A Rather Alarming Epstein / Russia / Israel Crypto Timeline

This is part four in an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to the crypto industry. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

   “Repetition in the music and we’re never gonna lose it.” - Mark E. Smith

I’m sorry to do this to you team but we’re going to talk about Jeffrey Epstein yet again. For one thing I dug up a few more eyebrow raising documents in the recent Epstein document dump. For another I wanted to put all the choicest morsels of Epstein/crypto information we now have into a single chronological timeline. There’s a lot of Epstein facts (and “facts”) swirling around out there; organizing them into a more digestible format like a timeline makes getting a handle on the evolution of Epstein’s involvement with crypto over the years a lot easier. This is doubly true when you intersperse that timeline with a few interesting geopolitical events that may or may not have been related to anything going on with Epstein.

While reading the sequence of events I want you to pay attention to three independent story lines:

1. Russia

2. Israel/Qatar

3. China

(Screenshots of the Epstein emails and text messages are from the site I put together that identifies a lot of Epstein’s redacted contacts and highlights interesting keywords with various colors. Links to the screenshots of the original documents can also be found there in cases where they aren’t provided here.)

• [2005]
Steve Bannon joins a company called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) and becomes friends and partners with its founder Brock Pierce, a much younger former child actor1 with an extremely sordid history of involvement in one of California’s most infamous child sex abuse rings. I wrote a lot about Brock Pierce’s life story here so I’ll spare you another biopic. I will just reiterate that IGE, which opened an office in Shanghai shortly after Bannon joined, was in the business of arbitraging pre-crypto internet money (like World Of Warcraft gold) against so-called “real” money (like U.S. dollars) by paying poor people in China to farm World Of Warcraft gold and then selling it to wealthy World Of Warcraft players in “the west”.
  

• [2011-01-??]2
Jeffrey Epstein and Isabel Maxwell’s3 husband Al Seckel co-host the first Mindshift conference on Epstein’s private island. One of the speakers at Mindshift is Brock Pierce who gives some kind of presentation about bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

• [2014/2015ish]
Fire and Fury author and man who likes to LARP as a journalist Michael Wolff4 writes a draft of an article about life at Epstein’s house. Among the many marvels described in the piece is the specter of Epstein introducing Brock Pierce to Harvard president and Obama economic adviser Larry Summers so the two can discuss cryptocurrency.

  

  The article is never published but, with the caveat that Michael Wolff is something of a fantasist, its existence in Epstein’s inbox strongly suggests that Epstein’s relationship with Pierce persisted past the Mindshift conference5. It also suggests that Epstein wanted to get publicity for the Pierce/Summers meeting, because if the recent Epstein document dump taught us anything it was the fact that Michael Wolff often served as a coordinator and idea man for Epstein’s PR strategies.
  

• [2014/2015ish]
Epstein apparently writes to a graduate of Russia’s FSB Academy6 (and thus probably a Russian intelligence operative) to propose the creation of a bank for criminals “stablecoin”7 as a means by which the Russian government could evade international sanctions.

  

• [2014-10-06]
Brock Pierce serves as the “doula for creation” of Tether, the world’s first and far and away largest bank for criminals stablecoin. I’ve written a lot about Tether and its connections to the Trump administration before so I won’t rehash it here. I will just note that I think it’s pretty interesting that Tether was launched right around the time Epstein was suggesting the creation of banks for criminals stablecoins to Russian intelligence operatives, especially seeing as how rumours have long swirled about Tether’s relationship with various “questionable” Russians in that early era of its existence.
  

• [2015-04-04]
Joi Ito, the disgraced former head of the MIT Media Lab, emails Jeffrey Epstein a note to thank him for funding bitcoin’s core development team. It doesn’t seem like there were any other donors involved in paying the salaries of the guys8 writing the bitcoin code.

  

• [2015-07-??]
  A dead body that may or or may not be Al Seckel, the co-host of the aforementioned Mindshift conference featuring Brock Pierce, is found at the bottom of a cliff in France.
  

• [2016-04-??]
  Larry Summers joins the board of Digital Currency Group (DCG), at the time the most important and influential crypto venture capital firm in America9. He goes on to oversee the incineration of staggering sums of money in hundreds of mindbogglingly stupid Made In America™️ crypto and NFT grifts funded by DCG and its CEO Barry Silbert AKA “Emperor Shillbertine”.
  

• [2016-11-11]
“An influential man in Qatar” labeled “Jabor Y”10 in Epstein’s address book sends Epstein a note saying he’s in touch with “the Sharia guys” and says he hopes to be able to get back to Epstein soon regarding “the e-currency.”

