So you are trying to understand the Hedera Blockchain.

First thing to understand is that it isn’t your typical blockchain. It is only blockchain in spirit. In fact, its not a blockchain at all, its a hashgraph. You don’t need to mine blocks as a validator and you don’t accumulate tokens to receive governance voting rights. Hedera runs on gossip protocol. Any action taken at anytime on the Hedera chain can be tracked and traced. It is a historical record of every transaction made at any point in the network. This is quite the upgrade from your conventional blockchain which runs linearly.

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

_{Comparison between hashgraph and blockchain}1

Hedera was originally created in 2016 by Dr. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon, who met at a US Airforce academy (Dr. Baird working as a professor). Hedera was originally commercialized by Swirlds but had its patents bought out by the Council, which stewards Hedera within Project Hiero under the Linux foundation. Hedera’s native token is Hbar, and capped at 50 billion tokens. The big question is, what separates Hedera from almost any other conventional blockchain? What is its use case?

First we need to understand this less as a speculative cryptocurrency project and more like technology infrastructure. Hedera Hashgraph is tailored as an institutional solution for file storage, cryptocurrency, smart contracts and consensus. Smart contracts are a tool that will streamline projects in the future. This can reduce the reliance of intermediaries like lawyers and contract mediators for rules based steps. Instead, these will be placed on smart contracts with preset criteria. Only once the criteria is met will the smart contract move to the next stage of the mediation process. That streamlines the process and historically logs it into the Hedera Hashgraph DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) A DAG is different from linear POW (proof of work) or POS (proof of stake) in the sense that no information is pruned or discarded.

It runs aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance). Its a fancy string of words describing that if up to 1/3 or the validators go down, the transaction still runs. In the world of blockchain that is worth its weight in gold. Ever heard of chains going down? Transactions unsettled? If you are a retail trader, that might be a piss-off. If you are a mega corporate that relies on blockchain tech, that is unforgivable. If you are IBM, that could be a billion dollar mistake. I use IBM as an example as it is one of the current governing council members.

Who uses Hedera Hashgraph?

_{Hederas Governing Council Circa 2025}2

If you want to understand how big a project is, you should start by seeing who backs it. Hedera has some of the largest global corporates on their governing council. The role of the governing council is to vote on amendments, otherwise known as HIPs (Hedera Improvement Proposal) and come to a consensus on the direction of Hedera Hashgraph.

An example of a HIPs amendment~

HIP-755 & HIP-756 – Scheduled Smart Contract Operations: These HIPs connect Hedera's native scheduled transactions with the Hedera Smart Contract Service (HSCS), enabling sophisticated automation capabilities and multi-party coordination. They address prior limitations such as authorization constraints (smart contracts couldn't carry multi-signature authorizations) and multi-party coordination barriers.3

_{Hedera Hashgraph Flow Chart}4

Any good blockchain developer understands that a blockchain ledger is a living breathing animal. It requires the careful steering of active participants who intend to see the chain grow and evolve into something that has utility. In Hedera’s case, only those on the governing council can vote and come to a consensus on the direction Hedera moves towards. The areas that governance affects are technical steering, product, finance, legal and regulatory obstacles. The governing council also rotates. A council member has a 3 year term limit and can serve up to two consecutive terms before being cycled out. Swisscom Blockchain lost its governing council spot mid 2020. Recently FedEx, Mclaren and Accenture became council members.5 Each council member gets one vote. Just because Deutsche Telekom is bigger than Aberdeen doesn’t mean their vote is worth more. For as long as Google, IBM and Dell sits on the governing council, its worth keeping a set of eyes on.

The Centralization debate

Is Hedera and by extension HBAR centralized or decentralized? Here is where things get spicy. The claim is made that it is decentralized because no one member of the governing council can steer the direction of Hedera’s ledger. The council rotates based on merit and contribution as well as being capped at 2 term limits (6 years).

The claim for Hedera is that 39 governing council seats is not decentralization, but a consortium of mega corporates that may have vested interests at the 30,000 ft level. If you are to take it a step further, you would find that the one thing many of the council members have in common are its stakeholders, Blackrock, Vanguard and State street6 (the usual suspects). Do these companies actually have choice when voting? Or is this just the illusion of choice? During the next internal stakeholder meeting at Google, do minority stakeholders band together in the kumbaya circle or does Blackrock steer the direction of the vote?

The other element of Hedera’s governing council is Swirlds the parent entity of Hedera whose major shareholders are Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon. Swirlds is a permanent governing council member. The record keeper and the steward of Hedera. Leemon Baird retired from the US Airforce as a Lt. Colonel and was the manager of the Missile Defense Agency and Course Director of Cybersecurity at the US Air Force Academy.7 If Hedera is a US national security interest, its probably not that hard to coerce Leemon or Mance into the direction that benefits US interests. This is a theory and therefore speculative.

What are your thoughts on Hederas Future? Was it intentionally implanted into corporate by the US military. Or was it just members of the US military taking their tech to the private sector?

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Sources and Further Readings

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

Everyday, we have hundreds of micro tasks; from brushing your teeth to choosing which pair of socks has the least least amount of odor. Many of us are subconsciously looking for ways to make our tasks easier and sometimes pleasurable. Don’t enjoy your 45 minute commute? Go listen to a softcore porn audio book in your car. Its crazy how that’s not considered distracted driving yet.

The point is, everyday we are looking for ways to shave off time, be more efficient, and run more smiles per hour. Logging into your Gmail account every time you open it is a monotonous task and it is even mildly infuriating when you forget your password. Why not have google keep you logged in, or run the authenticator app in the background? Even though a typical login requires maybe 20 seconds of time spent, they still find a way to sell you on convenience. Google has now set your expectations for login authentication, you now hold all other logins to the same standard. That is a microcosm of individual programming.

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” - Jeremy Bentham1

Lets use this as a jumping off point for social programming. Negate pain, seek pleasure. Not in any philosophical or moral context. Just an input to feed the machine.

If I was the WEF and I wanted to “force behaviors”2 as Larry Fink would put it. I would continue with their mandate to create programmable currency. Fink was generally speaking on behalf of following ESG guidelines (programmable money is a part of it but you need to read between the lines.)

If you are not up to speed. Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock is the interim Chairman for the World Economic Forum after Klaus Schwab stepped down for cooking books, and playing footsie with governments at scale.3 The WEF cutting backroom deals on the world stage? No way! (insert Pikachu face here) Back to the money.

The Programs we Run

Programmable money means influencing how you handle it. If your money can freeze when you make a political statement, you may be deterred from doing so. If your money can expire, you may not so inclined to save for retirement. However short or long your time horizon, money expiration will influence your actions.

As coined by Phillip Zimbardo and John Boyd “Time Perspective Theory, sorts people into present-oriented (short horizon — hedonism or fatalism) vs. future-oriented (long horizon — goal-setting, delayed gratification”.4 The restrictions placed on digital currency can undo generations of financial literacy. The culture that delays instant gratification has one of the many tools required to create long term prosperity. You may not be so inclined to hold 10,000 dollars worth of retail CBDCs if it can expire, best you spend it quickly.

If this is the future many countries are rolling towards, we may see a rise of alternative currencies. I expect to see a rise in demand for precious metals. We could also see the return of barter systems. To many, money is not money because the government says it is. Money is money because it has value, its liquid and its trusted. We trust that someone won’t take your coins and clip them. We also trust that our government won’t print massive amounts of stimulus for whatever reason is fashionable at the time, thus devaluing its worth. Maybe our trust has been misplaced.

Or maybe people are starting to wake up and realizing they’re holding the “shit-end” of the stick. How we will respond as a collective to digital dollars is something to watch vigilantly.

How the Programs run Us

You might be thinking, there is no way I would ever comply to that sort of standard. I hope you are right, but lets try to run a thought experiment. How many stores do you go to that is “card only”? Between 2016 and 2023 we saw a drop of cash use from 31% to 16%.5 What if its mandated that only retail CBDCs or stablecoins can be used within retail stores?

Image sourced from the Fabian Society Coat of Arms6

Its not something that will happen overnight. These systems take time to develop and if you push too hard, the peasants push back. Which is why you need to use a form of Fabian socialism7, otherwise known as gradualism. The concept behind the Fabian society of 1884 is that change that comes too hard and too fast often gets put in its place; which is why you must have the destination in mind. Slowly and incrementally, you install policies that are both compassionate and sensible, but also towards your desired objective. Give an inch, watch them take a mile. After decades of the Fabian approach, you have constructed your end goal. Through years of reform, you create social normalcy. You don’t see the changes year by year, but after decades, the changes are drastic.

Carrying Fabianism to Programmable Societies.

You cannot outright tell people that you are cutting their energy consumption. You need to set up think tanks to market the idea, start “grassroots” movements for saving the planet, get Al Gore to tell people to be conscious of emission reduction (and by extension de-industrialize), then create globally complaint ESG mandates to make sure everyone plays ball.8 You gotta make it palatable, but more importantly, there needs to be truth in the premise. That is Fabianism at play for the last 50 years.

How do you get everyone to adopt programmable money? Lets start by seeing where we came from. First we need to show people how convenient your debit and credit cards are. Money is bulky and its such a hassle to keep it in your wallet. Why not tap? Money is unsanitary by how many times it changes hands. In fact, money is so dirty, that many businesses during covid did not even accept it, whether is was due to government intervention or personal choice is to be evaluated case by case. Now its time to push the timeline. Christine Lagarde came out with her infamous statement that the “digital euro will not be programmable, but be preset to conditionalities.”9 Another form of Fabianism, creating semantics between programmability and conditionality. The EBC document clearly states, the have tested the functions of currency expiration.10 Its like building a cannon and convincing the people you’ll never use it. The ECB (European Central Bank) may have pushed too fast on that one, since that statement got quite a lot of flak. Time to back pedal to the drawing board.

When building the future, in most cases you use the tools of the past. Tweek up Fabianism and give it a 21st century face lift. Few people earnestly want their governments to have more control over their financial privacy, unless you slowly create the conditions where they find it necessary. “Too many bad actors using the dollar for nefarious activities, too many scammers convincing plebs to invest in crypto pump’n’dumps”. Remember, they are doing this for your financial security; wink*. Liberty for security is a battle as old as time.

Be wary of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

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Sources and Further Readings

What is the Bitcoin thesis? A crypto currency used for peer to peer transactions? At one point it was, until people got wise and found out it could only run 7 TPS (transactions per second). Does that mean its a store of value? Well, possibly, but the volatility makes its it hard to categorize it as a “stable” store of value. When you talk to some diehard maxis, they will tell you it is the ultimate peer to peer settlement vehicle. Well no, they don’t say that with words, they say that with conviction through their buy orders and portfolio allocation. Bitcoin is decentralized money by the people for the people and it will replace the banks! Maybe not. If there is one thing central banks and financial institutions know how to do quite well, its staying in power. Partially through lobbying efforts and back room deals, but also because they are providing a service that we all rely on.

A powerful quote by Brad Garlinghouse “countries would sooner roll tanks into the streets before giving up their power over monetary supply.”1 I don’t think he is wrong in that statement. But whether YOU believe that or not, lets take this hypothetical baseline at face value. If banks need to stay in power but remain competitive in this new blockchain environment, how do they proceed forwards?

Did they try to employ smear campaigns? Yes, Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan Chase called it a fraud and a pet rock and wouldn’t take seriously anyone who invested into it. Now he’s investing into tokenized bank deposits.2 Did they try to halt the industry? Yes, they’ve tried that through SEC “regulation by enforcement”3 but they were only able to hobble it, not stop the industry in its tracks. The only way path forwards is adoption. So if that is the case, who do they adopt? As much as we are to believe that bitcoin is the answer; I will bet the farm on Ripple and its native token XRP.

Ripple, turning into Waves

Over the last 3 years, Ripple has been using its war chest to buy out financial behemoths in the traditional finance space with the intent of seamlessly linking blockchain with global incumbent financial systems. No company pisses away 2.7 billion dollars in acquisitions unless they had a plan. No company hires members of former presidential administrations unless they were moving mountains. Some notable examples are ~

1. Rosy Rios: 43rd Treasurer of the United States

2. Gene Sperling: Director of the National Economic Council and National Economic Advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama

3. Craig Phillips: Counselor to the U.S. Treasury Secretary (under Steven Mnuchin in the Trump administration)

4. Benjamin Lawsky: Superintendent of Financial Services for New York State

5. Michael Barr (Michael S. Barr): Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Treasury Department (under Obama)

6. Michael Warren: Senior Advisor in the White House Presidential Personnel Office (Obama administration)

7. Anja Manuel: Former U.S. State Department official (special advisor roles; expertise in foreign policy and emerging markets)

You can find those sources in Ripples press releases.4

Ripples Acquisitions

This section was shamelessly created with the help of AI and was verified by me. I could write it myself with all of my inappropriate commentary but this is meant to be informatively dry. And away we go!

1. Metaco — May 2023 | $250M

Traditional Finance Role: Swiss-based institutional infrastructure provider for banks and custodians. Its core product, Harmonize, gave regulated institutions (Citi, BBVA, HSBC) the software to store, trade, issue, and manage digital assets with institutional-grade security — essentially the “plumbing” banks needed to enter digital asset custody without building it themselves.

Ripple Integration: Expanded Ripple’s enterprise offering into custody, tokenization, and settlement of tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger. Positions XRPL as a global hub for tokenized real-world assets, targeting the $10T institutional crypto-custody market by 2030.

