This series explores my findings on the largest criminal enterprise in history.

If you’re new to the series, you can jump in right here, plus I have links to the backlog down below.

It started by exploring the role of crypto in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but then revealed a diverse list of billionaires who’ve been growing a decades-long network of Ponzi schemes with Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail network holding it all together.

And I don’t mean “Everything is a Ponzi scheme in capitalism;” I mean we’ve been actively, criminally defrauded by many of the most powerful people on the planet to the tune of several trillion dollars as they collapse banks and build entire industries to sell us snake oil and lie to us about it.  

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Let’s stitch together some of what we’ve gathered in a timeline:

-          2010:

o   Summer Highlands Ltd. and a bunch of other companies are created in the British Virgin Islands to make a series of unregistered stock exchanges.

o   Stanford Professor and WestPac Bank CEO Robert Joss writes his case study looking for participants in a multi-currency offshore banking scheme.

-          2013:

o   A mysterious payments processing app called Clinkle posts the highest seed funding round in Silicon Valley history, with a big list of famous investors. This includes Peter Thiel, who started a bank run last month; and Richard Branson, who appears to have been running Ponzi schemes for decades. It also includes several people and funds associated with Stanford University, which has suspiciously strong ties to Theranos and FTX.

-          2014:

o   Some of the biggest names in tech venture capital get together to invest in Polychain, which looks to develop three new technologies in the crypto space. These technologies would allow them to develop an untraceable global liquidity pool in support of a decentralized Ponzi scheme.

-          2019:

o   Bitcoin trading volume goes through the roof, providing evidence of the global liquidity pool being developed and used.

There is quite a lot more to cover, especially in that 2014 to 2019 gap, but that is another deep technical slog, much like Part 4. For now, I’ll give the very short form receipts for Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund’s continued investment and involvement in building the decentralized dark pool tools that Polychain (a company Thiel backed previously) worked on previously:

• Greenhouse v. Polychain presents a brazen theft of Bitcoin derivatives (SAFTs) by Polychain management, which coincides perfectly with a seed round of SAFT funding for Orchid Labs LLC, backed by the same big crypto venture capital investors.

• Polychain v. Pantera gives more detail on the vague and powerful investors behind the operation, which aligns well with the language in Summer Highlands Ltd.’s SEC registration

• Founders Fund’s Napoleon Ta was a director for Tagomi Systems (also backed by Founders Fund), which brought on Greg Tusar from Goldman Sachs to build cryptocurrency’s first high-frequency trading network. An interview with the Tagomi president reveals that the company was created as an offshoot of Polychain.

• Tagomi was founded at the same address as BlockFi in Jersey City, a later Founders Fund cryptocurrency venture. BlockFi appears to be Tagomi 2.0, with the two of them directly responsible for the two Bitcoin volume anomalies in Part 4.

• Thiel and BlockFi held substantial exposure to FTX via West Realm Shires (many of Thiel’s companies have Lord of the Rings references in the name). This, along with the substantial crypto infrastructure investments made by Founders Fund and Coinbase in Chicago in recent years (where FTX.US was located) give further support to the theory that these actors were all colluding on the same decentralized Ponzi scheme that FTX was a part of.

During this time, we see many, many new investors into the scheme and a tidal wave of new money around cryptocurrency, replicating the operations that Polychain pioneered.

The Winklevoss twins, for instance, created the Gemini crypto exchange in 2014, and have since spawned several crypto startups that appear to reproduce and improve upon the high-frequency trading and zero-knowledge proof technology.

But they were just one of many investors: Follow any of the tentacles of money that pass through Polychain and you’ll find similar operations for many big tech venture capital players, building whole networks of operations around the globe.

