justice, Chief Legal Officer of HSBC, and a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations – as the CEO of Libra. After the shuttering of Libra/Diem, Levey joined CIA-front Oracle as an Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. Libra would similarly hire Steve Bunnell – former Chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s office, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, and Fellow of the Trilateral Commission – to become its Chief Legal Officer. “The people were really extraordinary, some of the very best,” stated Ari Redbord, who was the Senior Adviser to the Treasury Deputy Secretary and the Under-Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. “They basically put together the team that regulators would want to hear from when they are looking [at] how you’re going to build out a compliance programme.”

In an attempt to sway regulators, Libra also brought on former HSBC executive James Emmet as a managing director; Sterling Daines as Libra’s Chief Compliance Officer who previously worked at Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Deloitte in addition to consulting for the DOJ and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN); Saumya Bhavsar as General Counsel after experience at Credit Suisse, UBS, Euroclear, and the OCC, in addition to the European Commission and British Parliament; and former aide to the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Susan Zook from Mason Street Consulting to lobby on behalf of Libra.

In addition to Mason Street, Libra spent over $7.5 million in 2019 alone on third-party lobbying firms including Sternhell Group, the Cypress Group, and the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, the latter of which had previously employed Fed Chair Jerome Powell and NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand – one of the authors of the Stablecoin bill. Davis Polk & Wardwell are perhaps best known for representing the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma, infamous for their role in the U.S. opioid crisis, and for representing major Wall Street banks and firms during the 2008 crisis while also advising the government on the design of the bail-outs, some of which were deemed quasi-illegal even by its own lawyers. Facebook also hired the lobbying firm FS Vector, which was led by partner John Collins, the former Head of Policy at Coinbase, who had previously served as senior staff for the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs which in 2013 held “the first congressional inquiry and hearing into crypto and blockchain.”

By September 2020, Brock Pierce’s Blockchain Capital, featured in The Chain of Issuance, officially joined the Libra Association, leading Libra’s Head of Policy Dante Disparte to comment that the firm “would advise on the creation of its global payment system” and “make its network of experts and industry figures available for the Association’s use.” Bradford Stephens, a co-founder of Blockchain Capital, also joined the Diem Association board. By December 2020, Facebook had announced the rebranding of Libra to Diem, in no small part due to attempts to distance the project from the social network. “The original name is tied to an earlier iteration of the project that received a difficult reception, shall we say, from regulators and other stakeholders,” CEO Stuart Levey noted at the time.

The initial white paper and project outline for Libra described a synthetic stablecoin that would be pegged to a basket of fiat currencies and government bonds or Treasuries, referred to as the Libra Reserve. According to reporting from CoinDesk in October 2019, Marcus described some alterations to these intentions, claiming that “the new path isn’t necessarily Libra’s desired option.” However, the project must remain “agile.” Marcus further stated that Libra “could definitely approach this with having a multitude of stablecoins that represent national currencies in a tokenized digital form,” and that this is “one of the options that should be considered.” The pivot from a basket to a directly tokenized fiat currency was perhaps influenced by remarks from future SEC Chair and former CFTC Chair Gary Gensler, who argued in July 2019 that “as currently proposed, the Libra Reserve, in essence, is a pooled investment vehicle that should at a minimum, be regulated by the [SEC], with the Libra Association registering as an investment advisor.” Marcus reportedly told Reuters that Facebook still intended to launch Libra in June 2020 despite the regulatory pushback: “We’ll see. That’s still the goal.. We’ve always said that we wouldn’t go forward unless we have addressed all legitimate concerns and get proper regulatory approval. So it’s not entirely up to us.”

In April 2020, Libra announced the “offering [of] single-currency stablecoins in addition to the multi-currency coin,” in its mission to become “a complement” as opposed to “a replacement for domestic currencies” while expressing a “hope to work with regulators, central banks, and financial institutions” to “expand the number of single-currency stablecoins available on the Libra network over time.” The cover letter further explained the change from solely a Libra Reserve model:

“While our vision has always been for the Libra network to complement fiat currencies, not compete with them, a key concern that was shared was the potential for the multi-currency Libra Coin (≋LBR) to interfere with monetary sovereignty and monetary policy if the network reaches significant scale and a large volume of domestic payments are made in ≋LBR. We are therefore augmenting the Libra network by including single-currency stablecoins in addition to ≋LBR.”

In addition to the stablecoin modulation, the updated white paper removed “any mention of ever introducing permissionless participation in the Libra network” with “all counterparties operating nodes in the Libra network” remaining “known to all others.” “Regulators raised thoughtful questions about the perimeter of control for the Libra network – in particular, the need to guard against unknown participants taking control of the system and removing key compliance provisions,” the cover letter states in direct opposition to the original intentions for Libra “to become permissionless.”

By November 2020, just a month before the Diem rebrand, Libra again adjusted their plans to launch a “single dollar-pegged stablecoin next year” according to reporting from the Financial Times. Libra will “simply launch as a single coin” that is “backed 1:1 by the U.S. dollar,” assuming it receives “approval from the Swiss financial regulator FINMA.” The social network still claims that “the other currencies within the basket and the composite may still be rolled out at a later time,” whereas “the dollar-pegged coin could launch as soon as January [2021].” In February 2021, Diem announced a partnership with custodian Fireblocks and First Digital Assets Group to provide “the digital plumbing to allow financial service providers such as banks, exchanges, payment service providers (PSPs) and eWallets to plug into Diem on day one.”

According to previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout, Fireblocks has significant ties to the Israeli military and intelligence state, in addition to the U.S. regulatory regime via its advisory appointments of former SEC Chair Jay Clayton and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam:

“In 2022, Israel’s Ministry of Finance and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange established the first digital government bond with Fireblocks (a digital assets security platform). The initiative was called Project Eden and it focused on three features: “the tokenization of fiat, the tokenization of government bonds, and instructions to prompt the exchange of assets.” Fireblock’s CEO and co-founder, Michael Shaulov, was a team leader in an elite military outfit, Unit 8200 (participating in the most demanding and mission-critical IDF projects).

In 2022, Fireblocks was the highest valued digital (tokenized) asset infrastructure provider, supporting over 800 major institutions. That same year, BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian bank, tapped Fireblocks to develop a financial infrastructure for managing their digital assets and, since then, Fireblocks has secured the transfer of $2 trillion in digital assets.”

Fireblocks has been funded by BNY Mellon, Silicon Valley Bank, Malka’s Ribbit Capital, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, and DRW Venture Capital, among others. Fireblock’s employees include many former Unit 8200 and IDF members, not to mention CLO Jason Allegrante who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Davis Polk & Wardwell and the San Juan Mercantile Bank & Trust, which was founded by Nick Varelakis, a former executive of the Tether-affiliated Noble Bank founded by Brock Pierce. In October 2024, Fireblocks announced a $1 million grant program to “boost PYUSD [PayPal’s stablecoin] developer adoption.”

This partnership ultimately yielded little benefit for Facebook, however. In May 2021, the social network again pivoted to partner with Silvergate Bank to issue their U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin and manage its reserves. “We are committed to a payment system that is safe for consumers and businesses, makes payments faster and cheaper, and takes advantage of blockchain technology to bring the benefits of the financial system to more people around the world,” stated Diem CEO’s Levey. “We look forward to working with Silvergate to realize this shared vision.” Silvergate CEO Alan Lane added his own commentary, stating “we believe in the future of U.S. dollar backed stablecoins and their potential to transform existing payment systems. We’re inspired by Diem’s technology and commitment to building a regulatory compliant payment system.” The press release accompanying the announcement would also note that Diem would be moving its operations out of Switzerland and back to the United States.

Diem’s Levey and his executive team informed the Fed and the Treasury that they were planning on launching their stablecoin with Silvergate at the end of June 2021. In a heated phone conversation, the Fed’s general counsel Mark Van Der Weide told Levey that “the government was uncomfortable condoning any project until it had put a ‘comprehensive regulatory framework’ for stablecoins in place,” while expressing “nervousness about a coin with the potential to ‘massively scale’ as Diem might.” Levey would respond publicly, while demanding “fair and equal treatment.” “Stopping a limited, legally permissible pilot while other stablecoins grow unchecked is neither fair nor equitable.” In response to the “No” from the U.S. regulatory regime, Dante Disparte, then-Executive Vice President at Diem Association, quit in frustration only to join Circle, the issuer of USDC, in April 2021.

In August 2021, Marcus appeared on Bloomberg Technology to discuss the recent developments of Diem:

“In the early days, the idea the big idea of Libra was really one that had a stablecoin that included a number of existing currencies instead of just being aligned with a dollar, which is what is being prepared now. Also it was to be regulated in Switzerland, and since then the team at Diem brought this back to the U.S. to be regulated in the U.S. given it was a dollar stablecoin that was worked on. And so now it’s basically in the process of getting approvals to move forward, and getting the proper licensing structure to actually move forward.”

Diem co-founder Catalini subsequently made comments to CoinDesk to further articulate their plans for the Silvergate collaboration, including a commitment to phase their token out once a CBDC was issued:

“What we’re really suggesting is more of a public-private partnership. We see this almost like a temporary exercise, where issuers like Silvergate in collaboration with Diem will be issuing a diem dollar, but the moment there is a CBDC … We are the only issuer of a stablecoin, to my knowledge, that committed publicly to phasing out our own token and replacing it with a CBDC token.”

Before Diem could launch their stablecoin with Silvergate, in October 2021, Facebook announced yet another partnership with Paxos, a trust company and stablecoin issuer with numerous connections to PayPal, as profiled in The Chain of Issuance. The pilot program was set to “go live in the U.S. and Guatemala” which would allow “users to start trading the Paxos Dollar (USDP)” while “crypto exchange Coinbase will provide custody services for the program.” According to a Coinbase blog post at the time of announcement, Novi users who participated in the pilot could “acquire Pax Dollar (USDP) through their Novi account,” allowing Novi users to “be able to transfer USDP between each other instantaneously,” which “Novi will hold on deposit with Coinbase Custody.” As Paxos’ Head of Strategy Walter Hessert stated in Paxos’ blog post, “This news represents a tide shift in digital assets, as it’s the first time that stablecoins are readily available in a consumer wallet outside of the crypto ecosystem.”

The very same day, October 19, 2021, a group of U.S. Senators – Brian Schatz (D-HI), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MI) – penned an open-letter to Facebook demanding the immediate discontinuation of the Novi pilot. According to reporting from CoinDesk, the lawmakers felt that “Facebook cannot be trusted to protect user data or manage a payments network,” in the letter published “just hours after Facebook announced it was launching a pilot program for its Novi wallet subsidiary.” Excerpts from the timely letter include the following:

“On multiple occasions, Facebook has committed not to launch a digital currency absent federal financial regulators’ approval. In prepared remarks before the House Financial Services Committee in October 2019, you said that Facebook would ‘not be a part of launching the Libra payments system anywhere in the world unless all U.S. regulators approve it.’ More recently, David Marcus, the executive overseeing Facebook’s digital currency efforts, said, ‘[w]e are definitely not going to launch without the proper regulatory framework.’

Despite these assurances, Facebook is once again pursuing digital currency plans on an aggressive timeline and has already launched a pilot for a payments infrastructure network, even though these plans are incompatible with the actual financial regulatory landscape – not only for Diem specifically, but also for stablecoins in general. The agencies that oversee the U.S. financial system are studying the risks that stablecoins pose to financial stability. Accordingly, they are considering how to address these inherent risks and clarify regulation and supervision of these products. As Federal Reserve Chair Powell said of stablecoins at a July 2021 Senate Banking and Housing Committee hearing, ‘They’re like money funds, they’re like bank deposits and they’re growing incredibly fast but without appropriate regulation.’ Acting Comptroller of the Currency Hsu recently likened stablecoins to the wholesale funding markets whose collapse precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: ‘In terms of ‘known knowns,’ a run on a large stablecoin could be highly destabilizing.’ Mr. Marcus has cited Facebook’s success in securing ‘licenses or approvals for Novi in nearly every state,’ and concluded that ‘Novi is ready to come to market.’ To be clear, your ability to secure state-issued money transmitter licenses is not equivalent to obtaining the blessing of ‘all U.S. regulators,’ as you said in your testimony two years ago.

In addition to the risks products like Diem pose to financial stability, you have not offered a satisfactory explanation for how Diem will prevent illicit financial flows and other criminal activity. The intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force warned in a report to the G-20 finance ministers that stablecoins’ ‘propensity for mass-adoption makes them more vulnerable to be used by criminals and terrorists to launder their proceeds of crime and finance their terrorist activities.’ The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets said in December 2020 that stablecoins ‘are likely to attract illicit actors and, without appropriate mitigation measures, allow evasion of key public policy objectives.’

Unfortunately, Facebook’s decision to pursue a digital currency and payments network is just one more example of the company ‘moving fast and breaking things’ (and in too many cases, misleading Congress in order to do so). Time and again, Facebook has made conscious business decisions to continue with actions that have harmed its users and the broader society. Facebook cannot be trusted to manage a payment system or digital currency when its existing ability to manage risks and keep consumers safe has proven wholly insufficient.”

The letter concluded, “We urge you to immediately discontinue your Novi pilot and to commit that you will not bring Diem to market.”

The Dismantling of Libra

Despite the pivots, despite the new partners, and despite pandering to regulators across the globe, Diem never actually made it to market. Surprisingly, Facebook and its Libra/Diem agents were quite open in their acknowledgments that this was a likely final outcome, one foreseen by some even from the start of the project. In a conversation with CNBC in November 2019, Marcus was asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin, “What did you think was gonna happen then in terms of the expectation for how [Libra] would roll out and play out in the public?” Marcus’ answer was brief and to the point: “Well, almost as it actually happened.” In line with this sentiment, Facebook itself acknowledged that regulatory issues may be an insurmountable barrier to its Libra project in their quarterly report to the SEC in June 2019:

“Libra is based on relatively new and unproven technology, and the laws and regulations surrounding digital currency are uncertain and evolving. Libra has drawn significant scrutiny from governments and regulators in multiple jurisdictions and we expect that scrutiny to continue. As a primary sponsor of the initiative, we are participating in responses to inquiries from governments and regulators, and adverse government or regulatory actions or negative publicity resulting from such participation may adversely affect our reputation and harm our business.

As this initiative evolves, we may be subject to a variety of laws and regulations in the United States and international jurisdictions, including those governing payments, financial services, and anti-money laundering. In many jurisdictions, the application or interpretation of these laws and regulations is not clear, particularly with respect to evolving laws and regulations that are applied to blockchain and digital currency. These laws and regulations, as well as any associated inquiries or investigations, may delay or impede the launch of the Libra currency as well as the development of our products and services, increase our operating costs, require significant management time and attention, or otherwise harm our business.

In addition, market acceptance of such currency is subject to significant uncertainty. As such, there can be no assurance that Libra or our associated products and services will be made available in a timely manner, or at all.”

In a conversation with Harry Stebbings of 20VC, Marcus explained how the failure to convince regulators on the merits of Diem led him to call it quits:

Marcus: “When I think about the Facebook adventure with Libra – I still call it Libra because it’s a better name than Diem – when I basically decided it it was not worth fighting for it anymore, I felt really good, like really, really good, that we had tried everything in our power and then some to convince regulators and world powers, basically, that this was something of merit and that the world needed, but it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Stebbings: “What was the core reason it wasn’t going to happen?”

Marcus: “I think it was just really hard for regulators and others to accept that Facebook would be at the center of a protocol for money for the internet. And actually that any private company would be at the center of that and that’s why we devolved so much power into this consortium that we didn’t control, that we’re just a member of, but that wasn’t enough. And I think that the political – it was very political to be clear – and I think the political pressure on regulators to not enable a company with the reach of Facebook to actually be at the helm of such a project was just insurmountable.”

In an August 2023 conversation with Bankless, Marcus furthered these sentiments while articulating that “Unfortunately, no one actually believed the power dynamics behind it,” and that the “brand association with Facebook at the time was just not palatable from a political standpoint.” Marcus even went so far as to confirm that “the project was killed or shut down by the government.”

The fact that the government would be so hostile to Facebook’s digital currency efforts is interesting in light of the fact that Facebook was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11. Shortly after Peter Thiel and associates created Palantir with CIA funding to privatize, and thus rescue, DARPA’s then-embattled Total Information Awareness program, Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog’s architect has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military/intelligence communities, which go far beyond its origins to revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some of which have involved the Thiel-founded Palantir – makes one wonder if the animosity of the government toward Facebook’s digital currency ambitions was merely a smokescreen and that the real intent was in perfecting the public-private partnership of capital creation for the digital age, specifically its surveillance potential.

Despite the predicted failure to launch, Marcus recognized that Libra “served as a blueprint for a lot of projects that came after.” As Lisa Ellis of Moffet Nathanson explained to FT, Diem “forced regulators and governments to start to educate themselves on the technology and stimulated venture capital investment in other initiatives because there was such a frenzy of focus.”

These sentiments were seemingly confirmed in both the projects later headed by former Libra staff, not to mention the venture capital invested in said businesses. While Marcus’ LightSpark will be discussed later, Sui and Aptos, two “descendants” of Libra raised $300 million and $350 million respectively, both leveraging Libra’s Move programming language. Aptos was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Sui, the blockchain built by Mysten Labs which added native USDC availability in October 2024, was founded in September 2021 by four former members of Libra. Mysten Labs, which co-authored a troubling paper with O.N.E. Amazon’s co-founders – including the architect of BlackRock’s ETFs, Peter Knez, as described in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout – is deeply tied to Facebook and its Libra/Diem project. Evan Cheng, Mysten’s co-founder and CEO, was previously the head of Research and Development at Novi Financial, while Sam Blackshear, another co-founder and the CTO of Mysten Labs, was previously the Chief Engineer at Novi, having contributed significantly to the creation of the Move programming language used by Libra/Diem while at Meta. The founding team at Mysten also includes Adeniyi Abiodun and George Danezis, key contributors to Diem’s stablecoin and the aforementioned Move programming language.

In January 2022, the Diem Association formally folded by announcing the sale of its intellectual property related to the Diem Payment Network to their former partner, Silvergate Capital Corporation for $182 million. In the press release, Diem’s CEO Levey eulogized Facebook’s effort, claiming that despite “a senior regulator inform[ing] us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the US Government had seen,” and “despite giving us positive substantive feedback on the design of the network,” it “nevertheless became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead.” Levey commented on the continuing intentions of Libra even after the sale, stating that “we remain confident in the potential for a stablecoin operating on a blockchain designed like Diem’s to deliver the benefits that motivated the Diem Association from the beginning.”

Unfortunately for Levey, and those behind the efforts of the social network’s crypto project, Silvergate itself would be shutdown in March 2023, by the very same regulators that had first shuttered Libra.

The Regional Banking Crisis

Silvergate Bank was founded as a savings and loan association in 1988 by Dennis Frank and Derek Eisele. In 1996, Frank, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, reorganized the S&L into a regional bank servicing the Southern California area after recruiting investors he had met from his stint at Goldman. Frank convinced the board of Silvergate to cease its mortage operations in 2005, a few years before the subprime debacle. Thus, when the Great Financial Crisis struck in 2008, Silvergate remained solvent and ready to lend. At the onset of the crisis, Frank asked Alan Lane to join the bank as CEO, having spent time at Independence One Bank, Business Bank of California, and Southwest Community Bancorp. According to reporting from CNBC, Lane shared that Frank told him “I’m a Wall Street guy and I need a banker as a partner, would you join me?”

While the bank’s books were balanced, the standard issue of banking remained: how to garner customer deposits in order to fund loans. At the start of the 2010s, Silvergate would turn towards the oft-unbanked cryptocurrency industry to fill their coffers. In 2013, Lane purchased his first Bitcoin, partially out of interest in a new industry, and partially out of fear of how this upstart currency could disrupt the banking sector at large. “I thought ‘uh oh, what am I gonna do?'” Lane expressed upon discovering the blockchain. “I put two and two together and I thought, well it might disrupt banking long-term but in the short-term these companies need banks. They’re not doing anything wrong. They’re not doing anything illegal or immoral. If they were we wouldn’t be banking them.”

In 2013, Lane brought in the executives from a handful of “young crypto exchanges” in order to assess their areas of friction, and how Silvergate could help the blossoming blockchain industry. A year prior, Silvergate had received Federal Reserve status, and in the Summer of 2014, Lane had invited the California State Banking Department board and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to share what he had learned from the exchanges, and more specifically present the merits of Bitcoin. “That open communication with the regulators early on has proven to be really foundational,” Lane would share. “We’re very collaborative with the regulators, we ask them if they have suggestions, and what we can do better.”

Silvergate quickly added the Winklevoss twin’s Gemini exchange, Paxos, Kraken, and others to their list of crypto-clients, helping the bank source much needed deposits, while also providing an olive branch to a smattering of mostly unbanked blockchain stalwarts. As FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried put it himself in a now-deleted testimonial on Silvergate’s website, “Life as a crypto firm can be divided up into before Silvergate and after Silvergate. It’s hard to overstate how much it revolutionized banking for blockchain companies.” In January 2014, Silvergate brought on on their first crypto customer, SecondMarket, a firm started by Barry Silbert of the not-yet-founded Digital Currency Group.

SecondMarket was built to facilitate the sale of private securities, such as shares of companies not yet publicly listed. Its investors included FirstMark, Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, Temasek Holdings, Silicon Valley Bank, and Li Ka-shing among others, the latter being the controversial father of Block.one investor, Richard Li, as noted in The Chain of Consensus. SecondMarket was also advised by Steven Bochner – a former Chairman of the board of directors at Nasdaq, a former member of the board at the SEC, and a member of the board at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco – in addition to being advised by Alan Denenberg, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell.

SecondMarket later rebranded as Genesis Trading in April 2015 with Genesis Trading naming their new CEO, Brendan O’Connor, after Silbert resigned in July 2014 in order to form the Digital Currency Group. O’Connor told CoinDesk that Genesis Trading was “the largest over-the-counter market maker” in cryptocurrency, as well as being the “first broker-dealer in the U.S. regulated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to actively trade bitcoin.”

Nearly a decade later, both Genesis Trading and Silvergate would find themselves caught in the middle of the Terra-LUNA and FTX controlled demolitions. Terra’s Do Kwon accused Genesis Trading, via their subsidiary Genesis Asia Pacific, of collaborating with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda Research in order to attack the peg of the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD, known as UST. Kwon, in a series of tweets dated December 7, 2022, suggested that “the time has come for Genesis Trading to reveal if they provided the $1B USD shortly before the crash to SBF or Alameda.” The $1 billion dollar purchase was indeed brokered by Genesis Trading’s Asia Pacific, in addition to another $500 million sourced from Three Arrows Capital, with the deal being officially announced as closed on May 5, 2022. Genesis Trading’s own Twitter account explained that “the Genesis aspect of the deal represents the first of its magnitude, with Genesis Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. taking on 1 billion UST in exchange for $1 billion worth of BTC.” By May 12, Terra’s LUNA had lost 99.7% of its value, and the $1 billion of UST stable now held by Genesis was effectively worthless.

Kwon also questioned SBF himself, specifically looking for answers as to why his trading desk Alameda had borrowed over $1 billion worth of Bitcoin from Voyager during the de-pegging, alluding to possibility that the borrowing was related to a large short position on the Terra ecosystem. Kwon would also “reveal” that Alameda was responsible for the “large currency contraction that UST went through in Feb 2021” due to Alameda selling 500 million in UST “in minutes” to “drain the Curve liquidity pools during the Magic Internet Money (MIM) crisis.” FTX would officially lose around $100 million on the failure of LUNA. However, reporting from the New York Times would back Kwon’s assertion that SBF’s firms were behind the massive sell orders of TerraUSD. As covered inThe Chain of Consensus, the fallouts of Terra-LUNA’s collapse were crucial in creating the context that later led to FTX’s insolvency. It is of note that the Bitcoin that had once backed Terra-LUNA’s stablecoin was algorithmically liquidated via Binance, which was a long time banking client of Silvergate, having reportedly moved some $50 billion for the exchange through Silvergate accounts since 2019. The CEO of FTX’s Digital Markets, Ryan Salame, asserted via a Tweet that “Silvergate advised all our banking activity.” In the aftermath of their bankruptcy filing, FTX revealed that Genesis Global Capital “turned out to be the largest unsecured creditor of FTX” to the tune of $226.3 million owed.

The SEC went on to sue Silvergate for their participation in the FTX scandal, with the July 2024 suit claiming “SCC, Lane, and [former Chief Risk Officer Kathleen] Fraher misrepresented the operational and legal risks facing the Bank by falsely stating in SEC filings and other public statements that the Bank had an effective BSA/AML compliance program tailored to the heightened risks posed by its crypto asset customers.” According to reporting from Blockworks, the Silvergate staff “were able to trace $9 billion worth of transfers from FTX-related entities,” yet the lawyers at the SEC wrote: “Most troubling to the BSA staff was the trend of funds that flowed from FTX’s custodial accounts — which held FTX customer funds — to a series of non-custodial FTX-related entities’ accounts, followed by transfers of these funds to other third parties — either through the SEN or to accounts external to the Bank.” According to reporting from NYMag, SEC filings showed that “funds intended for FTX were deposited into the Silvergate account of an Alameda subsidiary” in order to “hide the fact that they were going to Alameda.” This subsidiary, North Dimension, claimed to be “an online electronics retailer” according to “a now-defunct website that appears to have been fake since nothing could be purchased on it.”

SEN, or the Silvergate Exchange Network, had become a critical piece of infrastructure for inter-exchange settlement in addition to providing much needed settlement services for stablecoin providers. As Alan Lane explained on Bloomberg’s OddLots podcast in 2022:

“We are the regulated on-ramp from the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies into the bitcoin and digital asset market. And then likewise, we are the off-ramp from that the digital asset market back into fiat currencies… So let’s talk about the stablecoins. The stablecoin issuers who use our platform are all of the regulated, U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin issuers… We don’t bank the algorithmic stablecoin offerings, nor these other stablecoins that are maybe collateralized by other digital assets. Those don’t need a U.S. dollar bank because they’re not backed by USD. Importantly, we also don’t bank Tether and believe it or not, we had the opportunity to work with Tether very early on but because they weren’t inside the United States. And, you know, again we are very serious about regulation, and so we looked at it and we thought you know this is an interesting idea… But they’re offshore. We can’t really get our hands around their regulatory status in the United States and so we were not able to bank them back then. This was back in 2017, nor do we bank them today. So that’s what we don’t do.

What we do is for USDC, for the Pax Dollar which is issued by Paxos, for the Gemini Dollar issued by Gemini and for TrueUSD. They use the SEN and our API for the minting and burning of their tokens. Those tokens are issued when a dollar hits their Silvergate bank account and it’s all programmatic. So if somebody wants to purchase USDC from Circle, what they would do is they would send dollars into Circle’s bank account at Silvergate. And when those dollars hit the bank account then, at that moment, there is an API call from Silvergate to Circle that says ‘we just received x amount of dollars from this customer.’ And at that point, Circle knows we have the dollars in our possession. So they turn around and they mint the USDC token and send it to the wallet address of that institution that is looking to purchase the USDC. And then the same thing happens in reverse. If someone wants to redeem their USDC and go back to U.S. dollars, they send the USDC to the wallet at Circle. Circle, at that point, once they have possession of the USDC, they then send an instruction to us via API and we then, in turn, will send the dollars back to that prior USDC token holder.”

According to a SEC filing with data as recent as October 2018, Silvergate serviced 35 digital currency exchanges, including “the 5 largest U.S. domiciled digital currency exchanges,” holding just over $792 million of deposits. The filing stressed the importance of SEN, while also highlighting the substantial growth of Silvergate’s “digital currency initiative.” In 2014, with only 8 customers, the bank held $6 million in crypto-related deposits, whereas by 2018, the bank had 483 crypto clients, with $1.6 billion in deposits on the bank’s books.

It was also in 2018 that Silbert’s Digital Currency Group invested in Silvergate Capital Corporation itself, selling 9.5 million shares for $114 million in funds to “further support the bank’s fintech deposit initiatives.” By November 2020, Bitcoin custodian and stablecoin bank Xapo – featured in The Chain of Custody – would lose their Director of Institutional Investments, the 13-year Morgan Stanley vet Jonathan Melton, after he announced he was to join Silvergate as the Director of Digital Asset Lending, in part to help expand the bank’s SEN Leverage product. In June 2021, the former CLO at Coinbase, Michael Lempres, joined Silvergate as Chairman, taking over for Dennis Frank. Prior to Coinbase, Lempres was an executive at Andreessen Horowitz and a senior attorney at Silicon Valley Bank. At SVB, Lempres was instrumental in working with regulators to expand their booming cryptocurrency clients, and even started working at SVB’s customer, Bitnet Technologies, in 2015. BitNet was formed by former Visa employees after Visa purchased payment infrastructure firm Cybersource in 2010, and was funded by Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, and Stephens Investment Management. In 2016, Lempres was additionally elected the mayor of Atherton, a small town in Silicon Valley that boasts Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg as residents. In the same announcement, Silvergate would add Aanchal Gupta, a former risk and security manager at Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo!, to its board. In 2019, Antonio Martino joined Silvergate as CFO, having been a senior manager at Bank of Montreal prior to 17 years at Citigroup.