Sources:

• Traditional finance: Citi Partners with METACO — Citigroup

• Ripple integration: Ripple Acquires Metaco for $250M —Reuters

2. Standard Custody & Trust Company — February 2024 | Undisclosed

Traditional Finance Role: An NYDFS-chartered limited-purpose trust company — the same regulatory classification as large custodian banks. Operated as a Qualified Custodian under the Investment Company Act of 1940, providing bankruptcy-remote escrow and settlement for institutional digital asset clients. Functionally mirrors what a traditional custodian bank does for securities.

Ripple Integration: The purchase of Standard Custody gave Ripple the trust charter needed to issue its RLUSD stablecoin and tokenize assets on the XRP Ledger. Enables banks to tokenize assets directly on XRPL and supports the auto-bridging mechanism on XRPL’s native DEX.

Sources:

• Traditional finance: Standard Custody Receives Bank Charter from NYDFS — BusinessWire

• Ripple integration: Ripple Finalizes Acquisition for Stablecoin Rollout — Cryptopolitan

3. Hidden Road — April 2025 | $1.25B

Traditional Finance Role: A FINRA-licensed prime broker and global credit network for institutions — the same role that Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley’s prime brokerage desks play for hedge funds. Provided clearing, financing, repo, fixed income, FX, and derivatives services. Its model: no conflicts of interest with clients, custodians, or trading venues — essentially a neutral intermediary for institutional capital flows.

Ripple Integration: Rebranded as Ripple Prime. Post-trade activity migrated to XRPL to cut costs. RLUSD became the first stablecoin to enable cross-margining between digital assets and traditional markets. Now live on the NSCC (National Securities Clearing Corporation via DTCC) — a landmark connection between blockchain infrastructure and U.S. financial clearing. Client collateral has doubled since acquisition.

Sources:

• Traditional finance: Hidden Road Launches Fixed Income Prime Brokerage — PR Newswire

• Ripple integration: Ripple Completes Hidden Road Acquisition, Launches Ripple Prime — LiquidityFinder

4. Rail (formerly Layer2 Financial) — August 2025 | $200M

Traditional Finance Role: A B2B payments infrastructure fintech with banking relationships across 12+ institutions. Served as a regulated cross-border payments rail, enabling enterprise clients to move funds in USD, EUR, GBP, INR, MXN, AED, and other currencies via a single API — similar in function to SWIFT or correspondent banking networks but purpose-built for B2B stablecoin-to-fiat flows. Claimed to process ~10% of global B2B stablecoin payments.

Ripple Integration: Becomes the backbone of Ripple Payments, enabling end-to-end stablecoin payments including RLUSD and XRP alongside existing USDC/USDT support. Adds virtual accounts, automated back-office operations, and expanded global payout reach to Ripple’s cross-border payments product.

Sources:

• Traditional finance: Ripple to Acquire Rail — BusinessWire

• Ripple integration: Ripple Acquires Stablecoin Payments Firm Rail — Ledger Insights

5. GTreasury — October 2025 | $1B

Traditional Finance Role: Enterprise SaaS treasury management system (TMS) used by Fortune 500 companies and mid-market corporates globally. Handled $13 trillion in payments volume in 2025. Core functions: cash management, liquidity forecasting, FX risk management, bank reconciliation, and financial reporting — the operational software running corporate treasury desks at large companies.

Ripple Integration: Became Ripple Treasury — the first TMS with native digital asset capabilities. Enables cross-border settlements in 3–5 seconds via RLUSD vs. multi-day traditional settlement cycles. Opens Ripple into the multi-trillion dollar corporate treasury software market with an installed institutional client base already in place.

Sources:

• Traditional finance: What is Corporate Treasury Management — GTreasury

• Ripple integration: Ripple Debuts Treasury Platform — The Block

6. Palisade — November 2025 | Undisclosed

Traditional Finance Role: Palisade is crypto-native (founded 2021) rather than rooted in traditional finance — its founders came from Ripple and Ava Labs. It functions as a “wallet-as-a-service” infrastructure provider for fintechs, crypto-native firms, and corporates, using HSM, MPC key sharding, zero-trust architecture, and multi-chain support to enable fast, compliant custody at scale. Its closest traditional-finance analog is a custodian or transfer agent, but it was purpose-built for digital assets.

Ripple Integration: Fills a gap in Ripple’s custody stack for high-frequency transaction environments, on/off-ramps, and payments — where Metaco served large banks, Palisade serves fintechs and crypto-native firms needing rapid wallet provisioning and DeFi connectivity under the same Ripple umbrella.

Sources:

• Background: Ripple Acquires Palisade — Crowdfund Insider

• Ripple integration: Ripple’s Custody Momentum Continues — Ripple Official

Total deployed: ~$2.7B+ across six acquisitions (2023–2025), building a full-stack institutional financial infrastructure layer — custody → prime brokerage → payments rails → treasury management → wallet services.

What is the End Game?

We are looking at a private blockchain company that has a treasury of a small country, a roster of ex presidential administrators going as far back as the bush administration, partnerships and working groups with some of the largest financial incumbents on the planet (BIS, DTCC, New York Fed) and now they have a full stack infrastructure that will facilitate custody, treasury management and cross borders on/off ramps for legacy banks and countries.

Do you think this is all for show, or is Ripple playing for all the marbles? “The world will be multi-chain” according to Garlinghouse CEO of Ripple. That’s what you say when you are so far ahead of the competition that modesty becomes a tactic. I predict Ripple will corner the digital payments space before 2030.

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Sources and Further Readings

Here is an interesting topic that articulately describes the problem, reaction, solution environment we live in today. Its as if our benefactors are instilling mandates and policies that have holes, only to patch those holes with more mandates and policies. A spinoff of Hegelian dialectics is “problem, reaction, solution”.

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

But what is Hegelian Dialectics? First coined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the 18th century and later formalized by Fichte. Dialectics was a way to describe how ideas and history evolve. It follows the path of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and like a hamster wheel it spins back, but to a new starting point. A simplified way of looking at it is through the lens of solving a problem. You provide a solution for that problem (thesis). That solution has its own set of problems (antithesis). You fine tune the solution to mitigate the problems it has created (synthesis). Hegelian dialectics in a nutshell.1 Simple enough. It seems like the natural course of progression we have taken as a species. Efficiency and optimization. The next question that arises is, can this process be hijacked?

The Fabian Society

Historically speaking, yes. The Fabian society of 1884 has built their philosophy and motto paraphrased around Hegelian dialectics “Make haste, slowly”. Guide the synthesis, while going at a tortoise pace on the antithesis. Its how the concept of gradualism also took form. Slow and steady, over decades. The key Fabian mechanics are~

1. Permeation — infiltrate existing institutions rather than destroy them

2. Gradualism — each reform becomes the new thesis, generating the next cycle

3. Elite stewardship — change managed by an enlightened vanguard, not the masses

This is going to rub some people the wrong way. But the founders of the Fabian & Roundtable society who gave rise to the RIIA (Royal Institute of International Affairs) which became Chatham House2, who also built the blueprint for the CFR (Council of Foreign Relations) which influences Yale and Harvard that has influenced the minds of many of the US presidents from the early 20th century onwards3, believes in engineered consensus4. Which means you peons have no place in dictating direction or structure. The concept of democratically electing presidents and policy is just a fine tuning of problem, reaction and solution, disguised as electoral pageantry. If entering into a conflict is unfavorable, maybe we need to create a little chaos to rustle up the natives. Hearts and minds baby! Time to drop a tower. Lets break it down and see where these concepts have been used by groups like the Fabian Society over the years.

_{President George Bush Signing the Patriot Act from The White House Archives}5

War, war never Changes

“I got spurs, that jingle jangle jingle” Documented since world war II. During the FDR administration, US intelligence knew the Japanese fleet was popping up all other the pacific. They were also conscious of the fact that the American public had an approval rating of 16% in favor for sending troops to Britain, France and Poland.6 There was a very real possibility that the US administration knew there was going to be a hit the Hawaiian islands according to Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the approval rating for war hit 97%.7 Patriotism went through the roof.

Another time chaos was used in US history was the war in Vietnam. The French colonialists was running out of steam, after losing the battle of Dien Bien Phu. This led to the US directly backing South Vietnam after the signing of the Geneva Accords which oversaw the effort to bring western values to Nam.8 It was attempting to thwart communism, as they put it. And maybe some of that is true. But they needed the approval rating to send GIs over to the jungle. Not shorty after, the North Vietnamese supposedly hit US Navy Destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy, known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.9 And you know how the US gets when you touch their boats. Despite the hit on the US destroyers had “false flag” written all over it, war was back on the menu.

The last example is probably the most conspiratorially contentious. That is the dropping of the twin towers, the pentagon, and building seven. You still think its some pissed off Saudi Nationals? If you are the diminishing few who believe 9/11 was kosher, this article might not be for you. You may have heard it a thousand times, but jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams. Also, towers don’t collapse into their footprint unless its a controlled demolition. Building Seven went down because it felt like it? Consult with your local civil engineer for a second opinion. Immediately after the fall of the towers, the Bush administration ran an executive order through the Patriot Act10 which gave unbridled surveillance over its citizens while subsequently invading 7 middle eastern countries over the next 10 years. Those seven countries look map out eerily to the countries on the “greater Israel” emblem given to its IDF soldiers. No coincidences in politics.

These aren’t even isolated incidents. historically, war is costly and if you don’t have the backing of the proletariat, you may have your current government overthrown. War weariness is a spectrum and sometimes if your people are going limp, you get them to pop the Viagra of an emotionally charged cause. Social justice, foreign occupation, religious fanaticism, take your pick. As long as it gets them back in the fight.

Social, Cause it gets the people going!

Here is a topic that most of you know far too well. Over the last two decades we have watched every side, group, tribe, ethnicity, uses their collective hurt as an excuse to commit atrocities. Welcome to the culture wars. The reason why Hegelian dialectics work so well in this realm is because in many cases, there is no delayed feedback loop. If you pushed too hard, you immediately get pushed out. If you took an inch and no one noticed, you gotta keep sliding it in, preferably while they are asleep. In western nations, the whites were conditioned to be accepting of all races, cultures, and sexual orientations. On the surface, no one really refutes any of those neighborly attributes. You may have some hard-lined racists, homophobes and misogynists, but by and large they were typically a fringe minority. Immigration was an issue since the early 2010’s but you were called a racist if you pointed that out. Fast forward to 2026 where the west is succumbing to the fracturing of our social programs, healthcare programs, education, and infrastructure due to a decline of production output as well as the strain open immigration has done. Look at how many years have gone by before we were allowed to talk about it?

Hegelian Dialectics, 2010’s edition

I’m going to make a prediction on the use of Hegelian dialectics and I’d like you to come along for the ride.

During the early 2010’s, Syria was war torn due to the pro-democracy violent uprisings of the Arab Spring. The result was a surge of Syrian refugees hitting the European Union for sanctuary. The UN, taking a compassionate approach unofficially took the position of “it was their job to help the down trodden and disenfranchised from the war". That is hardly objectionable, if it is in our power to help we should do what we can. We have accepted refugees before. So then Angela Merkel immediately took in 1.1 million migrants in 2015 alone.11 Germany started feeling the strain. Merkel along with the European Commission then requested that all European nations follow the same playbook.12 All EU member nations followed suit, except Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic. Poland said “zero” and kept their borders closed to the influx of migration. They also got bullied by the EU that doled out fines in the process but stood firm. Between 2010 and 2026, the EU's foreign-born population grew by over 24 million people — a net increase — with gross annual arrivals from non-EU countries reaching 3–4 million per year by the mid-2020s.13 Open immigration led to a couple outcomes. The overflow of low skilled, undocumented and a culturally disintegrated workforce. I don’t need to try hard to convince you that the local populace in many western European countries are pushing back hard on immigration. Eventually there will come to a point where calling them racists will no longer be met with a sheepishly apologetic stance. We are reaching the boiling point.

_{Example of Hegelian Dialectics from Societyopedia}14

Hegelian Dialectics in Practice

Lets conduct a thought experiment. Bring over a bunch of migrants to Europe for the sake of a better life and greater living standards (thesis). The migrants are putting structural strain on on European infrastructure; housing, social services, medical services, education, etc. (antithesis) We are watching the synthesis is playing out in real-time as we speak.

Many governments within Europe is going conservative and right leaning. The German AFD is leading in the polls. France, Portugal, the UK, Denmark and Sweden are surging in conservative support around parties that are calling for remigration.15 To the global chess players (social planners) who employ Hegelian dialectics, this is all part of the plan. The elite who engineer consensus, don’t pick political sides. When they have a goal in mind, they capitalize on all elements of the chessboard. A shift to the political right is part of the game. As much as the right leaning value of liberty, historically they will pick security if the situation calls for it. Refer to the Patriot Act of mass surveillance reeled in by the Bush administration after the towers fell.

I theorize that these countries will lean towards surveillance and digital ID technologies to assist in the efforts of separating undocumented migrants from the host population. The conservative leaders will sell you security for liberty (that age old tactic) placing not only the migrant population on DID (digital identification) and surveillance tech, but the host population as well. When they have succeeded in their goal to send some of the migrants back home, the host population will still be chained to the digital ID system of social compliance metrics and programmable currency. This is the synthesis at play.

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“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

Based on all of the information found, I have formed a hypothesis. In light of new or better information my hypothesis is subject to change. I am not beholden to a position; I am looking for the truth. Partly from a moral sense, but also because the truth can be immensely profitable.

Strap-in, it’s tinfoil hat time.

BTC (otherwise uncommonly called Beta-Test-Coin) was introduced into the retail market by United States NSA assets in order to field test blockchain and cryptocurrency use cases. The public began to build layer 2 applications as well as decentralized finance protocols on Bitcoin and the Ethereum network. These networks primarily catered to the retail markets and soon after, de-gens from around the world began to gamble on meme-coins (usually built on Ethereum). After a series of rug-pulls, the Security Exchange Commission conducted lawfare (regulation by enforcement) on various legitimate and illegitimate crypto-companies, thus hobbling the market.

You ask the SEC if your company is securities compliant? Straight to court. You ask if your exchange is following securities procedures? Wells notice, then straight to court. What is the rules, SEC? SEC, you are basing your enforcement action on the Howey Test, an outdated guideline from the 1940’s for the stock market. Can you provide some clarity? Hmmm, you want clarity? Too bad, fuck you, here’s a lawsuit.

This is where things get really interesting.

The Chairman of the SEC Gary Gensler (at the time of crypto lawfare) taught a crypto course called “Blockchain and Money” at MIT Sloan School of Management. He actually spoke quite highly of crypto, only to do a 180 to decimate the crypto market. Thing is, I don’t truly believe he wanted to conduct a blockchain witch-hunt. It’s one of those “I was just following orders” kind of deal under Elizabeth Warren, who has maintained an anti-crypto stance since its inception. And who knows who is pulling her strings to maintain that stance.

Thing is, I don’t believe they were trying to outright banish crypto. I think the major lawsuits between the SEC and various crypto companies was a way to build long term regulatory market clarity. When a new product or service emerges, there is usually a lack of clarity when it comes to how it operates and how the market interacts with the product. Lawsuits brought clarity to Amazon and Google. It is usually the first step before widespread adoption within the US. Anti-trust laws need to be put in place, so massive, far-reaching, unicorn crypto companies don’t gobble up all the market share.

While all this lawfare was running in the foreground, centralized crypto companies such as Ripple became the stewards of XRP, as well as maintained the XRPL, a decentralized ledger. The Ledger was aimed at circumventing the issues of Bitcoin as well as the larger pratfalls of an outdated financial system. Two primary issues with Bitcoin are the transaction speed capped at 7-TPS (transactions per second) as well as the computational power comparable to that of a small country. Ripple Labs aimed to solve this problem by pre-minting their total supply, using a fraction of Bitcoin’s required energy usage as well as increasing their speed to 1500 TPS.

The narrative for bitcoin is that it is a decentralized store of value that was made to circumvent the legacy financial systems. I believe the real reason why bitcoin was created was to sandbox crypto currency technologies as well as generate “organic” public and institutional adoption. Here is where things start to go full circle .David Schwartz who was Ripple’s CTO, worked for the NSA around the time of the “How to make a Mint” whitepaper. “In 1991, Schwartz filed U.S. Patent #5025368, titled “Computer System for Distributed Consensus.” This patent described a network design that allowed multiple machines to reach agreement without centralized control, a concept now essential to blockchain. In certain circles it is theorized that David Schwartz is Satoshi Nakamoto, or was at the very least, on the original team that created Bitcoin. There is still plausible deniability so it might be years, if ever, we reach that answer.

What do you think?

Is Bitcoin really just an NSA beta test that got out of control? Was the SEC’s “lawfare” actually creating regulatory clarity for mass adoption? Drop your hottest takes in the comments. If this piece made you question everything, share it, and subscribe for more unfiltered deep dives into money, power, and crypto.

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Sources and Further Reading

The Full List of Cryptos Named Securities in SEC Lawsuits Against Binance and Coinbase https://beincrypto.com/full-list-cryptos-securities-sec-lawsuit-binance-coinbase/

Coinbase execs respond to SEC’s Wells notice in person and on video https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-execs-respond-to-sec-wells-notice-in-person-and-on-video

SEC v. Ripple https://www.investopedia.com/sec-vs-ripple-6743752

A New Era of Antitrust: What the Lawsuits Against Google and Amazon Mean for the Future of Big Tech https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2023/a-new-era-of-antitrust-what-the-lawsuits-against-google-and-amazon-mean-for-the-futureof-big-tech

Bitcoins’ Transactions Per Second | Detailed Overview https://tokenview.io/en/learn/bitcoins-transactions-per-second.html

XRP Explained: Speed, Utility, and the Path to Global Adoptionhttps://www.binance.com/en/square/post/19084033249521

XRP’s Hidden Architect: NSA Roots, Forgotten Patents, Nobody Talks About https://www.tronweekly.com/xrps-hidden-architect-nsa-roots-forgotten/

Every heard of the quote “never let a good crisis go to waste”? There is a fundamental truth in that statement. If you are an opportunist, you understand that volatility is the fast track to policy change. Need to incite a war? Drop a tower. Get people to comply with medical interventions? Limit their travel. Its the last mile in a sales pitch and the nudge you need to get the ball rolling.

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

What is the Cloward / Piven Strategy?

In the 1960’s, Sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven published an article called “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the Nation Magazine. The paper outlined the intentional overloading of the welfare system with as many eligible recipients as possible for the sake of overburdening the program.1 During the cold war, the US lived in an era of blank cheques almost bottomless military spending. As much as we were led to believe, we do not live in an era of infinite money. Just because we can print, doesn’t mean that dollar from the 2020’s will hold a candle to a dollar from the 1960’s. Eventually the well runs dry through debasement and its off to another watering hole.

According to Richard Cloward, the rise of welfare systems was intended to be self-perpetuating. A continuous cycle of guaranteed annual income. Once we cross compare that to UBI (universal basic income), we begin to realize that there is nothing new under the sun.2 It is concepts that are rebranded, repackaged and lemon scented. “no no, this is different because AI or inflation and also because of the immigrants.”

Regardless of the reason, it runs the same life cycle.

1. Overload the system with claims

2. Generate crisis, panic then overload

3. Lead to the transformation and breakdown of the old system

4. Replace it with a centralized, “redistributed” system for the sake of compassionate initiatives

As written later by Cloward and Piven in the books Regulating the Poor (1971) and Poor People’s Movements (1977). Intentional disruption was a method used to rally supporters through protests and activism, over the creation of methodical organizations that can thoughtfully create change. What might seem like a flaw, is actually a function. Activism is fast, messy, sometimes violent, and not always “grassroots”. Players like Soros are always looking for new ways to rattle the ant jars in politics, culture and finances. Activism has its place, sometimes change needs to be expedited for the sake of swift course correction. You don’t want your society to fall off a cliff. It is however, when people in power tell you, like a rearview mirror “the cliff is closer than it appears” or walk you in the direction of one, over the course of months, years or even decades (Fabian Socialism).

How it was used back in the day

History rarely repeats, it rhymes. The issues from the 1960s are not exactly in lockstep with today. But its damn close. Replace inner city blacks with immigrants and you got yourself a whole new cause to fight for. Before I go further, I would like to clarify. I believe that we should do what we can to help people who are disenfranchised by whatever maladies life has thrown at them. Life is often unforgiving and seldom fair, but as long as citizens less fortunate are providing a net positive to the society they live in, we should lend a helping hand.

I am however, highly skeptical of welfare programs from social planners that portray themselves as arbiters of human compassion, only to keep entire societies from growing and expanding to greater heights.3 The issue with welfare, is that if you give the recipient “just enough to survive” they stop trying to thrive. Its how we kept the natives down in Canada for generations. Mix that with rez schools and the breakdown of the family, you have yourself a people that will struggle to get back up.4 I see welfare as the slow poison that kills ambition. But that is also not the end of the story.

Talk to anyone between their 20 to 40s today and ask them how they are doing financially. Inflation has eroded pensions, increased the costs at the pumps and some groceries prices are moving into hyperinflation territory. Welfare is becoming a necessary part of life for many people, and in most cases, not by choice.

Reposition and Retool

If I wanted to incite change through volatility, I have a couple questions that need clarification.

1. What change am I looking to make?

2. What cause will I utilize to help attain the goal

3. What is my time frame?

If I was the WEF and my goal was to implement digital identification, digital currencies, and social credit; I would manufacture the conditions to entice the local populace to side with my goals. All is right when you not only lead the horse to water AND make it drink. People might be sheep, but those sheep still pay taxes, vote and can also cut your head off during French revolutions.

If digital ID was the goal, I would flood European countries with immigrants to unsustainable levels. What does unsustainable mean? It means I would intentionally burden healthcare systems, housing, social services and job markets. Open door policy and screen no-one. If a migrant turns a British girl into a kebab; that becomes fuel to the growing animus of the British people. You will be begging me for digital IDs to separate “wheat for chaff”. With digital IDs, we can immediately spot repeat offenders, jail them or put them on the next boat home. Digital IDs are not a one-way street. That also means the host population must also get them, and once you have a digital ID that is centralized, the government now knows what you’ve had for breakfast.

If digital currency5 was the goal, I would make our current dollar worthless. I would target fiat currency and inflate it to fund wars and programs that are fiscally irresponsible. Money creation is a more nuanced subject, since all money has life cycles. However, if I understand monetary life cycles, I can speed up the process of erosion. Sprinkle a little market manupulation, money laundering and good ol’ fashioned debt debasement6 and now digital currency becomes a necessity. Digital currency can be programmable to freeze assets of any “illicit transactions”. It can also be on a blockchain public / private ledger. All transactions can be tracked for the same reasons previously stated. It might also need to expire. If money doesn’t expire, people might hoard it, thus putting a wrench in Keynes monetary theories of productive societies. In a nutshell, Maynard Keynes believes that any debt is good debt. So feel free to start a war here and overspend on social services there, it all balances out in the end. Please ignore the looming 40 trillion dollars of US debt that we can barely cover the interest on.

The Cloward / Piven strategy is being reproposed to incite change artificially instead of organically. They are smoking people out of their homes and into cages, with digital locks and programmable money as the wardens. If we do not put these institutions under the magnifying glass, the future we are walking into will be very different from the past we came from; in some ways good, and in many ways, not. Freedom is a right, not a privilege; and if you do not speak up for yourself, someone else will do it for you.

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Sources and Further Readings

Brain Fingerprinting

In the UAE, criminal investigation agencies are beginning to use tools to access “brain fingerprinting” Yes, its exactly what it sounds like. Just like how your fingerprints are unique to you and you alone, your brain signature is even more so. No one in the world would have a signature that comes close since it consists of an amalgamation of all of your thoughts, experiences, heartaches, achievements, and anything else that makes the contents in your head, distinctly yours.

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

What about polygraph tests? Don’t we have a 1950’s noir version of this tech already? Kinda, sorta, but no. Polygraphs don’t outright determine if you are telling the truth or not. The polygraph reads various metrics like heart elevation, breathing rate, and sweat through a combination of sensors.1 It kind of works like this— I ask you if you have ever fantasized about your grade 3 music teacher while your mother is in the room. The polygraph spits a “read out” of elevated blood pressure and an increased rate of breathing. As the interviewer, I start to dig deeper into your fixation on older women until I get the information I want. The polygraph can help source information but it requires the right questions and the right triggers. It not an oracle.

Brain fingerprinting uses an fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine and monitors for the P300 response your brain gives off when your brain has knowledge of an event. The P300 is a preconscious signal that can be tracked and traced. Its like a part of your brain that lights up when someone is talking about something you are familiar with, or have intimate / precise knowledge on something.2 Its current use is criminal investigations of “who dun it” when sourcing a confession or knowledge or anything that ties the suspect to the event.

The concern becomes societal. What happens when the last bastion of privacy “which is your mind” is no longer sacred? With tech like this, and a series of carefully tuned prompts I can dig around your head without surgically cutting you open. If we normalize this, what is stopping the largest and most well insulated corporations & governments from using that technology to either subjugate or mine information from us? Call me old fashioned, but I like my thoughts where they are, in my head, and usually no where else.

Chinas Workplace Surveillance Programs

Sourcing specific events isn’t the only application for brain monitoring. With EEG headbands and earbuds they can measure and monitor your level of focus. Companies in China are currently monitoring the focus of their train conductors.3 A loss of focus when operating a bullet train could have disastrous consequences. Sleeping on the job at 300km an hour isn’t great PR press. What happens when the same device is now placed on workers from whichever company is willing to integrate brain sensor technology? What if that is just part of the hiring requirements? There you are typing away at your office job, when you get called in for a meeting. “We noticed brain signals that imply you were sad. Were you thinking about your recently deceased family dog again? Not on company time, you’re not.” This is just a hypothetical example, it is my hope we never come close to a future such as this.

Emotiv a San Francisco based company built the MN8 an enterprise solution for attention management. A pair of earbuds that monitors an employees attention span and cognition in real time.4 This can be a tool to provide custom tailored support for the employee. It can tell you when you need to take a break, when to move to a more or less stimulating task and even provide insight on how to manage stress. Like any tool, its use, whether positive or negative, varies on the user and its application. The medium of paper can house the Declaration of Independence as well as the Communist Manifesto. Its use will depend on who uses it and for what purposes. It should be in everyone’s interest to install some mental privacy guardrails.