You can see all the different start-ups acting in service of this scheme on Multicoin’s job postings here. If you read past the vague feel-good tones of an “open” currency that’s found in much of the companies’ marketing, you’ll find that it includes the same specific technologies Polychain had invested in, presumably to create a global Ponzi scheme (see Part 4):

• Movement across blockchains:

o   Algorand: “…an extraordinary commitment to interoperability…”

o   Kadena: “…a hybrid blockchain platform…”

o   Nervos Network: “It allows any crypto-asset to be stored with the security, immutability and permissionless nature of Bitcoin while enabling smart contracts, layer 2 scaling…” In other words, “The crypto is hidden and we can move it”

• High frequency trading:

o   SKALE Labs: “…A high-speed, seamless experience…without latency.” “…A 100% decentralized network.” “…A unique pooled security model…”

o   Textile: “…to accelerate the exchange of information on the internet…”

• Secure, hidden crypto storage:

o   Filebase

o   Keep: “…helps contracts harness the full power of the public blockchain by enabling deep interactivity with private data…”

• Decentralized, global infrastructure:

o   Dfinity (which Polychain supported by name)

o   Helium:“…a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure…”

o   NEAR Foundation : …[a] decentralized storage and compute platform that is secure enough to manage high-value assets like money or identity”.

Much like my exploration into Richard Branson’s remarkably Ponzi-like investments in Part 3, this isn’t cherry picking from a deep trove; every company on that job board seems to be either actively building this technology of vast new theft, or operating in service of it (like mobile payments apps and cryptocurrency derivative assets).

As it turns out, Multicoin sums it up in nicely on their thesis page:

“Crypto will create the largest one time shift in wealth in the history of the internet”

Do you get it? That “one time shift in wealth” is them and their co-conspirators stealing trillions of dollars, and the really large text on their website is them having a hell of a laugh about it.

If you need more evidence, just slog through Part 4 and then read the rest of the text on that webpage: You’ll find the exact same fraudulent thesis that Polychain had proposed: the three keys to the kingdom.

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But if, as the mounting evidence is starting to suggest, all of these people were actively engaging in a global Ponzi scheme on which the entire cryptocurrency industry was built, that would raise a whole host of new questions:

• It would require billions and billions of dollars in technical investments worldwide, right?

• And it would require expert knowledge of international banking regulations to stay ahead of authorities, right?

• And it would require building political capital with foreign governments to let you set up shop in their countries, right?

• And it would require lobbying for political influence to get regulations that could crack down on the operation, right?

• And it would require an array of co-conspirators in international banking to help launder and move the money, right?

• And it would require global institutions whose main purpose is to secretly provide liquidity to the dark pool at the heart of the Ponzi scheme, right?

• And it would require actively promoting the scheme in print, television, radio, and internet media, right?

• And it would require front companies to justify dark pool tech hubs worldwide, right?

• And it would require various means of control to ensure that the enormous scheme wouldn’t be revealed, right?

So, how did they do all those things? Are we to believe that Sam Bankman-Fried and his trust fund polycule pulled all that off on their own?

Or is it infinitely more likely that such an operation would require economic, social and political power that extends well beyond cryptocurrency and takes root in our daily lives: in our apps and on our TVs; in our bank accounts and ballot boxes?

If you’re wondering where this series is headed, it’s developing rich, well-researched, well-sourced explanations to all of those questions. It was never about crypto - that was just the path that led us down the rabbit hole.

It wasn’t about crypto for the scammers either; they would have done the same thing with Theranos-style biomed Ponzis if there were that much money in it. But nothing lent itself to the scam quite like an unregulated, decentralized digital currency.  

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Let’s revisit three tech venture capital firms from our story: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Jim Breyer’s Accel Partners, and Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz (also known as “a16z”).

To recap, Thiel and Breyer made big bets on Clinkle, while Thiel and Andreessen were some of Polychain’s biggest backers.

If you’ve been paying close attention or you know too much about the tech world, you’ll note that all three are investors in Facebook. Not just any investors: they’re some of the most important, influential investors in Facebook’s history (this article from 2008 provides a great overview and some ominous foresight, though it makes the common mistake of investigating Thiel’s words more than his actions, just as he would hope):

• Thiel made the first outside investment in the company in 2004, buying a 10% stake for $500,000. He held a seat on Facebook’s board until 2022.

• Breyer has been on the boards of Wal-Mart and Blackstone. He invested $12.5 million in Facebook in 2005 when they had 10 employees: this was the first big, established venture capital money backing Facebook.

• Andreessen, a former Netscape Navigator exec, is the longest active member on Facebook’s board, having a seat since 2008.

And they’re not making small investments in cryptocurrency either: Last time, we saw potentially $3 billion that Founders Fund dumped into the crypto dark pool, and their direct investments in all of these and related companies are in the billions outside of that. Andreessen sits on Coinbase’s board, while Breyer Labs is a crypto fund.             

And we just had the Winklevoss twins starting a cryptocurrency exchange and an ecosystem around it. They’re the Harvard students who sued Zuckerberg, saying he ripped off their social media site idea in 2004. They were very early on cryptocurrency, in fact; reportedly holding 1% of all Bitcoin back in 2012.

With all this big Facebook money also making big financial and material investments in cryptocurrency for most of the time since, it raises the question: What about Zuckerberg and Facebook itself?

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Mark Zuckerberg’s crypto ventures tell a curious story about one of last month’s bank failures.

In May 2018, reports first surface of a Facebook cryptocurrency, which launched as Libra (since rebranded as “Diem”). Not only that, they established the Libra Association, backed by an “international consortium of companies” that included PayPal, eBay, and Stripe (to name a few), with each investor putting in at least $10 million.

After Libra struggled to find regulators, those companies all pulled out in October 2019. Thiel-backed crypto high-frequency trading platform Tagomi joins the Libra Association in February 2020 (which is notable for how not notable they are next to companies like PayPal). Later that year, Libra announces a scaled down vision and the rebrand to Diem. In January 2022, they liquidated their assets to Silvergate Bank, as the letter from the CEO on their home page makes clear.

(You may think that sounds like a Ponzi scheme, but hold that thought)

Now, that’s an okay bank failure connection: Liquidating $200 million in assets to the crypto bank that imploded. But Silvergate did banking for over 1,600 crypto companies; I’m sure virtually every crypto company I named above banked at Silvergate. It’s not revelatory, even if the $200 million liquidation is sizable.

But let’s do a better one.

While Libra was looking for the right (lack of) regulations, they set up shop in Geneva, Switzerland after other countries said Facebook was trying to establish a shadow bank.  

In the face of public outcry around lack of regulation, they brought in a new Chief Compliance Officer who came directly from his role as Global Head of Financial Crime Compliance at Credit Suisse.

Months later, they brought on new general counsel (that means corporate lawyer) who came directly from her role as Global Head of Regulatory Affairs (and Group Head of Data Protection) at Credit Suisse.

Let’s have a look at Credit Suisse’s stock price over the years (the peak is in 2007):

Do you see those last fifteen years where it just keeps going toward zero? Companies you know aren’t supposed to look like that, certainly not international banks. Texas rare earth mining corporations that bilk a few million dollars before closing shop have stock charts that look like that. Ponzi schemes look like that.  

But money laundering looks like that too.

I’ve mentioned both, but this is worth clarifying: Ponzi schemes and certain types of money laundering fronts can look very similar because they both need to justify the movement of funds out of the company (like Libra’s “it failed because we couldn’t find a good regulatory environment”).

The functional difference is often just whether the investors are in on the scheme or not. If they’re not and you’re stealing their money, that’s a Ponzi scheme. But sometimes they are in on it, and they’re just trying to move that money into something less legal. The money goes where it needs to without the company investing anything into the pretend business. That’s money laundering.

I’ll contend that this one looks like money laundering, mainly due to the numerous connections to all these crypto investors in Libra Association members PayPal, eBay, Stripe and Tagomi, and of course the Facebook investors themselves. They all put their clean money in, Libra gives it to a Swiss bank, and out it goes.

And that chart makes it look like Credit Suisse may have been more of a money laundering institution than a bank in the traditional sense: A “legitimate” bank that you can plug your good clean money into, then Swiss privacy laws hide the movement of those funds elsewhere, which is why the stock has trended toward zero (because the purpose is to move the money out of it, not keep it in there).

To be clear, a strong gust of wind could have killed Credit Suisse when it did, but if it turned out that Zuckerberg intentionally set up Libra in Geneva so he could pipe his business partners’ money into Credit Suisse, funnel it elsewhere via Tagomi’s high-frequency trading, and then close up shop.

That (along with any other crypto-adjacent cash Zuckerberg and associates may have been piping into this dark pool) could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for Credit Suisse once Silvergate went under.

Do I know that that has occurred? No, not even close.

Would it explain all of the above? Better than any explanation we’ve been given.

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Next time on Ponzi Papers: Buzzfeed News, killed with purpose