CRYPTO CORRUPTION IN FOCUS

Vladimir Putin, a crypto bro, the Polish President and Kristi Noem walk into a bar…

The most consequential crypto scandal this week happened in Poland. We had originally intended to take a couple of days off. Then we got excited, thinking we could write a corruption newsletter that wasn’t about Trump. But this story is too bananapants – a very technical political science term. It leads straight back to the Trump White House via the Kremlin and Kristi Noem. Buckle up.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament on April 17 that a cryptocurrency exchange built with what he called “Russian money” sponsored politicians from Poland’s former nationalist government and a 2025 CPAC conference. Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spoke at that conference, where she endorsed nationalist Karol Nawrocki for president of Poland.

The Polish exchange Zondacrypto, formerly known as BitBay, is Poland’s largest crypto trading platform, with 1.3 million customers. Polish intelligence believes the company was taken over in July 2018 by the Tambovskaya Bratva, one of Russia’s most violent organized crime groups, with documented historical ties to Vladimir Putin’s St. Petersburg political machine.

The story begins normally. The exchange collapsed. Polish prosecutors opened a criminal case. The CEO then fled to Israel. But we lurch into 2026. The founder has been missing since 2022 and is presumed murdered. Shortly after he vanished, the company redomiciled to Malta and then Estonia, a documented hub for this type of crypto-laundering architecture. Customer losses exceed 350 million zloty (roughly $95 million), with more than 30,000 victims (both figures are high for Poland).

Why this matters to Americans: Last year, the House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a 100-plus page report calling Trump’s White House the world’s most corrupt crypto startup operation. That was a US story. Now, we have a documented European mirror with the same political furniture, with a twist that feels…very on-brand Trump: Russian organized crime captures a crypto exchange. The exchange sponsors a Trump-aligned political conference that functions as a major convening authority for GOP-aligned groups. A Trump cabinet secretary endorses the exchange’s preferred candidate. That candidate wins. He kills crypto regulation, calling crypto an “innovation” that had been unfairly persecuted by regulation, which he then discards. He then visits the Oval Office, where he meets with Trump.

What to watch: Polish, Estonian, Monégasque, and Emirati investigators are now chasing the same exchange across four jurisdictions. The American political network that helped install its preferred candidate has, so far, said nothing. And the Democrats seem not to have noticed.

THE ENABLER WATCH

This week, two enablers: the Tambovskaya Bratva and CPAC, a line we never thought we’d pen.

Start with the Russian criminals: The Tambovskaya Bratva, also called the Tambov gang or Tambov clan, was formed in St. Petersburg in 1988 around Vladimir Kumarin, nicknamed the Night Governor of the city. By the early 2000s, the group controlled the fuel and energy sector of St. Petersburg. The NSA tapped Kumarin’s phone in 2002 and 2003 to probe his ties to Putin, who had been deputy mayor during the gang’s ascent. A 2025 New Lines Institute strategic assessment documents that since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has systematically used Russian organized crime groups to conduct sabotage, political targeting, and financial crime abroad, financing covert operations with the proceeds. Think of the Russian mob as the FSB’s Blackwater.

Gazeta Wyborcza cited a classified Polish internal security service file that described how the Tambov gang wrestled control over BitBay in July 2018, when the exchange was in financial distress. The shareholding was subsequently routed through three United Arab Emirates shell companies registered at the Burj Khalifa via nominee agents, a structure widely used by Russian oligarchs to evade Western sanctions.

Now the American criminals: In May 2025, Zondacrypto served as a strategic sponsor of CPAC Poland, the first Conservative Political Action Conference held in the country, five days before the Polish presidential runoff. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem addressed the conference and told the crowd that nationalist candidate Karol Nawrocki, in her words, needs to be the next president of Poland. She called his opponent an absolute train wreck of a leader. It was an extraordinary – scandalous? – act for a sitting U.S. cabinet officer to stump for a candidate in a foreign election… more so now that we know it was underwritten by likely FSB-linked Russian mob money.

CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp opened the conference with a call for global conservative solidarity. The corporate sponsor of that solidarity event, according to Polish intelligence, was a Russian mob asset.

Donning our tinfoil hat: Two people deeply involved with the Eastern European far right wing and crypto worlds have been Steve Bannon and his close friend, Jeffrey Epstein. If the Epstein Files ever see the light of day, will they contain crypto information?

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THE MONEY TRAIL

The Polish version of the crypto-to-politics pipeline looks identical to the American variant.

Zondacrypto CEO Przemysław Kral paid 450,000 zloty (about €100,000) to the Sovereign Poland Institute associated with former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro of the Law and Justice party. He also paid roughly €70,000 to political structures connected to Przemysław Wipler, a member of parliament from the far-right Konfederacja party. Polish prosecutors are examining the alleged Zondacrypto financing of Nawrocki’s 2025 presidential campaign.

The day after the CPAC event, Nawrocki posted on Facebook that Poland needs innovation, not regulation, and that, as president, he would guarantee that draconian laws restricting Polish freedom would not come into force. Substitute Trump for Nawrocki, and the sentence reads as White House press release, and the resulting policy could have come out of the SEC.

Nawrocki won in 2025. He met Trump in the Oval Office that September. He vetoed Polish crypto regulation that December and again the next February. Both vetoes preserved Zondacrypto’s unregulated market. The second veto came weeks before the exchange collapsed.

ENFORCEMENT TRACKER

Four jurisdictions are now chasing the same exchange.

For comparison, the US SEC has dismissed every major crypto enforcement case under Chair Paul Atkins. Atkins previously co-chaired the Token Alliance, a crypto industry lobbying group. A Kroll analysis found a 33% dismissal rate in crypto matters, compared with 4% across all other matters. Estonia and Monaco are out-policing Washington on crypto crime.

ORDINARY AMERICANS HARMED

The 30,000 Polish victims of Zondacrypto are Polish, but scale up this scandal, and alarm bells should ring here.

Roughly 2 million Poles hold about €9.4 billion in crypto, with market penetration broadly comparable to that of the United States in terms of share of the population. The Zondacrypto collapse shows how thin consumer protection becomes when a government deliberately weakens its regulator. Polish prosecutors confirmed 700-plus victims in the first weeks. Total customer debts may exceed 500 million zloty as more victims come forward.

The US variant of this risk has already started. An estimated 764,000 wallets lost money on Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin alone. Retail buyers have lost an estimated $2 billion combined. Under the SEC’s collapsed enforcement regime, no federal action is in progress against the issuers. House Democrats spent five days on Anti-Crypto Corruption Week last July, holding up $TRUMP as a microcosm of what could hit the US. The full-scale variant playing out in Poland is Exhibit A.

Capture the regulator. Kill the rules. Walk away with the money. It worked on 30,000 Poles. It is working on Americans. And this potential wrecking ball, hoisted above the American financial sector, may have Kremlin fingerprints all over it.

CORRUPTION RECEIPTS

A case stayed this week, a donation next week and a policy change the week after. The pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

ONE THING TO WATCH

The November 2025 House Judiciary Democrats report sent letters to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent requesting Suspicious Activity Reports tied to World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP memecoin. Bessent has not responded publicly. With the Polish case now demonstrating exactly how a Russian-mobbed-up crypto exchange laundered political influence through CPAC, the Democrats need to demand a response to these SARs — and do so very loudly. Will any official demand a response from Treasury? Or any U.S. media outlet willing to ask CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp who vetted Zondacrypto’s sponsorship? Or anyone subpoena Noem? We know Trump delivers a new scandal every day, but some of the most odious characters in Trumpworld, the European far right, the Russian mob, the Kremlin and a script that looks like a carbon copy of Fairshake PAC, all converge in Warsaw. This story is wild. Will Democrats start overturning rocks here to see if the scandal extends here, too?

Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)(4), an investigative transparency activism fund that incubates independent transparency organizations that put corruption at the top of the US political agenda. Like the rest of our projects, someday this will be an independent organization.

The US has grown cartoonishly corrupt, and that’s not just because of our current administration. We’re building organizations that will help Americans talk about the corruption crisis more freely, so that we can get on a path to restoring our democracy. You can support our mission here or explore our transparency portfolio here.

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CRYPTO CORRUPTION IN FOCUS

This newsletter focuses on corruption in the cryptocurrency industry. More Americans need to understand that behind the indecipherable wall of numerical gibberish stands an “industry” with no legitimate use. It is not some cutting-edge technology or remotely close to a technological advancement, or whatever nonsense the cryptobros are pushing. However, cryptocurrency is well-suited to money laundering and insider trading. This newsletter is intended to demonstrate that and is not intended to focus on President Donald Trump. But as the cryptocurrency industry chose Trump as its spirit animal, and Trump has remade his brand around it, avoiding a discussion of Trump has become impossible. In fact, the Trump family has begun doing our work for us, as we shall talk about today.

As you likely have heard, on May 14, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics released two 113-page disclosure forms showing that accounts in President Donald Trump’s name executed 3,642 individual stock trades between January and March 2026, worth between $220 million and $750 million. What you probably haven’t heard is that Crypto-tied positions sit at the heart of the file. Trump bought shares of Coinbase Global (COIN), Robinhood Markets (HOOD), SoFi Technologies (SOFI), Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings, Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), and Block, all of which benefit directly from rule changes his administration has imposed.

Why it matters: A periodic transaction report (OGE Form 278-T) is the only public window onto a sitting president’s brokerage activity. That sounds like insider DC bureaucratic trivia, but Trump is the first president since the 2012 STOCK Act took effect to trade individual stocks while in office. The law’s drafters assumed a basic level of patriotism from our public servants and from those in Congress, who are ultimately responsible for enforcing it. Sigh…

Back to Trump… he did not place his assets in a blind trust. The crypto-linked names that keep appearing next to Trump’s come from firms whose enforcement cases he made disappear and whose business models depend on rules he writes.

What it means for Americans: Reader forwarded Canadian writer Dean Blundell’s excellent post laying out how egregious Trump’s voluminous insider trading has become. You should read it. This is precisely the behavior Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent once conceded on Bloomberg TV would bring the SEC knocking on your door. Of course, he was criticizing Rep Nancy Pelosi. The SEC under Trump appointee Paul Atkins has only knocked on the doors of the little people, not Trump, crypto insiders.

What to watch: Six Senate Democrats asked the SEC to open an insider trading probe of Trump’s tariff trades in 2025. They received no public answer. This disclosure is a fresh test. Republican voters despise insider trading. Trump’s central 2016 message was about abuse of power (“drain the swamp”). Yet, his corruption has gifted the Democrats one of the greatest gifts in modern American political history. Trump’s brand is about abusing power for the benefit of the cryptocurrency industry. Can the Democrats capitalize on that?

Our recommendation: This must be the opposition’s electoral agenda. Every chance you get, announce that you are storing this stuff for January. Voters will vote for you for that alone. Every time the Republicans refuse to hold Trump accountable, expand the research and announce you’re doing so. We’ll help. But don’t focus solely on Trump. Build dossiers on all the enablers who make Trump possible. Name names. Create an accountability clock with their names on it. Then, come January, advise them to rent housing near Capitol Hill since they’ll be stars.

This can’t be one hearing — bigger than the Watergate Hearings. If the Democratic Party wants to be entrusted with governing, this must be its agenda. This is how Péter Magyar, the Hungarian candidate, beat Viktor Orbán. Whether the Democrats can do this is an open question. The Magyar lesson was that anti-corruption has magical political resonance against authoritarianism when wielded as a wire brush on the system. The Democrats’ goal should be to make Sen Slotkin’s cryptobro allies extremely nervous.

THE ENABLER WATCH

This week, Donald Trump Jr. and the prediction-market crypto pipeline.

A prediction market is an online exchange where users buy yes-or-no contracts that pay out when a real-world event occurs, from elections to military strikes. The two largest platforms are Polymarket, which settles bets in cryptocurrency and operates an offshore exchange, and Kalshi, which settles bets in U.S. dollars. Donald Trump Jr. now sits on the advisory boards of both. In August 2025, his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, made an eight-figure investment in Polymarket, and the president’s son joined its advisory board. The Trump family’s social media site, Truth Social, also has its own prediction market product in development.

Polymarket has become a chosen tool of insider trading. On April 23, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment of Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke for using classified information about the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to wager about $33,000 and pocket $409,881 on Polymarket. Trump gets away with it because he’s president. Law for thee, not for me, and all that… Last weekend, 60 Minutes reported on nine linked anonymous Polymarket accounts that netted $2.4 million on Iran war bets with a 98 percent win rate. Profits, the blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps found, were funneled through the Bybit, Binance, and HTX crypto exchanges.

In February, Israel indicted an army reservist and a civilian on serious security charges for using classified IDF information to bet on military operations on Polymarket. The same platform. Always cryptocurrency. And of course, the Trump family is on the board and involved in the policy decisions, swinging the markets.

THE MONEY TRAIL

The Coinbase trade in the OGE filing is the clearest quid pro quo on the page. Coinbase poured over $45 million into Fairshake, the crypto super PAC, during the 2024 election cycle, and then donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Just over a month after Trump took office, acting SEC Chair Mark Uyeda dismissed the SEC’s lawsuit accusing Coinbase of operating as an unregistered securities exchange. No fine. No admission. With prejudice, so the SEC cannot refile, even though the court had previously rejected Coinbase’s previous motion to dismiss.

Months later, Coinbase admitted donating to Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project to maintain good relations. In October, the company committed another $25 million to Fairshake for 2026. House Financial Services Committee Democrats called it a pay-to-play scheme. Trump’s brokerage account bought the stock anyway and is now sitting on an estimated +35% gain.

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ENFORCEMENT TRACKER

A Kroll analysis found a 33% dismissal rate for crypto matters at the SEC versus 4% for everything else under Chair Paul Atkins, a former co-chair of the crypto industry’s Token Alliance. The Van Dyke arrest is the only insider trading charge brought by the Trump Department of Justice involving crypto rails, and the target is a soldier, not a presidential cabinet member.

ORDINARY AMERICANS HARMED

In a regulated market with surveillance, insiders entrusted with governing who chose to exploit that trust by helping personal associates benefit from it face consequences. The plan for the Trump and Fairshake crypto economy is to run the US economy without surveillance. And they’re making progress on that goal. A research paper reviewed by CoinGeek examined 588 million trades on Polymarket between 2022 and 2026 and found that the top 1% of users captured 76.5% of all trading gains. A second study found that 3% of accounts drive price discovery, while the rest provide volume and losses.

Memecoins are just a trashier variant. Take Trump’s $TRUMP. He hawked it to retail investors in January 2025, but it has now crashed 94% from its peak. Those investors lost an estimated $4.3 billion. Insiders kept around 80% of the supply. A few months later, Argentine President Javier Milei endorsed a memecoin called LIBRA. Insiders cashed out roughly $107 million before retail buyers realized what hit them. The token lost 94% of its value in a matter of hours.

In 2022, a Coinbase product manager, Ishan Wahi, faced prosecution for insider trading. His relatives made $1.5 million. He went to prison. Last year, no Trump official faced a single such charge.

CORRUPTION RECEIPTS

Here we track ongoing stories. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after, the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

ONE THING TO WATCH

On April 30, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to ban senators and their staff from trading on prediction markets, effective immediately. The resolution was introduced by Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who was elected in 2024 with major support from the crypto sector. The same body has not banned itself from trading individual stocks. Speaker Mike Johnson, who controls whether the Restore Trust in Congress Act gets a floor vote, has said he supports a ban on balance. The discharge petition needed to force the vote sits 136 signatures short.

Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)4, an investigative transparency activist that incubates independent transparency organizations in order to put corruption at the top of the US political agenda. Like the rest of our projects, someday this will be an independent organization.

The US is shockingly corrupt, and that’s not just because of our current administration. We’re building organizations that will help Americans talk about it more often. You can support our mission here.

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Crypto corruption in focus

Three things most Americans do not realize are connected. The price of gas at your local pump. The war in Iran. And the Trump family’s private crypto company. They are all the same story.

The AAA national average for regular gasoline climbed to $4.52 per gallon on May 11, up more than 50% since the war with Iran began in late February. Gas cost just under $3 a gallon before the U.S. bombed Iran. Eight in ten Americans now say gas prices are straining their budgets. 63% of Americans say they blame President Trump.

Ordinary Americans may be busy paying at the pump, but the Trump family has been busy expanding its business with Binance. This crypto exchange pleaded guilty in 2023 to helping Iran evade sanctions and paid $4.3 billion in penalties, one of the largest corporate fines in U.S. history. Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group, published a detailed report on April 27 titled Conflict Coin, showing how the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (the private crypto company in which Donald Trump and his three sons hold a billion-dollar stake) is structurally dependent on Binance. WLFI’s main product is a stablecoin (a digital token designed to maintain a one-to-one value with the U.S. dollar) called USD1. Binance holds 84 percent of all USD1 in circulation. The float earns interest on Treasury reserves. The Trump family pockets that interest.

That is not the worst part. From January 2019 to May 2022, Binance willfully caused over $898 million in trades between U.S. users and users in Iran by failing to implement controls required by U.S. sanctions, according to the Department of Justice. It admitted to those violations in November 2023. Yet entities tied to Iran still received more than $1 billion in Binance funds from March 2024 through August 2025, according to Binance’s internal compliance documents reviewed by Fortune. Then, Binance fired at least five of the investigators who brought it to light. Senator Richard Blumenthal opened a Senate inquiry in February into $1.7 billion that flowed through Binance to Iranian proxies and Russia’s shadow fleet. The DOJ opened its own probe in March.

And on March 21, March 28, and again on April 20, while Americans were fighting a war against Iran, World Liberty Financial and Binance jointly rolled out promotions to encourage USD1 holders to keep their stablecoins on Binance. You may recall that Trump was threatening war crimes at the time. Thus, while simultaneously threatening a little light war criming from the Oval Office, Trump’s company doubled down with a partner the United States government is criminally prosecuted for helping Iran evade sanctions that Trump says were ineffective at preventing the war that he started.

Why this matters: The President of the United States holds a personal financial stake in a stablecoin whose primary distribution partner has been laundering money for the country with which we are currently at war – and that’s to say nothing of Russia, China and many terrorist groups. We shouldn’t have to point this out, but here we are: The US loses credibility when the President and his chief peace negotiator profit from a platform that undermines the country’s own war. Public Citizen’s report argues the arrangement may violate the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which, of course, it does. But arguments about the Foreign Emoluments Clause miss the titanic national security crisis in which the US finds itself.

Four days before Trump returned to office, his crypto company struck a deal with the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi, who is also the UAE’s national security adviser and the brother of the UAE’s king. The UAE official’s transaction routed $187 million to Trump family entities in exchange for a 49% stake in the same company, which then deepened its partnership with Binance.

What it means for ordinary Americans: You pay twice. First, you pay at the pump. Then, you pay again as a citizen of a country whose President is monetizing a war you are funding with taxes and grief.

If our children are unlucky, they will pick up the tab for the third bill that could come due. You may remember that this UAE official has close ties with the Chinese military. And it was this relationship and the transaction surrounding it that unlocked America’s most advanced AI chips, which may very well someday help train the Chinese military’s AI models to undermine the US.

What to watch: On Sunday, Trump rejected Iran’s counterproposal to end the war. Brent crude futures topped $104 a barrel on Monday. Trump on Monday floated a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, an idea that would require an act of Congress.

The enabler watch

This week, the enabler is Steven Witkoff. Witkoff is the U.S. Special Envoy for Peace, and he leads U.S. diplomatic negotiations with Iran on behalf of the President. He is also a co-founder of World Liberty Financial. He transferred his WLFI ownership stake to his sons in January 2026, the New York Times reported. His sons Zach and Alex remain co-founders. Zach is CEO and has been involved in pitching the company to foreign governments where the US is involved in high-stakes negotiations. For example, here he was pitching the company to Pakistan, at a time when the world worried the two countries could fight a nuclear war.

World Liberty Financial added $280 million to Steve Witkoff’s net worth in the past year alone, bringing his fortune to $2.3 billion, Forbes estimated in April. The largest single payment came from the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi, which routed $31 million to Witkoff-associated entities in the same January 2025 transaction that routed $187 million to the Trump family. The deputy ruler is also chairman of MGX. This state-backed Abu Dhabi fund in May 2025 directed $2 billion in USD1 to Binance, generating interest income for the Trump and Witkoff families on the resulting Treasury reserves.

Witkoff is negotiating peace with Iran on behalf of the United States. At the same time, his sons run a crypto company whose business depends on a Binance partnership that continues to handle Iranian transactions in violation of U.S. sanctions. He is conducting that same diplomacy with countries (the UAE, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) whose governments are simultaneously commercial partners of his sons’ company. If Iran were to demand crypto payment in USD1 for its Strait of Hormuz toll system, which it has already started demanding in bitcoin, the President of the United States and his chief peace negotiator would have a direct financial reason to lift sanctions on the country they are negotiating with.

There is no good outcome for the public here. The man making peace on behalf of the American people has a billion-dollar incentive to make the wrong kind of peace.

Crypto’s golden calf of Doral

For the avoidance of doubt, the president that the crypto industry bought wants to prove to America that the crypto industry is the most corrupt “industry” in American history by accepting a giant gold statue of himself from a memcoin promoter and assembling it at his golf course. Even taking the entire corpus of Trump’s Saddam Hussein-esque architectural aesthetic into account, it is easily the most cringe-inducing. You can judge for yourself.

While the Trump family has been profiting from Iran sanctions evasion, another group of crypto investors has been playing a more theatrical role in the same con. On Wednesday, May 6, a 22-foot (!) golden statue of Donald Trump, depicting his raised fist, was unveiled at Trump National Doral Miami. The statue is called Don Colossus. It was paid for by a group of cryptocurrency investors promoting a memecoin called $PATRIOT.

Pastor Mark Burns, the president’s informal spiritual adviser, led the dedication ceremony and held his phone to the microphone so Trump could call in and personally thank everyone. Then, that same night, Burns wrote on X, unprompted, “Let me be clear. This is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.”

The Miami New Times and the Daily Beast have reported the cost breakdown. $300,000 for the bronze. $60,000 for the gold leaf. $150,000 for the rights to use the statue’s image to market $PATRIOT. The sculptor, Alan Cottrill of Zanesville, Ohio, who has more than 400 life-size or larger statues across the country, called the project a “clusterfuck.” Asked whether the result was an accurate likeness, Cottrill told the New Times that his patrons had pushed him to slim the president down. “I had him even skinnier than he is, a little bit. I knew they’d want that,” he said of his first clay model. “They said, ‘Oh, he’s too big.’” Cottrill, who is 73, added that he had understood the request. “I’m close enough to his age, and I got some turkey neck going on, and I knew what that was. That’s what happens when you’re almost 80.”

The crypto investors named in news reports include Ashley Sansalone, a Canadian crypto developer, and Dustin Stockton, a Republican strategist. You may recall that name. Stockton’s last public political role was vice president of strategy and marketing for We Build the Wall, the private border-wall fundraising effort co-founded by Steve Bannon. In August 2020, federal agents served warrants on Stockton’s phones and a grand jury subpoena in connection with the federal investigation that led to fraud and money-laundering charges against Bannon and Brian Kolfage. Bannon, Kolfage, and two others were indicted. Stockton was never charged. It seems he reinvented himself as what he calls a meme coin kingpin. He has been a vocal public defender of the Don Colossus on X, mocking critics.

$PATRIOT itself has performed about as you would expect of a memecoin once its primary publicity event is complete. Around Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, the coin had a market cap of roughly $77.7 million. As of this writing, CoinGecko lists the market cap at $692,000, a 99 percent decline from the peak.

The sculptor, asked by the Miami New Times whether he would work with the group again on the planned Trump Presidential Library statue, did not need to hear the rest of the question before refusing in two profane words.

The Don Colossus is the Trump corruption economy in “miniature.” Insiders extract real money from real Americans by selling them a story. The story now stands in a clearing of palm trees at a Trump golf course, $510,000 of crypto-investor cash converted into a gilded fist of the president whose policies turn the same crypto pipeline into a billion-dollar inheritance for his sons. But it is not a golden calf.

The money trail

Congressman Al Green of Texas is now one of the loudest voices in Congress on what crypto money is doing to our democracy. In a March 19 House floor speech, Green accused the crypto industry of spending mega millions to control Congress. And he is right. Green has argued that lawmakers cannot allow the crypto industry to own Congress. He has been right on this from the start, and viral clips of his speeches have continued to spread this week.

Protect Progress, a super PAC affiliated with the crypto-industry-funded Fairshake network, has spent at least $1.5 million in advertising against him in the Texas 18th Congressional District primary. Green is a 20-year incumbent who has voted against every major piece of pro-crypto legislation (the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act, H.J. Res 25), according to the crypto industry’s own scorecard. He has been removed twice from the House chamber for disrupting Trump’s speeches. Now the industry he is fighting is trying to permanently remove him from the House. His runoff against Rep. Christian Menefee is on May 26.

Fairshake itself reported $193 million in cash on hand at the start of 2026, more than the group spent across the entire 2024 cycle. In 2024, 53 of 58 Fairshake-backed candidates won their races. The industry is on track to spend an order of magnitude more in 2026.

Where does that money come from? It comes from companies that benefit when Congress does what the industry wants. Ripple donated $25 million to Fairshake in the second half of 2025, after the SEC dismissed its case. Andreessen Horowitz donated $24 million. Coinbase donated $8 million after its own SEC case was dismissed. Each of those firms also donated at least $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inauguration, according to a January 2026 letter from House Democrats. The letter alleged a pay-to-play scheme.

If you want to see this pipeline mapped out, our 501(c)(3) affiliate Anti-Corruption Action has built the Quid Pro Quo Tracker (live at purchasingpolicy.org). It lets anyone visualize the donor-to-recipient-to-legislation pipeline, including the think tanks that justify the laundering of policy. It already shows Senators Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego as two of the largest recent recipients of crypto-industry money among the Democrats who provided the swing votes for the GENIUS Act. This stablecoin law gave the Trump-Witkoff USD1 a federal regulatory home. The Sunlight Foundation database, which was used to track political donations, shut down a couple of years ago. Anti-Corruption Action hopes to fill some of that gap with this tool. The Al Green speech makes the case. Purchasing Policy provides the evidence. Use it. Share it.

Enforcement tracker

Two pieces of crypto legislation are moving through the Senate this week. Neither will protect ordinary Americans from the corruption documented above.

The SAFE Crypto Act (S.3428), introduced by Senators Jerry Moran (R – KS) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) in December, creates a Treasury-led federal task force on cryptocurrency scams. The task force requires the inclusion of representatives of permitted payment stablecoin issuers and encourages industry participation in real-time interdiction networks. In plain English, the same companies whose products are used to launder the proceeds of human trafficking, sanctions evasion, and pig butchering scams get a seat on the body that will tell Congress how to regulate them. The bill has been sitting in the Senate Banking Committee since its introduction in December.

Without a hard prohibition on insiders profiting from stablecoin float, the SAFE Crypto Act will not change the incentive structure that put $4.2 billion of USD1 into Binance’s wallets in the first place. And putting Binance and Tether under the body that polices Binance and Tether speaks for itself.

The CLARITY Act is the bigger fight. The Senate Banking Committee unveiled the latest text of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act just after midnight on Tuesday, May 12, ahead of a Thursday, May 14, committee markup. The bill would split federal oversight of crypto between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), resolving the long-running (and absurd) question of when a token is a security or a commodity. Five major banking trade groups, including the American Bankers Association, formally rejected a compromise put together by Senators Thom Tillis (R – NC) and Angela Alsobrooks (D – MD). Senate Banking Republicans hold 13 of 24 seats so that the markup could pass on a party-line vote. But the bill needs 60 votes on the floor, which means passage cannot happen without Democrats. The ethics provision that would bar a sitting president from owning a stablecoin company, the only language that would prevent a repeat of the WLFI arrangement, will not be in Thursday’s Banking Committee text.

Ordinary Americans harmed

Gas prices since the war with Iran began have risen 50%, from just under $3 a gallon to $4.52 on Tuesday’s AAA reading. California has reached $6.16 a gallon. The average two-car household has lost an estimated $200 a month at the pump since late February.

That is not the only way crypto and Iran connect to your wallet. As the war stretches into its 11th week, Iran has been accepting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for tanker transit through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s seaborne oil. Iran’s shipping toll system is a tax on global commerce that did not exist a year ago. Every ship that pays the toll is paying with a financial instrument that the Trump administration’s policies have helped legitimize. The pace of Iranian crypto activity is now estimated at $8 to $10 billion a year by TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics firm. Most of that money funds the regime, which is why gas costs $4.52 a gallon.

North Korea’s Lazarus Group stole $577 million from two American-facing crypto platforms in April alone, according to TRM Labs. That money funds the regime’s nuclear and missile programs.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after, the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

Thursday’s CLARITY Act Senate Banking Committee markup will reveal whether Democrats are willing to hold the line on a single ethics provision, barring the President of the United States from personally profiting from the stablecoin industry he is simultaneously regulating. The amendment is straightforward. Senator Tim Scott (R – SC), the committee chair, controls the calendar. Watch which Democrats demand the ethics language as the price of their vote, which ones quietly let it slide, and which Republicans on the committee will or will not allow the language to be offered as an amendment. The markup convenes Thursday morning, May 14, Eastern time.

Also, keep an eye on Texas 18 on May 26. Whether the crypto industry can spend $1.5 million to defeat the loudest anti-crypto-corruption Democrat in Congress will tell us what the rest of the 2026 cycle looks like.

Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)4, an investigative transparency activist that incubates independent transparency organizations in order to put corruption at the top of the US political agenda. Like the rest of our projects, someday this will be an independent organization.

The US is shockingly corrupt, and that’s not just because of our current administration. We’re building organizations that will help Americans talk about it more often. You can support our mission here.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The most important crypto story this week is not American. It is the takedown of nine industrial scam compounds across Burma and Cambodia, where trafficked workers were beaten and forced to defraud Americans through cryptocurrency investment schemes. The U.S. Department of Justice announced 276 arrests on April 29, alongside the seizure of 503 fake investment websites and more than 701 million dollars in restrained crypto. Investigators reviewed more than 8,000 phones and 1,500 computers from a single compound, called Shunda, in Burma, where one supervisor’s team stole more than 3 million dollars from a single American victim and celebrated it.

Why this matters: The compounds are the consumer-facing edge of a global criminal supply chain that runs on cryptocurrency, particularly dollar-pegged stablecoins (digital tokens designed to maintain the value of the U.S. dollar). The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center estimated that Americans lost roughly $7.2 billion to these schemes in 2025 alone. The same week, the Treasury Department sanctioned Cambodian Senator Kok An and 28 associated entities for converting Crown Resorts properties into compounds where humans were enslaved to run pig-butchering scams (a fraud where victims are slowly cultivated into sending savings to fake crypto investments).

What it means for ordinary Americans: The same FBI office that announced this takedown said it has now notified almost 9,000 American victims and saved an estimated $562 million from being lost. Ninety-three of those victims have been referred to a victim specialist for suicide intervention, according to The Crypto Times. This is the human cost of a system Congress is racing to legitimize.

What to watch: The compounds keep running. Foreign Policy reported more than 250 scam factories still operate in Cambodia, staffed by an estimated 100,000 trafficked workers and protected by the same political patronage systems that just had one senator sanctioned.

What we wish we were watching: On Earth 1.0, we would be talking about the fact that the son of the president of the United States and Zach Witkoff, the CEO of the president’s company, were photographed with Jacky Sui, the beneficial owner of an entity deeply intertwined with the aforementioned pig butchering. Indeed, World Liberty Financial has a partnership with that company.

The enabler watch

This week, the enablers are not in Cambodia. They are in the United States Senate.

Senators Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Ruben Gallego of Arizona are two of the largest recent recipients of political spending from the crypto industry. Without their votes, the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law that gave the Trump and Witkoff family-linked USD1 stablecoin a federal regulatory home, would not have passed the Senate. They were among the 16 Democrats who crossed over to advance the bill in May 2025.

This December, Slotkin partnered with Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas to introduce the SAFE Crypto Act, which is sometimes informally called the SAVE bill. The bill, S. 3428, creates a federal task force on cryptocurrency scams and explicitly defines its membership using the GENIUS Act’s definitions of permitted payment stablecoin issuers. Slotkin’s press release frames the bill as a measure to protect Michiganders from crypto fraud.

Read the text closely: The task force is required to “work with permitted payment stablecoin issuers” and to encourage industry “participation” in real-time interdiction networks. In other words, the same companies whose products are being used to launder the proceeds of human trafficking are written into the consultative body that will tell Congress how to regulate them. TRM Labs, the blockchain analytics firm whose own vice president for policy was quoted in Slotkin’s press release praising the bill, has already documented that more than $141 billion in stablecoin transfers in 2025 went to illicit entities, a five-year high.

The bill treats crypto fraud as an industry hygiene problem rather than a structural feature of the product. It accepts the premise that the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin pipeline is permanent, and asks only how to police its edges. That premise is what enriches the Trump and Witkoff families. The Trump family’s World Liberty Financial USD1 stablecoin now has roughly $4.2 billion in circulation. Every dollar of that float earns the family interest on Treasury reserves. Every cross-border payment routed through it, including the ones being negotiated by Steve Witkoff’s diplomatic missions, generates fee or yield income.

This corrupt system would not exist without the enthusiastic support of Slotkin and Gallego. They are two of the most important enablers for the Trump and Witkoff families and the cryptocurrency industry. The vital lesson of Hungary was that Péter Magyar ran against a corrupt system. He did not run a campaign to manage the corrupt system better than Viktor Orbán. Anti-corruption is a unifying political force against a corrupt system. If the Democrats go to market and say that they should run the system (instead of destroying it), they will vastly underperform their potential. That argument gave Orbán 16 years to pilfer Hungary, and it has given Trump the same here. The cryptocurrency industry wears Trump’s scent like a low-rent mobster leaving Trump Casino after a hard night drinking in Atlantic City. If the Democrats cannot stake out a principled position against this wildly corrupt, orange-hued industry built for money laundering and that facilitates trafficked humans from stealing the life savings of grandma, then they need to take a very long look in the mirror. Cryptocurrency is the avatar of corruption that opposition politicians like Magyar could only have dreamed about.

The money trail

World Liberty Financial, the Trump and Witkoff family-controlled crypto firm, sold $5.9 billion previously locked WLFI tokens in undisclosed private deals to accredited investors after raising more than $550 million in two public rounds, according to Bloomberg’s review of governance filings. The company will not say who bought the tokens or where the proceeds went. Sources told Bloomberg much of the money flowed to entities affiliated with the founders. Pro tip: Companies that do this tend not to be doing well financially.

Side note: As a nation, we need to have a very serious discussion about the security threat posed by a president who has built a company intertwined with questionable Chinese “assistance” at critical junctures that may be hurting financially…

Public investors who bought WLFI at five cents in the public sale are still locked out of 80 percent of their tokens. The token traded near six cents this week, down 88% from its September 2025 peak. A separate governance proposal moving toward a 99% yes vote would lock another 62 billion tokens for at least two years, with full insider unlocks not arriving until 2030, conveniently after the end of Trump’s term.

Meanwhile, the Senate Banking Committee is preparing to mark up the CLARITY Act, the broader market-structure bill that the crypto industry has lobbied for since 2024. Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks released a stablecoin yield compromise on May 1. Senator Cynthia Lummis said the markup will happen in May. The ethics provision Democrats had wanted, the one that would prohibit a sitting president from owning a stablecoin company, is being negotiated separately and will not be in the Banking Committee’s text.

Enforcement tracker

The visible enforcement this month came from outside the United States. The European Union imposed its 20th and largest sanctions package on Russia on April 27, including a total ban on Russian crypto providers and the ruble-pegged A7A5 stablecoin, which Chainalysis has documented as having processed roughly $120 billion in sanctions-evading transactions to date.

In the United States, FinCEN and OFAC issued a joint proposed rule on April 10 that, for the first time, requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain a sanctions compliance program. The rule does not yet apply to USD1 because the Trump-linked World Liberty Trust Company national bank charter application remains under OCC review, with a final decision unlikely before 2027. But Trump’s own Treasury Department has final say over whether Trump’s company will get the license. If you want more information about these licenses, we wrote about them here. TL;DR: Hide your wallet.

Ordinary Americans harmed

North Korea’s Lazarus Group stole approximately $577 million from two American-facing crypto platforms in April. The Drift Protocol breach on April 1 took $285 million. The KelpDAO bridge exploit on April 18 took $292 million. TRM Labs reports North Korea is now responsible for 76% of all crypto hack losses in 2026 through April, a record share, and that the regime’s cumulative crypto theft now exceeds $6 billion since 2017. Most of that money funds nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs aimed at the United States and its allies.

Each of those hacks emptied the deposits of retail savers who had been told that decentralized finance (a peer-to-peer crypto banking system) was safe. After the KelpDAO theft, hackers laundered roughly $175 million before flipping the funds into Bitcoin and routing them through Chinese-language money laundering networks.

Closer to home, Tether froze $344 million in USDT on April 23 in response to U.S. law enforcement requests tied to pig-butchering and sanctions evasion. The seizure is welcome. The fact that this volume of fraud and sanctions evasion was running through a single stablecoin in the first place is the actual story. Surely, the fact that the Commerce Secretary used to be the custodial treasurer is part of it.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after, the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

The Senate Banking Committee CLARITY Act markup is targeted for the week of May 11. The version that emerges from the committee will not contain the Democrats’ ethics language barring a sitting president from owning a stablecoin company. That language is being handled separately and may or may not survive merger with the Agriculture Committee version. Watch which Democrats fight for it, and which ones quietly let it disappear…or whether they fight at all.

The Dekleptocracy Journal is a project of Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)4 whose focus is seeding the political landscape with transparency organizations to put the authoritarianism on the run. Visit our new website. It is almost finished. You may support the organization by donating here or by subscribing above.

As always, we want to hear what you think. This crypto stuff is painfully tedious. Our brains hurt trying to explain it, but we’re happy to try to answer your questions.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The crypto whale turned on his trainer last week. Justin Sun, the Hong Kong-based founder of the Tron blockchain (a major cryptocurrency network) and the single largest holder of President Trump’s namesake memecoin (a digital token tied to a person’s name with no underlying asset), sued the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial in California federal court on April 21. Sun alleges fraud, extortion, and that the company secretly installed a hidden blacklist function in its smart contract code to freeze his roughly 4 billion WLFI tokens, then threatened to burn them if he refused to invest hundreds of millions more in the firm’s USD1 stablecoin (a digital token pegged to the US dollar).

But who is the whale and who is the trainer?

When Trump’s project launched in October 2024 and sold only $22 million in its first month, Sun saved it by pouring $45 million into it, was named a company advisor, and was rewarded with 1 billion bonus tokens and the SEC case against him getting buried. Sales then accelerated. But Sun was already, as Molly White dubs him, a “shady crypto billionaire,” who founded the TRON blockchain, the crypto network most favored by terrorists, drug dealers and money launderers (which is a very high bar). When Sun refused to mint $200 million more in USD1 to prop up the stablecoin’s flagging retail demand, WLFI blacklisted his wallet. When Sun complained, Eric Trump’s response was a banana joke.

Why it matters. We brought this issue up in the last issue, but we’re repeating it because Sun’s complaint puts the Trump family’s largest revenue source on the witness stand. Don’t let this get lost in the din of Trump chaos. WLFI also borrowed at least $75 million against its own tokens earlier this month, a circular financing pattern crypto observers have compared to FTX, the exchange whose 2022 collapse cost retail investors billions. Sun’s filing warns the company faces collapse and potential insolvency. Discovery, if the case survives the inevitable motion to dismiss, could expose how the smart contract backdoor was added and to whom WLFI sold tokens.

Democrats: Use. This.

What to watch: WLFI has not yet filed a formal court response. Parts of the complaint are sealed under confidentiality clauses that Sun’s team disputes. Foreign press across Hong Kong (the South China Morning Post), Doha (Al Jazeera), and Sydney (The Sydney Morning Herald) led with the suit, while US coverage yawned. The whale has lawyers in Tehran’s neighborhood. The trainer is in Mar-a-Lago. Or maybe it’s vice versa. We honestly don’t know. However, we do know this case will generate nothing but dirty laundry about Trump or his business partner.

The enabler watch

This week. Zach Witkoff, the 32-year-old chief executive of World Liberty Financial and son of Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy for peace missions, whose portfolio includes Iran talks and South Asia diplomacy.

Witkoff is the lead defendant on Sun’s lawsuit. He is also the executive who, in January 2026, traveled to Islamabad to sign a memorandum of understanding with the government of Pakistan that would use Trump’s stablecoin, USD1, for cross-border transactions. Pakistan’s prime minister and army chief attended, which was strange. And as Russ Chuma noted, the same person attended Witoff’s Iran negotiations.

To underscore, Witkoff and the President of the United States are selling stablecoin infrastructure to a foreign government whose army chief is simultaneously a key channel for US negotiations with Iran in a war that nobody wanted. This is the same family-business pipeline that took in $500 million from the UAE’s deputy ruler, Sheik Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, four days before Trump’s second inauguration. His brothers are now intensely involved in spearheading shuttle diplomacy for the region, speaking to Marco Rubio and coordinating with the Gulf states.

Because it can always get shadier, Public Citizen documented this week that USD1 reserves are mostly held by Binance, the same exchange that previously admitted to facilitating billions in transactions for Iran, lots of terrorist groups the Russians and now Chinese toll payments through the Strait of Hormuz (or, as Trump called them, the “Iran Straits”) Trump pardoned the founder in October 2025, and is now generating business for his crypto company.

The money trail

The Trump family has made $4 billion off the presidency in 15 months, according to a tally Senator Bernie Sanders (I – VT) posted on April 23. Crypto accounts for $3.02 billion of that figure, with World Liberty Financial driving the bulk of it. House Oversight Committee Democrats publish their own running tally that pegs Trump family digital grift profits at nearly $2.5 billion, including $634 million from foreign sources.

Sanders called it unprecedented kleptocracy. Of course, that’s true. But Trump’s behavior is an indictment of the entire cryptocurrency industry. The people who love it are money launderers, terrorists, Iran, China and Donald Trump. Yet two of the biggest recipients of crypto-industry money are Elissa Slotkin (D–MI) and Ruben Gallego (D–AZ). Without their help, crypto’s various sham regulatory bills never would have passed the Senate. And without those bills, the Trump, Witkoff and Zayed families could not be raking in a disputed number of billions. So, yes, by all means, pummel Trump for his corruption, but Slotkin and Gallego are two of Trump’s most important enablers, Republican or Democrat.

Although Slotkin and Gallego appear not to have been invited, Trump held another “private” memecoin holders’ event at Mar-a-Lago, where he vowed not to let banks block the CLARITY Act, the bill that would shift crypto regulation away from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Perhaps he didn’t invite them because he needed them back in Washington lobbying on World Liberty Financial’s behalf. After all, they have long supported this bill. Trump’s crypto allies commanded the Senate to jump, and 12 Senate Democrats asked, “How high?”

Trump could not be Trump without crypto. The crypto industry could not be the crypto industry without Trump. They are effectively a single, corrupt organism feeding on American democracy, and metastasizing globally. And a handful of Democrats have sold their souls cheaply to help Trump’s corrupt ecosystem.

We will not stop beating this drum: The lesson of Hungary is that Hungarians hated Viktor Orbán’s corruption, but to beat him, Péter Magyar attacked that corrupt system, not Orbán. Lesson: If you want to beat Trump, you have to attack the system, not enable it.

Enforcement tracker

The CLARITY Act stalled again this week. After more than 100 crypto firms demanded a Senate Banking Committee markup, no markup was scheduled. We’re going to go on record: This legislation needs to die a violent death. CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton wrote that May is the month to watch. Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio warned that missing a Memorial Day deadline would put the bill on hold until 2030. Inshallah.

While the bill stalls, the SEC under Chair Paul Atkins, formerly co-chair of the crypto industry’s Token Alliance lobbying group, continues to retreat. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission added New York to the growing list of states it is suing to block their attempts to regulate crypto prediction markets. Federal regulators are using federal courts to disable state-level consumer protection. The states need to mount a blistering offense against this corruption. Remember, it was Letitia James who triggered the only full audit of Tether, the crypto company (in which Howard Lutnick has a financial stake), which owns more US debt than Germany or South Korea. The day is late—State AG’s need to stop playing nice. The world has changed, but they keep trying to pretend things will snap back to the way they were. Ask the Russians. This corruption will not go away unless we fight it.

Ordinary Americans harmed

April was the worst month for crypto theft since the Bybit hack of February 2025. North Korea’s Lazarus Group stole approximately $290 million from KelpDAO, a decentralized finance platform, on April 18 by hijacking infrastructure operated by another crypto firm, LayerZero. The funds were funneled through Tornado Cash, a mixing service used to launder stolen cryptocurrency. Trump dropped sanctions against Tornado Cash last month. Total decentralized finance losses in the first 24 days of April topped $606 million, according to Yahoo Finance.

The 29 top-tier guests at this Saturday’s Mar-a-Lago memecoin event held a median position of $539,000 in $TRUMP, an 84% drop from the $3.28 million median at last year’s first gala, according to Financial Times figures cited by Common Dreams. Many had liquidated holdings before the event. The $TRUMP coin trades 94% off its January 2025 peak. Conference organizers slashed the minimum holding required to attend from roughly $55,000 last year to about $8,460 this year, and counted merchandise purchases toward the threshold.

Sun himself, who once boasted of $100 million in the memecoin, skipped the gala. He filed his lawsuit instead.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week and a policy change the week after. The pattern emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

The Senate Banking Committee markup of the CLARITY Act is expected in May. Chair Tim Scott of South Carolina has not set a date. The Democrats could kill it. If Scott sets a date before May, it means key Democrats have done as the crypto industry commanded. Eyes also on the WLFI court docket in the Northern District of California, where the company’s first formal response to Sun is due in roughly three weeks. Watch for which arguments WLFI deploys, and which it does not. What the company does not contest will tell us as much as what it does.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The Trump family’s own crypto company is… in financial trouble. On April 9, CoinDesk reported that World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform (a type of crypto lending service) backed by Donald Trump and his sons, borrowed $75 million in stablecoins (digital dollars pegged to the US dollar) by pledging 5 billion of its own governance tokens as collateral. The lender was Dolomite, a platform co-founded by Corey Caplan, who is also World Liberty Financial’s own chief technology officer.

In English, it is basically self-dealing. The CTO of one company used that company’s tokens (think: equity) to borrow money from a platform he also controls. World Liberty Financial’s token, WLFI, crashed to an all-time low of $0.08, down 82% from its peak. At the same time, Dolomite’s USD1 pool hit 100% utilization, meaning ordinary investors who had deposited their funds could not withdraw them. They’re trapped.

What it means for Americans: Thousands of retail investors in WLFI have lost more than four-fifths of their money while insiders borrowed against the token at their own platform.

What to watch: World Liberty Financial has proposed unlocking 62.3 billion locked tokens. Justin Sun, the company’s largest outside investor, has accused World Liberty of embedding a hidden backdoor in its smart contract that would allow the team to freeze any holder’s tokens without notice. He’s warning that the company may not allow people to withdraw their money. World Liberty responded: “See you in court.”

Of course, if the Iranians figure this out, this presents an obvious bribe opportunity. As you likely know, their “toll system” for transiting the Straits of Hormuz is gaining traction. Leave aside that each ship pays, it proves the US Navy cannot guarantee freedom of navigation of the seas — a titanic crumbling of American power that Americans need to digest but haven’t seemed to notice. That’s another massive discussion because the last time this kind of thing happened was decades ago, when the British withdrew to become a regional power. We’ll have to discuss this meaty subject in future notes because we’ll need to discuss the likely coming Chinese control of the Straits, which gives Beijing unspeakable leverage over Washington (and your pocketbook)…all brought to you by corruption.

But back to the obvious potential bribe. Iran charges its tolls in crypto. What if they offer to require payment in WLF tokens? Suddenly, 20% of the world’s oil would have a $2M tax that would require purchasing WLF tokens. That’s the kind of demand that could prop up even a struggling Trump company. We don’t think there’s even a debate about whether Trump would accept that deal.

We began this organization with the premise that Donald Trump would mortgage America’s international leverage, power and prestige for his own benefit. That is precisely what’s happening. And he’s using crypto to do it.

The enabler watch

This week: Corey Caplan and the circular lending loop

Corey Caplan is technically World Liberty Financial’s chief technology officer. He is also the co-founder of Dolomite, a DeFi lending protocol that World Liberty used as its primary borrowing platform this month.

What he did: His company, World Liberty, deposited 5 billion WLFI tokens into Dolomite and then borrowed $75 million against them. More than $40 million of that moved directly to Coinbase Prime, a trading platform used for converting crypto to cash. World Liberty’s collateral now represents roughly 55% of Dolomite’s total deposits, meaning Caplan effectively attached his entire platform to the risk of another company (where he is a senior executive).

Multiple analysts have drawn direct comparisons to the structure that destroyed FTX in 2022, when Alameda Research borrowed against FTX’s own proprietary token, creating hidden leverage that collapsed the exchange. FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is now serving 25 years in prison. Caplan faces no such scrutiny, and there are betting markets (in which Trump’s son’s company invests) on whether Trump will pardon SBF. There is no SEC. Paul Atkins, the SEC chair (the top federal securities regulator), previously co-chaired the Token Alliance, an industry lobbying group. His agency dismissed seven major crypto enforcement cases in 2025. The likely incoming Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, is a known crypto evangelist. TL;DR: America, hide your wallet.

The money trail

Fairshake, the crypto industry’s political action committee, now has $193 million in cash on hand for the 2026 midterm elections, according to Axios. That is $60 million more than it spent on the entire 2024 cycle and more than ten times what the largest corporate PAC spent on any midterm before crypto entered politics.

On April 20, the Texas Tribune reported that crypto PACs affiliated with Fairshake have already spent more than $2.5 million on Texas congressional candidates alone this year, up from $1 million in 2024. In the 2024 cycle, 53 of 58 candidates backed by crypto super PACs won their races.

What sounds like an absurd amount of money is a mere drop in the bucket for companies making billions. Plus, the quid pro quo extended to the SEC dismissing cases against Coinbase, Ripple, and Binance, who just so happened to donate a combined $1 million or more each to Trump’s inauguration. Ripple, whose case was dismissed in 2025, subsequently contributed $25 million to Fairshake for 2026. The Cornerstone Research firm found a 60% drop in SEC crypto enforcement actions from 2024 to 2025, with monetary penalties falling to $142 million, from billions the year before. Each of those dismissed cases had a donor connected to the same political apparatus now choosing who sits in Congress. These candidates got a political sponsor, the sponsors got a get-out-of-jail-free card, and drug dealers, money-launderers and terrorists had their businesses unshackled. Everyone wins in a kleptocracy, except the voters. But they don’t matter. Just ask Peter Thiel.

Inspired (ie disgusted) by the above, our affiliate 501c3 has built an amazing piece of transparency tech called the Quid Pro Quo Tracker. It allows you to follow political donations, visualize the network of donors, recipients and think tanks and then follow that to the legislation that it “purchased.” We have helped them trial it. We donated the technology we used to build the Dekleptocracy Explorer to them, but they took it much further. We believe what they have built will help fill the gap formerly filled by the Sunlight Foundation’s database, which left a wide hole in the transparency ecosystem when the organization shut down a couple of years ago. It should go live at BuyingPolicy.org within the week. We’ll keep you informed.

Enforcement tracker

The SEC, run by Paul Atkins (who previously co-chaired the Token Alliance, a crypto lobbying group), dismissed seven major enforcement cases in 2025 and launched only 13 new ones, down 60% from 2024. Monetary penalties dropped to $142 million, less than 3% of the prior year's total. The agency lost 18% of its enforcement staff in fiscal 2025. The crypto bros would argue that’s a slow start.

In April, the SEC announced that David Woodcock, a Gibson Dunn partner who previously led the firm’s securities enforcement practice, would be the new head of its enforcement division, effective May 4. His predecessor resigned in March, reportedly over disagreements about the direction of enforcement. The revolving door is just propped open.

Ordinary Americans harmed

North Korea’s government-run hacking operation, known as the Lazarus Group, stole $292 million from KelpDAO, a platform that lets users earn returns on crypto they already hold, on April 18. The hack is the largest crypto theft of 2026 (so far). Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis attributed the attack to the Lazarus Group on April 21. The stolen funds will be laundered through exchanges beyond US reach and used, according to UN reports, to fund North Korea’s weapons programs. Luckily for North Korea, at the crypto industry’s urging, the US government lifted sanctions against the mixer most associated with laundering DPRK-hacked crypto, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended these laundering engines as necessary for privacy. Kim Jong Un couldn’t agree more.

Meanwhile, pig butchering scams (a fraud in which criminals build fake romantic or business relationships over weeks before stealing victims’ savings) cost Americans $4.57 billion in 2024, a 15% increase from 2023, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The average victim loses $177,000. Teachers, nurses, and retirees make up a large share of those victims. Reminder: Trump’s company is literally partnered with one of the primary culprits – and here is Don Jr and Zach Witkoff hanging out with him. With the SEC’s enforcement unit gutted and the CFTC (the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, another federal regulator) “pivoting” toward accommodation, the federal government prioritizes criminals over recovery for these victims.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after: the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

WLFI’s governance proposal vote closes in the coming days. The plan would unlock 62.3 billion tokens, burn 4.5 billion insider tokens (thereby reducing the overall supply), and impose vesting schedules. If rejected, 45 billion founder and team tokens remain locked indefinitely, with no exit path. Justin Sun, whose 545 million frozen tokens are worth roughly $42 million, called the proposal a trap. Watch whether ordinary token holders can vote at all, given that the company controls the blacklist function that can freeze any wallet at any time. And whether Iran takes advantage of Trump’s predicament. The founder of Dekleptocracy Alliance introduced the concept of strategic corruption five years ago, never thinking the President of the United States would give tutorials in it.

The Dekleptocracy Journal is a project of Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)4 whose focus is putting anti-corruption on top of the national political agenda and is building independent anti-corruption organizations to raise more awareness of it. You may support the organization by donating here.

As always, we want to hear what you think. This crypto stuff is painfully tedious. Our brains hurt trying to explain it, so it helps us understand what about it most bothers you.

Leave a comment

Crypto corruption in focus

The FBI released its 2025 Internet Crime Report this week, and the headline number is staggering: Americans lost $11.4 billion to cryptocurrency fraud last year, a 22% increase over 2024. Thank you, David Sacks! Crypto was involved in more than half of all online fraud losses. For context, that is roughly $31 million stolen every single day, enough to fund the entire budget of a mid-sized American city, every day, for a year.

Why it matters: the government agency responsible for tracking these crimes is publishing record losses at the exact moment the Trump administration is dismantling the agencies that investigate them. As we will talk about tomorrow, a very shady crypto bro (and large investor in WLFI, naturally) declared, “It’s crime szn, bro” when Trump got re-elected. He then moved his company to New York. And even though the New York Attorney General has all the authority that she needs to act, she has chosen not to… essentially proving him correct.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (the federal agency that polices financial markets) has dropped case after case. The Department of Justice disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. The people who are supposed to stop this are being told to stand down. States could stand up, but won’t…

What it means for Americans: the average crypto fraud victim lost $62,604. Americans over 60 lost $4.4 billion. The FBI intervened to stop one victim from cashing out $750,000 from a 401(k) plan and sending it to scammers. Another was about to sell her house to wire $500,000.

What to watch: the CLARITY Act (a bill that would create rules for stablecoins, the dollar-pegged tokens at the center of many scams) is moving through the Senate, having been stripped of almost all consumer protection provisions. The crypto industry hasn’t just bought the GOP, though they have done that. They’ve also bought some key Democratic enablers, too. Even though these Democratic Members know that this is how Trump is making his billions and how dangerous this industry is, watch for critical Members, who have the leverage to put teeth in this bill, instead make excuses that cryptocurrency is a legit industry and enable the crypto bros.

The enabler watch

This week: Corey Caplan and the self-dealing lending loop

World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company, deposited 5 billion of its own WLFI tokens into a small lending platform called Dolomite and borrowed $75 million in stablecoins against them. Dolomite is the 13th-largest crypto lending platform. Its co-founder, Corey Caplan, is also WLFI’s Chief Technology Officer.

Read that again. The Trump family’s crypto company borrowed tens of millions from a platform run by one of its own executives, using tokens it created as collateral. The borrowing drained Dolomite’s pool of WLFI’s own USD1 stablecoin so completely that other users who had deposited their money expecting to earn interest could not withdraw it.

WLFI called concerns about the arrangement, “FUD” (industry slang for fear, uncertainty, and doubt) and described itself as an “anchor borrower” generating returns for others. WLFI’s (effectively unregulated) token crashed to an all-time low of $0.08, down 82% from its September 2025 high. Analysts at Bubblemaps warned that selling just $8.2 million of WLFI into current markets would cause 72% slippage, meaning the collateral backing these loans could evaporate in a single bad day.

The money trail

Fairshake, the crypto industry’s political action committee (PAC), holds $191 million for the 2026 midterms. That is more money than it spent across the entire 2024 election cycle, when its favored candidates won 91% of their races.

The biggest donors: Coinbase ($75 million across cycles), Andreessen Horowitz ($70 million), and Ripple ($50 million). Each of these companies had SEC enforcement cases dismissed or settled favorably after the Trump administration took office.

A new crypto super PAC, the Blockchain Leadership Fund, launched this week and is backed by Anchorage Digital and Chainlink Labs. Anchorage Digital had a consent decree lifted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in August of last year. In lifting that decree, the Comptroller (a Trump-appointed crypto bro) stated that the company has effective money-laundering provisions and is therefore cleared to become a real bank. One of the company’s previous advisors was Kevin Warsh, Trump’s appointee to lead the Federal Reserve, a fact he and the company no longer advertise. If confirmed, Warsh will no doubt ensure that the Federal Reserve integrates Tether, a company associated with Howard Lutnick and proven to be a favorite of transactions for terrorists, Russia, China and Organized crime. Chainlink Labs got a long-sought decision from the SEC declaring that what they traffic in is not a security and thus should not face a security’s high regulatory bar.

The favor-for-a-favor should be obvious by now. Companies donate millions, their enforcement cases disappear, or they reap the fruits of regulatory capture. They have to keep donating to keep the politicians in office, so that they can keep stealing from your grandmother and laundering money.

Enforcement tracker

The Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report found that illicit crypto addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase year over year. Sanctioned entities (organizations banned from the US financial system) accounted for a 694% increase. Stablecoins now represent 84% of all illicit crypto transaction volume.

Meanwhile, Operation Atlantic, a joint effort by the US Secret Service, UK National Crime Agency, and Canadian police, disrupted $45 million in crypto fraud and froze $12 million in stolen funds. The operation targeted “pig butchering” scams (schemes where criminals build fake romantic or investment relationships to drain victims’ savings) across 30 countries. Good work by law enforcement, but $45 million recovered against $11.4 billion lost is a recovery rate of 0.4%. Big numbers, but this virtue signaling pales in comparison to what Warsh, Trump and their cryptobro allies are permitting by punching holes in the US regulatory framework. And don’t forget the stories from last week’s newsletter: Don Jr. and Zach Witkoff were photographed with one of the biggest culprits of this scam, and Pro Publica proved that Trump’s company is partnered with that company.

Ordinary Americans harmed

The FBI’s numbers deserve to be repeated in human terms. In 2025, 181,565 Americans filed complaints about crypto fraud. The average victim lost $62,604. That is a year’s salary for many families. Nearly 18,600 people lost more than $100,000 each. The FBI stopped one man from emptying his entire 401(k) retirement account. It stopped a woman from selling her house.

The cruelest detail: 38 people the FBI contacted through its Operation Level Up program had to be referred for suicide intervention. They had lost so much that they did not want to go on living. Americans over 60, the people who can least afford to lose their savings, reported $4.4 billion in losses.

Meanwhile, in Argentina, phone logs published by The New York Times this week show libertarian poster child President Javier Milei made seven phone calls to a key insider on the night he promoted the $LIBRA token. The token surged to a $4.5 billion market cap, then collapsed 96%, wiping out $251 million in investor funds. Prosecutors found a draft $5 million payment agreement on the insider’s phone. Crypto corruption is now a global pandemic.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after: the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

The CLARITY Act, which would create the first federal rules for stablecoins (dollar-pegged crypto tokens), is advancing in the Senate. Americans for Financial Reform this week warned that the bill “fails to prevent Trump’s billion-dollar-plus crypto corruption,” locks in weak oversight, and preempts state regulators from protecting consumers. It would strip state securities and banking regulators of their authority to pursue crypto fraud cases, the very regulators who have been the last line of defense as federal enforcement collapsed. Watch for: whether the bill’s ethics provisions get stripped before a vote, and whether any senator raises the conflict that Trump’s own stablecoin, USD1, would directly benefit from the law’s passage. Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) and Mark Warner (D-VA) have signaled their support for some form of the bill and will not oppose it on principle. Schumer and Warner face an election this year.

This is all infuriating, of course. And there is so much corruption that it’s easy to become exhausted and give up. That’s the point. But as Hungary’s Viktor. Orbán can testify to the potency of anti-corruption as a political message. That is why the organization that produces this newsletter exists. It documents the corruption and then puts it in front of the eyes, where it will have the most political impact. And it is building organizations dedicated to doing nothing but put specific anti-corruption information in front of targeted audiences. We have spent decades living and working in Eastern Europe and Russia. If you would like to help us bring that populist power to this side of the Atlantic, we and democracy sure would appreciate it.

Crypto corruption in focus

OCCRP and the Guardian revealed this week that World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company co-owned by the Trump and Witkoff families, partnered last November with a blockchain network called AB whose proposed resort project in Timor-Leste involved three people sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for ties to the Prince Group, a Cambodia-based conglomerate the U.S. government calls one of the world’s largest online scam syndicates.

Why it matters to you: The Prince Group industry steals tens of billions of dollars a year from ordinary people through “pig butchering” scams, in which fraudsters befriend victims online, build trust over weeks and then convince them to pour their savings into fake crypto investment platforms. The FBI reported this week that $11.3 billion in losses were tied to crypto in 2025 alone. The president’s family crypto company is now linked, through its business partner, to the same network responsible for much of that theft.

What to watch: A photograph obtained by OCCRP shows Donald Trump Jr. and Zach Witkoff (son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff) meeting in Singapore last October with Jacky Sui, the beneficial owner of AB’s Cayman Islands foundation. World Liberty’s lawyers say they conducted due diligence on AB but were not made aware of the resort or the sanctioned individuals. The investigation raises a direct question for Congress and regulators. If World Liberty Financial’s due diligence missed a connection to sanctioned figures tied to a $15 billion scam syndicate, what else did it miss? Or “miss?”

The enabler watch

This week. The AB Network and the infrastructure of legitimacy

This is how the corruption ecosystem works. It doesn’t require a single mastermind. It requires a chain of enablers, each lending credibility to the next, until a blockchain network connected to sanctioned scam syndicate figures ends up in a formal partnership with the president’s family company. And cryptocurrency is custom-created to facilitate this ecosystem.

Start with AB. Launched in early 2025, the network listed former Serbian president Boris Tadic as its “blockchain moderator.” It's an Irish nonprofit listed about two dozen current and former world leaders as advisers and was chaired by former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern. AB promoted a “blockchain theme resort” in Timor-Leste, a tiny Southeast Asian nation of 1.4 million people, where most business is still done with paper cash.

The local company set up to develop that resort was 60% owned by Yang Jian, a Cyprus passport holder who the U.S. sanctioned in October 2025 for ties to Prince Group’s CEO, Chen Zhi. Two other people sanctioned in the same action also worked on the project. A fourth shareholder, Zhao Chen, is the wife of Hu Xiaowei, the alleged “second in command” of the Prince Group. All were removed after the sanctions, but the connections were there.

Then came the partnership. On November 12, last year, World Liberty Financial and AB announced their collaboration, giving AB the right to carry the Trump family’s USD1 stablecoin (a digital token pegged to the U.S. dollar) on its blockchain. Jacky Sui, AB’s beneficial owner, says he was introduced to World Liberty by Lin Xiaofan, a secretive Chinese businessman who admits to knowing the alleged Prince Group number two and once flew on his private jet from Manila to Switzerland.

None of this proves World Liberty knew about the scam syndicate connections. Its lawyers deny it. But the pattern is the story. A blockchain network wraps itself in the prestige of former presidents and prime ministers. It signs deals with entities connected to sanctioned individuals. It scrubs those connections after sanctions are announced. And it partners with the president’s family crypto company, which either failed to discover any of this or didn’t look for it.

The money trail

The Democracy Defenders Fund obtained Steve Witkoff’s financial disclosure report from the Office of Government Ethics (OGE, the federal agency that reviews officials’ finances for conflicts of interest). Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. He co-founded World Liberty Financial with the Trump family, is a business partner with an oligarch who made his money in Russia, and is negotiating the agreements with Russia and Iran. The report remains uncertified more than seven months after filing, a red flag that, at a minimum, suggests unresolved conflicts of interest.

Witkoff reported holding significant shares in World Liberty Financial while simultaneously negotiating over “peace” with Iran, while literally sitting at the same table with his Government-of-UAE official co-investor, who holds a 49% stake in his company. Forbes reported that Witkoff is 15% richer than he was a year ago, thanks to his crypto venture with the Trump family and his stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The Witkoff family has earned at least $200 million from WLFI token sales and related transactions.

Fairshake super PAC (the crypto industry’s) now holds $191 million for the 2026 midterms. It is targeting New York House races, watching how members voted on the CLARITY Act (a bill that would shift crypto regulation away from the enforcement-focused SEC to the more industry-friendly CFTC). Six New York Democrats who voted yes are now being monitored. The PAC’s strategy is to fund candidates before elections so the industry’s biggest threats never take office. It’s working. Ask Trump, Witkoff, the Emeratis and North Koreans.

Enforcement tracker

The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) issued a joint interpretation on March 17 declaring that most crypto tokens are not securities. SEC Chair Paul Atkins, who previously co-chaired the crypto industry’s Token Alliance lobbying group, called it the end of “more than a decade of uncertainty.” Translation for ordinary Americans: The cop who used to write the tickets just declared that drunk driving isn’t illegal.

Ordinary Americans harmed

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released its 2025 annual report this week. The headline number is staggering. $17.6 billion stolen through cyber-enabled fraud, with $11.3 billion tied to cryptocurrency. That is more than the annual budgets of several U.S. states. Investment fraud (which includes pig butchering scams) led all categories, accounting for $8.6 billion.

People over 60 filed 201,266 complaints and lost approximately $7.7 billion. A Dooly County, Georgia, man lost $164,000 after a woman he met on Facebook convinced him to invest through a fake crypto trading platform. The FBI traced his Bitcoin to wallets in Myanmar, the same region where the Prince Group and similar syndicates operate forced-labor scam compounds. The agency recovered roughly $24,000 of his money—less than 15%.

On April 1, DeFi platform Drift Protocol was hacked for approximately $285 million, already the largest crypto theft of 2026. Chainalysis estimated that $17 billion was stolen through crypto scams and fraud in 2025, with impersonation scams up 1,400% year over year. These are the victims the SEC is no longer protecting. This was the “persecution” David Sacks, Mark Andreesen and the crytobros used to complain about.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week and a policy change the week after. The pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

The Binance WLFI reward campaign, which is distributing 135 million WLFI tokens, ends on April 17. Watch for a sell-off as participants cash out rewards, which would test whether there is real demand for the Trump family’s governance token or whether it is sustained entirely by promotional campaigns. WLFI is currently trading at roughly $0.095, down over 70% from its all-time high. At the same time, the Chainalysis 2026 Crime Report projects that scam losses this year will exceed 2025's record of $17 billion. Every dollar lost to pig butchering, every retiree cleaned out on a fake trading platform, is another data point in the case that this industry's growth comes at the direct expense of the people the president claims it serves.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The SEC’s top enforcement official, Margaret “Meg” Ryan, resigned on March 16 after clashing with Chairman Paul Atkins, the former crypto industry lobbyist who now runs the agency, over cases tied to President Trump’s family and their business partners. Ryan lasted six months. Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter on March 30 demanding records of all communications between SEC leadership and Trump family members, World Liberty Financial, Justin Sun, and Changpeng Zhao.

Why it matters: The SEC, the agency that is supposed to protect investors from fraud, dismissed its fraud case against Justin Sun, a major Trump family business partner, just 11 days before its own enforcement chief walked out. A Cornerstone Research report found that SEC enforcement actions against public companies are at their lowest levels in at least a decade.

What it means for Americans: On the same day Blumenthal sent his letter, the Labor Department proposed a rule that would open 401(k) retirement plans, which hold trillions in American workers’ savings, to cryptocurrency and other risky alternative investments. The Biden administration had warned employers to exercise “extreme care” before exposing retirement savings to crypto. That guidance was rescinded last May. TL;DR: Americans, hide your wallets!

What to watch: Blumenthal’s letter requests a response by April 14. The 401(k) rule is open for 60 days of public comment. Both deadlines will test whether any accountability mechanisms still function.

The enabler watch

This week: The crypto industry’s money laundering machine

The Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report, released in recent weeks, documents the scale of what the crypto industry has enabled. In 2025, illicit cryptocurrency addresses received at least $154 billion. That number is a floor, not a ceiling, because analysts continue to identify new criminal wallets after the fact. The 2024 estimate was revised up from $41 billion to $57 billion within a year.

The enablers are easy to find. They are the stablecoin companies, the exchanges and DeFi protocols that process transactions without asking questions. Stablecoins, digital tokens designed to hold a steady dollar value, now account for 84% of all illicit crypto transaction volume, according to the Financial Action Task Force, the global anti-money laundering watchdog. That is $129 billion in criminal activity flowing through the same type of product that the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial issues.

Chinese Money-Laundering Networks have emerged as the dominant infrastructure providers. These are not ad hoc services. They are full-service criminal enterprises offering laundering-as-a-service for everything from fraud proceeds to North Korean hack funds and terrorist financing. One network, Huione Group, processed $39.6 billion in 2025 alone before being designated by FinCEN, the Treasury Department’s financial crimes bureau.

The money trail

Fairshake, the crypto industry’s political action committee (a fund that pools crypto industry money to influence elections), now has $221 million to spend on the 2026 midterm elections, according to donation data tracked by researcher Molly White. The industry has already deployed $271 million into races this year.

The money bought results. On March 17, two weeks after Fairshake’s biggest donors, Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z, each gave tens of millions, the SEC and CFTC issued a joint interpretation declaring that most crypto assets are not securities. That means the SEC will not regulate them. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and 14 other tokens were classified as “digital commodities” under the friendlier CFTC. Chairman Atkins called it “clear lines in clear terms.” For the companies that donated to put him there, it was the return on investment they paid for.

The PAC lost one high-profile race: Fairshake spent $10 million opposing Juliana Stratton in the Illinois Democratic Senate primary. She won anyway. But Fairshake-backed candidates prevailed in three House primaries the same day.

A noteworthy fact: The Fairshake PAC ads rarely mention crypto. They simply run ads favoring those that they know are pro-crypto. The industry knows Americans find it toxic and won’t elect people who support it, so they just amplify an attribute of their preferred candidate that will get them elected. Pro-tip for candidates: If you are running against a pro-crypto candidate – especially if Fairshake is spending against you – make that an issue. In fact, drop us a note. We may have some crypto-corruption research that could prove useful.

The SEC’s enforcement division has lost 18% of its staff through buyouts and departures in fiscal 2025, according to a Government Accountability Office report. New enforcement actions against public companies are at their lowest levels in at least a decade. Acting enforcement chief Sam Waldon said he does not think case counts are a good measure of effectiveness. The enforcement director position is now vacant. We are seeing the results of the Thiel, Andreessen and crypto bro donations.

Ordinary Americans harmed

The Labor Department’s new rule could expose trillions of dollars in American retirement savings to cryptocurrency. There are roughly 70 million Americans with 401(k) plans. The Biden administration warned that crypto posed “serious concerns” for retirement savers, citing volatility, fraud, and theft. That warning is gone.

In just January and February, the crypto industry lost $113 million to hacks and scams across 31 incidents. Phishing attacks, where criminals trick people into handing over their account credentials, surged 1,400% year over year—every scam and grift dreams of unlocking access to America’s retirement system. The cryptocurrency industry bought its way in.

“Pig butchering” scams are a huge problem. These confidence schemes steer victims into fake crypto platforms. The FBI reported $6 billion from pig butchering in 2024 alone, and the DOJ seized $61 million in funds tied to them in North Carolina this month. TRM Labs estimates $35 billion flowed to fraud schemes in 2025. The United Nations estimates more than 200,000 people are held in scam compounds across Southeast Asia, many of them trafficking victims forced to run these schemes.

American Bitcoin, the Trump son’s public “Bitcoin Mining” company, has lost 90% of its value since going public last year. Its Q4 report printed a $59 million loss. It now trades at $0.81 from a high of over $14. Though we don’t know ABTC’s goals, the typical goal of a company that hoards bitcoin is to grow large enough through rising bitcoin prices that it gets added to a major stock index, forcing pension funds to buy it. This is what happened to Trump’s media company, which runs Truth Social. Millions of teachers across America and Canada now have their retirements invested in Truth Social. We even ran a letter-writing campaign in California about it last year. California’s legislators didn’t respond. Don’t be surprised if you wake up to find your 401(k) invested in Eric Trump. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

One thing to watch

Fairshake lost the Illinois Senate primary despite spending $10 million. But the PAC still has $221 million, and its sights are on New York House races. Reps. Dan Goldman, Laura Gillen, and Ritchie Torres, all Democrats who voted for the CLARITY Act, the bill that would codify the SEC’s new crypto-friendly interpretation into permanent law, are on Fairshake’s watch list. Goldman faces a primary challenge from former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander. Whether Fairshake intervenes could determine if the CLARITY Act’s biggest Democratic supporters survive the midterms.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The crypto industry bought this war. Fairshake PAC, the crypto industry’s political action committee (PAC), reported $193 million in cash on hand for the 2026 midterms. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who bankrolled Trump’s rise and helped install JD Vance in the Senate, is back pumping millions into Republican PACs. These are the same donors who purchased a president, a Congress, and an SEC chair who would look the other way on fraud. Now that the president has started a war in Iran, and the people who bought him are still cashing checks.

This week, while American service members died in the Middle East and oil surged past $112 a barrel (up 44% since the war began on February 28), the SEC and CFTC (the two federal agencies that police financial markets) issued a landmark 68-page interpretation declaring 16 major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP, to be “digital commodities” rather than securities.

Thiel and the cryptobros may or may not have wanted war with Iran, but the war was worth it to see regulatory capture come full circle this week.

With this regulatory move, the government just said these assets don’t need the same investor protections as stocks and bonds. This corruption-laden industry, which has little practical use beyond laundering money, has been stripped of all regulatory oversight. Sure, there will be regulatory theater, like with Trump’s business partner Binance (which set up a US entity to distract from the criming undertaken by its foreign entities), but none of that will protect American investors or stop any actual corruption.

What it means for Americans: gas prices are climbing because of a war launched by an administration that crypto billionaires helped install. And while you’re paying more at the pump, those same billionaires just got their regulatory wish list handed to them on a silver platter.

What to watch: Trump extended his deadline on striking Iran’s power plants by five days. Bitcoin whipsawed between $67,500 and $71,200 in a single session. More than $400 million in crypto positions were liquidated in four hours. The war isn’t just geopolitics. It’s a volatility machine that crypto traders are profiting from while ordinary people lose their savings and go into debt to fill their cars with gas.

The enabler watch

This week: Paul Atkins delivers the goods

Paul Atkins is the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency responsible for protecting investors from fraud. Before Trump appointed him, Atkins co-chaired the Token Alliance, a crypto industry lobbying group. He held $6 million in crypto assets. He is the definition of regulatory capture, which is when the people running a government watchdog agency used to work for the companies they’re supposed to police.

On March 17, the SEC and CFTC issued the biggest gift the crypto industry has ever received from a regulator – a joint interpretation declaring that most crypto assets are not securities. This means Coinbase, Ripple, and the other companies whose enforcement cases Atkins already dismissed no longer face the presumption that they were selling unregistered securities. The cop who dropped the charges just changed the law, so there were never any charges to begin with.

The interpretation is technically agency guidance that a future administration could reverse. That’s why the industry is pushing the CLARITY Act through Congress to make it permanent. The bill passed the House in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee in January 2026. The Senate Banking Committee markup is next. Every dollar Fairshake spent bought a step in this pipeline.

And the Iran war is the cost you have to bear, so that Thiel and the cryptobros could get their payday

The money trail

The network that built this administration is doubling down. Peter Thiel, the billionaire who doesn’t believe freedom and democracy are compatible (his words), is back in the political spending game. After sitting out 2024, Thiel is pumping millions into Republican PACs. Thiel is part of the PayPal Mafia alongside Elon Musk and Trump’s “Crypto Czar” David Sacks.

Fairshake PAC scored wins across the board in the first 2026 congressional primaries on March 4. In Texas, Jessica Steinmann, a former DOJ lawyer backed by Trump, won with nearly 70% of the vote after Fairshake spent over $750,000 on her behalf. House Financial Services Chairman French Hill, the point man on crypto legislation, cruised to victory with $400,000 in Fairshake support.

Meanwhile, Fairshake spent $1.5 million targeting Rep. Al Green, a Texas Democrat who co-sponsored a bill to ban Trump’s personal crypto business interests. Green was forced into a runoff. The message to Congress is clear: criticize crypto corruption, and we will spend whatever it takes to end your career.

Enforcement tracker

The SEC’s March 17 joint interpretation didn’t just classify crypto assets. It functionally ended the enforcement era. Under the new taxonomy, the companies that Atkins already let off the hook, including Coinbase, Ripple, and Binance, now have formal confirmation that the assets they were accused of selling illegally are not securities. The SEC dismissed crypto cases at a 33% rate versus 4% for everything else. Now it’s rewritten the rules so there’s nothing left to dismiss.

Bright spot: the U.S. Secret Service, along with UK and Canadian agencies, launched Operation Atlantic on March 16, targeting “approval phishing” scams (a type of fraud in which criminals trick people into granting full access to their crypto wallets). These scams are often linked to pig butchering operations, where victims are groomed over weeks or months before being robbed. The SEC may have stopped policing the industry, but someone still is.

Ordinary Americans harmed

The war in Iran has turned crypto markets into a meat grinder for retail investors. Bitcoin crashed from $76,000 to $67,500 in a week as oil surged past $112 a barrel. More than $243 million in leveraged positions were liquidated on March 23 alone, mostly from traders who bet Bitcoin would keep rising. To put that in human terms: imagine 2,430 families each losing $100,000 in a single day because of a war that Jared Kushner and his corrupt friends convinced the government to start without consulting the American people.

The $TRUMP memecoin (a joke cryptocurrency issued by the president himself) is now trading at $3.19, down 95.7% from its all-time high of $73.43. The people who bought at the top have lost almost everything. Insiders control over 525 million of the 1 billion tokens in the supply. This week, Trump announced another Mar-a-Lago dinner for top holders, temporarily pumping the price 35% before it fell back. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the last dinner an “orgy of corruption.” This one is scheduled while the president is actively waging war, and it conveniently conflicts with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Meanwhile, a Resolv stablecoin (a cryptocurrency designed to maintain a steady $1 value) crashed by 70% after an attacker withdrew $25 million. The recovery rate for victims of crypto theft remains below 1%.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The cryptocurrency industry spent over $290 million electing the president who just started a war.

Fairshake PAC, bankrolled by Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz, was the single largest outside spender in the 2024 cycle. Its money helped install a crypto-friendly Congress, a crypto czar, and an SEC chair who dismantled enforcement. Now those same donors and officials are profiting from, enabling, or staying conspicuously silent about the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which has killed over 1,400 people in 18 days.

Why it matters: The crypto-to-war pipeline is not metaphorical. Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir, whose AI systems helped justify the strikes. His Founders Fund invested in Polymarket, where over $529 million was wagered on the timing of those strikes, with suspected insiders collecting hundreds of thousands. Donald Trump Jr., a Polymarket adviser through 1789 Capital, sits at the intersection of war intelligence and war gambling. A Washington Post article identified 70 senior administration officials – that’s 1 in 5 – holding cryptocurrency positions ranging up to $120 million.

What it means for Americans: Oil passed $100 per barrel. The Dow fell over 400 points. That’s just the beginning. Crypto czar David Sacks finally broke his silence on March 14, not to condemn the killing, but to warn that escalation is bad for markets. He urged Trump to “declare victory and get out.” His concern was the Gulf’s desalination plants, not its schoolchildren.

What to watch: Whether Sacks’ public break with the war hawks signals a real rift or a hedge. And whether Congress investigates insider trading on Polymarket’s war bets.

The enabler watch

This week: The crypto-war complex

Palantir Technologies, co-founded by Peter Thiel, provided an AI analytics platform called MOSAIC that flagged the surge in uranium enrichment, which became the stated justification for the strikes. Byline Times found that Palantir’s three most prominent figures, Thiel, co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and CEO Alex Karp, each publicly advocated for exactly the military confrontation that followed.

Lonsdale was the most explicit. In a CNBC interview during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, he urged strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, said he was told American bunker-busters “work,” and added he couldn’t wait to “invest in Iran” after regime change. Karp predicted war with Iran would prove the value of Palantir’s autonomous weapons. Thiel argued in a 2024 interview that every country acquiring nuclear weapons produces a regional war, framing Iran as a “catastrophe” requiring preventive action.

Palantir’s stock valuation now exceeds $300 billion. The company signed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry in January 2024. Its AI platform is being used to conduct the war its founders called for. That is not a coincidence. It is a business model.

Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm that gave $70 million to Fairshake PAC and whose partners gave millions directly to Trump, built a real-time war dashboard tracking strikes on Iran. The dashboard links to prediction markets, including Kalshi, a company that a16z has invested in. One X user asked if anyone wanted to “pull this up on a 100-inch TV” in San Francisco. War as spectator sport, brought to you by the same firm that bankrolled the “pro-crypto Congress.”

Marc Andreessen has not issued a public statement on the war.

The money trail

The crypto industry’s political spending created the conditions for this war. Fairshake PAC and its affiliates spent $290 million in 2024 to elect crypto-friendly candidates. Andreessen and Horowitz personally gave $5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. The Winklevoss twins gave $1 million in Bitcoin to Trump’s campaign. Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z together gave over $190 million across affiliated PACs.

Those donations bought an SEC that dropped every major case, a Commerce Secretary (Howard Lutnick) whose firm manages $80 billion in Tether reserves, and an AI/crypto czar (David Sacks) who retains a 7.8% stake in BitGo while shaping the policies that benefit it. They also bought a president who rejected a negotiated nuclear agreement, reportedly within reach according to Oman’s foreign minister, and launched strikes four days later.

Fairshake now holds $193 million for the 2026 midterms and has already spent $271 million. Its targets include anyone who questions the crypto-corruption pipeline.

Enforcement tracker

Enforcement is not merely on pause. It is being actively dismantled while the administration wages war. No new SEC crypto enforcement actions have been announced since the conflict began. The war provides convenient cover for continued deregulation.

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Ordinary Americans harmed

Oil surged past $100 a barrel after Iran vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. The Dow fell over 400 points in a single session. The US is releasing 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the largest draw in years, but that is a PR move that does not even register against the largest energy disruption in history. Gas prices are climbing, and grocery costs will follow as fertilizer supplies through the Strait are disrupted.

David Sacks, the crypto czar who now warns of catastrophe, framed his concern in market terms. “This is a good time to declare victory and get out, and that is clearly what the markets would like to see.” Not what civilians would like to see. What the markets would like. A dozen US service members are dead. Over 1,400 Iranians have been killed. More than 170 schoolgirls died in a single strike on a school in Minab. Sacks mentioned none of them.

Meanwhile, crypto markets tanked alongside everything else, reminding retail investors that Bitcoin is not, in fact, a hedge against geopolitical chaos. It is a bet on the same system that produces the chaos. It just doesn’t have any US regulatory oversight.

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The Trump family’s crypto company is now stripping its own investors of voting rights. Bloomberg reported that World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture listing President Trump as co-founder, is pushing a governance proposal to revoke voting power from early token buyers unless they agree to lock their holdings for 180 days. The vote started on March 5 and ends on March 12.

Why it matters: Early investors paid 5 to 15 cents per token. The Trump family received 22.5 billion tokens for free. The proposal lets insiders dilute outside investors while maintaining their own control. A crypto industry analyst on the WLFI governance forum called staking “a death case for a token.” This is why securities are regulated by bodies like the SEC – to protect investors. But the Trump administration has systematically gelded the SEC and CFTC, so investors are on their own on this one. The President’s crypto company is setting the music for the entire crypto industry. But remember, this is the mood music the industry wanted. Trump is branding it as corrupt, dangerous and shady. As they used to say back when we regulated things: Buyer beware!

What it means for Americans: This is how wealth extraction works. Ordinary (if gullible and maybe corrupt) investors put $550 million into WLFI. Now those investors are being asked to surrender their rights or lose their voice. The Trump family keeps 75% of the net proceeds regardless.

What to watch: The governance vote closes March 12. Over 300 comments on the forum show investors are divided. Meanwhile, Trump posted on Truth Social, blaming banks for stalling the CLARITY Act, a bill that would directly benefit his family’s stablecoin business. The American Bankers Association rejected the White House compromise on March 5. It’s rare for the bankers to be on the side of the rule of law. We’ll take what we can get.

The enabler watch

This week: Fairshake PAC and the buying of Congress

Fairshake is a super PAC, which is a political action committee that can raise and spend unlimited money on elections as long as it doesn’t coordinate directly with candidates. It is the crypto industry’s main tool for purchasing congressional influence. It has $193 million to spend on the 2026 midterm elections, a war chest funded primarily by Coinbase ($25 million), Ripple ($25 million), and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ($24 million).

This week, Fairshake spent $8.6 million in Illinois congressional races. Earlier this cycle, it committed $5 million to boost Alabama Republican Barry Moore’s Senate bid and targeted Texas Democrat Al Green with $1.5 million in opposition ads. Green co-sponsored a bill to ban the President from profiting off crypto. Now Fairshake wants him gone.

The mechanism: Fairshake’s ads rarely mention cryptocurrency. They run generic political attack ads funded by crypto money. Voters in these districts often have no idea the crypto industry is behind the campaigns. Molly White of Citation Needed documented how the dark-money group Cedar Innovation Foundation, which shares a spokesperson with Fairshake, can spend without disclosing its donors.

Twelve of the 22 sponsors of the CLARITY Act received backing from the Fairshake network. That is how a PAC buys a law.

The money trail

President Trump intervened in the CLARITY Act fight on March 4, posting on Truth Social that banks are “holding the bill hostage.” The bill would allow crypto firms to offer yield, meaning interest-like returns, on stablecoins like the USD1 stablecoin his family’s company issues. JPMorgan and Bank of America warned that stablecoin yield could siphon $6.6 trillion in deposits from the banking system.

This would be bad because undercapitalized banking systems lead to banking crises, such as the one in 2008-2009.

Eric Trump, who co-founded World Liberty Financial, called banks “anti-American” for opposing stablecoin yield, the same day his father pressured Congress. World Liberty Financial issues USD1 and is applying for a national bank charter through the OCC, an arm of the Treasury run by a Trump political appointee. House Democrats wrote to Treasury Secretary Bessent demanding a probe into conflicts of interest and foreign influence at WLFI.

Enforcement tracker

The SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, is the federal agency that polices securities fraud. Under Chair Paul Atkins, a former co-chair of the crypto industry’s Token Alliance lobbying group, the SEC has reduced the number of new crypto enforcement actions by roughly 60%. The agency is focused on what Atkins calls “real fraud” rather than the regulatory cases it has systematically dropped. Bitcoin is trading near $67,000, which means that public pensions have lost up to 60% on investments they were forced to make into “bitcoin treasury” companies like MSTR.

Ordinary Americans harmed

The $TRUMP memecoin, a cryptocurrency token launched by Donald Trump three days before his inauguration, hit an all-time low this week. It is now trading at $2.88 to $2.95, down 96% from its January 2025 peak of $73.43. The market capitalization, which is the total value of all tokens in circulation, has collapsed from $14.5 billion to roughly $680 million. Insiders, including two Trump-controlled companies, still hold 80% of the total supply. Retail investors, meaning ordinary people who bought the coin, have lost an estimated $2 billion. Even though the price has fallen precipitously, the Trump family makes money on transaction fees whenever it is traded.

That makes us wonder: Have there been any suspicious surges in trading of $TRUMP before or after major policy decisions?

Meanwhile, Chainalysis reported that crypto scam losses hit a record $17 billion in 2025. Americans aged 60 and older lost $4.9 billion to fraud, more than any other age group. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center found $2.8 billion in crypto-related losses among seniors alone. Pig butchering scams, in which fraudsters build relationships with victims over months before persuading them to invest in fake platforms, have gone industrial. TRM Labs documented $23 billion in verified fraud and $103 billion in illicit crypto finance in 2025.

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Corruption Receipts

One thing to watch

The WLFI governance vote closes March 12. If it passes, early investors lose voting power unless they lock their tokens. The proposal also creates a tiered access system in which holders of at least 50 million WLFI tokens receive direct access to the project team, a provision critics described as creating a “pay-to-play” governance model within the Trump family’s own crypto company. Watch whether the Trumps vote their own tokens.

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Crypto corruption in focus

Senator Elizabeth Warren called the Trump family’s crypto company “the center of perhaps the most disgraceful Presidential corruption scandal in U.S. history” during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on February 26. She was referring to World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company co-founded by the president’s sons. It has applied to become a federally chartered bank, which would give it the same powers as JPMorgan or Bank of America.

Why it matters: The president’s family stands to profit directly from a company that the president’s own appointee at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the agency that approves bank charters, will decide whether to approve. A UAE investment vehicle purchased 49% of the company for $500 million just four days before Trump took office. Warren asked whether this foreign ownership was properly disclosed. The OCC’s Jonathan Gould refused to say.

What it means for you: If approved, the president’s family would own a bank while the president controls the agency that regulates banks. That’s like a restaurant owner also running the health department.

What to watch: Gould agreed to consider sharing the unredacted bank charter application with Warren and Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott. House Democrats set a March 13 deadline for Treasury to respond to their investigation into WLFI conflicts of interest.

The enabler watch

This week: Jonathan Gould and the revolving door at the OCC

Jonathan Gould runs the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that decides which companies get to become banks. President Trump appointed him.

Before his appointment, Gould worked in private practice advising financial technology companies. Now he’s reviewing the bank charter application of the president’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. This company would directly profit from approval, and the Trump family holds a controlling stake.

At the February 26 Senate hearing, Warren pointed out the conflict: “If the application is approved, you would promulgate rules that influence the profitability of the president’s company.” Gould’s response was telling. He said the “only political pressure” he felt came from Warren herself, not from the president whose family stands to make millions from his decision.

r Silicon Valley billionaires who are major Trump donors. An internal fundraising memo reportedly touted the bank’s “political network” and “unique connectivity to banking regulators” as reasons investors should expect approval. The charter was granted in under eight months.

Warren has set a March 12 deadline for Gould to produce Erebor’s full unredacted charter application.

But the pattern goes deeper. The OCC also fast-tracked a charter for Erebor Bank, a tech-focused bank backed by Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and othe

The money trail

Eleven Senate Democrats sent a letter on February 27 to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding a federal investigation of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance is a platform where people buy and sell cryptocurrency, similar to a stock exchange but for digital coins.

The accusation: Binance let $1.7 billion flow to organizations linked to Iran’s military, including groups tied to the Houthis (a militia attacking ships in the Red Sea), Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and entities connected to Hamas and Hezbollah. That’s money that may have funded attacks on U.S. allies and disrupted global shipping routes, affecting the prices Americans pay for goods. Not to mention, America is now spending billions to bomb a lot of those things.

Why this connects to corruption: In 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws and paid a $4.3 billion penalty. Its founder, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, served four-months in prison. Trump pardoned him last October. Now Binance is promoting USD1, the stablecoin (a cryptocurrency designed to maintain a $1 value) issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, offering users 20% interest to hold it. Binance also accepted a $2 billion investment tied to WLFI.

The quid pro quo: A company convicted of helping America’s enemies gets its founder pardoned, then promotes the president’s family crypto product. Meanwhile, compliance staff who discovered the Iran transfers were reportedly fired. The senators set a March 13 deadline for a federal response.

Enforcement tracker

The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency that polices financial markets), under Chair Paul Atkins, has now formally removed all cryptocurrency from its 2026 enforcement priorities. Before Trump appointed him, Atkins co-chaired the Token Alliance, a crypto industry lobbying group. A Kroll analysis found a 33% dismissal rate for crypto cases (the percentage of cases the government chose to drop) versus 4% for everything else.

The SEC’s staffing has also decreased 15% this fiscal year, from roughly 5,000 to roughly 4,200 employees. Both remaining Republican commissioners at the SEC and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a sister agency) serve without any Democratic counterparts, meaning zero internal pushback on deregulation.

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Ordinary Americans harmed

Bitcoin trades around $68,200 today, down 46% from its all-time high of $126,210 last October. That’s like buying a house for $300,000 and watching its value drop to $162,000 in five months. Nearly $2 trillion has evaporated from the total crypto market since October, and millions of Americans’ pensions have been forced to invest in it.

The New York Times editorial board wrote on March 2 that despite unprecedented government support, crypto has only “pulled back the curtain on the fundamental worthlessness of its assets.” The board called the technology “useless” outside of crimes and scams.

The $TRUMP memecoin, a digital coin launched by the president himself, is trading at $3.40, down 95% from its January 2025 peak of $74.27. That means someone who put $1,000 into the president’s coin at its height now has $46. Insiders, including Trump family entities, control 80% of the total coin supply. Analysts found that 58 insiders made over $1.1 billion in profits while approximately 764,000 ordinary buyers lost money.

Meanwhile, Indiana passed a law allowing state pension funds to invest in cryptocurrency, effective July 1. That means teachers’ and firefighters’ retirement savings could be invested in the same volatile markets. America: hide your wallets.

Corruption receipts

We need you to tell us how to improve this newsletter. Last week, we heard you say that we needed to make it less dense. We tried to do that. Let us know how we did. This stuff is awful. We know. But we also know how important it is that more Americans understand how dangerously corrupt this sector is.

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Crypto corruption in focus

The Trump family’s crypto company convened nearly 400 finance and policy leaders at Mar-a-Lago on February 18, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, pardoned Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig. Two deals were announced: tokenizing Trump hotel revenue and piloting the USD1 stablecoin as a payment rail for a $3.5 trillion asset manager. The guest list was a map of the quid pro quo pipeline, and nobody bothered to hide it.

Why it matters: CZ, who Trump pardoned in October 2025 after his exchange received $4.7 billion in USD1, sat alongside the CFTC chairman and the president’s sons. At Davos in January, CZ told CNBC, “there’s no business relationship whatsoever” between himself and the Trump family. The Mar-a-Lago photos told a different story.

What it means for Americans: While insiders cut deals at a private resort, ordinary investors are sitting on devastating losses. The $TRUMP memecoin is down 95.5% from its peak. State pension funds have lost $337 million on MicroStrategy shares. Bitcoin ETFs have seen five straight weeks of outflows.

What to watch: Rep. Ro Khanna’s March 1 deadline for WLFI documents on the $500 million UAE deal is approaching. WLFI has not responded. Sen. Warren’s February 27 deadline for Treasury to provide assurances on a crypto bailout is in three days.

The enabler watch — Corruptopalooza at Mar-a-Lago

World Liberty Financial’s inaugural forum wasn’t a conference. It was a live demonstration of how the crypto-corruption pipeline works.

The bankers came to build the on-ramps. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon joked on stage that “his client had requested his presence.” Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson attended. Her firm manages crypto ETFs that benefit directly from SEC deregulation. BitGo CEO Mike Belshe was there. His company IPO’d on January 22, holds USD1 in reserves, and benefits from provisions of the GENIUS Act championed by David Sacks, who retains a stake in BitGo through Craft Ventures.

The politicians came to signal fealty. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig participated in a panel discussion alongside CZ, the pardoned crypto billionaire whose exchange holds 87% of all USD1 stablecoins. Plus, Binance coders wrote the original USD1 code. The creator, the regulator and the regulated, sharing a stage at the president’s private club, talking about the president’s company, which they all helped build.

The pardoned came to collect. CZ made his first major U.S. appearance since Trump pardoned him. He was photographed with Eric Trump and Don Jr. His exchange, Binance, holds $4.7 billion in USD1 and facilitated the $2 billion MGX deal using WLFI’s stablecoin. The New Republic characterized the event as “an opportunity for the Trump family to make more money off of the presidency in defiance of any ethical concerns.” It’s almost quaint.

Two new deals emerged. WLFI announced plans to tokenize loan revenue interests in Trump International Hotel & Resort, Maldives, through Securitize and DarGlobal. And WLFI signed a strategic collaboration with Apex Group, a $3.5 trillion company.

An important statistic: Binance holds $4.7 billion in Trump’s stablecoin, but Binance’s US-regulated affiliate holds just $1,119 in USD1, suggesting overwhelmingly foreign usage.

The money trail

Fairshake PAC, the crypto industry’s PAC, entered the week with $193 million in cash on hand. Total crypto industry political spending toward the 2026 cycle has reached $288 million, according to Molly White’s Follow the Crypto tracking, more than double the $130 million spent in the entire 2024 cycle. Of direct contributions to candidates, 92% went to Republicans.

This week’s targeting: $5 million in Alabama backing Rep. Barry Moore in the Senate primary. $1.5 million in Texas against 11-term Rep. Al Green, who voted against the GENIUS Act and co-sponsored a bill to ban Trump from personal crypto businesses. Seven-figure ad buys in Illinois Democratic primaries against La Shawn Ford and Robert Peters. In every case, Fairshake’s ads avoid mentioning crypto entirely.

New lobbying infrastructure: Hyperliquid launched the Hyperliquid Policy Center on February 18, a D.C. nonprofit funded by $29 million in HYPE tokens, led by former Blockchain Association policy head Jake Chervinsky. That single grant exceeds the Digital Chamber’s entire 2024 lobbying spend of $5.6 million.

Enforcement tracker

SEC Chairman Atkins and Commissioner Peirce outlined their most detailed deregulation roadmap yet at ETHDenver on February 18. The plan: let tokens “shed securities status,” create innovation exemptions for tokenized securities, allow “super-app” platforms combining securities and non-securities crypto, and formalize Project Crypto as a joint SEC-CFTC initiative. Translation? No more regulation!

It’s his current direction of travel, so you shouldn’t be surprised. New crypto enforcement actions have dropped approximately 60% since Atkins took office. The SEC has dismissed or closed at least 12 major cases. Enforcement staff was cut from roughly 50 to 30. No Democratic commissioners remain.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted two more conditional national trust bank charters this week: Bridge (Stripe-owned) on February 17 and Crypto.com on February 23. They’re warming up for the approval of bank charters for Trump’s World Liberty Financial, which has applied. OCC falls under Treasury, but we’re sure it will adjudicate the application on the merits

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Binance investigators flagged $1.7 billion in Tether flows to Iranian-linked entities last year. At least four of those investigators were fired or suspended weeks after their findings surfaced. Binance claims the departures were for data-protection breaches, not whistleblowing. The $1.7 billion moved through Tether, the Salvadoran stablecoin company in which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s family firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, holds a 5% ownership stake valued at roughly $600 million. Cantor also serves as custodian for Tether’s approximately $122 billion in U.S. Treasury reserves. Once again, Tether failed to prevent its cryptocurrency from being used to evade sanctions designed to cut off funding for Iran’s nuclear program and its support for terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah and Hamas. Tether has never undergone a full financial statement audit.

Crypto.com: On January 23, crypto[.]com transferred $5M to the Trump PAC, MAGA, Inc. Shortly after the donation, the Trump-led CFTC filed an amicus brief supporting Crypto.com’s appeal before a Nevada court in a critical court case deciding whether the company may do business in Nevada.

Ordinary Americans harmed

State pension funds holding MicroStrategy shares have suffered approximately $337 million in paper losses, roughly 60% declines across eleven state pension systems. CalPERS purchased over 470,000 shares and is now severely underwater. Better Markets warned that, despite this, more than 20 states have introduced legislation to expand crypto in public pension funds with minimal oversight.

Bitcoin spot ETFs saw their fifth consecutive week of outflows. Year-to-date net outflows range from $2.7 to $4.5 billion. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index hit 5 to 13 out of 100 (”Extreme Fear”), near all-time lows.

The $TRUMP memecoin is trading at approximately $5.73, down over 92% from its all-time high of $75.35. Retail investors lost approximately $2 billion purchasing the token after launch. On February 2, a team wallet moved $105 million in TRUMP tokens. The entities behind these wallets — CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC — sit within a corporate structure that traces directly to Donald Trump’s revocable trust.

Donald J. Trump wholly owns the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which owns CIC Digital LLC, described as “an affiliate of The Trump Organization.” CIC Digital jointly owns Fight Fight Fight LLC DL News (registered in Delaware, with Bill Zanker listed as “authorized person”) along with Celebration Cards LLC (registered in Wyoming). Celebration Cards was organized by Andrew Pierce, founder of Wyoming LLC Attorney (formerly Cloud Peak Law Group). The true beneficial owners of Celebration Cards LLC are unknown — Wyoming does not require LLC members to be disclosed.

Completely unrelated, CertiK documented $370 million in losses from crypto exploits and scams in January 2026. A single victim lost $284 million. DOJ sentenced Daren Li to 20 years for laundering $73 million from pig-butchering victims and filed a $225.3 million civil forfeiture complaint, the largest crypto seizure in Secret Service history.

Corruption Receipts

This section tracks ongoing stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after: the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

One thing to watch

Three deadlines converge in the next seven days. Rep. Ro Khanna’s March 1 deadline for WLFI to answer 16 questions about the $500 million UAE deal. Sen. Warren’s February 27 deadline for Treasury and the Fed to confirm no taxpayer money will bail out crypto markets. And the White House’s own end-of-February deadline for the stablecoin yield compromise that will determine the CLARITY Act’s fate.

And one more thing: Reuters reported on February 23 that China’s DeepSeek trained its AI model on Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell chip, despite U.S. export bans. The chips were likely routed through intermediaries to a data center in Inner Mongolia. The Trump administration approved the UAE’s request for 500,000 advanced AI chips per year. If those chips are reaching China through the same intermediary networks that moved the UAE’s $500 million into Trump’s crypto company, the national security implications dwarf any financial scandal this newsletter has ever covered.

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