Right to Cognitive Liberty

The introduction of neuro invasive technology requires the introduction of agreed upon cognitive rights. Without them, it is a slope so slippery that we are bound to fall into a pile of mental refuse. Nita Farahany, a leading legal scholar, bio-ethicist and policy advisor for the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues believes we should be following three core principles.5

1. Mental Privacy - the right to keep thoughts private from state access

2. Self Determination - the right to control ones own brain and mental experiences without state manipulation

3. Freedom of Thought - Protection from government punishment for private thoughts and beliefs

Since there is no specific concrete legislation on the commodification of thought, these massive data companies are doing exactly what their shareholders expect from them. Create value. By seeing how many miles they can run before anti trust laws come into effect over the right to individual cognition and privacy.

The thing about conflict from the past is that it was kinetic. Winners and losers were determined by the toys they brought out on the battlefield. The weapons of the future are far more intricate. They catalogue and compile data and information. “Those who knows the most, wins” The scary thing is that these neurodevelopmental tools don’t need to be used on soldiers. In fact it probably isn’t to a large extent. Its used on us. By governments, corporations and NGOs. Perception management, otherwise known as 5th generation warfare. To control public thought, you must know how they think, consciously and subconsciously.

Your thoughts may no longer be sacred.

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What is Mica?

If you spoke to anyone in finance a decade ago, they would tell you that crypto has no place in the world. It’s a scam, a bubble, a pet rock, a speculative asset, a deep rooted regret and a crack smoker’s pipe dream. Time has a funny way of making us eat our own words. Cryptocurrency as a category, is being written into law, with its own set of regulators and guardrails. MiCA (Markets in Crypto Asset Regulation) went live December 2024 for the sake of regulating which stablecoins will be complaint within the EU. The transition period end date is July 1st 2026 as many of us have been hawkishly watching. This means that whichever stable coin has not obtained the the EMI (e - money institution) license by the date will not be able to operate, issue or redeem stablecoins with EU clients.

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

To the layman who works in anything other than finance this note is something they have most likely glossed over. Why does it matter which stablecoins are complaint and which ones aren’t? The short answer is because, if your stablecoin can’t be used, value can’t be transferred. You’re money’s no good here partner (in the spagetti western tone). But the difference is the bartender isn’t saying that to the injun or the foreigner but to a corporate entity. The backlash is bound to be a bit more dramatic and costly. Lets try to understand what that means.

MiCA’s Rules of the Road

So why create barriers to get into their little club? For starters, stablecoins is currency. You want to make sure your currency is backed by treasuries, bank deposits or anything that resembles high quality liquid assets assessed by the EBA (European Banking Authority). You probably wouldn’t want to be paid in counterfeit cash or monopoly money if you live in Europe. That is the EU’s take on it and pretty common sense. Here is the criteria that must be met if a stablecoin is to be used in the EU~

1. Licensing: EMT issuers must be an authorized credit institution or e-money institution (EMI) + file a MiCA white paper.1

2. Reserves: Full backing in liquid, segregated assets; ≥30% in bank deposits for non-significant tokens, ≥60% for significant ones.

3. Capital: Minimum €350,000 own funds for EMT issuers, scaling with circulation.

4. Redemption: Holders can redeem at par, any time.

5. “Significant” token (extra EBA oversight): >10M holders or >€5B outstanding.2

6. Non-euro cap: Stablecoins referencing non-EU currencies (USDT, USDC) are capped at 1M transactions/day OR €200M/day as a means of exchange; exceed it and the issuer must curb use.3

MiCA watches over 3 distinct categories. Consisting of ARTs (asset referenced stablecoins) EMTs (e-money tokens), and utility tokens. MiCA also works along side with CASP (crypto-asset service provider) which is a licensing regime. Lets understand what that means~

1. Asset-Referenced Tokens (ARTs): Commonly known as stablecoins, these tokens maintain a stable value by referencing other assets (e.g., fiat currencies, commodities).

2. E-Money Tokens (EMTs): Stablecoins officially pegged to a single official fiat currency. Like a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, the British pound, or the Euro.

3. Utility Tokens: Tokens intended to provide access to a good or service available on a distributed ledger (e.g., in-ecosystem tokens). Think of XPM a token used to obtain access to XP Market, a decentralized AMM (automated market maker).

4. Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASPs): Entities such as crypto exchanges, custodian wallet providers, and trading platforms.4 You would refer to Coinbase, Robinhood, or Kraken.

The Stable in Stablecoins

Here is where the rule holds the line. USDT Tether has a track record of failed or incomplete audits. If we don’t know how much of USDT’s capital is backed by acceptable assets like US treasuries or tier one assets, how do we know whether their stablecoin is 1:1 backed or if they decide to rehypothecate their assets in the future? You don’t, I don’t and I’m not sure if the EU is waiting to find out if their books aren’t cooked. USDT being non-compliant within European markets seems like MiCA is playing an effective role in holding up capital requirements

There are however many stablecoins that fall in line with MiCA guidelines. There is EURC (France), EURCV (Société Générale), EUROe (Finland), USDC (Circle) who are a part of over a dozen currently registered & compliant stablecoin issuers. Expect to see that number grow in the future.

The stablecoins that currently fail compliance is USDT (obviously) as well as Dai, PyUSD (Paxos) and BUSD (Binance). BUSD being non compliant was a no brainer as it is regarded as a defunct token. It has no authorized issuer and has no whitepaper (which is a MiCA criterion). Where this gets interesting is that Binance does not hold MiCa’s CASP (crypto asset service provider) authorization (that’s not without trying, since they were working with Greece’s Hellenic Capital Market Commission to obtain the license). That means the Binance exchange and its token are not MiCA compliant. Binance is an interesting example since it houses one of the largest exchanges globally. From a clarity standpoint, this is good news for market participants since it draws a line in the sand, free from ambiguity.

New Player is Entering the Arena

USDT and USDC accounted for a little over 60% of the daily volume managed by stable coins within European countries since 2024.5 Fast forward to 2026, as the USDT is no longer accepted into the EU, USDC (Circle) and USDG (Global Dollar by Paxos) have been able to absorb some of USDT’s daily volume. It was not a process that happened overnight, but a slow rollout as European exchanges began to delist USDT from their platforms.

Which stable coin (or coins) will attempt to pick up the slack?

I speculate that Ripple RLUSD will absorb a a notable percentage of the daily volume previously managed by USDT. Ripple has received preliminary approval for their CASP license in Luxemburg on June 23rd 2026.6 Ripple also has an existing EMI license and a clear whitepaper. They check all the boxes to become MiCA complaint. Being MiCA complaint gives in 30 European nations access to RLUSD and by extension Ripples full stack of custody, treasury, on/off ramps, and wallet services. We are watching a fintech behemoth enter the cross border payments space in Europe.

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“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

What is the controversy around USDT Tether? You know, The first and largest stable coin to hit the crypto scene in 2013? Over 150 billion dollars worth in circulation and only a few people fully understand how they are collateralized. They have gold, US T-bills, as well as crypto currencies. Are they backed 1:1? Nobody knows. Based on they past failed audit reports, you may just need to take their word for it. Its worth noting that a powerful US senator is backing this stable coin.

Lets try to dissect this murky cryptocurrency asset.

The Genius behind Mica

In June 29 2023, The European Union understood the implications of crypto currency and they came to the realization that blockchain tech is here to stay. It is faster than traditional banking running on wire transfers, it outpaces the automated clearing houses on an institutional scale and finally, it is more secure (blockchain dependent). I would like to overstate the term blockchain dependent because Solana might claim they can manage 3000 TPS when half of them fail, and Ethereum, recently, have been able keep their gas fees in check but we can chalk that up to developer migration to other, more efficient chains, but lets get back on topic. The EU needed some crypto guardrails put in place. We spent enough time getting pump-n-dumped in cryptos “wild west”, circa from its inception until very recently. Thus the Mica (Markets in Crypto Assets) Regulation (EU 2023/1114) entered into force. Crypto rules of the road set with regulated collateral parameters for EMTs (E-Money Tokens), ARTs (Asset Referenced Tokens), and other crypto assets like utility coins, bitcoin and other altcoins.1 The purpose of Mica is to create an harmonized framework for the European Union on the crypto market through managing investor protections and curbing market manipulation.

Now it was up to the US to play catchup. Out comes the Genius (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins) Act in July 18 2025. The rules of the road to dictate compliance and use case within the US financial markets, its basically the US version of the MiCA regulation. Some key takeaways on the Genius are2

1. Permitted Users Only - Only PPSI’s (Permitted Payment Stable Coin Issuers) are allowed to operate within the US Jurisdiction

2. 1:1 Reserve backing - Issuers must maintain full 1:1 reserves with liquid US assets (such as US Dollars or short term treasuries), and they cannot be rehypothecated (fractionalized banking - read Creature from Jekyll Island)

3. Must abide to Redemption and Audits - The issuer must disclose monthly audits and redemption policies

4. Consumer Liability & Protection Requirements - All PPSIs must adhere to AML (anti money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) verification checks for all participants of their stable coin.

Stable coins will affect the largest forex markets, stock markets, derivatives, liquidity providers and institutional buyers. These are by far the largest markets on the globe and with crypto getting the green light, expect a global integration of blockchain tech.

Tethers unique position

Here is where things get interesting for Tether. It isn’t complaint, and they can’t build in compliance without massive financial restructuring. One of the clauses in the Genius Act articulate that all stable coins must be backed by a 1:1 ratio with US coins, currency, Fed Notes, or treasury bills under a 93 day maturity.3 Tether being tether, has US currency and related US financial products. But their balance sheet also contains gold, Bitcoin and altcoins. And come to think about it, we don’t even know if it is 1:1 backed. Are they under collateralized on USDT? Shit, we’ll never know, we can’t seem to run a proper audit.

Now, I do have a theory on how they can become complaint in the US. Its a bit of a stretch, but what if they build another stable coin that is Genius Act complaint then hard-fork USDT into the new stable coin? A hard fork can be understood as migrating value from one asset to another.

Plausible, yes but likely? No. Certain coins have hard forked in the past. If certain protocols within a coin are immutable then they cannot be rewritten. Bitcoin, being blackholed, cannot have more than 21 million coins on-chain for this reason. If you wish it weren’t so, you would need the majority of BTC holders to migrate their coin over (hard fork) it to another chain. They won’t play that game either if there is no guarantee the forked chain will retain its value.

Why tether most likely won’t hard fork their token to another chain is because they are sitting on 20 billion dollars worth of gold reserves4, 2.6 billion dollars already tokenized on Tethers XAUT balance sheet. In todays day-n-age it would be a death sentence to sell it. Central banks globally are stockpiling gold as trust in the US dollar is eroded by the day. Gold is the hedge. Tether isn’t likely to sell it for the sake of building a US compliant stable coin. If I was a betting man, tether will probably skirt through regulations untouched and unfazed. Its kind of like a “liberty for me but not for thee” situation, as Howard Lutnick’s kids, are managing part of tethers portfolio.

This requires a bit of clarification.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary under the Trump administration was the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald; a major financial firm. Cantor Fitz was also one of the largest custodians of Tethers USDT reserves, of whom, Lutnick’s son Brandon oversees as the new CEO. It is stated in a letter (this one)5 that a large loan was used with tethers reserves to buy out Lutnicks divestiture from Cantor on becoming the US Commerce Secretary. Money and power has a funny way of staying at the top. The genius act could be interpreted as the perfect solution for tether as they can operate under special conditions while every other stable coin is required to color within the lines.

Am I making things Clear Enough?

At the time of writing, we are still waiting on the clarity act. A major contention with this act is yield from stable coins. The TLDR: is big banks are lobbying hard to remove yield from stable coins. Their reason is that “crypto exchanges are not regulated like the banks”, they have less red tape (or so they say) and stable coin yield might cause a flight of capital. “Flight of capital” is the string of words we need to focus on. If I was normie who put my money in a savings account so I could earn an interest of .6% APY, why wouldn’t I put it into a stable coin on an exchange and receive a APY of 4.5% yield instead? Swapping to stable coins is a no brainer, since the introduction of the genius act, PPSI issued stable coins are legal property, we expect that it will be legal tender in the future.6 Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase was the opposition of the banks. You can interpret him as a pariah of the crypto common man from his stance on yields, but I tend to believe his opposition was based on self serving interests. Brian has much to gain from a surge of stable coins generating interest on his platform Coinbase. That’s just the way the world spins. If you don’t like it, take it up with your kangaroo courts.

The bigger implications of the Clarity act is dictating what is a security and what is a commodity. That will be the hard red line for the compliance of a crypto asset. Brad Garlinghouse said it himself, “more than 99% of crypto assets will probably go to zero”.7 It is presumed that most crypto currencies will fall in line as a security, thus requiring securities clearance / certifications8 which will be hard to obtain. This act is the starter pistol for tradfi conglomerates to rollout crypto products as well as crypto infrastructure rails their businesses will run on.

Where does that put tether? Is it business as usual or are they apart of a bigger plan? Tether is the largest stable coin by market cap. Every previous stable coin that depegged from their asset dug a one way trip into irrelevance. You look at the depeg from Terra USD and MakerDAO as the most notable examples. They claimed to have 1:1 backing, but once the traders found out they were overleveraged, a mass exodus from the token ensued. Will Tether follow the same path? I’m not so sure.

I see this as going one of two ways.