  

  “The e-currency” in question could be bitcoin but it could also be something like Tether. Either way the fact that “Jabor Y” is checking with “the Sharia guys” implies that he is seeking official clerical sign-off that “the e-currency” in question does not violate the rather particular rules of Islamic finance, which in turn implies that Epstein and “Jabor Y” are discussing the use of “e-currency” by people who are strict adherents to Islam.
  [UPDATE] Subsequent tranches of Epstein documents have confirmed that “Jabor Y” is former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim AKA “HBJ”.

• [2017-11-22]
  Joi Ito emails Epstein from the MIT Media Lab to inform him that Madars Virza, the co-founder of a new “privacy coin” ZCash that’s like bitcoin but completely untraceable, is “doing well” at MIT.

  

• [2018-02-24]
Epstein emails Steve Bannon about “coin issues” and says he needs to talk to “[Brock Pierce’s] people” in the midst of a longer colloquy about undermining democracy in the European Union, which Bannon charmingly refers to as “Eurabia” and Epstein even more charmingly calls “Yourlabiia” (because Europeans are like women, get it?). Bannon replies that he has just the bro to handle Epstein’s concerns about “prohibitions foreign donor” (sic): Jeffrey Wernick.

  

  A man named Jeffrey Wernick was also the COO of Parler, the now defunct Twitter clone which would go on to be the favoured platform of the people planning the January 6th attacks on the U.S. capitol.
  

• [2018-02-26]
Epstein emails Bannon about “cripto coin issues” (sic) that are “US based” and require intervention from the U.S. Treasury Department because of “some bad shit. very bad.”.

  

• [2018-05-??]
  Digital Currency Group, the crypto venture capital firm on whose board Larry Summers sits, makes a large investment in ZCash, the “privacy coin” developed by Epstein and Joi Ito’s friend Madars Virza at MIT.

• [2018—08-??]
Benjamin Netanyahu writes a letter to the government of Qatar asking them to allow $30 million a month to flow to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

  

• [2018-11-13]
Epstein introduces Bannon to the “influential man in Qatar” Jabor Y (the guy who was interested in the Sharia compliance of “the e-currency” whom Epstein now calls “my arab brother”) and Hamad bin Jassim (“HBJ”), the former prime minister of Qatar. Epstein also implies that Jabor Y is “family” with former Israeli primer minister Ehud Barak.

  

• [2018-12-05]
  Epstein and Bannon discuss their mutual acquaintance Chinese crypto rapper, billionaire supervillain, possible double agent, and all around very scary guy Miles Guo AKA Miles Kwok11. Bannon describes Guo as “like Trump, an instrument”, presumably in the great “fourth turning” showdown of civilizations between China and the U.S. that Bannon has been LARPing about for most of the last decade. Epstein just says that he’s scared of people like Miles Guo.

• [2019-04-03]
  Tether announces that it will be teaming up with Chinese national (and future business partner of President Donald J. Trump) Justin Sun to expand the reach of their bank for criminals stablecoin by launching a version of it on Justin Sun’s new “Tron” blockchain12. Tron and Tether become wildly popular in the Chinese speaking segment of the crypto market (AKA “the majority” of the crypto market).

  

• [2019-05-01]
  Bannon tells Epstein that China is “looking down the barrel of an economic shotgun” to which Epstein replies that “the real game is in the shadows”.

  

• [2019-05-06]
  Joi Ito writes Epstein and says “Heard you saw Madars [Virza, the co-founder of the privacy coin ZCash].”

  

• [2019-07-06]
  Jeffrey Epstein is arrested after returning from a trip to Europe. A few weeks after his arrest and subsequent death there is more bitcoin activity “on chain” than on any other day save one in modern bitcoin history as well as a large spike in Tether’s “on chain” transfer activity, all of which I detailed here.

  

• [2020-08-20]
Steve Bannon is arrested on Chinese crypto rapper cum billionaire supervillain Miles Guo AKA Miles Kwok’s yacht.
  

• [2021-01-01]
  Tether’s market cap hits $78 billion, the majority of it possibly in the form of money that Chinese citizens have illegally taken out of China13. Almost $40 billion of that total is issued to Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research (AKA “FTX’s trading arm”) using Justin Sun’s Tron blockchain.

  

• [2020-2021ish?]
  Brock Pierce, a homosexual non-Jewish man with an extremely sordid history of involvement in sex crimes against children as well as a slightly less sordid history of involvement in multi-billion dollar crypto frauds14, hires a Hasidic chief of staff and at least a few other Haredi Jews from the American and Israeli far right in between backing Eric Adams in the New York City mayoral race. The Jerusalem Post’s Zvika Klein writes a puff piece about Pierce that makes zero mention of his involvement in enormous frauds and/or child sex abuse rings.