In July 2021, Silvergate announced they had garnered $4.3 billion in new deposits from “new and existing digital currency customers” in Q2 of 2021 alone. The lion’s share came from crypto exchanges, which “deposited $2.4 billion in cash during the quarter,” while institutional investor deposits “grew by $1.8 billion.” Silvergate noted that 120 new digital currency customers were added in the quarter, bringing their total to 1,224, while the bank’s SEN had “processed 137,947 transactions and transferred $239.6 billion over the network” during the quarter. In the announcement, Lane commented on the growth of deposits, while speculating that future growth might come from a venture such as Facebook’s Diem:

“In the second quarter, average deposits from digital currency customers grew by $3.5 billion to $9.9 billion. Driven by the record volume we experienced on this, we are prudently deploying these deposits into interest earning assets, including the purchase of $4.5 billion of both short and long duration securities during the quarter…We are looking at our capital needs and anticipated growth to be capital efficient and having runway to support that growth. We’re also looking at off balance sheet mechanisms to take on that growth that might come from a stablecoin project like Diem.”

Of importance in regards to the bank’s eventual failing, Silvergate’s Tier 1 leverage ratio, which “measures equity capital against risk-weighted assets,” stood “well above the regulatory threshold of 5% at 7.9% this quarter” but down from “the 9.68% level it was at in the first quarter of this year [2021].” As noted above, Diem was shut down and its assets sold to Silvergate at the end of January 2022. On March 29, 2022, Silvergate issued a $205 million Bitcoin-collateralized loan with MacroStrategy, a subsidiary of Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy, in the Washington, DC-based software company’s now-successful attempt to become one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world. Interestingly, one of the other largest Bitcoin holders in the world, Block.one/Bullish Global, had taken a $225 million loan itself from Silvergate just the day before, on March 28, according to an SEC filing. Silvergate was quickly becoming an indispensable pillar in the cryptocurrency industry, but before 2022 could close, the entire industry, Silvergate included, would find itself scrambling to make depositors whole.

On November 7, 2022, Tyler Pearson, the son-in-law of CEO Lane, was demoted from his position of Chief Risk Officer, in addition to other executive level shakeups. Four days later, on November 11, FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Less than two weeks later, on November 23, Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer purchased a 9.27% stake in Silvergate, promptly upping the investment to 9.9% the next month, making EOS’s developer Block.one the largest single investor in Silvergate. According to reporting from Protos, Citadel Securities and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest also purchased millions of dollars worth of shares of Silvergate, while millions worth of “advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) were taken out by Silvergate.”

On December 5, Silvergate filed a letter with the SEC where Lane claimed “we conducted extensive due diligence on FTX and Alameda Research,” and “we have a resilient balance sheet and ample liquidity.” However, a month later, on January 5, 2023, Silvergate revealed that, due to its client FTX collapsing, a massive bank run had taken place, with $8.1 billion, over 68% of its deposits, leaving the bank in Q4 2022. This quickly “led to an acute liquidity crunch, which forced Silvergate to sell off illiquid securities for a loss of over $700 million and to borrow $4.3 billion in short-term advances from Federal Home Loan Banks.” Likely in response to the balance sheet revelation, the price of Silvergate stock “declined by $11.54 per share, or 22.6%, from a closing price of $50.96 per share on November 7, 2022, to a closing price of $39.42 per share on November 8, 2022,” on “unusually high trading volume,” as noted by Cohen Milstein’s case study. Silvergate also announced they fired about 40% of their workforce, with 200 employees receiving pink slips.

Despite the tanking stock price, and accusations of fund mismanagement, Silvergate instead saw a string of positive announcements from traditional investment stalwarts as the winter of 2023 carried on. On January 31, 2023, Larry Fink’s BlackRock– a major shareholder in FTX – reported a 7% stake in Silvergate, after a filing with the SEC revealed that the firm increased their position from the previously reported 5.9%. Two days later, on February 2, State Street reported a 9.32% stake in Silvergate, while on February 14, Citadel Securities also revealed a 5.5% stake in the California-based bank.

While the traditional asset managers were seemingly buying up the deeply-discounted shares, March 2023 would fare far worse for Silvergate’s digital currency clients. On March 2, Coinbase, Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, Paxos, Circle, CBOE’s Digital Markets, Crypto.Com, Gemini, LedgerX and Bitstamp all suspended banking partnerships with Silvergate. The next day, March 3, Silvergate announced that SEN would be shut down “effective immediately,” after making a “risk-based decision.” This was likely due in part to a bankruptcy judge ordering the bank to release nearly $10 million to their former client, BlockFi, an issue which was ordered the same day.

Signature Bank, which failed two days after Silicon Valley Bank, had its own inter-crypto exchange network, known as Signet. Signature had relationships with many cryptocurrency companies, many of which had begun in 2018, including Circle, Coinbase, Kraken and even FTX. The bank was to the New York Community Bancorp subsidiary, Flagstar Bank, one week after the FDIC assumed control of Signature. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, would later lead an investment package to rescue NYCB with $1 billion in March 2024, leading the firms to rename the now-merged banks into Flagstar Financial in October 2024. Joseph Otting, a “longtime banking executive and close ally of Mr. Mnuchin,” the former President of OneWest Bank and the Chief Operator at Trump’s OCC before Brian Brooks, would become its CEO.

On March 7, Block.one, by then known as Bullish Global, liquidated its Silvergate position after expressing concerns about the bank’s inability to file its 10-K and the bank’s announcement of the shut down of SEN, revealing it had “no exposure to Silvergate.” The next day, March 8, Silvergate shut down operations after a voluntary liquidation to federal regulators. Certainly, a voluntary liquidation is an unusual happening in the banking industry, and thus there has been much speculation as to why Silvergate would do such, including a well-researched piece from Pirate Wires suggesting that the Biden administration’s regulators used “an informal mandate” which limited “crypto deposits at 15 percent” to bring the bank down.

While the exact reason why the bank shuttered will likely never see the light of day, there were certainly firms that benefited from the voluntary liquidation. On March 23, MicroStrategy announced they were able to repay their loan early due to the bank’s closure “without prepayment fees” and at a “21% discount,” paying only $161 million of the $200 million owed. On March 8, the day the bank was closed, Marathon Digital, which had opened a $200 million line of credit from Silvergate, announced they had halted its credit facilities, helping remove nearly $50 million in debt and save around $5 million in annual borrowing costs.

A month before the bank liquidated, on February 14, Yahoo! reported that George Soros’ Soros Fund Management, in addition to its sizable investments in Marathon and MicroStrategy, had placed “100,000 shares worth of put options” via a short position on the soon-to-be-shutdown Silvergate. Short sellers during the regional banking crisis made over $3.5 billion in mark-to-market profits in March 2023 alone, with Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank – the second- and third-largest bank failures respectively in U.S. history – having been in the top 20 most-shorted regional bank stocks, according to reporting from Yahoo!.

The Silicon Valley Bankruptcy

Silicon Valley Bank was founded in October 1983 by Stanford professor Bob Medearis and Wells Fargo executive Bill Biggerstaff, after the two former Bank of America managers decided to found a bank to fund an infantile Silicon Valley. The idea for the bank first emerged during a game of poker in Pajaro Dunes, California that featured Starr Colby, who was the head of Lockheed’s “pilot-less drone program” at the time. Medearis claimed the deregulation from the Reagan administration created the environment for such a financial institution, and the lack of venture capital in the region created ample opportunity to finance the students and entrepreneurs, kickstarting the computer revolution in earnest.

According to reporting by Vox, by 2021 SVB claimed to bank “nearly half of all U.S. venture-backed startups,” not to mention being a banking partner for “a lot of the venture capital firms” that fund those startups. By the time of its failure in March 2023, SVB held more than $200 billion in assets for California’s tech industry, making it the largest bank to fail since the Great Recession. But before it failed, the bank had become an indispensable pillar in the FinTech industry of the valley. Dallas Business Journal‘s Mark Calvey reported that executives at SVB had told him that “the bank’s focus on working closely with VCs and their portfolio companies was actually a way to reduce risk.” According to Calvey, if “top-tier venture firms,” such as Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, were “pouring millions into a promising startup,” SVB felt “more comfortable in extending venture debt.” The once Treasurer of Silicon Valley Bank, David Jaques, went on to join PayPal extremely early in the company’s history, helping the firm properly comply with banking regulations.

Unfortunately, it was some of these venture capital stalwarts that would later help trigger the run that would bring the bank down on March 10, 2023. Two days before, on March 8, SVB Financial Group, the parent company of the bank, announced it would undertake a $2.25 billion share sale after offloading $21 billion worth of securities at a $2 billion loss. Deposits at the bank had soared after unprecedented pandemic-era stimulus coincided with effectively zero-percent interest rates, leading the bank to invest in longer duration bonds in the search of yield. While the purchase of U.S. government debt is often considered risk-free, banks that get stuck holding long duration bonds during an interest rate hike – such as the fastest rate hike in U.S. banking history in 2022-2023 after the highly inflationary period during government lockdowns – often have to sell at a loss before the bonds can mature to cover fleeing deposits.

Astute venture funds that had their money in SVB – often in egregious excess of the FDIC’s insurance limit of $250,000 – such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures advised their clients to pull their deposits out of the bank before the losses tallied higher. On March 9, the top executives at Founder’s Fund decided to move the firm’s capital to an assortment of larger banks, with their CFO Neil Ruthven stating, “Thursday morning [March 9] it was clear we were in the middle of a bank run, and we reacted in line with our fiduciary duties.” Other firms, such as Sequioa Capital, Coutue, and the several unnamed founders that shared comments privately to Axios, also moved their funds out of SVB that day as well. The Information reported that Union Square Ventures directed companies in their portfolio to “only keep minimal funds in cash accounts.” According to reporting from John Titus for BestEvidence, 10 customers alone had $13 billion in deposits at SVB, while $42 billion would leave the bank in just 6 hours. By the end of the day, the bank’s shares would drop over 60%, taking out nearly $9.4 billion in the stock’s market cap.

The priming for such a bank run, however, was far from built in a day. While the match in this regional banking bonfire was these aforementioned, influential VC firms advising partners to quickly pull funds, the tinder was these “killer whale accounts” depositing billions beyond typical FDIC insurance and the kindling was the bank investing in long duration bonds during a low interest rate environment. Ultimately, the fuel wood itself was the Trump administration’s deregulation of the banking industry in 2018.

In an effort to defang the Democrat-led Dodd-Frank regulation during the Obama administration, the Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation in May 2018 that weakened certain restrictions on banks, specifically upping the “too-big-to-fail” threshold from $50 billion in total assets to $250 billion as it relates to specific reporting and capital requirements. Due to this change, all three of the banks that failed in 2023 no longer had to “undergo stress tests,” or “submit so-called living wills,” both of which are “safety valves designed to plan for financial disaster.”

The bill, signed by President Trump and known as the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, lifted this provision to $100 billion for 18 months, and eventually raised it to $250 billion in an effort to make it easier for smaller banks to lend more and save costs on reporting and stress testing. Banks with less than a quarter trillion in assets would no longer need to undergo annual stress tests conducted by the Federal Reserve, nor would they have to conduct their own semiannual tests. In addition, banks with under $10 billion in total assets would no longer have to honor the Volcker Rule, named after former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, which banned banks from proprietary trading and made it illegal for banks to “place bets with money from deposits.” Finally, the capital requirements for banks no longer deemed “systemically important financial institutions” were loosened, freeing up capital for increased lending.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a proud heel of cryptocurrency, would specifically point to these reforms as being a critical component to the bank’s failure, stating: “President Trump and congressional Republicans’ decision to roll back Dodd-Frank’s ‘too big to fail’ rules for banks like SVB – reducing both oversight and capital requirements – contributed to a costly collapse.” Of note, as reported by The Lever, SVB had spent “more than half a million dollars on lobbying” to “hike the regulatory threshold to $250 billion” in 2015. Despite the bank itself having pushed for the exact regulation that helped set up its failure, many prominent financial figures came out in defense of the customer deposits, including Bill Ackman, Larry Summers, PayPal’s David Sacks, and Sam Altman.

Even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated “We are concerned about depositors and we’re focused on trying to meet their needs.” According to reporting from The Washington Post at the time of the bank’s failure, “Federal authorities are seriously considering safeguarding all uninsured deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, weighing an extraordinary intervention to prevent what they fear would be a panic in the U.S. financial system.” The Post further noted that “Although the FDIC insures bank deposits up to $250,000, a provision in federal banking law may give them the authority to protect the uninsured deposits as well if they conclude that failing to do so would pose a systemic risk to the broader financial system. In that event, uninsured deposits could be backstopped by an insurance fund, paid into regularly by U.S. banks.”

Former Treasury Secretary and former Xapo advisory board member Larry Summers called for quick action to protect deposits, stating “What is absolutely imperative is that, however this gets resolved, depositors be paid back, and paid back in full…this is not the time for moral hazard lecture.” The former COO of PayPal, David Sacks, tweeted “Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop the crisis NOW. Announce that all depositors will be safe. Place SVB with a Top 4 bank. Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.” OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman similarly tweeted that “TL;DR: at this point, to be certain of avoiding catastrophe, the FDIC needs to temporarily guarantee all deposits. other solutions might work, but this is the best one.” On March 12, two days after the bank failed, the Treasury, the Fed and the FDIC announced “steps to ensure deposits will be paid in full,” stating:

“After receiving a recommendation from the boards of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, and consulting with the President, Secretary [Janet] Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors… Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.”

Endeavor board member Matt Harris – a Bain Capital Venture partner and NY Fed Fintech Advisory Group member discussed in The Chain of Custody – commented on the hypocrisy of the moment, tweeting “Looking forward to the tweets from the VCs who sparked this bank run congratulating themselves on their prescience.” According to their website, Silicon Valley Bank was an official bank partner of Endeavor.

While the U.S. regulators showed up at the right time to help ensure depositors were made whole, only a few weeks before SVB went under, the bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, had already begun offloading shares of the soon-to-be-collapsed bank. According to reporting from Newsweek, Becker had sold “more than $3.5 million in stocks,” with a February 27 filing with the SEC demonstrating that precisely “$3,578,652.31 in common stock” was liquidated “two weeks before SVB was shut down by federal regulators.” These 12,451 shares sold would account “for 10 percent” of “his roughly 98,000 shares,” while another SEC filing would show that the bank’s Chief Financial Officer, Daniel Beck, had also sold “$575,180 in stocks” on “the same February day.” SVB also reportedly paid out bonuses to U.S. employees mere hours ahead of the take over by regulators.

It wasn’t just executives at the banks, or Soros’ short positions, that benefited from the regional banking crisis. According to a study from McKinsey, deposits flowed “out of midsize U.S. banks after the regional banking crisis,” while “the largest and smallest banks added deposits.” One of these “smallest banks” was a new entity known as Mercury, which was founded in 2017 and has raised over $163 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Naval Ravikant, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and CRV as well as “angel investors, athletes, entertainers and customers.” Mercury saw more than $2 billion in deposits in the first handful of days after SVB’s collapse, with around 8,700 new customers in March 2023 alone. “It was by far our biggest month we’ve had at Mercury, a huge inflow,” Mercury CEO and co-founder Immad Akhund told TechCrunch. “We tried to prioritize people coming from SVB and even built some tools so they could connect to SVB accounts… We were already growing and we saw an approximately 20% jump because of what happened with SVB.” By July, Mercury had seen over 26,000 new customers since March’s regional bank crisis.

While the immediate uncertainty of the bank failure surely ruffled some feathers of the various depositors at SVB, the U.S. regulatory system promised to make them whole, and thus clients such as Sequoia Capital, the Tencent-backed Kanzhun, the Bezos, Milner and Mubadala Investment Company-backed Altos Labs, among others, would all escape unscathed. SVB’s largest creditor aided by the government rescue was be the issuer of the stablecoin USDC, Circle Internet Financial, which had had $3.3 billion deposited at the bank. According to a press release from Circle, this amounted to about 8% of the USDC total reserve, with a remaining 77% of its reserve being collateralized short-dated U.S. Treasury bills held by BNY Mellon and managed by BlackRock.

In the failure of SVB, USDC would “depeg” from the USD, falling as low as 86 cents. Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald which custodies Tether’s Treasury holdings, took a dig at Circle during his speech at the Bitcoin2024 conference in which he stated: “Think about it: Circle had USD $3.3 billion of your reserves uninsured in the Silicon Valley Bank when it went bust.” Tether’s Paolo Ardoino also commented on the situation, saying “You might remember that I was very public about my concerns about MICA and the requirement of 60% in non-insured cash deposits, like what happened to Circle with Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. They lost $3 billion and then survived because the FDIC stepped in.”

Despite allegations of starting the bank-run himself, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel claimed to lose $50 million personally with the failure of SVB. Thiel’s Founders Fund had been investing in Bitcoin since 2014 and realized nearly $2 billion in profits from their 8-year cryptocurrency investment in March 2022, when Bitcoin was nearly $50,000 a coin. Founders Fund would begin investing again in the digital asset industry shortly after the banking crisis, putting $100 million each in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Six months after the crisis, in August 2023, PayPal announced their own stablecoin, PYUSD, with all eyes turning towards Congress for the legislative clarity via their oncoming regulation that would determine the winners and losers of the “Great Stablecoin War.” The House Financial Services Committee’s Republican chair, Representative Patrick McHenry, commented that the PYUSD announcement was an indication that stablecoins “hold promise as a pillar of our 21st century payments system.”

Two weeks before Paxos and PayPal launched PYUSD, the U.S. House Financial Services committee advanced the first iteration of their stablecoin bill. McHenry stressed the importance of the bill, stating: “We are currently at a crossroads to keep America at the forefront of digital asset innovation. Congress is making significant, bipartisan progress on legislation to ensure the U.S. leads the financial system of the future.”

The Consolidation: The Gillibrand-Lummis Stablecoin Bill

Since 2022, the efforts to pass legislation dealing the crypto industry have been largely spearheaded by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY). The two female senators, who both receive a significant amount of funding from the crypto industry, tried but failed to get their first attempt at a crypto oversight bill passed in 2022 as did their second attempt in 2023. The Gillibrand-Lummis bills have generally favored giving the CFTC more oversight over the industry than the SEC (leading to criticism from the SEC’s Gary Gensler) while the most recent iteration would ban algorithmic stablecoins and ensure that stablecoin regulations are used to maintain “the U.S. dollar’s dominance.”

Ultimately, the bill – among other things – is seen as encouraging banks to begin issuing dollar-pegged stablecoins, having them compete directly or form alliances with existing stablecoin issuers like Circle, Paxos and Tether. Over the past few years, where concern over a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) has become prominent in the U.S. and elsewhere, top crypto executives – like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong – as well as CIA veterans have stated quite plainly that dollar-pegged stablecoins were to become the U.S.’ de facto CBDC in order to give the U.S. a “first-mover advantage” in digital currency issuance, as dollar stablecoins are “already here” whereas a CBDC would take years to develop. In addition, the policy of the Federal Reserve since last year has made it clear that they favor “private stablecoin issuance rather than official CBDC issuance.” With stablecoins being just as programmable and surveillable as CBDCs, and some stablecoin issuers like Tether already allied with U.S. intelligence and security agencies, the current stablecoin bill is poised to pave the way for the U.S.’ de facto CBDC and to ensure that Wall Street and well-established titans of digital finance like PayPal have the advantage.

Given the above, Kirsten Gillibrand’s involvement in the bill makes sense. After starting her career as a law clerk in Albany, NY, Gillibrand worked at the global, white-shoe law firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell, whose alumni include current Fed chairman Jerome Powell, from 1991 to 2000. The firm, since its earliest years, has been closely connected to J.P. Morgan (now a major donor to Gillibrand’s campaigns) and Wall Street in general. One telling example of the role of the firm in Wall Street’s political machinations occurred during the 2008 financial crisis, when the firm represented the public sector, i.e. the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as the Wall Street banks deemed to have played a role in creating the crisis, including Citigroup. Subsequently, the firm helped develop the government response to the crisis including by helping draft the relatively toothless Dodd-Frank Act which, over a decade after its passage, has done next to nothing to rein in the “too big to fail” banks or prevent the government’s “privatize the gains, socialize the losses” policy with respect to bank failures. Davis, Polk & Wardwell continues to give heavily to Gillibrand’s political war chest as does another law firm where she used to work, Boies, Schiller & Flexner.

While Wall Street banks like J.P. Morgan and Wall Street law firms like Sullivan & Cromwell donate heavily to Gillibrand, she has more recently taken on important players in the crypto industry as donors. The biggest of these is Coinbase, while other donors include Uniswap Labs. Another important donor is Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures, which has backed Coinbase as well as MondoDB. Andreessen Horowitz is another significant donor to Gillibrand, which has made many investments in the crypto space, including being the bulk of the funds behind Multicoin Capital, which is also backed by Union Square Ventures. Multicoin Capital itself donates significant sums to Gillibrand and is also a major donor to Cynthia Lummis. As will be discussed shortly, Mulitcoin Capital has significant ties to the stablecoin industry, particularly the stablecoin issuers most favored by the Gillibrand-Lummis bill.

While Gillibrand may have started off as a corporate lawyer, politics was always within her sights. Indeed, Kirsten Gillibrand’s political career is largely thanks to her very politically-connected family. Gillibrand’s father, Douglas Rutnick, a career lobbyist who has represented Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin and even the NXIVM sex cult, was a long-time “close associate” and friend of former New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato. Rutnick has been described as a “beneficiary” of the corrupt Democratic Party-run “machine” in New York’s capital Albany, with local papers noting that Rutnick “both served as Albany County public defender and ran a private law firm representing clients with business before the city” that was later accused of engaging in “questionable deals.” Gillibrand’s grandmother, Polly Noonan, was also intimately connected to the “Albany machine” as she was the long-time mistress of former Albany mayor Erastus Corning, a Democrat, and served as vice chair of New York’s Democratic party in the 1980s. That appointment was allegedly a favor granted by former New York governor Mario Cuomo, as Noonan had raised significant campaign funds for his gubernatorial bid prior to her appointment.

Gillibrand later claimed that it was her father’s ties to D’Amato that scored her a college internship at D’Amato’s office in Albany, NY when he was a serving Senator and marked her earliest foray into politics. Though she subsequently stated that she didn’t personally meet D’Amato until years later over “one lovely dinner together,” D’Amato – a scion of New York’s Republican party – was a central figure when it was announced that Gillibrand would inherit Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat after Clinton joined the Obama administration as Secretary of State in 2009.

D’Amato later claimed to have had nothing to do with Gillibrand’s appointment and Gillibrand later claimed that D’Amato did nothing to influence her politics, instead claiming that Andrew Cuomo and Hillary Clinton (both extremely corrupt) had helped secure her political future. She specifically identifies Clinton as a mentor. However, for anyone familiar with New York politics, where the back-door deal and close-knit power networks reign supreme, the reality is likely quite different from what they publicly professed.

D’Amato is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, he was slavish to criminal banks throughout his career, many of which funded his political campaigns. For instance, he was a major supporter of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which allowed for the mergers that produced many of the “too big to fail” banks and later helped produce the 2008 financial crisis. D’Amato, while head of the Senate Banking Committee, had tried to speed up the passage of legislation that would repeal it. D’Amato had previously been bought out by Drexel Burnham Lambert, altering his stance on junk bond legislation that could have mitigated financial crises of the late 1980s, including that which led to Drexel’s bankruptcy in 1990. Gillibrand is backed by many of the same interests as J.P. Morgan – run by former Travelers Group executive Jamie Dimon – and Apollo Global Management – created by Drexel Burnham Lambert executives led by Drexel’s former head of M&A Leon Black – are among the current top donors to Gillibrand.

D’Amato is also important for his ties to organized crime networks that have become deeply embedded in U.S. politics and the American intelligence community, as discussed in the book One Nation Under Blackmail. For example, D’Amato was closely tied to both Roy Cohn and Cohn’s long-time law partner and right-hand man Tom Bolan, who was a close aide and advisor to D’Amato. Cohn was also reported to have been a major influence on D’Amato’s (unsuccessful) efforts to reduce sentences for a convicted mafia member as well as to push to re-evaluate murder charges against Gambino mafia boss Paul Castellano, a client of Cohn and Bolan’s law firm. As noted in One Nation Under Blackmail, Cohn – also widely recognized as Donald Trump’s mentor – was intimately connected to New York power networks as well as organized crime factions that worked with intelligence to blackmail prominent figures in government by hosting “parties” where targets were encouraged to have sex with minors.

Members of this faction have ties to the so-called “Mega Group” of billionaires, which is alleged to include figures like Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estee Lauder fortune, whose failed political career was backed by D’Amato. In addition, D’Amato’s later political campaigns intimately involved the Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who is also credited with securing Benjamin Netanyahu’s successful win as Israel’s Prime Minister in 1999. Finkelstein’s role in the Netanyahu campaign had been brokered by Ronald Lauder, who had also donated heavily to Netanyahu that election cycle.

Doug Rutnick, Gillibrand’s father and D’Amato’s close friend, as noted earlier, was also a lobbyist for the NXIVM sex cult, which was closely associated with the Bronfman family. The Bronfmans have a long-standing association with organization crime and Charles Bronfman co-created the aforementioned “Mega Group” with Leslie Wexner, the main patron of Jeffrey Epstein, in 1991. Both the Bronfmans and Wexner greatly influence and are major donors to the Israel lobby organization AIPAC, Gillibrand’s top donor from 2019-2024.

According to reports, Rutnick was paid $25,000 a month by NXIVM in 2004. Though the group’s sex cult aspect was still unknown at the time, it had been derided as a “cult” before he was hired. However, Gillibrand’s associations with NXIVM, unfortunately for her, appear to go far beyond just her father, with her stepmother having also been wooed by the group. The NXIVM executive who courted her stepmother, Nancy Salzman, is also alleged to have sat with Gillibrand at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser in 2006. A key figure in NXIVM, Clare Bronfman, was a major donor to Clinton and also contributed $2,400 to Gillibrand’s 2010 campaign to maintain Clinton’s old Senate seat.

The founder of NXIVM, Keith Raniere, is the son of James Raniere, a New York-based advertiser who handled his agency’s account for Seagrams and knew Edgar Bronfman Sr. professionally during the 1970s. Keith Raniere, an avid fan of Ayn Rand, reportedly considered the population to be divided into two classes – parasites and producers – which helped shape the cult’s views and even the 12 commandments of the organization. The 11^th NXIVM commandment, according to reporting from The Observer, required all members to “pledge to ethically control as much of the money, wealth and resources of the world as possible” due to being “essential for the survival of humankind for these things to be controlled by successful, ethical people.” Despite most New Age organizations’ rejection of materialism, NXIVM understood the importance of money in the modern age. As Sara Bronfman explained in 2009, the year Bitcoin was launched, “in order to survive in a Western capitalist country, one needs to be able to exchange the products of their efforts for money that’s going to allow them to live.”

Lummis, like Gillibrand, is also funded by Multicoin Capital. In Lummis’ case, Multicoin Capital was her 4^th largest donor last campaign cycle and the biggest giver to her campaign from the crypto industry. Multicoin Capital is mainly backed by Andreessen Horowitz as well as other figures linked to Peter Thiel or Thiel protégés, such as David Sacks of the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” Multicoin investors such as Chris Dixon and Elad Gil have ties to companies created by Thiel protégé Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR (acquired by Facebook) and the defense contractor Anduril. Gil is also an investor in Coinbase in addition to Multicoin. Mulitcoin, along with several of its backers (Chris Dixon, Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures), invested a significant sum alongside Peter Thiel in the Brock Pierce-founded firm behind EOS, Block.one.

Multicoin’s portfolio includes Paxos (which is also backed by Thiel’s Mithril Capital) and Worldcoin (founded by Thiel protégé Sam Altman) as well as Algorand, Ethereum and the now defunct crypto exchange FTX. Multicoin was significantly affected by FTX’s collapse in late 2022, as it had around 10% of the assets for one of its three funds at FTX and also had significant exposure to FTX’s over leveraged token FTT. Unlimited Hangout previously reported on FTX’s close ties to the stablecoin Tether as well as FTX’s own ambitions to back a different dollar-pegged stablecoin via its affiliation with the highly suspect Moonstone Bank. Sam Bankman-Fried, prior to FTX’s implosion, had spoken of a “stablecoin war” where different players in the crypto industry were fighting for dominance over whose stablecoin would dominate in a post-regulatory environment. Bankman-Fried notably had played an outsized role in efforts that preceded those of Gillibrand and Lummis to regulate digital assets in the United States.

Multicoin itself is also very interested in and has invested in stablecoins. They have a particularly interesting relationship with Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin. Circle Ventures is an investor in Multicoin, while Sei – which is backed by Multicoin – is an investor in Circle. According to Lummis, Circle is poised to benefit significantly more than its competitors from the stablecoin legislation she recently introduced with Kirsten Gillibrand.

Multicoin also led the Series A funding round for the Mountain Protocol, which produces USDM, a yield-bearing stablecoin backed entirely by short-term U.S. treasuries. Multicoin supports USDM in part because “USDM has the strongest regulatory moat today” compared to other dollar stablecoins and is “significantly ahead” when it comes to imminent stablecoin legislation. They write that they “are optimistic that USDM will become the market leader and scale to billions of people.” Coinbase Ventures also made a major investment in the Mountain Protocol, which is partnered not only with Coinbase itself but also the CIA-funded Chainalysis and the Israeli intelligence-linked Fireblocks. Within four months from its launch, USDM had become the largest Treasury-backed dollar stablecoin in the world.

Notably, yield-bearing stablecoins are absent from the Gillibrand-Lummis bill, even though such stablecoins can come with significant risk and often misstate the yield as gains rather than simply keeping up with monetary dilution. The lack of interest in addressing this type of stablecoin may be related to the fact that players much larger than Multicoin Capital, such as BlackRock, are launching their own yield-bearing stablecoins. BlackRock’s yield-bearing BUIDL token. Circle, which has a major alliance with BlackRock, offers conversion from BUIDL to its USDC stablecoin and USDM also only currently converts into USDC. In addition, Paxos, a Multicoin Capital and Thiel-backed stablecoin issuer partnered with PayPal, has also entered the playing field with their Lift Dollar (USDL) stablecoin.

In February 2024, both Treasury Secretary Yellen and Fed Chair Powell made remarks to Congress that the U.S. needs a legislative framework for stablecoins, stressing the importance they play in global dollar hegemony. Both Gillibrand and Lummis view their legislative efforts as largely aimed at ensuring dollar dominance. Lummis’ other crypto proposals, such as a recent introduction of bitcoin strategic reserve bill, are also aimed at “supercharging” the dollar. Lummis announced the strategic reserve proposal at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville, commenting that “Establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve would firmly secure the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency into the 21st century and ensure we remain the world leader in financial innovation.”

“Passing a regulatory framework for stablecoins is absolutely critical to maintaining the U.S. dollar’s dominance, promoting responsible innovation, protecting consumers and cracking down on money laundering and illicit finance,” according to Gillibrand. She also stated that:

“The bipartisan Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act preserves the dual banking system and gives both federal and state agencies roles in chartering and enforcement. It protects consumers by mandating one-to-one reserves, prohibiting algorithmic stablecoins, and requiring stablecoin issuers to comply with U.S. anti-money laundering and sanctions rules. To draft the strongest bill possible, our offices worked closely with the relevant federal and state agencies and I’m confident this legislation can earn the necessary support in the Senate and the House.”

In April, Lummis and Gillibrand introduced the Payment Stablecoin Act of 2024. Gillibrand referred to it as a “landmark bipartisan legislation that creates a clear regulatory framework for payment stablecoins that will protect consumers, enable innovation, and promote U.S. dollar dominance while preserving the dual banking system.” The bill itself would also allow stablecoins to be “issued by non-depository trust companies (nonbanks) when the nominal value of all its tokens is under $10 billion.” The text itself states that stablecoin issuers with a market cap above $10 billion would be required to be “a depository institution authorized as a national payment stablecoin issuer.”

According to reporting from Forbes, companies such as Circle or Paxos would “have two options to be able to continue to issue stablecoins” if this bill was to become law by “either a state nonbank pathway” or as “a depository institution at the federal or state level that becomes a national payment stablecoin provider.” Importantly, the bill expressly prohibits “any other form of stablecoin issuance” beyond being backed by 1:1 reserves of dollar denominated assets, including algorithmic payment stablecoins such as the failed TerraUSD, as discussed in The Chain of Consensus. The bill also contains an “extraterritorial clause” which means that, if codified into law, even companies operating outside the U.S., such as Tether, would be required to abide by the legislation simply due to dealing with U.S. dollar tokens.

“In order to meet the growing demand for our ever-evolving financial industry, we need to craft legislation that strikes the careful balance of establishing a clear and workable framework for stablecoins while protecting consumers,” explained Lummis. “Together, Senator Gillibrand and I worked to preserve our dual banking system and install guardrails that protect consumers and prevent illicit finance while ensuring we don’t derail innovation. Passing this bipartisan solution is critical to maintaining the U.S. dollar’s dominance and making certain the U.S. remains the world leader in financial innovation.”

The content of the bill was advised via “multiple rounds of technical assistance” from representatives of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Department of the Treasury, the National Economic Council, the New York Department of Financial Services, Wyoming Division of Banking and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. While developing the landmark bill, both Lummis and Gillibrand “worked closely” with “key industry lobbies and trade associations,” publishing six pages of statements from entities including the Digital Chamber of Commerce, the Association for Digital Asset Markets, the Blockchain Association, Fireblocks, Multicoin Capital, the Crypto Council for Innovation, Kraken, Coinbase, and even FTX’s SBF, among others.

Included in this collection of statements was a quote from J. Christopher Giancarlo – the former Chairman of the CFTC, current board member of Paxos and The Digital Chamber of Commerce, and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation – which stated:

“The Responsible Financial Innovation Act is what our country needs at this moment – a thoughtful, comprehensive approach to regulation that recognizes the potential of digital assets to drive American competitiveness on the global stage. The bill provides a common-sense path for digital asset exchanges to register with the CFTC and balances consumer protection and innovation. I look forward to working with Sen. Lummis and Sen. Gillibrand to ensure we have legal clarity for digital assets soon.”

Preserving The Dual Banking System: The Private-Public Partnership

The preface to the 2008 edition of Who Controls The Internet? by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu notes the pivot within the “net neutrality” movement. They note that, during the 1990s, the core belief was that government censorship of the internet was impossible, while the 2000s were spent lobbying the government to uphold and protect free speech on the web from threats emanating from internet service providers and adversarial foreign governments. The parallels to the cryptocurrency industry are astounding, complete with the formation of entirely new lobbying groups that perpetuate the notion that the adoption of the technology once framed as “kryptonite” to the nation state must now obtain “clarity” from legislators and regulators.

Two of the largest lobbying groups in the industry, Coin Center and The Digital Chamber of Commerce, have numerous connections to the parties covered thus far in The Chain series. Coin Center was previously advised by Xapo’s Wences Casares, in addition to both DCG’s Silbert and Paxos founder Charles Cascarilla being early funders. The original iteration of Coin Center’s advisory board featured Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Marc Andreeseen, World Economic Forum and Council of Foreign Relations member John Villasenor, and Jason Thomas, the creator and director of the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and Associate Director of the Center for Intelligence and National Security Analysis (CINSA). In addition, Lightning Lab’s Elizabeth Stark is listed as Coin Center Fellow. Notable early Bitcoiners Balaji Srinivasan and Jeff Garzik were also listed on the founding Board of Directors, with Srinivasan also being credited as a co-founder of Coin Center.

The Digital Chamber of Commerce was founded by CEO Perianne Boring, a former television anchor and “legislative analyst in the U.S. House of Representatives.” The current Board of Advisors boasts heavy U.S. regulatory stalwarts; including former SEC Chair Paul Atkins; former CFTC Chair J. Christopher Giancarlo; the godson of David Rockefeller and former Richard Nixon speech writer, George Gilder; former J.P Morgan executive and creator of the credit default swap, Blythe Masters; the DCG’s Rumi Morales; former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; and DRW and DRW Cumberland founder Don Wilson, among others.

Giancarlo, lovingly referred to by some as “CryptoDad,” has served on numerous boards related to the blockchain industry, including BlockFi, Paxos, and PolyMarket, among others. He previously had been appointed by President Obama to the CFTC in 2013, and was eventually made its chair by President Trump in 2017. Giancarlo also was appointed a Director of the Board Risk Committee for Nomura Holdings, in addition to his stint on the board at the American Financial Exchange (AFX). The AFX was founded by Dr. Richard Sandor in order to create new lending rate benchmarks in lieu of LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate), referred to as AMERIBOR.

Richard Sandor is credited with inventing financial derivatives in the 1970s and, during the 1980s, he was an executive at the scandal-ridden bank known for its role in the junk bond scandal and S&L crisis, Drexel Burnham Lambert. Shortly after Drexel’s implosion due to its financial criminality, Sandor was tapped by the Bush administration to develop a market-based “solution” for the acid rain crisis, resulting in sulfur emissions trading that was pioneered by groups like Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald. Shortly after the success of the sulfur emissions trading scheme, Sandor was sought out by Maurice Strong, a Rockefeller crony who served as founding director of the UN Environmental Programme and who was later fled to China to avoid prosecution for the egregious mishandling of UN funds in what is remembered as the oil-for-food scandal. Strong tasked Sandor with developing another market-based “solution” to carbon dioxide emissions in order to help implement Agenda 21, the pre-cursor to today’s “sustainable” development goals or SDGs. Sandor, with input from Strong, spent the next few years developing what is now known as the cap and trade system and has since become an advocate for creating similar markets for access to clean water and air.

Upon his announcement of joining Sandor’s AFX, Giancarlo stated: “Dr. Richard Sandor is one of the true visionary developers of new financial products. He has done it again with AMERIBOR and AMERIBOR Futures, recognizing that LIBOR will not be replaced with a singular benchmark, but with several. AMERIBOR is aptly designed to serve the particular need of America’s regional and community banks for an unsecured lending rate that is transparent, hedge-able and IOSCO compatible.”

PolyMarket, a prediction market that has come under scrutiny recently for facilitating alleged whale manipulation of their 2024 Trump/Harris election bet, announced the addition of Giancarlo as Chair of its board in May 2022 shortly after settling with the CFTC for $1.4 million. In May 2024, PolyMarket’s Series B founding round was led by Thiel’s Founders Fund, in addition to Ethereum founder and 2014 Thiel Fellow, Vitalik Buterin, among others. Upon the raise, PolyMarket also brought on former President of Cantor Fitzgerald’s Cantor Exchange, Richard Jaycobs, as the Head of Market Expansion, with reporting from Yahoo! claiming he will work “closely” with Giancarlo.

Three months after Giancarlo was appointed to the CFTC, in November 2013, the CFTC charged Donald R. Wilson and his company DRW Investments with price manipulation of interest rate swaps futures contracts, which “allegedly affected the prices of over 1,000 futures contracts,” according to the complaint. However, in December 2018, the CFTC lost their case against Wilson, having their compliant dismissed by Manhattan Circuit Judge, Richard Sullivan. Upon the ruling, according to reporting from Reuters, Giancarlo stated that “the regulator was considering its next steps,” but would “continue pursuing market manipulation cases, including at trial.” Judge Sullivan, a former counsel for Marsh & McLennan, was nominated by President Trump to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in May 2018, and was confirmed by the Senate in October 2018, just two months before the ruling. On February 27, 2019, the CFTC announced they would not appeal the dismissal from Sullivan. “[A]fter careful consideration of the issues, as well as discussions with agency staff and Commissioners, Chairman Giancarlo has decided that the agency will not appeal the district court’s decision in CFTC v. Wilson et al.,” according to CFTC Director of Public Affairs, Erica Elliott Richardson.

Exactly one week later, on March 6, the Chamber of Digital Commerce announced the addition of Wilson to its advisory board, in addition to seven new companies joining their executive committee, including Block.one, DRW’s Cumberland, MakerDao and TrustToken, the issuer of the stablecoin TrueUSD. Upon his appointment, Wilson stated that “as a member of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, we [DRW’s Cumberland] look forward to engaging the policy community around the importance and potential of these technologies and helping this emerging market mature.” Six months later, in September 2019, Giancarlo was also appointed to the Board of Advisors for the Chamber of Digital Commerce.

Giancarlo had previously been the U.S. legal counsel to Fenics Software, an online U.S. Treasury market formed by Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary BGC after selling their eSpeed product to Nasdaq. BGC is led by CEO and Chairman of the Board, Howard Lutnick, who now co-chairs the Trump transition team. In July 2022, BGC facilitated “the first ever intermediated block trade of CME Group Bitcoin options contracts in Asia” between Wilson’s Cumberland DRW and Goldman Sachs. Upon the settlement, Paul Kremsky, the Global Head of Business Development for Cumberland, stated that “Since Cumberland DRW first established an OTC cryptocurrency desk in 2014, the goal has always been to help usher institutions into the digital assets space.” Kremsky also added that “BGC will be a key partner in opening the growing asset class to a broader group of banks, funds, and investors, and Cumberland is extremely excited to work with them as a liquidity provider.”

Cumberland’s partnership with Tether (USDT) custodian Cantor Fitzgerald should be unsurprising, given that Cumberland is the second largest Tether customer, only behind FTX’s Alameda Research arm. Cumberland was considered an “incredibly important market maker on Binance” according to reporting from Protos, with approximately 79% of all USDT issued to Cumberland being sent directly to the world’s largest crypto exchange. Cumberland had also worked with Silbert’s Genesis lender, as was noted in a Tweet from Cumberland’s social media account. Cumberland is also “a very active participant” with other stablecoin providers, including Circle’s USDC and Binance’s BUSD (issued by Paxos), in addition to sending USDT to Coinbase, FTX, BitFinex and Huobi, among others.

Cumberland also participated in the 2021 President’s Working Group in their discussions on stablecoins, providing five recommendations to the administration, including giving “oversight authority to established banking regulators.” Cumberland also made clear the surveillance potential of digital dollars on blockchains, stating “stablecoins enable funds to be transferred 24/7, in real-time, globally, and with traceability,” while explaining that “existing banking solutions are unable to offer the same capabilities.” Both Coin Center and the Digital Chamber of Commerce offered similar comments regarding the future regulation of stablecoins. Interestingly, the Google Analytics ID for the Digital Chamber of Commerce’s website is reportedly linked to two of Tether co-founder Brock Pierce’s former companies, including Noble Bank and Blockchain Capital.

In August 2023, Coin Center referred to The Clarity for Stablecoins Act as one of “three good crypto bills” which “incorporates our guidance that stablecoins comprised purely of software not be subject to covered by regulation.” Coin Center would later push back on the Stablecoins Act provision for a two year moratorium on algorithmic stablecoins, citing “First and Fourth Amendment concerns” within the clause that states it is “unlawful for any person to engage in the business of issuing, creating, or originating an algorithmic payment stablecoin.” However, they would later backpedal and call this approach “not unreasonable” due to it being “not an outright permanent ban, but a two-year moratorium.” “It only prohibits future activity and does not affect existing projects,” the group explained, and “it does not prohibit speech, only the issuance of tokens that the ‘originator has represented will be converted, redeemed, or repurchased for a fixed amount of monetary value’.”

In October 2024, the Digital Chamber of Commerce (DCC) commented on the “Senate version” of the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, remarking that “the absence of a clear regulatory framework has held back its full potential.” Cody Carbone, the President of the DCC added that “Stablecoin regulation is no longer just an option – it’s a necessity that’s been overdue for too long.” Previously, in April 2023, the group had made general comments to the House Committee on Financial Services, articulating that “We believe clear, consistent legal standards for stablecoins are critical to the success of the digital asset and Web3 industries globally, preservation of U.S. primacy in development and innovation, and for U.S. national security by upholding and extending the dollar’s world reserve currency standing.”

The Digital Chamber has since expanded on this concept of dollar hegemony via stablecoins in a section titled “Stablecoins will preserve the U.S. dollar as the worlds reserve currency”:

“A federally regulated stablecoin regime that requires backing by cash and cash equivalents like U.S. treasury notes does not infringe on government’s issuing authority, it extends the use of the dollar. As digital assets pegged to a stable value, such as the U.S. dollar, stablecoins offer a unique combination of stability and accessibility, allowing for seamless cross-border transactions while minimizing the risks associated with volatility. This can help maintain global confidence in the U.S. dollar and ensure its continued dominance in international trade and finance.

Additionally, the widespread adoption of stablecoins can foster financial inclusion, bringing the benefits of digital currency to unbanked and underbanked populations around the world. By promoting the use of stablecoins, the U.S. can leverage the advantages of digital currencies to extend the reach and influence of the dollar in the rapidly evolving global financial landscape.”

This idea of stablecoins helping retain U.S. dollar hegemony was echoed by President Trump in his keynote at Bitcoin 2024. As articulated in previous reporting on Unlimited Hangout, Trump’s speech included intentions to “create a framework to enable the safe, responsible expansion of stablecoins […] allowing us to extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers all around the world.” Trump even went so far as to say that “those who say that Bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards” and that “Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar.” Of note is Trump’s comment that “there will never be a CBDC while I’m President of the United States,” despite his intention to use dollar-denominated stablecoins to spread the U.S.’s dominance across the globe.

This concept can also be found in a May 2024 post by Morgan Beller, the previously mentioned co-founder of the Libra project, titled “Stablecoins Are Defense Tech.” Beller’s missive states in the first paragraph that “One of my personal motivations behind Libra was national defense.” The piece also stated the following:

“Stablecoins are defense tech…The basic idea is that the future of money will be more digital than it is physical. And stablecoins – in this case, cryptocurrency pegged to a stable currency like the USD – are the best tool we have for digitizing the dollar. If we don’t digitize the dollar, we risk losing its position at the center of the financial world. If that happens, we will lose a critical pillar of US stability and leadership that most people are taking for granted right now…

If you are a stablecoin founder and you haven’t been thinking of yourself as a defense tech company, think again. And if you are a regulator who has been sleeping on stablecoins and the role they will play in the hegemony of the dollar, wake up… If we want to create stable infrastructure – for finance and even democracy (bear with me) – then we need to move quickly…

Being the world’s reserve currency is not a right. It is a privilege. It comes with some financial perks, like never having to go through an exchange process for trade, or the fact that we borrow money at lower interest rates (and, in a different light, it makes it easier for us to impose sanctions on other countries).

But the real power is security. If the dollar were to collapse it would have huge repercussions throughout the world economy. Much of the world’s monetary system is held together by the fact that the US is stable. Which means we are less likely to experience targeted attacks, financial warfare, hostile takeover…or worse…

From our American POV, the USD not as much a weapon as it is a shield…It has always confounded me that there are still US regulators that don’t see safe and secure stablecoin projects as our (benign) trojan horses for continued dominance of the US dollar. If you want to proliferate your currency through many stable assets, across many secure exchanges, what better option do you have than a stablecoin? It’s also free marketing for USD – an immediate way to give access to those dollars to millions more people around the world who want them through a decentralized network…

A diverse stablecoin ecosystem is exactly what we want to see. Not just for consumers, but for national security. Many projects pegged to the USD, means the dollar is way harder to overtake…

We have a network of stablecoin founders throughout the US who can step in to solve this problem for us, if we provide them with the resources and support they need. The crypto-obsessed out there like to focus on individual coin market caps, but come on guys: this is a team sport.

Technically and organizationally, stablecoins will allow the dollar to digitally proliferate…This is what I hope all stablecoin founders will come to realize, if you don’t know it already. Your work is a matter of national defense, and even a matter of democracy.”

This sentiment seems widely shared, with many key figures in both the public and private sectors seeing the future of the dollar in privately-issued dollar stablecoins in lieu of a U.S. issued central bank digital currency so that it perpetuates the “dual banking system,” allowing the government to service its budget and debt via the selling of Treasuries to private banks and companies, such as stablecoin issuers. It should be of little surprise that many of the companies poised to capture this trillion dollar industry via king-making regulation, including many of the firms covered thus far in The Chain series, have numerous connections to the first major player in online settlement, PayPal.

Regulatory Approval: The King’s New Market

One of Libra’s other co-founders, Christian Catalini, recently co-authored a piece for Harvard Business Review in August 2024 titled “The Race to Dominate Stablecoins.” The article opens with “Stablecoins, a novel form of interoperable and programmable money, have the potential to rewire the global financial system.” Catalini, along with his co-author Jane Wu, expresses the thesis that stablecoins are poised to displace legacy payment networks, with the “promise to change the balance of power in these industries,” and thus “the companies that control the stablecoin market will wield substantial influence over the future of money.” The piece furthers that the concept of “The Stablecoin War” has come to a head, and the winner(s) of this conflict will become dominating figures in the new global financial system, making parallels to other technology platform wars such as HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, VHS vs. Betamax, or even Macintosh vs. PC. Unsurprisingly, the piece, excerpted below, paints an outcome favorable to PayPal’s PYUSD issued by Paxos vs. the incumbents, Tether and Circle:

“The conclusion of a platform war is always the same: A dominant design emerges, everyone switches over, and the conflict is done…But while the blockchains war might be over, the one for stablecoin dominance is just beginning…

Stopping the consortium behind Libra only bought incumbents time, and things are heating up again… Regulation gives incumbents a chance to leverage their distribution and lobbying to slow things down to a halt while building a counteroffensive. This is what killed Libra, and others may face the same fate soon.

Stablecoins present a second chance at reforming the financial system. But whether they will be able to do so depends on the stablecoin wars — and whether regulators tip the scales in favor or against innovation…Irrespective of the unpredictable level of regulatory interference in the stablecoin wars, the most important question is whether we will end with one or two global players leading, or with a swarm of commoditized issuers.

For both Tether and Circle, we believe the strategy is simple: Adapt to tighter compliance and consumer protection standards without losing the ability to monetize the stablecoin ecosystem. This is a delicate balancing act, as stricter regulation will inevitably limit how issuers create and capture value…

Paxos is betting on a world with many stablecoins. By positioning itself as a stablecoin infrastructure provider, Paxos helps others issue branded stablecoins. This has been so effective that when PayPal decided to enter crypto, it partnered with Paxos. While PayPal’s PYUSD only has $350 million in circulation, market cap is the wrong metric if you care about payments rather than crypto trading and decentralized finance (DeFi). For stablecoins that want to compete with the card companies, total payments volume (TPV) will be a better metric, and that’s where PayPal could rapidly overtake USDC thanks to its existing merchant business…

So while Tether and Circle have dominated the crypto era, graduating from this niche, unregulated market to billions of consumers and businesses is a fundamentally different game.”

Catalini left Meta after the Libra project was shuttered, only to shortly join former PayPal President David Marcus at LightSpark. LightSpark later partnered with Xapo, Ripio, and Coinbase in order to help facilitate their Lightning Network builds, including launching their Universal Money Address standard with Xapo and Ripio. Both of which boast ties to the Endeavor Argentina network, with Endeavor itself largely funded by Pierre Omidyar, the previous owner of PayPal who remains its largest shareholder. LightSpark’s roster is chock full of former PayPal employees, including Marcus, VP of Product Nicolas Cabrera, CMO Christina Smedley, Operating Partner Tomer Barel, in addition to former Libra team members, including Catalini, Head of Engineering Vincent Durmont, CTO Kevin Hurley, CDO Geoff Teehan, and VP of Finance, Mary Kauffman. LightSpark was funded by investments from Mickey Malta’s Ribbit Capital, Paradigm, a16z crypto, Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Beller’s NFX, and Coatue, among others.

In October 2024, LightSpark announced their own Bitcon Layer 2 platform Spark, which enables native issuance of stablecoins, while also allowing the transfer of stablecoins issued by other means, including Lighting Lab’s Taproot Assets. LightSpark also announced an upgrade to their UMA product, UMA Extend, which integrates Bitcoin’s Lightning Network directly with traditional banking systems for 44 fiat currencies in over 100 countries. VP of Product Nicolas Cabrera stated that “this is the first time connecting the Lightning Network to traditional banking routes and bank systems.” Marcus himself stated that “At the end of the day, if you build a more efficient network that enables global money movements to move faster, cheaper, in real time 24/7 with no blackout dates, then that’s where money is going to flow and the financial system and the ecosystem players are just going to need to adapt to that.” Due to Diem’s previous partnership with Paxos, the issuer of PYUSD, and Marcus’ relationship with PayPal, it seems likely that LightSpark could eventually add support for PayPal’s stablecoin.

Paxos’ Head of Strategy, Walter Hessert, expressed positive sentiments on PYUSD’s adoption in a conversation with Bitcoin Magazine in October 2023, stating “PYUSD certainly has an opportunity to be one of the largest, if not the largest stablecoin in the market over the coming years.” Hessert also stated that “we’re going to be in a market that is trillions of dollars of stablecoins, which are privately issued and highly regulated,” whereas “PayPal has set the standard for regulatory oversight.” In a slight to these incumbent issuers, Hessert asserted that “the USDT or USDC models of regulation,” or “lighter forms of oversight” are not “going to be sufficient anymore, and “that PayPal has a really, really great opportunity to take a big share of this next wave of growth.”

This regulation, which Hessert claims will dictate the future of stablecoins, is set to come to a head during the imminent 2024 Presidential election. Trump’s pick for Vice President, J.D. Vance, who has numerous connections to Peter Thiel and the extended PayPal mafia, was formerly a principal at Thiel’s Mithril Capital, a major investor in Paxos. Leading Trump’s Transition Team is Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald which custodies Tether’s Treasuries, who has recently come under scrutiny for “improperly mixing his business interested with his duties standing up a potential administration.” According to reporting from Politico, Lutnick took meetings on Capitol Hill under the guise of transition team matters, then “allegedly us[ed] the opportunity to talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald,” which included “high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business.” In regards to the conflict of interest, Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, articulated “to have a guy who is in the crypto industry picking financial regulators, I think, is an invitation for trouble.”

In addition, another member of the Trump transition team, former Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out to campaign on behalf of Trump and whose top aide joined the Trump campaign in November 2023, founded Strive Asset Management in 2022, and was promptly funded by Lutnick and Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, after receiving seed funding from Peter Thiel.

In September 2024, Trump announced plans to launch his own cryptocurrency, known as World Liberty Financial, which pegged Rich Teo – the co-founder of Paxos, as noted in The Chain of Issuance – to serve as their stablecoin lead. World Liberty Financial’s mission, according to a Tweet, is to “make crypto and America great again by driving the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance.” Another tweet from World Liberty Financial reads, “By spreading U.S.-pegged stablecoins around the world, we ensure that the U.S. dollar’s dominance continues, securing America’s financial leadership and influence on the global stage.”

In August 2024, Anchorage Digital announced a partnership with PayPal in which they would offer stablecoin rewards for holders of PYUSD. Anchorage Digital, as noted previously in The Chain series, was the first and only digital asset bank to receive a Federal Charter charter from the OCC in January 2021, which was given to Anchorage in the final days of the Trump administration. The head of the OCC at the time, Brian Brooks, a former co-worker at OneWest Bank with Secretary Mnuchin and the former Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase, left the public sector to join Binance’s U.S. exchange for three months before joining Bitcoin miner Bitfury . Anchorage has been funded by Visa, BlackRock, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, PayPal Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Alameda Research, Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Naval Ravikant and Leon Black’s Apollo. In October 2024, Anchorage investor PayPal Ventures announced the future use of PYUSD as a funding mechanism for all future investments. Anchorage’s board features Blockchain Capital co-founder, P. Bart Stephens, in addition to a16z’s Chris Dixon, and Paradigm’s Kate Biber. It is also currently advised by former U.S. Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, former Soros Fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.

While the initial promise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was to minimize government control over the issuance of money, the killer use case of blockchain technology thus far has been the tokenization of dollars backed by U.S. Treasuries. This premise, albeit with the added public and immutable ledger, is shockingly similar to the current “dual banking system” referenced by Gillibrand and Lummis. Capital creation remains the ultimate public-private partnership, in which the Treasury creates bonds, the Fed sets the rate of yield over set durations, and private banks use these securities to back dollars in checking accounts.

In a stablecoin economy – at least one in which non-Treasury-backed, algorithmic alternatives are neutered by public sector regulation penned in response to private sector crimes – the premise is precisely the same. The main differences, unfortunately, are due to the nature of public blockchains, in which every and all transactions are published transparently in a novel database structure allowing total observation of financial data, including account balances, payment size and denominations, and even the account addresses of senders and receivers. This is seemingly a significant disadvantage from legacy payment rails, which solely provides financial information to the select banking institutions involved in settling the payment. Government regulation generally restricts this type of data from being sold or made available to the public en masse, outside of the case of hacks stemming from irresponsible data protections.

The financial information to be gleaned from a public blockchain economy has created a scenario in which no longer do information brokers or intelligence agencies need warrants or regulatory approval to track and trace these digital payments. As Max Levchin put it, “There is no such thing as technology that is strictly for good.” This sentiment was articulated by the former Acting Director of the CIA, Michael Morell, who called the technology behind Bitcoin a “boon for surveillance.” Morell wrote a piece titled “An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Use in Illicit Finance” in which he furthered that “blockchain technology is a powerful but underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity and bring criminals to justice,” and that “Put simply, blockchain analysis is a highly effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool.”

The piece sets the premise that governments should not fight this technology, but rather embrace it as means to combat illicit finance. Within the report, a current CFTC official stated that it “is easier for law enforcement to trace illicit activity using Bitcoin than it is to trace cross-border illegal activity using traditional banking transactions, and far easier than cash transactions.” Another unnamed expert told the authors that “the chance of catching illicit actors” is “magnitudes greater” using “blockchain than in the traditional banking sector,” while another “went so far as to say” that “if all criminals used blockchain, we could wipe out illicit financial activity.” Another expert drove this point home, with the report stating that “the biggest threat involving cryptocurrencies is not illicit finance but rather that governments do not yet fully understand the power of blockchain as a tool for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

This sentiment was echoed by Tether founder Brock Pierce in a conversation at Idealab, the California technology incubator known for being PayPal’s first institutional investor, as covered in The Chain of Issuance:

“Bitcoin is not really anonymous. Imagine if I had a dollar bill and passed it to you and then that bill was signed that this transaction was conducted and that bill got passed around. Every transaction that occurs with a Bitcoin is permanently recorded, maybe not with my identity directly associated with it, but in the same way that you thought you would post things on the internet 5 or 10 years ago, and that might not ever be tracked back to you, at some point pretty much every Bitcoin transaction is going to be connected back to an individual. So anonymity is actually not its real use case.”

Peter Thiel himself has also perpetuated this idea, stating that “people in the FBI tell me that they’d much rather have criminals use Bitcoin than 100 dollar bills.” Thiel’s CIA-linked Palantir even announced in 2021 that they were considering adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet, and that it currently accepts Bitcoin as payment for its products and services. While banks like J.P. Morgan and Citi are widely considered to be the forefathers of information banking, PayPal’s Max Levchin insinuates that it was in fact PayPal that pioneered this data-driven behavioral analysis which, when paired with its anti-fraud algorithim “Igor” – the precursor to Thiel’s Palantir– created a formidable private-sector intelligence broker:

“At PayPal, which I co-founded many years ago and was a CTO for the first four years – right after we got acquired by eBay, I left – we sort of pioneered that concept, I would say, by capturing human behavioral data in the transactional processing, that we’ve seen millions of those per day, to gain such deep understanding of what people would do that we were able to predict their intentions sometimes before they knew their own intentions”

According to Thiel, PayPal was the first company to file in the U.S. for a public offering after the events of 9/11. The downstream effects of that day would have large implications for the world at large, and the reactionary regulations the U.S. put in place would both limit capabilities of new ventures, while king-making incumbents such as PayPal. As Thiel himself stated, “I actually do not know if a company like PayPal could have been started even two, three years later.” He would further articulate this concept in an interview with The Rubin Report:

“In the aftermath of 9/11, we got the Patriot Act in the U.S and that attached, you know, much more regulatory scrutiny to financial transactions, to payments, that know-your-customer rules became much, much trickier. And so I do think that there’s a weird way in which there was an opening to start a business like PayPal in 1999, 2000, [but] even three years later, I think it might not have been possible.”

While Thiel claims to be a libertarian – despite being a government contractor and an FBI informant, among other hypocrisies – his first real success as a business, not to mention his first major windfall of cash, was cemented in its near-monopoly in no small part due to government regulation after a major destructive event. Unfortunately, the parallels to the controlled demolition of FTX and Terra-LUNA to the mass casualty event of 9/11, at least in regards to inspiring king-making government regulation, are numerous. For starters, there were mass profits made by those equipped with insider knowledge informing their short positions, and further, the proliferation of government-endorsed technological answers to criminal activity has led to constitutional conflicts with massive impacts on the privacy of the country’s citizens, not to mention the world population at large, all under the guise of protecting people.

Thiel overtly expressed the need for redistributing the compromises between security and freedom in his essay “The Straussian Moment,” in which he wrote that “the brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics,” further stating:

“The twenty-first century started with a bang on September 11, 2001. In those shocking hours, the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed of the modern age, with its emphasis on deterrent armies, rational nation-states, public debates, and international diplomacy, was called into question.

For how could mere talking or even great force deter a handful of crazy, determined, and suicidal persons who seemingly operated outside of all the norms of the liberal West? And what needed now to be done, given that technology had advanced to a point where a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death?

The awareness of the West’s vulnerability called for a new compromise, and this new compromise inexorably demanded more security at the expense of less freedom. On the narrow level of public policy, there needed to be more x-ray machines at airports; more security guards on airplanes; more identification cards and invasions of privacy; and fewer rights for some of the accused. Overnight, the fundamentalist civil rights mania of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which spoke in the language of inviolable individual rights, was rendered an unviable anachronism.

Even as the debate over freedom and security gathered strength, whatever military force could be mustered was used to track down those responsible for the violence of September 11… On the broader level of international cooperation and development, September 11 called for wholly different arrangements. The issue of unilateralism, and of the institutions designed to provide a cover for unilateralism, could be raised publicly by serious people for the first time since 1945.”

Serious People: Satoshi Nakamoto, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel

One of these “serious people” would be the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, who understood that “technology had advanced to a point where a tiny number of people” could fundamentally change the world. Despite once claiming that “if we knew who it was, the government would arrest him,” Thiel believed he had actually met Satoshi on a beach in Anguilla during a financial cryptography conference a year before the events of 9/11:

“My sort of theory on Satoshi’s identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla… I met them on the beach in Anguilla in February of 2000. We were beginning the revolution against the central banks on the beach in Anguilla. We were going to make PayPal interoperable with E-Gold and blow up all the central banks… Bitcoin was the answer to E-Gold, and Satoshi learned that you had to be anonymous and you had to not have a company. Even a company, even a corporate form, was too governmentally linked.”

Thiel had previously told the story of traveling to Anguilla with PayPal’s cryptographer and CTO, Max Levchin, in a 2004 discussion with Levchin at Stanford University:

Levchin: “We were not the first company in digital payments. In fact, a decade of digital payment attempts had just been capped off with a very spectacular flame out by a company called DigiCash. And literally a couple of nights before I met Peter, I went to the shutdown party of DigiCash which was on Stanford grounds. And it was a bankruptcy and it was a CEO brought in to just, you know, dispense with the employees and dispose of the intellectual property. It was really bad news. The whole cost of digital cash has been around for about 25 years, so certainly we were not the first ones. I think we were the first ones to compromise wisely on the notion of user interface being actually useful, as opposed to complicated, or just purely secure.”

Thiel: “There’s a three-way trade-off between privacy security and convenience and if you get any two of them 100% the third one you’ll be at 0% and that would be bad. I remember Max and I went to this financial crypto conference in Anguilla. We have all these people to try and develop new payment system, they have a conference on this, and in February of 2000, we went there and we decided, you know, all these people working on this for 10-15 years, and we announced we have figured out the formula for how to do payments online and how to actually create a new digital currency, and it is hard to to understate the degree of anger and resentment that the people felt.”

Levchin: “So when Peter and I went there, I made a promise in February 1999 that I will come back and I’m gonna do something very obnoxious if PayPal is successful because I wanted to make a point that, you know, we have figured it out because people were really not very friendly… I actually gave a talk at Financial Crypto 2000 and I think Peter wasn’t in the audience because he slept through, but I forgave him later on. The talk was titled ‘No One Needs Anonymous Digital Cash’ and the whole point of the talk was really ‘Look, there’s this trade off.’ There’s privacy, security and convenience, and if you get the security perfectly and privacy perfectly, convenience is gonna go to hell, and you just have to deal with that and compromise. The talk was fairly academic, and I was really trying to make a point, and they sort of involved a lot of math. But I basically had two slides. The first slide had all of my math and all of my academic stuff in it, and a second slide, I had a dramatic pause and I said, ‘Look, if you don’t believe me, look at my slide.’ That’s a 250,000 users, which is what we had at the time. The largest number of users DigiCash has ever seen was, I think, 2000. So it was a very quiet moment in the audience, then people started to boo me offstage.”

In 1975, long before Levchin would explain how he and Thiel had “figured out the formula” for online payments and “how to actually create a new digital currency” at the same Anguilla conference Thiel speculated he had met Satoshi, Maksymilian Rafailovych Levchyn was born into a family of physicists in Soviet-era Ukraine. In 1991, Levchin and his family departed the Soviet Union under political asylum, boarding a PanAm flight in Moscow with only $700 to their name, before arriving in Chicago. As the story goes, before the wheels had touched ground in Illinois, the USSR had collapsed. “My family immigrated to the United States as refugees. I was a man without a country,” explained Levchin. “My red Soviet passport was a passport to no country. America offered us safety and opportunity.”

Levchin attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Computer Science alongside two future PayPal co-founders, Luke Nosek and Scott Banister. Levchin stated in 2013 that he “spent [his] entire college career reading up on distributed networking [and] distributed systems, which was all about bringing intelligence all the way to the edge.” Between his studies, Levchin also demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit, founding SponsorNet New Media in 1994, NetMomentum Software in 1996, and NetMerdian Software in 1997. His alleged reasoning for continuing the trend of naming his companies with SN or NS as initials was simply because he wanted to retain the use of a logo featuring the letters. All of these companies would focus on early online advertising, with SponsorNet focusing on ad banners, while NetMomentum and NetMeridian would built out early “white-label classifieds for newspaper sites.” Both Nosek and Banister were involved in SponsorNet while still students, although the company was a failure.

Levchin graduated in 1997, and promptly headed to Silicon Valley – specifically a couch in Banister’s apartment in Palo Alto – where he would encounter the then-currency speculating Thiel, whose main venture at the time was Thiel Capital. Before PayPal, or X.com, or even Confinity, there was FieldLink, a 1998 technology startup founded by Levchin, Thiel and Nosek, which was focused on applying cryptography on handheld devices for enterprise use. “I was one of the first developers of the PDA… and I was like one day, everyone is gonna use these at work,” Levchin recalled telling Thiel. “What do you think they’re gonna do when the man is gonna try to read their documents, when their customers are gonna steal all their data? They’re gonna encrypt it. And I’m gonna invent all the crypto.”

But the community was small and the applications dreamed up by Levchin and his compatriots were early, leading him to describe FieldLink as “early Christians in the first century… waiting for the second coming.” In 1999, a year before the aforementioned Anguilla conference, Levchin appeared at the International Financial Cryptography Association conference to pitch the company’s – now known as Confinity – on the concept of “a cashless, all digital, PalmPilot-based money system.” The response was hardly enthusiastic, perhaps dimmed by the recent failure of DigiCash.

Despite the conference-goers sentiment of rejection, Confinity soon scrounged up significant investments from Nokia Ventures, Idealab, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs before the millennium’s close. In a widely publicized event now referred to as “Beaming At Buck’s,” the PayPal co-founders “beamed the capital [raised] for its first round between Palm Pilots,” arguably marking “the first time in history money was ever transferred electronically.”

Pete Buhl of Nokia Ventures, which had invested $4.5 million in Confinity, stood across from Thiel, both equipped with PalmPilots, and after positioning their infrared ports correctly, “beamed” the entirety of the Nokia-invested capital across the California restaurant. Levchin, who had spent many sleepless nights preparing for the 9AM event, made sure to express it was anything but a publicity stunt in a 2004 conversation with Thiel, stating: “And it was really for real…I kid you not…it was a real encrypted transaction.” Buck’s of Woodside, an aptly-named, Americana-decorated breakfast joint which sits between Stanford University and the VC breeding ground, Sand Hill Road, was owned by Jamis MacNiven, who has posed in photos that adorn the walls of Buck’s with prominent public figures like Yitzhak Rabin and George Bush. The event was both a technological and social success, leading to many features in papers, and effectively putting the-soon-to-be PayPal on the map. Or, at least, in investors’ Rolodexes:

“Three million dollars, Palm pilots, breakfast at Bucks, it was actually a technology story that sort of made sense and got written in a number of papers, number of press coverage.. And at that point on the investor side, people just started banging down the door and I remember the range from sort of the very respectable, sketchy, and the seemingly respectable but really sketchy..

I remember the classic example of the second type was about a month later, we installed this one thousand square foot office, we had about fifteen people working at the company in a thousand square foot office at University Avenue in Palo Alto and this delegation from Japan showed up, Six Japanese business suits and ties and “We would like to form a relationship with your company and we read about you in the newspaper and we like to invest.” Over the next three, four months, it was this iterative process.. We fly to Tokyo a few months later and one of our Japanese advisers told us, “Hikari Suchen, they’re a very aggressive company and many people of Japan do not like them.” And I thought, “That’s great! We want people who are aggressive and who will be able to move quickly.”

And two months later as we were ready to close another round, they called me up at midnight and said, told me, “I’ve been getting orders from Tokyo.. I must invest $20 million in your company.” And I said, “Well, I can’t really take any of your money right now but can we rest half a million…” It was just, it was really, really crazy.. Although, a few months later, we figured out that they were actually a front organization for organized crime in Japan.. And of course we’ve been warned very clearly by our Japanese adviser although the slight translation problem didn’t quite catch it…”

While the technology certainly worked, then-Confinity board member Reid Hoffman questioned its practicality outside of their PalmPilot-dense Silicon Valley bubble. According to Jimmy Soni’s The Founders, Hoffman pushed the company to utilize this technology via another medium, stating: “We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots, and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” Allegedly, Hoffman postulated that “the answer was between zero and one per restaurant.” Leading Hoffman to determine that “your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.” And further more, what happened if a PayPal user forgot their PalmPilot at home? Levchin would quickly hack together a “backup” email service, allowing PDA-less users to still be able to send money electronically simply by using an email provider. While initially designed as a “throwaway demo” banished to the corner of PayPal.com, Levchin increasingly found himself “using the email service to test transaction functionality” due to its convenience over the hardware instance.

The future COO of PayPal, David Sacks, would later stress during his job interview that he would only join the company if they made the email service the main product offering, bringing up a few problems with the PDA approach: “One is that there are only five million Palm users, so unless you’re with somebody who also had a PalmPilot, the app is useless. And then there’s the other problem, even if you’re with somebody who’s got a PalmPilot, what would you use it for? Nobody could really come up with anything better than splitting dinner tabs.” The Primordial PayPal Mafia was, of course, directionally correct, and while PalmPilots were overtaken by smartphones by the end of the 2000s, today, email remains one of the most widely-used technologies in history.

Unfortunately for Levchin, the viral network growth of PayPal led to a plethora of fraud, as covered in The Chain of Issuance, and the majority of his time as CTO of PayPal was spent focused on anti-fraud efforts. This effort led to the creation of the Gausebeck-Levchin Test, used essentially as a reverse-Turing test – meaning the successful completion of the test would prove one is a human, and not a computer – and was the first commercial application of CAPTCHA, ultimately being instrumental in limiting fraud on their website. Within the constant fight to stop the bleeding of funds lost to fraudulent activity, Levchin collaborated heavily with government intelligence and law enforcement. He later stressed these relationships in a controversial conversation with Charlie Rose in 2013, stating “When we were working on security and anti-fraud measures at PayPal, we collaborated with every imaginable three and four-letter agency and those were some of the best, most productive relationships I’ve had as a business person.”

Levchin’s affinity for the intelligence community started far before PayPal’s founding, during his early days exploring cryptography, once stating “I was hooked [on cryptography], and even tried to apply to the NSA for an internship, but was promptly rebuffed because I was not (yet) a U.S. citizen.” A few weeks after his Charlie Rose appearance, Levchin appeared at TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF 2013 to clarify his statements, articulating:

“When I was a in college, I applied to the NSA. I couldn’t get accepted because I was not a citizen yet…I was a crypto nerd. I was very excited about applying cryptography for the good of the country that I literally just came to. [The NSA recruiter] said the one thing you should be very clear about [is that] not only will you get paid peanuts, you will also never achieve fame as a mathematician because you are not allowed to publish any result that you find as a mathematician under the employment of the NSA.”

During the 2019 SFELC Summit sponsored by Hoffman’s Greylock Partners – a firm with numerous ties to the CIA and the intelligence community, as described in The Chain of Custody – Levchin suggested that law enforcement was still reaching out to him for information regarding the aforementioned trip with Thiel to Anguilla. Levchin explained that in attendance at the Financial Cryptography conference “there were three types of people,” including “broke students like me,” “real cryptographers like the R and the S of the RSA” and “a bunch of guys in two-piece suits that spoke with really heavy Eastern European accents” asking for help with private payments. He would further reveal that “on occasion, I still get calls from investigators saying ‘Hey, did you meet this person 20 odd years ago at Anguilla?’” In the same spirit, in 2015, Levchin joined the advisory board at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a “watchdog agency created by the Obama administration to police financial institutions.”

At the start of 2016, Levchin would announced the creation of Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography, stating in a LinkedIn post that “I hope that this prize encourages younger researchers – especially students – to think about how cryptographic principles can be applied to improve the many flawed systems of today.” The post concluded with the sentiment that “at a time when governments and corporations are scrambling to stem the rising tide of data breaches, cryptography has never been more important to the security of our economy and our personal privacy.” During the 2022 Levchin Prize Award Ceremony, the committee requested nominations for future prize winners, with the caveat that “we’re a bit bored of Satoshi getting nominated because who would we give it to?”

Levchin himself, in 2017, told CNBC that “It’s a brilliant mathematical idea, fantastic technology, interesting commodity to speculate on.” While unsure on Bitcoin itself – “I’m still trying to figure it out” – he expressed a firm belief in the underlying database structure itself, stating: “I think a form of a blockchain technology, bitcoin or otherwise will be essential and will not go away. Not only that, it will continue advancing and being used in many different industries from financial technology to medicine. But it’s not clear to me whether Bitcoin itself is the great long-term investment.” Alluding to the similar “digital gold” argument of his PayPal Mafia counterparts, Levchin claimed it was “TBD [to be determined] on whether it’s a currency or just a way to make money fast.”

Despite his public-facing ignorance on Bitcoin in 2017, in 2014, Levchin admitted to investing in a “friend’s startup that mines Bitcoin.” Presumably, this startup was Balaji Srinivasan’s 21e6, which raised $70 million in 2013 from Levchin’s compatriots, Peter Thiel and David Sacks, in addition to Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. According to Nathaniel Popper’s Digital Gold, “the 21e6 investment was attractive in part because venture capital firms generally felt that they couldn’t buy Bitcoins directly. 21e6, on the other hand, offered to pay its investors back with Bitcoin dividends, allowing the firm to get Bitcoins without buying them outright.” Levchin would confirm this payment arrangement in the aforementioned 2014 interview, stating “they paid dividends in Bitcoin. I’ve never taken my dividend, but I believe they declared at least one. So, I actually have some Bitcoin to my name somewhere.”

In a 2014 conversation with Pando, Levchin expressed admiration for Bitcoin’s white paper, stating “The math behind the original paper, which I read it a many, many times before I decided I actually believed it, is beautiful.” He also added that “the fact that it’s a distributed ledger without a third-party trust system is awesome, and a fundamental breakthrough.” Levchin would also seemingly take a positive stance on the underlying database structure, if not Bitcoin a a currency itself, claiming “I am confident that there will be a form of settlement that will be a cryptocurrency. And the ledger piece, there’s no need to reinvent that. The bitcoin distributed ledger is a fundamentally sound idea and it will get used, maybe in a slightly different format.”

Thiel would take a slightly differing approach with his public views on Bitcoin, stating that, despite its lack of a payment system, it held much potential. In a 2017 interview with Fox Business, Thiel articulated this idea further:

“It’s like a reserve form of money. It’s like gold and it’s just a store of value. You don’t actually need to use it to make payment… If bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold and it has a great potential left and it’s a very different kind of thing from what people in Silicon Valley focus on – companies, not algorithms not protocols – but this might be maybe one exception that is very underestimated.”

In a telling comparison, back in 2014, Thiel concluded that “Bitcoin is the opposite of PayPal, in the sense that it actually succeeded in creating a currency.”

PayPal: The New World Currency

In March 2014, a group of early Bitcoiners descended on Lake Tahoe to visit the vacation home of Dan Morehead, a former Goldman Sachs trader who started Pantera Capital after leading the global macro desk at Tiger Management. Morehead, a Princeton graduate, was one of the first investors of Coinbase and his Pantera firm became one of the largest cryptocurrency holders in the world. This meeting, known as Bitcoin Pacifica, attracted the likes of Mt.Gox’s Jed McCaleb, Kraken’s Jesse Powell, BitGold’s Nick Szabo, BTCC’s Bobby Lee and SatoshiDice’s Erik Voorhees, among others. Another unnamed guest was identified as a New York trader who formerly worked at the NSA. As described in the book Digital Gold, after this ex-NSA agent brought up the idea that Bitcoin likely came out of his former agency, one of the first Bitcoin evangelists, Voorhees, revealed his “pet theory” on the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Voorhees speculated that Satoshi was “actually a small circle of programmers at some major tech firm, who had been assigned by their company to come up with a new form of online money.” He speculated the firm’s executives deemed the project “too dangerous,” and thus its creators decided to release it anonymously.

While unbeknownst to most, and in spite of their obvious, world-changing success, the true founders’ vision for PayPal and its “new world currency” never materialized before the formative group of early PayPal-ers had moved on to other enterprises. It wasn’t until 2009, with the launch of Bitcoin, or perhaps not until the 2014 founding of Tether – the first USD stablecoin – or maybe not until the 2015 launch of Ethereum, that PayPal’s original vision was achieved. But certainly, as this series implies, it had materialized by PayPal’s 2020 integration with Paxos and the subsequent 2023 announcement of PYUSD. While Thiel’s intended expressions for “world domination” are easy to naively dismiss as enthusiastic rhetoric, his company’s goal to create a new world currency was anything but an afterthought. Brought up in board meetings, discussed in their Silicon Valley offices, and even printed across their T-shirts, PayPal’s aspirations to dismantle the legacy financial system with technology has been publicly resurrected by the emergence of the cryptocurrency industry.

As the former COO of PayPal David Sacks explained to CNBC in 2017, “Bitcoin is fulfilling PayPal’s original vision.” He stated:

“After PayPal I never thought I would get interested in payments again. But bitcoin is fulfilling PayPal’s original vision to create ‘the new world currency.’ We actually had T-shirts printed in 1999 with that mission statement. A payment is just a credit to one account and a debit to another. That’s a database entry. We believed that, if we could get enough people to participate, money would never need to leave the system. PayPal could become the database of money. We added features like interest and debit cards so you’d never have to withdraw funds to the legacy banking system. When we got acquired by eBay, that project kind of stopped. But cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are now fulfilling that original vision. They are doing it in a decentralized way (with a decentralized database called the blockchain) whereas PayPal tried to do it in a centralized way…

In its purest form, currency is confidence. It’s a network effect around an agreed-upon medium of exchange that has some promise of scarcity. Bitcoin enforces its scarcity through a combination of cryptography and economic incentives (“cryptoeconomics”). A lot of people find that more comforting than relying on the good faith of a government. In math we trust. People in the U.S. – and especially longtime participants in the U.S. financial system – have tended to underestimate bitcoin because we have long enjoyed relatively stable political and financial systems. People in parts of the world with less trusted systems have gotten it sooner because almost anything would be preferable to having their life’s work trapped in a fiat currency that could collapse or be confiscated at any moment.”

While these comments were made in 2017, they sound eerily similar to those made by Thiel before 2000 in the early PayPal offices. In The PayPal Wars, the insider account of PayPal from an early marketing hire Eric M. Jackson, an illuminating company meeting led by Thiel is depicted in which the young entrepreneur articulates an apparent altruistic good that comes downstream from the technology-driven dollarization of the developing world, and what PayPal was intending to deliver:

“We’re definitely onto something big. The need PayPal answers is monumental. Everyone in the world needs money – to get paid, to trade, to live. Paper money is an ancient technology and an inconvenient means of payment. You can run out of it. It wears out. It can get lost or stolen. In the twenty-first century, people need a form of money that’s more convenient and secure, something that can be accessed from anywhere with a PDA or an Internet connection.

Of course, what we’re calling ‘convenient’ for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Many of these countries’ governments play fast and loose with their currencies…They use inflation and sometimes wholesale currency devaluations, like we saw in Russia and several Southeast Asian countries last year, to take wealth away from their citizens. Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars.

Eventually PayPal will be able to change this. In the future, when we make our service available outside the U.S. and as Internet penetration continues to expand to all economic tiers of people, PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before. It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

Thiel would conclude that he has “no doubt that this company has the chance to become the Microsoft of payments, the financial operating system of the world.”

While PayPal may have faltered where Bitcoin thrived, as articulated in The Chain series, their fingerprints are all over the history of Bitcoin. As an early PayPal programmer states in The PayPal Wars, “Why move atoms in order to exchange bits?” In 2009, the first year of the network’s existence, Martti Malmi, a Satoshi-collaborator and software developer from Finland, made the first ever Bitcoin transaction for dollars, selling 5,050 BTC for $5.02 to early Bitcoiner NewLibertyStandard, with the dollar-end of the transaction settled using PayPal. NewLibertyStandard then started the first ever Bitcoin exchange, New Liberty Standard (NLS), which settled it fiat needs using PayPal, allowing the first ever Bitcoin/USD exchange rate to be published on NLS on October 5, 2009. Another early Bitcoin exchange, The Bitcoin Market, went live in March 2010, using PayPal again for all dollar-denominated needs. Even Jed McCaleb’s Mt.Gox, the first prominent exchange of Bitcoin, also handled all their dollar settlements using PayPal.

PayPal itself wouldn’t publicly affiliate itself with Bitcoin until April 2013 when then-President of PayPal David Marcus told Bloomberg “I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at it and it’s truly fascinating. The way that the currency has been designed and the way inflation is built in to pay for miners and all of that is truly fascinating… I think for us at PayPal, it’s just a question of whether bitcoin will make its way … as a funding instrument or not.” Marcus concluded by stating, “We’re kind of thinking about it.” Seven months later, in November 2013, eBay President John Donahoe echoed this idea, telling the Financial Times that PayPal (then-owned by eBay) may one day accept Bitcoin natively. In September 2014, PayPal even released a short promotional video titled “PayPal Voices” that included someone saying “Our phone is our wallet. We can spend bitcoin with a tap, without a pocket.” This clip was quickly replaced by a nearly identical promo instead saying, “Our phone is our wallet. One touch to buy just about anything without sharing our credit card and banking details.” Also in September 2014, Thiel appeared on a Reddit Ask Me Anything, in which he stated “PayPal built a payment system but failed in its goal in creating a ‘new world currency’ (our slogan from back in 2000). Bitcoin seems to have created a new currency (at least on the level of speculation), but the payment system is badly lacking.”

With the 2020 partnership with Paxos, PayPal’s founding mission converged directly with Bitcoin’s novel database architecture and its internet-native asset, complete with stablecoins like their PYUSD acting as a payment medium, for a truly new global financial system. With their regulators at bay, their politicians soon to be – if not already – in office, and their technology stack built and distributed across the planet, the Bitcoin-Dollar system has been carefully constructed. Furthermore, this system has presented itself as a randomized organization of separate entities, rather than a cleverly hidden network of technologists and economists working in tandem towards a desired goal.

A disinflationary monetary reserve asset, such as Bitcoin, which is heavily custodied within the United States, complete with an internet-based, transparent payment system built on stablecoins backed by government debt, preserves the dual banking system within the country and effectively neuters the world’s nation states from fighting capital flight towards an ever-inflating, yet ever-demanded dollar. Thiel himself stated that “the ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related.” When Bitcoin broke $60,000 in 2021, Thiel felt “it surely tells us that we are at a complete bankruptcy moment for the central banks.”

At Libertopia 2010, Thiel told the crowd of the founding intentions of PayPal, and how within technology lies the ability to circumnavigate the political system and the global order of currency:

“The initial founding vision [of PayPal] was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilateral change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

With the recent embrace of Bitcoin and stablecoins by Wall Street, Senators, and presidential candidates as a means to extend the dollar’s world reserve status, the anti-state framing of the early Bitcoin ethos has withered on the vine – at least as it applies to the United States. The cryptocurrency industry at large, with a handful of dollar-denominated stablecoin issuers operating on a dozen-or-so dollarized blockchains, has become a tool of U.S. empire building, at the expense of other nation states and central banks around the world. The sales pitch of the blockchain being a mechanism for financial empowerment for the individuals of the world has been slowly and carefully replaced with one that perpetuates the hegemony of Silicon Valley oligarchs and their Washington, DC counterparts. The window for making Bitcoin a means for global freedom is quickly shutting, and with it, the realities of a financial system based on private-issuers of tokenized dollars upheld by public, transparent blockchains are made apparent. The poles of power remain deeply entrenched between the coasts of the continental United States, and those in command of The Chain – the new digital Federal Reserve – wield immense leverage over the global financial system.

Thiel would put it simply, in a fitting conclusion: “We need to take over the world, we can’t slow down now.”

The Chain Of Command: How Facebook’s Libra, Bank Regulators, and PayPal Built A New World Currency.