Option 1: Tether orchestrates an intentional collapse. The players involved isn’t just CEO of tether, or Justin Sun of Tron or even Howard Lutnick’s kids, but members within the US government (trilateral commission, Council of Foreign Relations), City of London (Royal Institute of International Affairs & MI6), Club of Rome, Committee of 300, take your pick; “its a big club and you’re not in it”- George Carlin. Tether doesn’t crash because of some “eye opening” overleveraged shady financial statements coming to light. They crash because it will create a cause & effect scenario for reasons that can only be speculated on at this stage. It is highly possible that this is yet another domino to fall in the game of the great reset. What is the fastest way to finish a game of monopoly? You would say, forfeit, but if the US says forfeit, that means they default on their 40 trillion dollar debt. The other way to finish is flip the game board over. And either start over or stop playing. In the game of life, you never stop playing, and if you are not first, you’re last. Which I believe is the US’ stance on economic policy. They are not willing to give up control that easily. The collapse of Tether is flipping the game board. Everyone continues playing from where the pieces fell.

Tether is the largest stable coin on the planet. You crash that, you sink multiple markets in the process. Bonds, stocks, forex. People forget that tether holds more US bonds than Germany.9 Tether is literally scooping up bonds to that of a mid sized country, they are a financial sleeper car. Yes, they haven’t passed an audit, but don’t fool yourself into thinking they don’t have any power under the hood.

Option 2: Tether stays in the game. Not because they sneak inside the club when the bouncers not looking but because the club they are “sneaking in” is owned by established parties who have a hand in tethers operation. Howard Lutnick’s son Brandon manages Cantor Fitzgerald which custodies Tethers reserves in the US. Howard Lutnick is the secretary of commerce for the Trump administration. Anyone who studies the murky waters of American politics knows that power and influence stays at the top. The same CEO who works for Haliburton can also become the vice president of the US.10 Powerful senators like Prescott Bush knew how to pull decade long strings that got his son and grandson into the Whitehouse. This isn’t a defense of nepotism, just an observation on how the game is played. As far I can tell, USDT Tether is a US financial asset. Either used as a buyer of US T-bills to float their debt based economy or to migrate the world into programmable currency. That makes USDT a national security concern. If they require Tether to play a role, they will use it, for as long as it serves them,

Maybe its one or the other, a combination of both, or something entirely different. I don’t believe this amounts to a false dichotomy, if new information arises I am always open to changing my position. In the meantime, I suggest you sit back, relax, monitor gold, silver, XRP, other ISO20022 tokens (not financial advice) and let the show play out.

We are ants witnessing Billy and his magnifying glass reshaping the playing field. We don’t have a say but we can choose how to act. Emphasis on “Act”, reaction is not the position you want to find yourself in.

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Sources and Further Readings

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

Environmental, Social, Governance Goals

The ESG framework is the backbone of stakeholder capitalism. Klaus Schwab authored the criteria, and the WEF voted them in — an NGO of unelected officials setting the standards that corporations are now expected to meet.

On the surface, ESG looks altruistic. Better labor standards. Environmental accountability. Transparency in governance. Who doesn’t want kids out of the mines?

My concern has always been execution.

Are you going to penalize Poland when they refuse EU migration directives? [24] Are you going to boycott businesses that won’t adopt DEI practices? You want to know how to tank a company’s valuation? Put a DEI-first leadership team in charge of Disney and DreamWorks and watch them rewrite the fairytales. [25] A conversation for another time.

The WEF’s Global Competitive Index and Inclusive Development Index are the tools they’ll hand you to stay compliant — a mechanism to “track a broad variety of environmental, social, and governance indicators beyond the economic ones.” [26] Stay within the lines. Don’t fall short.

If you run pattern recognition on how ESG compliance gets enforced, the architecture becomes clear. If your business operates within national boundaries, disciplinary action gets outsourced to your local government. Years of lawfare will cost you years of sanity and potentially bankrupt you in the process.

If you’re a larger organization, expect disruptions upstream — global players tinkering with your suppliers, legacy media inciting a smear campaign, or foreign governments closing their borders to your products.

The top 25 asset managers hold over $110 trillion in AUM. [27] There were over 30,000 banks in the US — there are now just over 4,000. [28] Seven oil companies dominate the global oil market. [29] Ten international corporations control nearly all of our food. [30]

The trend is visible. The outcome is predictable. Everything is being centralized under the control of NGOs — and if they want to stick their hands in your company’s cookie jar, there really isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.

The purpose of ESG goals is to formalize centralized control under the guise of altruistic compassion for people, the environment, and the planet.

Despite my criticism — make no mistake. Would the world be better off with a little more consciousness, a little more foresight into the consequences of our actions? Yes.

My concern is that we’re allowing NGOs, which are in bed with the largest perpetrators of poor governance and environmental standards, to dictate global policy. It’s like having a landlord who jacks up your rent and simultaneously takes away your washing machine because washing clothes by hand is “environmentally friendly.” Salt in the wound, after they’ve salted the earth.

A Token for Your Thoughts

Tokenization is the insertion of a derivative proxy over your physical right of ownership on a physical item. [31] In plain terms: real-world assets — RWAs — can be placed on a digital token, fractionalized and transferred. [32]

Whoever holds the token owns the rights to the asset. That token can be transferred from buyer to seller through a smart contract — a set of coded criteria that must be met before ownership changes hands.

A simple example: the sale of a home might require that the buyer reside in the same country, meet a minimum down payment threshold, and carry mortgage approval from a domestic bank. Those criteria are baked into the smart contract itself. No broker needed. The contract is the broker.

This is less theory and more reality than you’d expect.

A US company called Propy is already tokenizing real estate — a licensed Web3 broker that has facilitated over $4 billion in transactions across Florida, Colorado, and Arizona since 2017. [33] Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the largest bank in Japan, is in the process of tokenizing a ¥100 billion office tower as a digital security. [34]

The next question you should be asking is: what blockchain will that tower sit on? A little digging into major blockchain partnerships gets you that answer quickly.

What’s fascinating — and unsettling — is how wide the tokenization net is being cast. NGOs are working with blockchain companies like Algorand to tokenize identity through digital IDs. [35] Your name, your home, your work history, your traffic violations, the places you’ve traveled, your net worth. In some circles, the belief is that the digital ID will eventually house your medical records.

I don’t know how they clear regulatory hurdles on that last one. But whatever daddy wants, daddy gets.

NGOs are also attempting to tokenize natural resources — rainforests, clean water supplies — running parallel to SDG Goal 6. [36, 37] We have to do this; we need to protect the rainforest from insidious corporations and asset managers who defile the natural world. It would be in far better hands under the watchful eye of the World Economic Forum. I sure hope they don’t elect Larry Fink — CEO of Blackrock — as co-chairman of the WEF. That would be crazy. Right?

As of now: gold, treasury bonds, private equity, and stocks can all be tokenized. Blackrock, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Ondo are already tokenizing US Treasuries. [38] Paxos and Tether lead on tokenized gold by market cap. Figure, Maple, and Tradable are the top three on tokenized private equity.

Why are institutional players this interested? Speed, security, and cost. Smart contracts cut out the middlemen. Blockchain settles transfers in under five seconds. And blockchain — at its core — is just a vape-smoking tech bro’s euphemism for double-entry ledger technology. It’s digital accounting software.

We will come to a point where we say: “If it’s not on the blockchain, it didn’t happen.” This is modern record-keeping, and it’s here to stay.

When Stakeholder Capitalism and Tokenization Merge

Two core features of tokenization are the derivative proxy over a real-world asset and the fractionalization of ownership. If you can’t afford a $100 billion skyscraper, you can become one of 100,000 investors each holding a token worth $1 million, with dividends priced accordingly.

Now take it closer to home.

Say you want to set up a trust and divide your estate — valued at $1.8 million — into 1,800 tokens at $1,000 each. Your eldest gets 400. Your middle child gets 400. Your youngest gets 200 (he racked up enough debt that you had to bail him out). Your spouse gets the remaining 800. Holders can attach voting rights to their tokens, sell them to a reverse mortgage dealer, or transfer them among family. The token structure determines both ownership and value.

Now scale that model up.

Take a corporation whose stakeholders — per the stakeholder capitalism framework — include lenders, suppliers, shareholders, the state, the economy, international governance, and customers. That corporation is now tokenized. Its value is distributed across a finite number of tokens.

The question that should stop you cold is this: how many of those tokens, as a percentage, land with the state, the economy, and international governance?

And do those tokens carry Class A or Class B characteristics? Class A means voting rights. Class B means dividends only. Whoever holds Class A shares steers the company. If the state and international governance hold equal or greater shares than the shareholders — they control the direction.

The glue that binds the Sustainable Development Goals together is a web of top-down centralized control. The WEF will tell you that you have a seat at the table and your voice is taken into consideration. But whatever daddy wants, daddy gets. If your vision sits outside the SDGs, it won’t be taken into account. If you resist, disciplinary action gets outsourced to the state you reside in — and they begin dismantling your operation, or finding ways to push you out.

If we’ve learned anything in the 21st century, it’s this: there are ways to make you comply.

Sources and Further Readings

[24] Poland Refuses to Comply with EU Immigration Rules While Leading the Union

[25] Disney Shifts Away from DEI to Return to Its Primary Business Mission

[26] Stakeholder Capitalism — Klaus Schwab, pg. 190

[27] Largest Asset Managers by AUM in 2025

[28] Slow, Steady Decline in the Number of U.S. Banks Continues

[29] Who Were the “Seven Sisters” of World Oil?

[30] This Infographic Shows How Only 10 Companies Own All the World’s Food Brands

[31] Francis Hunt on Tokenization

[32] RWA Tokenization 101

[33] Propy Real Estate Tokenization

[34] MUFG Acquires Osaka Skyscraper for ¥100 Billion to Tokenize as Digital Securities

[35] Algorand Foundation Joins Decentralized Identity Foundation

[36] The Tokenization of Natural Resources: A Sustainable Approach

[37] Clean Water and Sanitation — SDG Goal 6

[38] Ondo Finance Brings 24/7 Access to Tokenized U.S. Treasuries on the XRP Ledger

• ESG scoring

• tokenization of real world assets

• stakeholder capitalism

• WEF centralization

• RWA tokenization

• digital identity

• blockchain compliance

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

Profits Over Everything

The gripe about shareholder capitalism according to Schwab, is the overvaluation of profits. Profits over everything else. If you can corner the market on EpiPens, why not jack up the price?¹ If your airlines can save $40,000 dollars a year by removing the olives, do it, think the customers will be bothered?²

The term JND (Just noticeable difference) is a term learned in business school. It’s the shrinking of a product by 10-15 percent of its original size while the price remains the same. Its barely noticeable, and the customer (more often than not) still consumes it. If you wonder why your burger gets smaller or there’s more air in your potato chip bag, you can blame JND practices. I’m not inclined to fall for the marketing narrative that you need to air to keep the chips crisp, pringles seemed to figure it out.

Sustainable Development Goals

Back to stakeholder capitalism. It is an initiative that is pushed by the World Economic Forum for the sake of reinforcing its Sustainable Development Goals. 17 goals oriented around climate action, poverty, gender equality, and education just to name a few.

If you haven’t learned by now, these are all euphemisms. Education is education on the surface, but what they don’t tell you, it is how the WEF wants you to think. Indoctrination at scale, always remember that the one in charge writes history. Climate action is climate action on the surface, but what they don’t tell you is that NGO’s are tokenizing the rainforest³ as well as your drinking water. We will save the natural world because we will own it! You won’t hear them say that, but that is the gist of things.

Stakeholder capitalism involves all members of the organization. Shareholders, lenders, suppliers, employees, state, economy, as well as international organizations.⁴ Again, on the surface, this seems like a fair and equitable equation. What is not to love, employees and customers have a say in how that corporation’s product or service is shaped? That sounds like a great idea.

With the integration of state and society, they can adjust their taxes accordingly to reflect their profits and if there are any crisis’ they can redirect resources for the betterment of their community. It sounds like the perfect utopia of meshing corporation with societal needs.

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

So if this is what Stakeholder capitalism can achieve on a societal level, what can they achieve at a global level? Well, that question has a little more ambiguity. We can see how these projects have been piloted within various corporations in previous years. Ever wonder why the Little Mermaid and British Queen Consort Anne Boleyn became black within modern day cinema?⁵ You can blame that on DEI practices which is an SDG goal number 10; reduced inequalities.⁶

There is nothing wrong with casting characters that fit the role but are outside of the narrations ethnic background. It is when they are intentionally trying to claim that Sub Saharan Africans lived in Scotland all along, that’s how you cause friction.⁷ Remember kids, '“diversity is our strength” The wise words from Keir Starmer as he floods the UK with unsustainable levels of migrants. Braveheart came in the form of an axe wielding little girl.⁸ If immigration is not managed holistically, name calling people “racists” will no longer serve as a deterrent to keep the locals from becoming violent. Careful about rustling the natives, the Scots and Irish can be an angry bunch.

You could take the apologist stance and say “this is payback for the colonization of Africa” but once you run that social experiment till the end; all you create is a race war in Europe. To make an omelet you need to crack a few eggs. And to these globalists, when the UK’s citizens raises the colors of St. George, it is conflict taken into account. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

The Soft Power Takeover

So lets conduct a bit of a thought experiment. Your company just went public and you were forced to relinquish or sell shares to the state or to an international governing body. What control you had has now been subdivided amongst national and international members of the community.

If you’re the 1950’s monopoly man sitting behind his desk smoking a cigar, maybe that’s a good thing. We can’t let Reginald dump toxic run-off into the local water supply. But if you are a business that already follows ethical practices (which is many of them) I don’t see how giving an international 3 letter agency a stake in your company comes out as a net benefit for your organization.

The WEF states that their policies will be criteria agnostic (so as long as you follow the criteria you will be fine), but what they don’t tell you is that your largest competitors who sided with the WEF long ago already have the home field advantage⁹. Do you think they would let another Amazon, Apple or Google take the top spot? No. They will wipe out their most likely number 2 competition and let the remaining tertiary companies fight for market share scraps. Sorry bud, your ESG score was too low, we gotta liquidate your company into 4 segments and let Blackrock sort you out.

Klaus quotes Peter Thiel in Stakeholder Capitalism “Monopolies are necessary because only a monopoly can allocate resources towards more altruistic endeavors”¹⁰ If you don’t know what Palantir is, take this short opportunity to give them a quick google.¹¹ It’s a rabbit hole the entire military establishment can fit into. Digital ID and Digital DNA are words that should be integrated into your social dictionary. You better start believing in dystopian nightmares, because you’re in one (in captain Barbossa voice).

If Stakeholder Capitalism truly puts ‘all voices’ at the table — governments, NGOs, international organizations, and elites — then whose voice gets drowned out in the end?

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Sources and Further Readings

1. Mylan CEO on EpiPen drug price controversy: “I get the outrage”

2. American airlines saved 40 000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class

3. “Sustainably” Surveilling and Tokenizing Nature: The Case of O.N.E. Amazon

4. What is stakeholder capitalism?

5. Candace Owens: If a Black woman can play Anne Boleyn, then a white man should play Obama

6. Understanding SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities

7. Lost “African tribe” of Kubala claims Scottish woodland as ancestral home

8. Axe-wielding Dundee teen who ‘defended friend from migrant man’

9. WEF Partners

10. (Sovereign Individual — Lord Rees Mogg & James Davison )

11. Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

What is Stakeholder Capitalism?

What a bland question, meant for the purpose of getting middle aged asset managers’ dicks hard. What is this word, what does it mean and why should you give a shit? Is this just capitalism wearing a funny hat? A new word aimed at creating nuance for a corporate upgrade?

No, this is a concept that has been around for more than 50 years. It takes elements from shareholder capitalism as well as state-run capitalism and glues it together with SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Where this should raise your antennas, is the person (and organization) that is pushing for stakeholder capitalism, who is none other than Klaus Schwab; the founder of the World Economic Forum. The same man who famously said the phrase “you will own nothing, and be happy”¹.

Seems like the WEF got some flack from using NGO’s (Non-government Organizations) to dictate policy on a global scale. You can use the WHO and the BIS as the most notable examples. WHO (World Health Organization) during covid ran roughshod in almost every country in regards to covid procedures. 6-meter distance protocols, the shutdown of small businesses, and multiple boosters was apart of the program.

Hindsight 20/20 but how did all that play out? Did we stop the spread of transmission? No. Did we stop immediate infection? No. All that came out of it was a spike in pulmonary embolism, myocarditis² as well as a surge in miscarriages³. Turbo cancer is a word you better start getting acquainted with because chances are you are going to know someone who has it. WHO wrote the protocols and the WEF enforced it on a global scale. We got culled during lockdown and racked up more debt in the process.

As written by Klaus, stakeholder capitalism blends local shareholders, state members, employees, suppliers and international organizations. The aim is to reinforce behaviors towards the 2030 SDG (Sustainable Development Governance) goals specifically around equality, climate action, and consumption & production. On the surface, these goals seem altruistic but when digging a little deeper, you will find these are all euphemisms for centralized control.

This is socialism the long way around. Not socialism like your grand daddy remembers it, but socialism in the sense where the largest 3 letter organizations write the framework, then your local government enforces it. “World leaders unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015”⁴ That was an op-ed written by the Council of Foreign Relations. Your government must meet the requirements Agenda 2030 or financial penalties could ensue.

When Poland decided not to let in migrants, the EU slapped them with fines.⁵ When a company decides against installing DEI measures, their funding gets withdrawn. As Larry Fink of Blackrock describes it “We need to alter behaviors”. You know Blackrock, the largest asset manager on the planet? As of the time of writing, Larry Fink is now the Co-Chairman of the WEF⁶. It’s a little funny how money stays at the top.

That is a fairly simple explanation that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, so pull out your favorite weed pen and buckle up, we are going 60 in a school zone.

What sort of Capitalism is the right kind of capitalism?

The current systems we have are Shareholder and State capitalism. Shareholder is basically the capitalism of the West. You have a board of shareholders who own various percentages of the company or organization and depending on their shares, they either have voting rights, or not. When the shareholders decide the direction of a company, the CEO usually responds with a professionally articulated “yes daddy” and that path is set in motion with quarterly reviews.

The CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. It’s why companies like Dole can start coups in South America and Johnston & Johnston can put asbestos in baby powder⁷. If Quality and Assurance cuts into their margins, then lets just hope your baby has a fully developed blood brain barrier. If not, then for “all intents and purposes” fuck them kids.

We can see how shareholder capitalism can become predatory and it is the reason why we see movements like “eat the rich” and “occupy wall street”. These are the same shareholders that also sit on the board of various legacy media companies. When the peasants are revolting, throw a culture war at them and let them fight amongst themselves. What will it be this decade? A race war, gender, the immigrants? Just do whatever you can to point the spotlight somewhere else, I’m too preoccupied denying people’s health insurance. I sure hope I don’t get popped by an angry Italian.⁸

Fiduciary responsibility means that management is beholden to the interests of their shareholders. “If it isn’t profitable, it isn’t worth my time.”

The second form of Capitalism comes from the state. We can primarily see this form of capitalism in communist or socialist countries. We work for the motherland; profits go to the government. This form of centralized control allows countries to use their manufacturing arm as a bargaining chip.

Need some hydro plants in Pakistan? no problem, China will build you what you need.⁹ Just ignore the repayment schedule for the loan you took with us. By the way, if you don’t pay that back, we are shutting down your plant. All your base are belong to us (insert Chinese accent). Hey Sri Lanka, if you let us build you another port, you will get a flood of trade coming in. You could pay that back in 10 years. Interest and principal? That’s chump change.

The moral of that story is that Sri Lanka never paid that back, and was subsequently forced to relinquish a port to the Chinese navy, which reinforced their string of pearls strategy of enveloping trade routes around India.¹⁰ With state capitalism, China was able to leverage local Chinese manufacturers and construction developers to encroach land in various countries. Don’t believe me? See who has leverage over the International Zimbabwe airport in Harare.¹¹

The Chinese basically followed the playbook of the US back in the 1980’s when the US used companies like Main and Bechtel to build infrastructure projects in South America as referenced in Economic Hitman by John Perkins. US companies convinced countries to take on debt to build power plants and mines. Those crafty Americans exaggerated the return on investment, procured a loan from the World Bank and constructed piles of debt for South American governments. Its fine though, they can always refinance the loans and continue the mandrake mechanism of fractional reserve lending¹². Those are some of the gears and levers central banks around the globe use when loaning and creating currency (that’s a story for another time).

As you can see, I am displaying the worst outcome examples for where each form of capitalism can take you. A few bad apples can ruin the bunch, and depending on where you are in history, your apple cart could be infested. They are both flawed systems but if we replace them, could the cure be better than the illness? What does stakeholder capitalism look like?

Check out the next article for a deep dive into Stakeholder Capitalism!

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Sources and Further Readings

1. “You will Own Nothing and Be Happy”

2. The Pfizer Documents

3. Increased risk of fetal loss after COVID-19 vaccination

4. The SDGs Are Not on Track: Here Is What the World Should Do

5. Poland refuses to comply with EU immigration rules, while leading the union

6. Statement from Larry Fink and André Hoffmann, Interim Co-Chairs of the World Economic Forum

7. J&J Knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder

8. Who is Luigi Mangione, CEO shooting suspect?

9. The strategic intent of China’s hydropower investments in Pakistan

10. With Sri Lankan port acquisition, China adds another ‘pearl’ to its ‘string’

11. Zimbabwean president commissions Chinese-funded airport terminal extension

12. The Mandrake Mechanism: How the Fed Prints Money (and Who Profits)

You may have heard about the DTCC, but do you understand what they do and how it works? If you looking for a financial powerhouse, swap out your microscope for binoculars. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation as of June 2025 custodies more than 100 trillion dollars worth of securities, ETFs (exchange traded funds, equities and money market instruments.

If you are looking for a course on the the DTCC I’d suggest you spend some time with the resources they provide.1 Its informative but quite dry unless get hard for securities and ETF management.

If you don’t got time for all of that, here are the spark notes.

With over 50 years of experience, DTCC is the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry. From 20 locations around the world, DTCC, through its subsidiaries, automates, centralizes, and standardizes the processing of financial transactions, mitigating risk, increasing transparency, enhancing performance and driving efficiency for thousands of broker/dealers, custodian banks and asset managers. Industry owned and governed, the firm innovates purposefully, simplifying the complexities of clearing, settlement, asset servicing, transaction processing, trade reporting and data services across asset classes, bringing enhanced resilience and soundness to existing financial markets while advancing the digital asset ecosystem. In 2024, DTCC’s subsidiaries processed securities transactions valued at U.S. $3.7 quadrillion and its depository subsidiary provided custody and asset servicing for securities issues from over 150 countries and territories valued at U.S.2

The DTCC is like the hall monitor for the stock market. They set rules and makes sure everyone follows them. They also manage derivatives but its primarily for the sake of record keeping, instead of custody. Derivatives are financially literate gambling. Lets say you own 10 million dollars worth of apples and you make a bet that they will be worth 11 million due to apple shortages in Georgia, who supplies the global market with an arbitrary amount of apples. Derivatives is also a form of insurance hedging on the world stage. If I own an airline and fuel prices are outside of my control (because i’m not a oil company) I can use derivatives to insulate my costs if fuel goes up. If it goes down, I pay the difference.

How the DTCC is going digital

The DTCC manages settlement between investors and stock issuers. Making sure all parties involved are globally compliant is a full time job and there can’t be any issues open to interpretation. Currently they settle on a T+2 framework. That means when you buy a stock on a Monday, it will settle and reach the issuers account by Wednesday. That’s the old system. The new system is digital and it runs on blockchain rails. The speed, transparency and security of crypto allows you to settle on a T+0 framework. That is instantaneous settlements. Being on blockchain means that information doesn’t need to change hands and get funneled down the approval processes of asset transfers. It is on Blockchain, meeting criteria, logged on digital accounting software, and possibly run by AI agents. The future is now, old man.

The DTCC is working with over 50 firms that are moving the financial industry on digital rails. 15 or so companies are directly blockchain / crypto related. A couple notables on that list are Ripple, Circle, Ondo, Bitgo, Fireblocks, Canton, Chainlink and Talos. 3 Not including various financial powerhouses like Bank of America, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, and the NYSE Group. If the big dogs have a seat at the table, its probably not something you want to sleep on.

A Token for your Thoughts

One of the largest migrations for the DTCC is tokenization. In this case, a digital proxy of a financial asset that can be fractionalized, and transparently tracked and settled on T+0. It is the financial upgrade of the century, for better and for worse. Will it make the financial system more efficient? Yes. Will it make the transactions more transparent? Yes. Will it reduce cost? Yes. Can it also be used to relinquish assets from your custody? Maybe not initially but the answer is also, yes.

Tokenization is the future of digital asset management. But it must be closely examined through the lens of a skeptic. It is the age old sales tactic of selling us convenience. But at what cost? What happens if our assets are fractionalized and democratized? Does that mean, that if we are not the primary “stakeholder”, our voting rights comes second to the one who holds the majority of the asset? When the elderly decide to reverse mortgage their homes through tokenization, it will be a form of digital colonialism, chipping away at their ownership; bit by bit.

We are taking all of your shit, democratically.

But back to the DTCC. Check out their official statement from their May 2026 paper.

DTCC plans to facilitate the initial, limited production trades of real-world assets tokenized using DTC’s tokenization service in July 2026 and then plans to launch the service in October 2026. DTCC will continue collaborating with the DTCC Industry Working Group to align best practices, advance industry readiness and prove operational and technical workflows, including the use of DTC tokenized assets in a production environment and their ability to interoperate across many chains.4

The DTCC are running a soft launch by July 2026 and a full digital token integration by October 2026. We are looking at the greatest wealth transfer in our generation. Stocks, bonds, ETFs, ETPs, money market funds, its all coming on-chain.

The latest addition to the Roster

Stellar Development Foundation. The blockchain that could be referred to Ripple’s baby brother. They are the custodians of the crypto currency XLM. The [TLDR] version of their relationship to Ripple is, apparently, Jeb Mccalleb had a “falling out” with the original Ripple team like Arthur Britto and David Schwartz. So he created the Stellar Foundation and its native crypto currency XLM. I’m not sure how many people believe the story of “I don’t like your toys and your ideas are dumb, so I’m going to to make my own blockchain, with cocaine and hookers and it’ll be awesome, narrative”. Its more likely that Ripple and Stellar are working closely together to corner the entire retail and financial institution markets. There must be an anti-trust law put in place to keep them from monopolizing all of it, so it would be in their best interest to accomplish the same goal as two separate entities. Ripple for Institutional players. Stellar for “banking the unbanked” retail. Its a working theory.

“DTCC is the backbone of global capital markets, and integrating their tokenization service with Stellar connects public blockchain networks to regulated market infrastructure, said Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation”5

In the interim, DTCC and SDF will collaborate to evaluate tokenization use cases for eligible asset classes, including opportunities to tokenize highly liquid assets such as constituents of the Russell 1000, ETFs tracking major indices, and U.S. Treasury bills, bonds, and notes, consistent with DTC’s regulatory obligations.6

Above is the official statement from the DTCC on the meshing of blockchain and traditional finance. We are running out of time to properly position ourselves for the digital transition of finance. The DTCC’s 114 trillion dollars are about to come on-chain by the first half of 2027. Stellar is sitting at .24 cents USD at the time of writing. Do what you will with that information, just remember it is not financial advice.

Sources and Further Readings

A simple understanding of tokenization is that RWA’s (real world assets) can be placed on a digital token. A real-world asset could also be interpreted as anything that can be collateralized and fractionalized. As a home owner, selling your home would require contracts to be drafted up between the bank as well as the buyer consisting of mortgage payments, payment schedules, agreed upon price, as well as provincial and possibly federal regulatory requirements.

Now what if the deed to that home is tokenized and placed in your digital wallet?

This is less theory and more reality than you think. A real estate company in the US by the name of Propy is currently tokenizing real estate. Propy is a licenced Web3 real-estate broker that has been in operation since 2017 and has facilitated more than 4 billion dollars in transactions within Florida, Colorado and Arizona. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) — the largest bank in Japan — is in the process of tokenizing a 100 billion Yen Office tower as a security.

The next question should be “what blockchain will that tower be tokenized on?”

A little digging into major blockchain partnerships will help you find that answer rather quickly. We will come to a watershed moment where all assets can be tokenized. Whoever is the holder of the token, owns the rights to the asset. The token can then be transferred from buyer to seller through the facilitation of a smart contract.

Smart contracts are a set of criteria that must be met for the transfer of ownership of the token. As an example, perhaps the sale of the home must be to another resident presiding within the same country, as well as provide a minimum down payment and must have the mortgage approved by a bank within the same country. The criteria of the smart contract would be unique to the asset transfer. That token can then be placed onto a blockchain of the users choosing to help facilitate the speed and security of the transfer.

What if the US transfers their debt to a token or a cryptocurrency?

The Coles notes of tokenization is that you can “tokenize RWAs” (real world assets) and place the value of the RWA onto a blockchain thus increasing the valuation of the blockchain/ledger. Example, if I wanted to tokenize 100 billion dollars worth of real estate on the public XRP ledger, the market cap will rise comparable to the 100 billion dollars added. Here comes the million-dollar question.

What happens if you can tokenize debt?

How much debt will flow onto the XRP ledger? Can the US transfer its debt onto a ledger on the blockchain? Does this include both short term T-bills as well as long term treasury bonds? Diving into the relationship between Blackrock and their BUIDL fund (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) will determine that US treasuries have been tokenized to the tune of 2.5 billion dollars at the time of writing. Blackrock is the leading early institutional adopter of tokenized treasury assets, but they are also in competition with Franklin Templeton, Superstate, Wisdom Tree, VanEck, Fidelity as well as many others.

There was always an insidious relationship between big banks and government. If the US plans to maintain US dollar hegemony, this may be the way they can settle their debt and maintain reserve currency status, all while letting the largest financial asset managers sit pretty at the top.

This brave new world we are sleep walking into will present us with a new asset class. We are looking at the greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world, while most of us common folk are treated like mushrooms. They feed us shit and keep us in the dark. You talk to your bank teller, your mother, your retired next-door neighbour and they will tell you the same thing. Crypto is a Ponzi scheme that will separate you from your hard-earned money. And maybe some of that is true. We have experienced enough rug-pulls to believe it.

But we are about to be left in the fucking dust if we don’t look past the headlines. We need to open our eyes to the macro events set in motion of the financial world. We need to read between the lines, focus less on what they say, and be acutely aware of what they are doing.

Sources and Further Readings

Propy Real Estate Tokenization https://propy.com/home/

MUFG Acquires Osaka Skyscraper for ¥100 Billion to Tokenize as Digital Securities Marking Pivotal Step in Japan’s Real Estate Sectorhttps://www.ainvest.com/news/mufg-acquires-osaka-skyscraper-100-billion-tokenize-digital-securities-marking-pivotal-step-japan-real-estatesector-2507/

RWA Tokenization 101 https://www.defactor.com/post/rwa-tokenization-101

Tokenized Treasuries https://app.rwa.xyz/treasuries

What’s your take?

Is tokenizing America’s debt on blockchains like XRP the ultimate reset — or the biggest wealth transfer in history? Drop your thoughts in the comments. If this piece opened your eyes, share it, and subscribe for the full series on Bitcoin, Ripple, debt, and the new financial system.

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How many of you remember Trumps speech back in October 2025 on paying down the US debt with a little bitcoin?

If Trump were to theoretically use only Bitcoin to payoff the national debt which is nearing 40 trillion dollars, bitcoin would need to be at $2 million dollars per token and he would need almost the entire 21 million coins in circulating supply to pay off its debt. That seems impossible to use bitcoin, but he might have an ace in his back pocket.

Ripple is headquartered in San-Francisco, making it a US based company. You can also find photos of the Ripple C-suite team meeting President Trump as well as members of the White House.

(Sourced from Twitter)

When you do a little digging into the Ripple ecosystem, you begin to see the multibillion-dollar acquisitions of Metaco and Hidden Road for international prime brokerage as well as institutional custody of digital assets.

Metaco was purchased by Ripple in 2023 for 250 million dollars USD. It manages the custody of digital assets (crypto) for many large financial institutions like BNB Paribas, Citi Group and Societe Generale.

The acquisition of Hidden Road was made on April 8, 2025 for 1.25 billion dollars USD; making it one of the largest crypto acquisitions in history. Hidden Road is a global credit network that manages trading, clearing, and financing digital / trad-fi assets for institutional investors such as hedge fund firms, market makers, brokers and trading firms.

Ripple is also building CBDC’s in 8 countries as well as assisted on developing the framework for digital assets on the governing board for the BIS (Bank of International Settlements). This is separate from their 1700 NDAs from various financial institutions globally. Ripple’s native token “XRP” is positioned to be the lifeblood of the new financial system. XRP is also highly undervalued for its global role as cross border settlement liquidity.

So, could it be possible that the US government scooped up a bunch of XRP at the single digits?

Once all the regulations come into affect, they flip the switch for the new monetary system, all federal as well as cross border payments flow onto the XRP Ledger, thus inflating the value of the XRP token. Theoretically, if XRP was $10,000 per token, the US would only require 4 billion tokens to pay off the US National Debt. This is 4.00% of XRP’s total supply. Now I don’t believe it will be just XRP to facilitate the role.

“The world will be multichain” according to Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. There will be a few select cryptocurrencies tied to centralized insitutions who will be building legacy rails for defi, tokenization, and cross-border payments. To gather more insight on which other digital assets will be used, you can start with the ISO20022 messaging standard and which coins are compliant to that standard.

ISO20022 is a messaging standard that has been adopted by FedNow (US federal inter-settlement program) as well as SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication).

Sources and Further Readings

Donald Trump Once Said The US Could Pay Off Its $37 Trillion Debt Burden With Bitcoin—But Could It Really? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-once-said-us-180108637.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall

Ripple Acquires Prime Broker Hidden Road for $1.25B in One of the Largest Deals in the Digital Assets Space https://ripple.com/ripple-press/ripple-acquires-prime-broker-hidden-road/

Ripple buys crypto custody firm Metaco for $250 million https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/ripple-buys-crypto-custody-firm-metaco-250-million-2023-05-17/

Ripple Agrees to Acquire Prime Broker Hidden Road for $1.25B in One of the Largest Deals in the Digital Assets Space https://hiddenroad.com/ripple-agrees-to-acquire-prime-broker-hidden-road-for-1-25b-in-one-of-the-largestdeals-in-the-digital-assets-space/

Ripple has revealed over 8 countries are building CBDCs on XRP Ledger https://coinography.com/ripple-has-revealed-over-8-countries-are-building-cbdcs-on-xrp-ledger/

Ripple (XRP) Leads SWIFT On BIS Cross-Border Task Force List https://timestabloid.com/ripple-xrp-leads-swift-on-bis-cross-border-task-force-list/

Ripple’s 1,700 XRP Contracts Revealed: What This Means for the Future of XRP https://thecurrencyanalytics.com/altcoins/ripples-1700-xrp-contracts-revealed-what-this-means-for-the-future-of-xrp-131438

ISO 20022 Crypto: List of Compliant Coins & Tokens in 2025 https://coincodex.com/article/27964/iso-20022-crypto/

US Federal Reserve completes long-awaited ISO 20022 migration for Fedwire https://paymentexpert.com/2025/07/14/us-federal-reserve-completes-long-awaited-iso-20022-migration-for-fedwire/

The Future of Cross-Border Payments is Now: Leveraging Swift ISO 20022 Migration Into a Strategic Advantage https://www.citigroup.com/global/insights/future-cross-border-payments-now-swift-iso-20022-migration

What do you think?

Could XRP and Ripple actually play a central role in resetting America’s $40 trillion debt? Or is this just another crypto conspiracy theory? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

If this piece connected the dots for you, share it with friends, and subscribe for the next part of the series.

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What is a Ponzi Scheme?

If you have been alive since the pre 2000s, there is a good chance you know what a Ponzi scheme is. Between the 60’s to 80’s Bernie Madoff gathered investors and claimed that he could get 10 % returns on their million dollar investments. He would do this by acquiring a loan from an initial investor and pay a 10 % dividend (through a sophisticated split strike conversion) annually.

He would do this by using the funds from a latter investor to pay off the previous investor. The investment was not placed in an index, a stock or a leveraged trade, it just sat in an account for the sake of paying off initial investors. Thus the game of Ponzi schemes were revitalized (or popularized at least). To see a 10% return, you must keep your money in the account. Them’s the rules, that is at the very least, a year of staked risk.

Initially it goes smoothly, Bernie & team can manage a decent number of accounts simultaneously. Its when it becomes too large, mistakes happen. Investors don’t get paid on-time, phone call pile up and letters cease to be answered. Like rats off a sinking ship, investors begin to make attempts to withdraw. Notice the word “attempt”. The punchline to a costly joke. You can’t pull your money because its not there. Each investor pays off the previous investor, developing trust in the system, because we don’t ask about the process. All we see is the dollar amounts, and in a state of euphoria, we don’t ask questions.

BG and DSJEX

So what happens when we give the Ponzi scheme a 21st century face lift?

In the BG Wealth Sharing group, it took the form of a suave educated professor by the name of Steven Beard. A person who claims to have found the ultimate trading strategy. One of which an investor can make 1.3% compounded daily. Yes you heard that right, daily; not monthly not yearly. Daily. To put that in perspective, if you invested $10,000 US dollars (USDT) in the DSJEX platform, you will see a 100% return in approximately 2 months (if you ended up following all of the trading signals).

To make a platform like this even somewhat believable, you need to be coming from a place of authority. SEC filings, shareholder ownership documents and an “official” partnership letter from Stephen Beard himself. As many of the investors were from outside of the US, authenticity of US legal documents were hard to determine.

Before I go further, I would like to state my position in all of this. I was one of the many investors in the DSJEX platform between March 2026 to May 2026. So I was able to gather a bit of insight into the trading platform. I understood the risk going in. I have experience in risky crypto assets, going all the way back to the days of 400% pumps from meme coins like Safe Moon, to 50x leveraged copy trading platforms like Margex. The controversial takeaway with these get rich quick schemes in crypto, is that they actually work. As long as you enter closer to the top. Timing is the challenge. Being a day late makes all the difference. In Margex, I could turn 300 XRP into 750 XRP over the course of 3 days through leverage copy trading. That lasted (maybe) 10 days. With DSJEX I wasn’t so lucky.

I put 1000 USDT into the platform, made 1000 USDT in two months and removed my principle. I needed to pay a 12% fee to withdrawal, but I just chalk that up to the cost of doing business. After removing the principle I fell into one of the oldest traps to exist.

The bricklayers strategy.

You invest a small amount then you are given the returns promised so you are incentivized to invest more. So you dump another $5000.00 dollars in the pot and you are again, paid back the returns promised. Then after your last and largest investment, you get rugged. At 1.3% compounding daily, how can your eyes see anything other than dollar signs?

In my case, it was a strong enough risk to reward ratio. I knew this platform won’t last forever so I might as well take the risk. Funny enough, it wasn’t the financial losses that hurt so much, as I didn’t remortgage the family home into it. But it was a bruising of ego. I saw an opportunity that was too good to be true and I took it. We were fed the story of a genius who created a trading strategy that guaranteed a win-rate over 96%. A man of the people, who did this for none other than “philanthropic reasons”; for the sake of “helping families create generational wealth”, when in reality he targeted the most financially vulnerable.

Cracks in the Dam

Video of Stephan Beard speaking about the 12% tax levied on the BG Investment group that investors are expected to pay

This was the first video interaction I saw of “Professor Stephen Beard”. After watching it thoroughly and listening to his forced (high society English and German) inflections he placed on his words. All I was thinking was one thing. Who is this aristocratic, young Klaus Schwab wannabe?

Then I came to the realization; fuck, they pulled a fast one on me.

In the video, he claimed that many of the investors created multiple accounts and a 12 percent “tax” was levied on BG Investment group for the sake of regulatory compliance; that all members were required to pay. ALL members, all 800,000 (approx) of them, to pay, out of pocket. Otherwise their accounts will be terminated.

This sent shockwaves in the BG Wealth WhatsApp group chats as well as the Bonchat (an encrypted official messaging platform for BG Wealth).

Chaos ensued within the WhatsApp groups. Angry investors became vocal and admins did their best to maintain composure by kicking them from the chats. “Don’t stir the pot” was a phrase commonly used by admins who attempted to maintain order. Once you stir the pot one too many times, expect to be removed from the group. Its hard to say if the admins were apart of the charade or if they genuinely put their faith and trust in a business that compounds their principle anywhere between 1.3 to 2.1 percent a day. This became the age old lesson of “if its too good to be true, it probably is”.

I kept silent in the chats for the sake of compiling information and what I sadly concluded was it was a blissfully naive group of admins, account managers and people who referred their friends and family; doing their best to remain optimistic. “Trust the professor” “Trust the plan, our leader has always been transparent” Many people referred their brothers, sisters, fathers, friends, husbands, kids, and even their pastors. All of whom lost whatever investments they poured into BG Wealth. Of course they want to remain optimistic. We all hope that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the collective debt on a foreclosure notice.

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Damage Control

Clearly the 12 percent tax levied during the rectification period was an unpopular one. Team members from different parts of the world began speaking with each other. Some veterans touted “no one pay this tax”, others question “is this even a real request?”. Stephen Beard turned off commenting on Bonchat and came out with his next official statement that “Bonchat and the Whatsapp groups have been compromised by hackers”. When in doubt, blame hackers from the ether, wash your hands, then call it a day.

One of the “stated” reasons behind the tax was because BG Wealth needed to provide more money up front for an IPO to the tune of 12% of whatever was in your account at the time. If you had 1000.00 dollars at the time of Stephens request, you pay 12 percent (120.00) on that. If you had $100,000.00 in your account you pay 12 percent (12,000.00) on THAT. This raises the question, why could you not use the balance in your DSJEX account to pay this “tax”? If the money was genuinely there, why not use the gains from the investor accounts to pay the tax / levy / fine / regulatory compliance requirements?

Because, fuck you, that’s why.

This was the last ditch attempt to siphon the few remaining dollars held by the targeted retail investor. Some people caved, in attempts to pull out the rest of their principle. Some of us accepted our fate and cut our losses.

Oldest trick in the book when building a cult-like persona. Position yourself like a genius messiah. A man above the people, for the people. Then when investors begin to ask questions, you pull the plug on the operation and ride off into the sunset. It may be a slim silver lining that they didn’t make it out with all of the investors funds as

“Tether froze $38.4 million based on the findings. An additional $3.1 million was frozen at various services and exchanges, bringing the total frozen to $41.5 million”

Of the 93 million that was stolen from retail investors.

Let this be the lesson of the 21st century. When it comes to Ponzi schemes, the tactics may change but the intent stays the same. How can I separate you from your hard earned money? What is plausible, what is believable? What do I need to do to gain your trust? As long as scammers have answers to those questions, every generation will continue to get fleeced.

What do you think?

Is this the end of Ponzi schemes? Or will we keep falling into the same traps once enough time has passed? Drop your thoughts in the comments. If this piece made you think, share it, and subscribe for the next deep dive.

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Sources and Further Readings

DSJEX team freezes $41.5M after alleged $150M crypto Ponzi crash https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/dsjex-team-freezes-415m-after-alleged-150m-crypto-ponzi-crash/ar-AA22r6qW

Alleged investment group BG Wealth Sharing LTD and cryptocurrency trading platform DSJ Exchange PTY Ltd may be fraudulent https://dfi.wa.gov/alerts/alleged-investment-group-bg-wealth-sharing-ltd-and-cryptocurrency-trading-platform-dsj

Alberta Securities Commission warns public of suspected investment scheme https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/alberta-securities-commission-warns-public-of-suspected-investment-scheme/

“I cover emerging digital technologies and tactics that are currently or will be used in the near future. Follow me for updates, insights and briefings on crypto, blockchain, digital ID, tokenization, carbon credits and social credit”

How does this all relate to our current financial situation? Let’s aim the spotlight to the US’s 40 trillion dollars in debt (approximately). The interest alone is 1.1 trillion dollars and climbing. That is more than the cost of the US’s 2024 defense budget. There is no way to pay that back or pay it down under current conditions. The US has a couple options when dealing with their debt.

1. They can tax it out of you, which is grossly unpopular and it doesn’t even begin to settle the 1.1 trillion-dollar interest payment, let alone the principal.

2. They can default, which is the first step towards the end of the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world.

3. Or, they can raise the debt ceiling and print more money as a stimulus package under the narrative that it will get production back on track.

There is a 4th option that no-one talks about.

How many of you have heard of the term jubilee? Do you know the religious connotation of Jubilee? It was a debt forgiveness that was practiced in the Old Testament amongst Jewish communities every 50 years as well as a sabbatical on the 7th year. All property and fruits of the earth belonged to God alone. Debts are pardoned and the slaves are freed. In a way, this tradition brought fiscal balance back to the Jewish community. It would be kind of nice if the government could wipe their debt clean (as well as ours) like Sunday nights browser history.

It’s a bit more complicated than that.

How can you ask every single country on the planet, that also holds US Treasury bonds, to forgive the US’s debt? If you have been following the US foreign Bond market, you will find that countries around the world have been dumping US treasury bonds at record rates, while central banks are quietly moving towards stable tier 1 assets like gold. Treasury bonds are basically debt that is sold off to other countries. When countries buy US debt, they are paid interest on that debt. The rate of interest is determined by magical money wizards at the Federal Reserve who intentionally make the rate calculation difficult to understand.

This is a separate topic, from the whispers of Operation Sandman, which is theorized as a coordinated effort by BRICS nations to dump US bonds and T-bills back on the US, thus hyperinflating the US dollar. Not my circus, not my monkey, right? Not if you live in Canada.

Canada is the 5th largest holder of US T-bills. If the US goes down, we are also sinking with the ship. Unless of course, we have gold (precious metals) or another tier 1 asset we can peg our currency on. Spoiler alert, we don’t. We sold most of our gold back in 2016.

So what does have to do with Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and the Blockchain?

There is a very strange connection between US stimulus, Bitcoin cycles, the bond market and Tether/USDT, the largest stable coin by market cap. Whenever the US engages in QE (quantitative easing / print more monopoly money), bitcoin, as well as the stock market increases in value. Now that itself isn’t too strange, since lower interest rates increases risk appetite. Cheap money usually means high risk investments.

But here’s where it gets strange.

When the US can’t sell their T-bills and treasury bonds, USD Tether scoops them up. The company around USDT is buying US bonds when no other country is willing to. As Tether purchases more bonds, they mint USDT in billion-dollar increments, then cycle some of the USDT back into US dollars. As of a 2024 Q2 annual report, Tether acquired over 97.6 billion dollars in US treasury bonds, putting it ahead of Germany, the UAE, and Australia taking the 18th spot of the largest holder of US Treasury Bonds. Tether, a crypto company, is buying bonds at the rate of a medium/large scale economy.

They also purchase Bitcoin and use USDT as a stable asset for the purchase of high-risk meme coins, usually built on the ERC-20 chain (Ethereum, a de-gen sandbox). After reviewing USDT and Bitcoin from the last bull-run it was concluded that USDT inflows are what pushed the BTC price to $69,000. Is it possible that Tether minted USDT to the tune of billions of dollars and pushed it into Bitcoin to artificially drive up the price?

As of the time of writing, we are still in the speculative phase of the question.

7 times Tether was asked to provide audits. 7 times, they failed to report. This is one of the reasons why USDT doesn’t pass the MiCA regulations of Europe and it won’t pass under the Genius Act in the US. Tether is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands with offices in Switzerland, so there is a corporate veil that makes transparency difficult. All of these findings lead to the question of whether or not USDT Tether is an off-the-books US deep state slush fund. Edo Farina as well as Versan Aljarrah cover this point quite extensively. New developments display that tether is attempting to create another stable coin that is Genius Act and MiCA compliant. Is USDT forever barred from participating in the US and Europe?

Sources & Further Reading

Defense Budget Overview UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE FISCAL YEAR 2024 BUDGET REQUEST https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2024/FY2024_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf

Jubilee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee

Foreigners Dump U.S. Treasuries. You Won’t Believe Who Did the Most Selling https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/foreigners-dump-u-s-treasuries-you-won-t-believe-who-did-the-most-selling/ar-AA1BmNRv

Central Banks Continue Their Gold-Buying Spree https://money.com/central-banks-gold-buying-spree/

From a billion dollars to zero: Canada stands alone in G7 as it empties its coffers of gold https://financialpost.com/news/economy/from-a-billion-dollars-to-zero-canada-empties-its-coffers-of-gold

2024 Attestation: Reports Record-Breaking $5.2 Billion Profit In First Half Of 2024, Highest Treasury Bill Ownership Ever and Largest Ever Group Consolidated Equity At Almost $12 Billion https://tether.io/news/tether-q2-2024-attestation-reports-record-breaking-5-2-billion-profitin-first-half-of-2024-highest-treasury-bill-ownership-ever-largest-ever-group-consolidated-equity-at-almost-12-billion/

Brief History of Bitcoin Bull & Bear Markets (2008–2024) https://altcoininvestor.com/history-of-bitcoin-bull-bear-market/

What do you think?

Is Tether quietly propping up the US debt machine while pumping Bitcoin — or is it something even bigger? Drop your thoughts in the comments. If this piece made you think, share it, and subscribe for the next deep dive.

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Have you heard the myth of Satoshi Nakamoto? A man who wanted to build a decentralized digital currency that operated outside of legacy financial systems? One of the early miners of Bitcoin once bought a couple pizzas for 40,000 bitcoins. If he developed chronic depression I would understand completely.

When you have something worth fractions of a cent, during a time of zero foresight, how could you possibly know the value of such a token? Retail, financial institutions and even countries are adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets. Now we have retired pensioners dumping their retirement savings into BTC, HODLing it to the moon, or at the very least, to retain its value.

Does anyone know how Bitcoin got started?

You can track down a 9-page document from 2009 otherwise referred to as, “the Bitcoin Whitepaper”. Inside are details on transaction speed, halving cycles, as well as reasons for the 21 million token supply. The Bitcoin ethos could also be interpreted as a peer-to-peer decentralized form of currency outside of the legacy financial system. A hedge against the devaluation of currency tied to debt.

What do you think Bitcoin is really about?

Here is where the truth gets a bit muddled. Back in 1996 there was a white paper made by members of the NSA (National Security Agency). That white paper was called “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash” which coincidentally has a lot of overlap with the Bitcoin whitepaper of 2009.Both papers propose electronic cash systems that bypass traditional payment systems as well as address the issues with “double spend”. Double spend could be interpreted as the act of inputting the value on both sides of the balance sheet. One of the fundamentals of crypto is that it is an automatic double entry ledger system — an accounting practice we have been using since the 1700s. Another similarity between the papers is the critique of our current financial system. The consensus that was reached is that their solutions will be able to mitigate fraud and the high cost of transactions from the traditional payment system.

Where they differ is their stance between centralization (“How to Make a Mint”) and decentralization (Bitcoin Whitepaper).

It’s a little too convenient that the “Bitcoin Whitepaper” made in 2009 stems much of its fundamental ideas from the “How to Make a Mint” whitepaper made back in 1996 by the NSA. Is it possible that Satoshi was not a single person, but a group of people who were spearheading the development of the next financial system? Look around you. The fractional lending system of fiat currency historically runs its course every time it was introduced as monetary policy. We have had cycles from dollars backed by gold to dollars backed by debt for over 2000 years. Debasing currency is in our blood — clipping coins could count as a family activity. Is this a re-run? Are we moving towards an asset-backed dollar, where money isn’t tied to debt — but to precious metals, production, and cryptocurrency? Seems too good to be true until you see BlackRock’s plan for tokenization (we will go into detail about that later).

If you have not read Lyn Alden’s Broken Money or Ray Dalio’s Changing of the World Order, I highly recommend you do so. Ray Dalio’s belief is that all empires go through cycles of growth, prosperity and decline — which simply put, is to produce more than you consume; until you can’t. Eventually all prosperous nations rack up more debt than they can pay for. Sounds eerily similar to the US’s current state of affairs. They have over-extended themselves. Every time they decide to print, they borrow against their children’s future. Money printing is a hell-of-a-drug. Lyn Alden believes in the same premise, but with a focus on the life cycle of money. Those books will go in depth about the cycles of monetary systems as well as nations. The premise behind both books is that change is constant when it comes to currency life cycles as well as power dynamics. Every cause to an effect keeps the rhythmic ebb and flow constantly in flux between the poles. The only thing that is constant is change.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash https://archive.org/details/HowToMakeAMintCryptographyElectronicCash/page/n1/mode/2up

What do you think?
Was Satoshi a lone genius or part of something much larger? Drop your thoughts in the comments. If you enjoyed this piece, share it with friends, and subscribe for more deep dives into money, Bitcoin, and the changing financial system.

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