  

• [2022-02-23]
Brock Pierce meets with (then former) Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

  

• [2023-03-15]
  Steve Bannon’s anti-China “instrument” Miles Guo AKA Miles Kwok is arrested. Somehow he manages to firebomb his own Park Avenue penthouse on the way to prison. George Santos, the recently pardoned former Republican congressman who stole a bunch of money from elderly MAGA enthusiasts with Alzheimer’s, makes a speech defending Guo on the floor of the U.S. congress.

  

• [2025-04-01]
The Times of Israel reports that Zvika Klein, the Jerusalem Post editor who wrote the puff piece about Brock Pierce that failed to mention any of the man’s extremely sleazy history, was questioned under caution in an Israeli probe into “Qatargate”.

• [2025-07-??]
Udi Levi, the former head of Mossad’s Economic Warfare and Financial Intelligence Division, publicly questions the Netanyahu family’s involvement in cryptocurrency and specifically calls out Yair Netanyahu’s close relationship with Brock Pierce.

  

If one dons a sufficiently sized tinfoil hat it’s easy to wonder about the outlines of a sinister conspiracy or two (or three) in the above fact pattern, even if for now we can’t completely prove any of them and are left to resort to mere speculation.

[RUSSIA] We now know that Epstein was hanging out with Tether’s “doula for creation” (Brock Pierce) at the same time as he was suggesting to Russian intelligence that something like Tether could and should be created. Funnily enough this also just so happens to coincide with the time Tether was created by a team including Brock Pierce. Tether just so happens to be extremely popular with Russian sanctions evaders to this very day.

[ISRAEL / QATAR] We now know that Epstein was communicating with “influential” people in Qatar (including the former primer minister) about the Sharia compliance of “e-currency” around the time Netanyahu was encouraging the Qatari government to allow funds to flow to Hamas, preferably in an untraceable fashion. A lot of those funds ended up being delivered to Hamas in cash-filled suitcases but, at least according to available reporting, not all of the $30 million per month requested by the Netanyahu government was so delivered. It’s also not very hard to envision a world where, even if “last mile” deliveries of money to Hamas were being done with cash, a bank for criminals stablecoin like Tether could have been used at an earlier stage of the remittance process to obscure the flow of funds, especially back then when government monitoring of banks for criminals stablecoins was borderline nonexistent15. It’s no secret that Tether has been (and still is) used by regional players like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to move large sums of money around.

[CHINA] The China / Bannon / Miles Guo / FTX story line kind of postdates Epstein’s existence on this mortal coil… but not Steve Bannon’s. It’s at least worth noting that this plot line really starts moving - and starts pushing Tether’s connections to Russia to the background as its connections to China grow exponentially - at more or less exactly the time the Epstein player character is removed from the game and the Justin Sun and Miles Guo player characters are placed on the board.

One of the things that has managed to go almost wholly unreported about FTX (other than an amazing piece in The Financial Times about people in Hong Kong “lining up [outside FTX subsidiary Genesis Block] with bags of cash [every day for years]”) is that the FTX + Tether combo grew into what could be viewed as an economic weapon deployed against the People’s Republic of China. The combination of a U.S. dollar bank for criminals stablecoin with a marketplace where that stablecoin could be freely traded for cash (no questions asked) allowed Chinese citizens16 to make an end run around the capital controls that would have otherwise prevented them from taking their money out of the country.

Tether’s market cap is now roughly $185 billion. Extracting any reasonable percentage of that amount from China’s grip would be the kind of geopolitical financial superweapon that Steve Bannon would have wet dreams about. So I find it interesting that the explosion in Tether’s market cap happened at the exact same time as Bannon was becoming very close to Miles Guo AKA Miles Kwok, a certified master of getting illicit money out of China.

Have I mentioned that FTX and Miles Guo used the same bank, the formerly crypto friendly Silvergate Bank (R.I.P.)? Or the fact that in 2022 Miles Guo took his yacht to the island nation of The Bahamas, which just so happens to have been where FTX was headquartered? Because I have a bad feeling those things are probably not coincidences either.

You know the drill: likes and restacks appreciated, “Notes” to follow.

Substack is trying to be Twitter with a product called “Notes”. It’s pretty cool but not everyone looks at it so I’m reposting some recent highlights at the bottom of some of my Substack “Posts”.

On corruption in the DEA and CIA:

On “sports contracts”:

On Epstein’s vocabulary:

On raising children the right way:

On podcasting:

On pardoning major drug traffickers who also happen to have launched crypto city states with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen:

On electricity bills in the AI era:

On presidential crypto companies:

On Kazakh gold:

On prediction markets: