UNLIMITED HANGOUT

Download PDF

The Praxians—a new breed of tech billionaires—form the core of the Silicon Valley-rooted wing of the global oligarchy. The Praxians are a subset of the network of tech moguls who are embedded within and encircle the Trump administration. The Praxians are distinguished by their close affiliation with the ideas of the Neoreactionary movement (NRx) and by their enthusiasm for building their own private city-states.

Some Praxians, such as Marc Andreessen, openly declare their adherence to NRx principles. Others, such as Mark Zuckerberg, extol NRx ideology through their corporate sloganeering. And still others, such as Peter Thiel, continuously fund specific NRx projects, such as Praxis in Greenland (see Part 1).

Ironically, there are aspects of the technology that the Praxians are encouraging us to adopt for their own ends that we could instead repurpose to finally free ourselves from their hierarchical authoritarianism. We could flip the features of programmable digital currency, such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) or stablecoins, and turn them from the ideal tool for centralised control into the means by which we achieve monetary and economic emancipation. And we could use some facets of the network state—the Praxians’ own technology-based nation-building strategy—to construct new models of sovereign decentralised sociopolitical structures.

In my book, The Technocratic Dark State, I wrote:

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), such as blockchain, could be used to liberate instead of enslave us. Artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to improve our lives, not diminish them. Digital currencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and financial technology (Fintech) could free up investment and lead to an explosion of economic, scientific, technological, and social innovation that benefits humanity, not just the oligarchy. [. . .] We could build homes, towns, and even cities that maximize our individual sovereignty and independence from authoritarian control.

It is a choice. It is our choice. Humanity, not oligarchy, is the dominant force on this planet. But if we don’t get on with building the world we want, and if the oligarchs succeed in imposing the world they want, future generations will face a long and arduous struggle to once again free humanity from slavery.

Praxian Libertopia Is Not Libertarian

There is no need to doubt what the Praxians and their oligarch partners want to construct. The NRx’s oligarch backers, like Peter Thiel, have been transparent—at least in part—about what they are trying to achieve.

Speaking in 2010 at the Libertopia anarcho-capitalist conference, Thiel explained why he co-founded PayPal and why the Thiel Foundation bankrolled the Seasteading Institute:

The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world. [. . .] We could never win an election [. . .], but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people, who are never going to agree with you, through technological means. [. . .] This is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.

This kind of rhetoric resonates well with libertarians, who are opposed to the imposition of centralised authority by governments. When, in 2008, Thiel seed-funded the “startup” called the Seasteading Institute, the media widely reported it as a libertarian project. Such media reports, which paint the Praxians as libertarians or anarcho-capitalists, are commonplace. Framing Praxians as libertarians serves as propaganda to entice genuine libertarians to make a massive error of judgement and get on board with Praxian city-state projects.

As Thiel outlined at Libertopia in 2010, in the Praxian world view, technology enables them to unilaterally change the world without other people’s consent. If, as the libertarians who have fallen for the NRx’s alleged Libertopia believe, the objective were simply to build parallel societies where people could voluntarily co-exist outside of the current political system, where their individual sovereignty would be maximised “through technological means,” then NRx-aligned libertarians would have reason for hope.

But that is not what oligarchs like Thiel, Andreessen, Musk, and Zuckerberg have in mind. Rather, they want to use technology to literally replace human agency with Agentic AI. They want to offer us Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS), which they will program and control unilaterally. And they want to change the “monetary system of the world” for their benefit, not humanity’s.

The Praxians are part of a global oligarch network that has adopted the smart city-neostate model as the best route to stamp its centralised authority on the entire planet and on every individual inhabitant of the planet. Their collective ambitions could not be further removed from the libertarian ideal.

The Praxians are highly deceptive. For example, Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto reads like an attack on the centralisation of authority and global governance structures. Andreessen claims that “statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, [and] central planning” are among the accelerationists’ “enemies.” He attacks the stakeholder capitalists and, by supposedly denouncing “the limits of growth,” also attacks globalist think tanks like the Club of Rome. Andreessen says that the self-styled NRx optimists stand against “Sustainable Development Goals” and other UN initiatives. Again, the attempt to appeal to libertarians is plain.

Yet, the Praxians are trying to construct exactly the world order most desired by the UN. The Praxians call it their “Network Empire,” while the UN calls it “multipolarity.” As we’ll cover shortly, the UN considers “institutional innovation” through a global network of smart city-states essential for it to implement technocratic global governance through the enforcement of SDGs. Contrary to Andreessen’s Praxian propaganda, the Praxians do not oppose UN sustainable global governance; they are working tirelessly to enforce it.

The Network Empire Manifesto

The Praxians’ ultimate goal is to create a web of interconnected smart city-states that are either public-private or completely private and that will form the NRx’s “patchwork of realms.” The United Nations (UN) supports the Praxian idea of a lattice of city-states because it views it as the most effective method of establishing, for the first time, genuine centralised global governance over the world’s population. (We’ll also elaborate on this point shortly.)

The Praxians are eager to accelerate the global governance agenda. They want to go further than stakeholder transnational capitalist oligarchs have gone thus far—by dispensing with the public sector entirely. Either way, whether the smart city project be public-private or purely private sector, the Praxian model of the network city-state—the neostate—has the backing and blessing of their international and “globalist” peers.

The original 2024 version of the Praxian Manifesto—the version reported by Gil Duran at his informative website, The Nerd Reich—has been removed from every Praxis Nation site and has not been archived. All that remains is the 2024 Declaration of Ascent.

Fortunately, Gil Duran preserved some of it, including the following excerpts:

Network States offer a path to crypto’s next wave of adoption by integrating onchain infrastructure into the parallel institutions supplanting the global system’s core functions. [. . .] As local communities dissolve and Nation States stumble, Network States will ascend. Soon, Network States will be your most important group affiliation, passport, and community. Network States will represent Citizens controlling trillions dollars of assets, represented on their native asset registries. We’ll watch the flippening of Network States over Nation States in real time. Network States will coalesce neighborhoods and build cities. The next global superpower will be a Network State. The next America will be onchain.

The notion of the system’s “core functions” references the 1934 publication of the Technocracy Inc. Study Course, where “a governance of function, a Technate” is described. The Praxians’ objective is to supplant the current Westphalian-based global order with a patchwork of network states, otherwise known as a governance of function—aka, a global Technate.

In the 2022 book The Network State, referenced repeatedly in the original, now-removed Praxis Nation Manifesto, author Balaji Srinivasan determined that “all value eventually becomes digital” and that “nothing officially exists unless it’s on-chain, in the blockchain system of record for that society.” The adoption of programmable digital currency by captured populations forms “the backbone” of the neostates. Though all references to The Network State have now been dropped from the Praxis Nation Manifesto, what remains is even more concerning.

In the new Praxis Nation Manifesto there’s a “Declaration by the Founding Citizens of the Praxis Empire” that is littered with quasi-mystical New Age junk. In that declaration, the billionaire Praxians tell us:

We, the founding citizens of Praxis, declare our intent to ascend [. . .] and establish a new form of human civilization: the Network Empire. [. . .] As the warrior-kings once sought the sacred Grail, so too shall we build an empire where true power flows from heroic courage and alignment with the divine order. [. . .] We, the founding citizens of Praxis, hereby pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in pursuit of these noble aims.

Who knew that subjecting humanity to techno-feudalism would be regarded as a “noble aim”?

Original image taken from the Praxis Nation Manifesto. Now removed from the Praxis Nation Website – Source

To what extent the Praxians seriously believe this puerile nonsense is debatable. Their practical application of technology to build the “Network Empire”—namely, using artificial intelligence and surveillance technology—is less debatable. We can now see why Praxians consider AI to be their “Philosopher’s Stone.”

Within their “noble aim” of “Sovereign Intelligence,” the Praxians decree that “AI’s omnipresence in physical production, media, and governance will remake the world in the image of whoever’s moral paradigm it serves.”

Can you guess whose paradigm it serves?

The Praxians boldly outline how their AI-based sovereignty will serve them and their oligarch partners:

Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest power transfer in human history. As AI surpasses human capability, trillions in annual economic value will shift from labor to capital, never to return.

The AI revolution is seen as a mechanism to permanently transfer all power and all sovereignty away from humanity—whose labour is no longer necessary—to those who hold all the capital: the transnational capitalist oligarchs.

The oligarchy knows it is currently more exposed than it would like to be. Its ability to rule without challenge is in notable decline. Its vanguard Establishment does not serve as the protective layer it once did.

If there is a real race, it is not a technological race between nations but a race for sovereignty between humanity and oligarchy. Either we humans assert our equality, our individual sovereignty, or the unseen sovereignty of a ruling oligarchy will be strengthened and reimposed. That is the whole point of the new global governance system we’re about to discuss.

In the section of their Manifesto extolling alleged “Sovereign Intelligence,” the Praxians disclose their key sales pitch to their fellow so-called elites. They explain why the global governance agenda needs to accelerate:

We face a decisive moment — before our power slips away, we must gain control of our civilization’s mind. [. . .]

The $50 trillion in annual costs of production currently flowing to wages will then accrue to the owners of AI infrastructure — the companies controlling models, chips, data centers, robotics, energy, metals, and more. Those who control AI will shape our world through control over three key channels: The production of goods, services and infrastructure, [. . .] [t]he creation and curation of media, [and] [t]he administration of governance. [. . .]

As such, the beliefs and intentions of the people who control AI — the primary source of all goods, beliefs, and governance — will determine the destiny of every society where it is employed.

We should take the Praxians at their word. They are serious about seizing control of everything and constructing a system where a small group holds unprecedented power. Again, from the Praxians’ Manifesto:

AI becomes responsible for cultural production, physical production, and the administration of governance — curating content, growing food, writing laws, negotiating alliances. The small number of people prompting this tool will have power unprecedented in human history.

Writing that “Zuckerberg and Ellison running companies from Hawaii” and that Thiel “securing a passport in New Zealand” are examples of billionaire Praxian oligarchs exiting from “jurisdictions [. . .] they don’t trust,” the Praxians reflect on what they call “Singularity Politics.” The alleged singularity is the purported existential threat that has obsessed the thinkers behind the Dark Enlightenment.

In their reflection on the singularity, the Praxians lay out their Network Empire-building strategy in full:

Digital Nations are polities that form online around shared values, accumulate economic and political capacity, and settle physical territory. As existing nations lose coherence, Digital Nations will fill the void, [. . .] powered by their Sovereign [Artificial] Intelligence. Praxis is the first Digital Nation. We are uniting [. . .] $2T tech net worth in a coalition dedicated to the revitalization of Western Civilization.

We are building a shared way of life, aligned technology, and eventually physical territory. As AI alters the political landscape, we must act before misaligned governments accumulate power they were never built to wield.

The kind of power oligarchs accumulate and exercise is not meant for governments to wield, and, according to them, it never was intended for this purpose. After all, oligarchs are the rarefied few who assume for themselves the divine right of kings. The Praxians’ Network Empire is the methodology they propose to finally secure total global control.

The Praxians’ Secret Enclaves

As previously discussed in this series, Praxians Peter Thiel and Alex Karp sit on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group. Occupying this lofty position proves they have already been invited to join the same global oligarchy that they have attempted to posture against publicly. Thiel also runs a more technology-focused globalist think tank through his off-the-record discussion group for “leaders” called Dialog.

As recently reported by WIRED, a Swiss hacktivist who goes by the name of maia arson crimew claims to have accessed the Dialog website source code, which reveals an attendees list that WIRED journalists say they have seen and confirmed. That the information provided by WIRED is congruent with numerous other reports about the secretive Dialog group makes the WIRED story plausible. The names shown on the list of invitees, such as Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Joe Lonsdale, and Jared Kushner, also lend it credibility.

The reported topics for discussion at Dialog 2026 are not surprising. “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “Build-a-Cult” are precisely the kind of ideas that secretive oligarch-led think tanks often explore. Not surprisingly, all attendees—most notably the selected politicians and government officials—tried to avoid public scrutiny by signing up using only private email addresses. Power is supposed to be wielded unseen.

Writing on Substack, Hans Jonsson explained that Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s co-founder and chairman, has developed technology firms, such as Safegraph and LiveRamp, that specialise in data harvesting, analysis, and surveillance. Jonsson also noted that, via Dialog, Hoffman has had “off-the-record” chats with government insiders, including Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and US Sen. Ted Cruz (TX), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Cruz’s committee oversees the conduct of the Federal Trade Commission, among other matters. The FTC supposedly controls the nation’s antitrust (data privacy) regulations.

Jonsson astutely observed:

The people who build the surveillance systems sit in private rooms with the people who are supposed to regulate and oversee those systems. Off the record. No government email. No public disclosure. Dialog isn’t just a dinner club. It’s where the regulated and the regulator meet without a transcript.

That’s the truth. In reality, so-called elites and state officials, working in partnership, privately collude. They never openly disclose what they are trying to achieve together. This has always been how hierarchical power structures operate. Unfortunately, enabling the technocratic rule of oligarchs is the purpose of the modern system. And, unfortunately, we can see all too clearly how their technocratic rule is evolving.

A New World Economy Under BIS Sovereignty

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank for central banks, has made itself the key institution in the oligarchy’s global monetary and economic remodelling plan.

In The Technocratic Dark State, I observed:

In Working Papers No 1178 [published in April 2024], the BIS described the construction of a decentralized, tokenized, digitized world that will enable the recentralized (unified) surveillance and control of everything. To this blatant swindle the BIS gave the name “the Finternet.”

More recently, in March 2026, the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a globalist think tank closely linked to the Soros-Omidyar oligarch group, published a paper written by a research team led by S. Yash Kalash and titled “How The Bank for International Settlements is Redesigning the World Economy.” (For short, we’ll call it the CIGI paper)

In it, the CIGI accurately defined the BIS’ Finternet (which from now on, in keeping with the CIGI paper, we will refer to in the lowercase as the “finternet”):

[It is] a unified, programmable financial internet, where digital money, tokenized assets, identity credentials and compliance logic operate seamlessly across jurisdictions. [. . .] [I]t is a meta-network of interoperable financial systems. [. . .] In a finternet world, assets and money are no longer separate categories; they coexist on a common ledger framework. [. . .] Trust and compliance in the finternet hinge on verifiable digital identity. [The finternet] embeds [digital] identity as infrastructure. [Programmable] code [. . .] governs how money and assets interact. [Programmable] smart contracts [determine] how financial logic instruments such as interest payments, taxes, compliance checks and even monetary policy triggers can be embedded directly into tokens and payment instructions.

Graphical representation of the BIS’ finternet from the authors of CIGI Papers No. 351, March 2026 – Source

Programmable digital currency (PDCs), linked to the digital identities of everyone and everything—from individual human beings to all businesses, alongside existing and new tokenised asset classes and every device connected to the Internet of Things—is the envisaged “backbone” of this hoped-for global governance system. Once the interoperable system is in place, resolving all transactions on a permissioned unified ledger will give those who have access to the program unprecedented control of the planet’s economy.

The CIGI paper examines the forty-five monetary system redesign projects that the BIS has run through its various international innovations hubs in recent years. Nearly all of these projects explored, to a greater or lesser extent, the practical design and application of interoperability. IBM defines “interoperability” as a technological “standards-based approach to enabling different IT systems to exchange data and share functionality with minimal end user intervention.”

The BIS has published a string of subsequent project reports since 2020.

One example, according to the CIGI paper, was the mBridge project, the results of which were published in 2022. The mBridge project was an experiment conducted by the BIS in league with “the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE” to create “a multi-CBDC [Central Banks Digital Currency] platform.” The idea was to see if “different national currencies can transact instantly and directly.”

Another example, according to CIGI, was the Agora project, the results of which were published in 2024. The Agora project was an experiment in which the BIS collaborated with “seven central banks and 40 private financial institutions” to “test the desirability, feasibility and viability of a multi-currency, unified ledger for wholesale cross-border payments,” using systems like mBridge.

The mBridge project, CIGI observed, tested the feasibility of an International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) that “transforms liquidity geography.”

The current IMFS relies on the “liquidity”—the relative ease of converting assets into capital (cash)—that primarily stems from the trading conducted in the world’s financial centres (the top three being New York, London, and Hong Kong). CIGI noted that mBridge essentially creates a new IMFS where “instead of liquidity pools held in New York or London, settlement can occur anywhere a node of trust exists.”

The BIS intends the “nodes” to be “central bank nodes” on “a unified, programmable financial internet”—the “unified ledger” underpinning the finternet. The CIGI paper points out that a “unified ledger” does not infer the creation of “a single database” but rather “a network of interoperable ledgers linked through standardized APIs [Application Programming Interfaces], digital identity frameworks and verifiable credential systems.”

It is important to appreciate that the CIGI paper was written by a CIGI team led by senior fellow S. Yash Kalash and that they were representing a faction of the global oligarchy. Consequently, when referencing the proposed “unified ledger,” the CIGI paper claimed that there is no implied “centralized authority.” This was directly contradicted within the same paper, however. The CIGI authors also outlined how the BIS’ interoperable finternet system operates as an economic dictatorship:

To understand the emerging digital global order, one must see the BIS not merely as a bank, but rather as the protocol layer of twenty-first-century power — the invisible architect engineering the standards through which the world’s next financial system will operate.

Of course such a system consolidates centralized authority, to an almost unimaginable degree. It is irrational to pretend otherwise.

From the CIGI paper, we can see that, regardless of whatever interoperable wholesale (“reserve”) digital currencies are used, the clearing and settlement of any trade or transaction are set to resolve through the anticipated “nodes.” We can also see that the BIS, which effectively controls the nodes, is building out its global hegemony for a multipolar world. It is assisted in this endeavour by the global public-private partnership (G3P) in which the Praxians are notable partners.

Graphical representation of the Global Public Private Partnership as described in the book “Pseudopandemic: New Normal Technocracy” by Iain Davis – Source

The current IMFS operates as a two-tier system. Transactions conducted everyday by individuals and businesses, usually via commercial bank balance transfers, occur on the “broad” currency layer. Some form of settlement netting eventually enables the commercial banks and financial institutions to settle their aggregate balance of payments between each other, typically using their central bank reserves on the “base” money layer.

In the world of programmable digital currencies (PDCs), broad money transactions are commonly called “retail,” and base money clearing and settlement are called “wholesale.” The BIS would prefer to maintain the two-tier system, where retail PDC transactions clear and settle on the wholesale PDC layer. Instead of being called “two-tier,” however, the two-tier system is referred to as the “hybrid” model of digital currency “ecosystems.”

The Global Blockchain Council, which partners with numerous multinational corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions in hundreds of countries, considered the likely practical adoption of the hybrid model:

In practice, many ecosystems will use a combination of stablecoins, bank money, and potentially CBDCs. Stablecoins [will be used] as the programmable settlement layer for consumer and internet-native payments, [t]okenized deposits or bank-issued stablecoins for regulated payment flows and [. . .] [w]holesale CBDCs to modernize interbank settlement and support tokenized securities settlement with stronger finality guarantees.

Yet the CIGI paper posited:

[P]rivate-sector developments, such as US dollar-backed stablecoin, and public-private hybrids, such as Brazil’s Pix, pose significant challenges and alternatives to BIS led architectures.

The CIGI offers no rationale to explain why the advent of these programmable retail PDCs, such as US stablecoins, would threaten a BIS-led programmable hybrid system hosted on its finternet. Discussing China’s retail and wholesale PDC ecosystem, which operates on a two-tier, or hybrid model, the CIGI stated:

The digital yuan (e-CNY) is already one of the world’s most advanced CBDCs, operating domestically with sophisticated programmability, offline functionality and integration into major retail ecosystems, such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Ever since 2020, the BIS has been preparing its “global stablecoin arrangements.” The BIS is seeking to integrate the privately issued PDCs into the architecture of its finternet by setting the interoperability standards for retail PDCs, such as US stablecoins.

There is doubtless some ongoing horse-trading. Representatives of Tether and Circle, the companies that issue the most widely circulated US stablecoins, didn’t respond well to BIS assertions that their coins resemble securities and are therefore not money. Tether made a public statement calling the BIS “ignorant,” adding that its USDT stablecoin users “don’t buy USDT expecting a return, they use it as a digital dollar.”

But Tether’s insistence that its stablecoins are used as “digital dollars” repudiates Sec. 2(22) of the Trump administration’s stablecoin regulation legislation, called the GENIUS Act, which clearly says that US stablecoins, like USDT, are not a national currency, i.e., supposedly they are not “digital dollars.”

Retail CBDC, like cash, is issued as a direct liability of the central bank. Unlike cash, its programmability enables the central bank to have “absolute control” over where, when and how any CBDC transactions proceeds. Central banks are ostensibly public sector entities, whereas stablecoins and tokenised deposits are said to be different because they are issued by private sector entities: stablecoins by non-banks, like Tether, and tokenised deposits by commercial banks, such as J.P. Morgan.

In truth, though, as demonstrated in The Technocratic Dark State, central banks are private sector financial institutions. Furthermore, stablecoins and deposit tokens are just as programmable, and they give “absolute control” to the non-bank and commercial bank issuers. The real three-way debate between central banks, commercial non-bank institutions, and commercial banks is about who should have “absolute control” of transactions using their PDCs.

Evidently China’s hybrid PDC-based financial ecosystem works perfectly well. This fact must please the BIS, given that the essential purpose of its finternet is to expedite the interoperable exchange between all PDCs. There is no technical reason why the BIS global stablecoin arrangements cannot be seamlessly integrated into the finternet. All that remains is for the various players to reach an agreement.

Interoperable Tokenisation on the Finternet

The CIGI outlined how the proposed new IMFS centralises global monetary power. As the CIGI said, the BIS can determine who or what qualifies as a verified node on its finternet. This may be a central bank, but it could also be a BIS-licensed commercial financial institution or an AI algorithmic agent that the BIS favours.

The BIS defines which interoperable digital identity credential the system requires, or permits, in order for individuals and businesses to transact. Through controlling the financial data standards, both for financial communication protocols and for tokenized assets, the BIS determines the conditions for cross-border trade between jurisdictions.

The tokenisation of assets is racing ahead, as intended. Recently the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of the US financial market infrastructure company, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), announced its plans to begin facilitating the global trade in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) as early as this month (July, 2026). RWAs are digital tokens representing ownership of “tangible physical assets or traditional financial instruments, such as real estate, government bonds, or gold.”

DTC-enabled tokenisation is not replacing the existing financial system with ledger-based decentralised finance (DeFi). In keeping with the BIS agenda to centralise control over a global financial system, DTC-approved tokenisation integrates distributed ledger technology (DLT) financial workflows into the regulated, approved, and compliant permissioned system that largely already exists.

Considering the implication of DTC’s decision, NFT News Today reported:

Tokenization is no longer confined to crypto-native experimentation. The operational challenge now is interoperability — making tokenized assets work across brokers, custodians, exchanges, wallets, compliance systems, and post-trade infrastructure that was built over decades for traditional securities.

The DTC tokenised wallets are designed for institutional investors. Private sector financial giants, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Circle, Citi, and Morgan Stanley, are pushing ahead with tokenisation. BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is already set up to tokenise RWAs, such as US Treasuries. The trading of highly liquid assets is moved “on-chain” by BUIDL, and the recent DTC initiative vastly increases the potential scale of tokenised RWA trading.

Programmability is built into the system. Compliance and distribution can be automated using smart contracts to determine who gets to profit and who doesn’t. Only the financial institutions permitted to access or operate a “node of trust” will be advantaged by the new token-based economy. These won’t be limited just to US financial corporations. Any “entity,” operating anywhere in the world, could be afforded access. Thus, “liquidity pools” move from their geographical centres to the distributed ledger of nodes on the BIS’ finternet.

Farcically, the CIGI paper maintained that the “BIS envisions the finternet as a public good.” Calling this blatant contradiction “the Paradox,” the CIGI insisted that the BIS is trying to provide “democratized access to global finance.” Yet, simultaneously, it conceded that the BIS’ work represents “a centralization of governance power unprecedented in modern finance.”

Tying itself in more illogical knots, the CIGI added that the “same architectures that democratize access to payments also consolidate decision-making authority in the institutions designing the code.”

There is no “Paradox” here. No institution purposefully designs systems that centralise power to such an incredible extent for the “public good.” The centralisation of authority over the proposed digital IMFS is exactly the BIS’ intention. The motive couldn’t be more obvious. Otherwise, why build such a system?

The CIGI report eventually revealed the central propaganda theme that its oligarch benefactors wish to promote. Insisting that geopolitics are fundamentally shaping the BIS finternet proposal, the CIGI argued that there is “a silent contest between competing visions of the digital global economy.” On the one hand, it said, there is “China’s state-centric model of digital sovereignty” and on the other is the US and EU’s “fragmented regulatory approach,” which is allegedly opposed by “the BRICS+ bloc’s search for parallel infrastructures.”

The CIGI contentions make no sense.

For one thing, nearly all the BRICS national governments have participated in the BIS’ finternet project. Take mBridge for example. Despite widespread media reports that the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (CBR) was suspended from the BIS due to Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine, at no point did the BIS remove the CBR from its published list of member central banks. The CBR evidently maintained its BIS voting rights throughout its reported exile.

For another, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) was also a BIS mBridge partner. It worked with the BIS to test the possibility of “different national currencies” being exchanged “instantly and directly.” At the same time that the PBC was involved in mBridge, the PBC was also reportedly working with the CBR on cross-border payments using digital currencies (e.g. their respective CBDCs). Obviously, if this is true, both the PBC and the CBR were equally trialing mBridge.

Now we are told by Western news media outlets that the BRICS nations, including Russia, have used mBridge to “bypass” the SWIFT system and defeat various tariffs and sanctions. According to these news sites, apparently the BRICS nations have conducted “over $55 billion in cross-border transactions” “instantly and directly” via mBridge, using “India’s e-Rupee, China’s digital yuan, Brazil’s Drex, and Russia’s digital ruble.”

What this demonstrates is not that there is “a silent contest between competing visions of the digital global economy,” as the CIGI paper claimed, but rather that there is a shared vision and, in this regard, no contest at all.

A Contradictory and Absurd Hybrid War

In the hybrid war we find ourselves in, deceptive propaganda is trotted out to convince us to believe the contradictory and the absurd. Clearly, the BRICS’ use of mBridge evidences the interoperability of their programmable digital currencies. The DTC announcement expands the interoperability of tokenised assets to be traded using interoperable PDCs across borders.

Yet we have people like Zennon Kapron, a contributor to Forbes, who insists that “interoperability is dead.”

In his May 12, 2026, Forbes piece, titled “After MBridge and Agora, Multilateral CBDC Interoperability Is Dead,” Kapron bizarrely declared that because the BIS handed mBridge over to the project’s partner central banks, which then used it to conduct seamless cross-border transactions using CBDCs, “the era of multilateral CBDC interoperability is over.”

Actually, the BRICS have just used mBridge to show the world that the “era of multilateral CBDC interoperability” has just begun. Yet Kapron ignored the obvious and flipped reality on its head.

The apparent point of the Forbes contributor’s flimflam is to sell the idea that the reported tensions between nations—geopolitics—are what we should heed and that the “contest between competing visions” is real. Contrasting mBridge with Agora, Kapron opined that they were not “parallel CBDC experiments”—even though that is exactly what they were.

Agora tested the feasibility “of a multi-currency, unified ledger for wholesale cross-border payments,” and mBridge was a real-time test of a “a multi-CBDC platform” specifically designed to run what Agora subsequently sought to perfect. They are intrinsically and most assuredly two components of one interoperable finternet.

But by emphasising geopolitics, Kapron framed the Agora and mBridge projects as “competing answers to the same question, sponsored by competing blocs, with no overlapping membership.”

No, they were not “sponsored by competing blocs,” and there was “overlapping membership.” They were sponsored by one global financial institution, and it was the leading “member” of both projects: the BIS.

The idea that global financial institutions like the IMF, the BRICS development banks, or the BIS are constrained by geopolitical considerations is laughable. The BIS’ own constitutional Statutes, established by intergovernmental agreement in 1930, afford it “immunity from jurisdiction.” That means from any jurisdiction.

The BIS doesn’t respond to geopolitics. As a world sovereign, the BIS plays a major role in engineering geopolitics. It is redesigning the global International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) for its own and its partners’ benefit, because empowering itself is the purpose of the global system it leads.

Zennon Kapron is a former global banking executive. He worked out of Shanghai, China, where he was founder and director of his own financial consultancy business, Kapronasia. Prior to that, he was the chief information officer for US-based financial giant Citigroup, a leading partner in the DTC interoperable tokenisation project.

Kapronasia is now an owned subsidiary of Atlas Technologies Singapore. Kapronasia’s consultancy services “help companies understand payments, banking, capital markets and cryptocurrency in China and Asia.”

The fact that Kapron infers that geopolitics between “competing [financial] blocs” determines how investors should strategise their investments in China and Asia and the fact that Kapronasia offers a consultancy service to assist them on that basis indicates that his article possibly reflects a conflict of financial interest.

But more than that, the notion that there are competing blocs is the purported basis for the Multipolar World Order. Specifically, the MWO theory argues that a regional balance of power system is needed for global “stability.” This is what Kapron is apparently promoting.

Most of the estimated “$55 billion in cross-border transactions” conducted by the BRICS using mBridge were ultimately settled using the “digital yuan,” also known as the “digital renminbi” (e-CNY). Furthermore, UAE and Saudi central banks were prominent mBridge development partners. Consequently, Kapron wrote, “mBridge was in practice a renminbi-denominated wholesale settlement rail for trade between China and the Gulf, running outside the dollar correspondent system.”

Because he dismissed interoperability, which has been nearly the sole focus of the BIS for the last decade or more, Kapron had to make the (incorrect) case that Vladimir Putin’s suggested wholesale “BRICS Bridge”—alongside numerous retail currency payment systems, such as “Indonesia’s QRIS, Singapore’s PayNow, and Malaysia’s DuitNow”—is further proof that “interoperability is dead.”

Hardly.

In touting the alleged currency war, Kapron directed readers away from the BIS’ global finternet project and urged them toward the false assumption that the development of digital currencies should be seen in terms of a geopolitical competition between “blocs.” He concluded with this maddening piece of propaganda:

What comes next is a fragmented map of bilateral, bloc-specific, and corporate-built corridors, negotiated one pair of countries at a time. There is no single global rail in it.

He’s got it backwards. The finternet is the “single global rail” running through and interoperably linking (not fragmenting) the “bilateral, bloc-specific, and corporate-built corridors.”

Sadly, by publishing in Forbes, Kapron was informing the chattering middle-class business intelligentsia—or so they thought. Yet, seemingly, his narrative diametrically opposed reality. His readers were, it appears, sorely misled with regard to the new, cohesive global IMFS that is obviously being constructed.

Let’s return to the CIGI May 2026 paper. On the subject of the new IMFS being built, the report concluded:

Collectively, these initiatives aim to create a plural yet interoperable monetary ecosystem — a world where digital currencies of different nations can coexist and interact seamlessly, governed by shared technical and legal standards rather than by the dominance of any single reserve currency. In doing so, they begin to redefine the geography of liquidity, shifting the gravitational centre of global payments from legacy financial hubs to distributed networks of central bank nodes.

Just as in Kapron’s article, so in the CIGI report is there a lot of hybrid propaganda. Nonetheless, the CIGI report’s conclusion, once appropriately filtered, is correct. The BIS and its international coalition of public and private partners are indeed developing a global hybrid IMFS in which PDCs “coexist and interact seamlessly”—an “interoperable monetary ecosystem.” This system will essentially create what current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney once called a “Synthetic Hegemonic Currency” (SHC).

Speaking in August 2019, when he was Governor of the Bank of England, Carney stressed the importance of constructing a SHC for a “multipolar IMFS” to boom. The SHC he conceptualised was not a single dominant reserve currency but rather a digital “basket of currencies” that could collectively be “seen as reliable reserve assets.” The imperative, Carney said, was to make the IMFS “worthy of the diverse, multipolar global economy that is emerging.”

Seven years later, the CIGI paper referenced this new interoperable finternet-based IMFS as the “proposed multipolar digital financial order (MDFO)” and gave the reason the BIS was building it:

Ultimately, the BIS’s innovation ecosystem represents a new form of monetary hegemony, not through currency dominance but through infrastructure governance. By defining the technical foundations of the finternet, the BIS ensures that even in a multipolar world, the core logic of global finance remains interoperable with — and thus anchored to — the Western institutional order.

The new “Western institutional order” is not based on the dominance of the US dollar (USD) reserve currency or of any reserve currency. It is not based on the economic dominance of any geopolitical superpower[s] either. In the context of the envisaged “Western institutional [monetary and financial] order,” these concepts are anathema.

The CIGI explained:

In the coming decade, the geopolitical economy of digital finance will not be determined by who issues the most powerful currency, but by who writes the code of the system through which all currencies interact. The BIS, operating behind the façade of technocratic neutrality, has positioned itself as the potential custodian of that code.

The new IMFS, or Synthetic Hegemonic Currency system, designed to deliver the tokenised “multipolar digital financial order” is a global hybrid system of interoperable PDCs that operate on a global “network of interoperable ledgers linked through standardized APIs”—that is, on the unified ledger of the BIS’ finternet.

Whoever is given “node” access to “write the code” for the standardized APIs will be the “monetary hegemon[s].” They will be given global authority to control economies by forcing compliance with the coding standards and protocols decreed by the BIS. The “Western institutional order” could be comprised of any selected “central bank” or “licensed commercial financial institution” from any country anywhere in the world—or indeed of any corporation or other private sector “entity.”

Prospective hegemons definitely include the Praxians. As the CIGI observed, the APIs could be programmed using “[AI] algorithmic agent[s].”

Introducing the Praxians’ AI Agents

Using AI agents to control the global monetary system, the economy, and all governance systems is not some distant pipe dream. The Praxians are already building new city-states with infrastructure primed for Agentic AI governance.

They are not alone. Governments around the world are also doing the same, and the UN is actively encouraging them. The UN reasons that hard global governance can finally be achieved through a global network of smart city-states. The oligarchs behind the global governance agenda are aligned with the Praxians.

As we wrote in the introduction to this article, the Praxians are positioned within a wider network of oligarchs attached to the Trump administration. The people in the entourage that accompanied Trump on his recent visit to China and in the group appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) are among the representatives of that wider network.

The Praxians’ clear collective priority is digital transformation. Everything they set their sights on is a target for that digital transformation. Their Praxian intention to turn global society into a Technocracy is exemplified by the BIS’ finternet and by the UN’s sustainable development goals. The oligarchs are united.

The various associated experiments and initiatives are globe-wide, not local, national, or regional projects. The oligarch vision is not dependent on putting certain politicians or political parties into office. They don’t care who holds executive power in any nation as long as they can control them.

Based on the list of PCAST members, we can see exactly whose advice appears to be reaching into nearly every sphere of US government policy (refer here to Part 1). They are:

• Marc Andreessen (co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz)
• Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc.)
• Safra Catz (executive vice chair of Oracle)
• Michael Dell (founder and CEO of Dell)
• Jacob DeWitte (founder of Oklo)
• Fred Ehrsam (co-founder of Coinbase and Paradigm)
• Larry Ellison (co-founder, executive chair, chief technology officer of Oracle)
• David Friedberg (unicorn investor and founder of The Production Board)
• Jensen Huang (founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA)
• John M. Martinis (quantum physicist and professor at the University of California)
• Bob Mumgaard (co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems)
• Lisa Su (president and CEO of AMD)
• Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder, CEO, chair of Facebook and parent Meta Platforms)

The most prominent business and technology company executives who accompanied Trump on his recent visit to China were the following:

• Tim Cook (CEO of Apple)
• Jensen Huang (CEO of NVIDIA)
• Larry Fink (CEO and co-founder of BlackRock)
• Stephen Schwarzman (CEO and co-founder of Blackstone)
• Kelly Ortberg (president and CEO of Boeing)
• Brian Sikes (chair and CEO of Cargill)
• Jane Fraser (chair and CEO of Citi)
• Jim Anderson (CEO of Coherent)
• Larry Culp (CEO of GE Aerospace)
• David Solomon (chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs)
• Jacob Thaysen (CEO and interim chief commercial officer of Illumina)
• Michael Miebach (CEO of Mastercard)
• Dina Powell McCormick (president and vice chair of Meta)
• Sanjay Mehrotra (president and CEO of Micron)
• Cristiano Amon (CEO and president of Qualcomm)
• Ryan McInerney (CEO of Visa)
• Elon Musk (CEO of Teslia, SpaceX/xAI)

We needn’t delve too deeply into this network to see where its members have found common cause. We’ve already discussed many of their partnerships in Part 1 and Part 2.

Now Marc Andreessen has been appointed to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s newly reconstituted Defense Policy Board (DPD). Its remit is to provide “independent strategic advice and recommendations” on such matters as US military “strategic planning, the policy implications of [US] force structure and modernization.” Conspicuously, the board will provide independent guidance on “regional defense policies” as a new muscular UN 2.0 multipolar regional balance of power system emerges.

Michael Dell is another notable member of the Praxians’ extended clique. In May 2025, he authorised the publication of his own thoughts on the alleged AI revolution. Explaining how his company, Dell Technologies, provides data centre solutions for Elon Musk’s xAI, among other companies, Michael Dell said:

We are entering the age of ubiquitous [Artificial] intelligence, but it’s not here to replace humans. AI is a collaborator that frees your teams to do what they do best: to innovate, to imagine, and to solve the world’s toughest problems. And Dell infrastructure is the backbone, enabling enterprises to think faster, act smarter and dream bigger.

AI is not “intelligent” at all. In The Technocratic Dark State, for example, I stressed that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or “strong AI”—which could perhaps achieve intelligence if and when significant technological problems are resolved—remains a purely theoretical concept.

Systems engineer Sanath Thilakarathna has said that human intelligence is “characterized by consciousness and self-awareness.” No current AI is capable of, or even close to accomplishing, this cognitive feat.

Instead, so-called Artificial Intelligence uses little more than algorithmic pattern recognition. It can perform complex calculation with amazing speed, enabling it to emulate the appearance of intelligent speech, for example. But current AI is not, by any definition, intelligent.

Considering that Dell was selling his services and products, he understandably had to deny that not only is AI intended to replace humans but that it is already doing so. Presently, in the US alone, 11.7 percent of American jobs are directly threatened by AI, MIT has estimated.

Dell Technologies is leading the development of “edge computing.” In contrast to cloud computing—centralised large-scale data storage—edge computing is a framework that manages the data closer to the source of its generation. Combining cloud with edge computing creates cloud-edge networks capable of managing enormous amounts of data near the source. This is particularly useful for enhancing the data processing capabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as smart vehicles in a smart city.

As Dell Technologies highlights, edge computing is also ideally suited for Agentic AI:

Unlike traditional AI models, [. . .] agentic AI consists of autonomous “agents”—software entities that can perceive their environment, reason about goals, plan actions, and execute them independently or collaboratively. These agents learn from interactions, adapt to changes, and negotiate with other systems and humans to achieve outcomes. The fusion of agentic AI running on edge hardware creates “distributed intelligence,” where smart agents collaborate across devices, forming a self-tuning ecosystem. [. . .] AI agents now work together, learn from local data, and make autonomous decisions.

The possibility that allegedly autonomous Agentic AI could improve industrial, manufacturing, or commercial administrative processes is clear enough. AI agents are not, however, beyond the reach of human control.

AI agents may be capable of a certain degree of autonomy, but only within the confines of their programming and they cannot “reason.” AI agents are programmed, steered, and directed by the people with the digital permissions to do so. Many of them have very specific agendas. Chief among the permissioned people with specific agendas are the Praxians.

Consequently, we should be wary of supposedly autonomous AI agents controlling any system that directly impacts human lives. When running health care and social care systems, financial systems, defence systems, and other highly personal, private, and risky systems, deploying Agentic AI is not simply the application of passive, dispassionate, logical algorithms to improve services and outcomes. On the contrary, it is an agenda-specific method of control exercised by invisible, unchallengeable, and anonymous human beings.

It is through AI agents that these systems can be manipulated for any purpose desired by the oligarchs. The BIS’ finternet-based IMFS is but one example.

Praxian Global Agentic GaaS

Programmable AI agents are ideally suited to enforcing Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS) upon captured populations. Through the enforcement of AI agent-based GaaS, the resultant Agentic State can feasibly dispense with any and all forms of public sector government.

In software engineering, GaaS takes a systematic approach to streamlining workflows. GaaS enables better compliance, risk management, and governance for software-reliant technical processes. It is in this context that the AI analytics platform Secoda describes GaaS:

Governance-as-a-service (GaaS) is a transformative approach that shifts governance responsibilities from internal teams to specialized providers, typically leveraging cloud-based technology. [. . .] In practice, governance-as-a-service integrates governance controls directly into an organization’s digital infrastructure. [. . .]

GaaS provides the automation and seamless integration needed for effective oversight. The core components of GaaS include automated policy enforcement, centralized identity governance, [and] real-time compliance monitoring. [. . .]

These elements ensure governance is consistently applied across the [system]. [. . .] [C]ustomizable AI agents further simplify access and collaboration.

Applied to government decision-making, Agentic GaaS “shifts governance responsibilities from [governments] to specialized [private AI corporations].” Praxian-backed city-state projects, such as Próspera in Honduras, are already implementing GaaS to control the behaviour of their human “customers.”

Lest anyone think that GaaS is simply “hot air,” Próspera Vice President of Growth Lonis Hamaili announced to attendees at an event in London earlier this year, “We’re inventing this new industry we call governance-as-a-service.”

The ordinary libertarian men and women who have been convinced to go along with the Próspera project are not inventing GaaS. Rather, they are participating in a GaaS pilot on behalf of oligarchs. Whether they recognise it or not, they are contributing to the global GaaS experiment that has already begun.

Hamaili appears to understand the global nature of the Agentic State project. Given that his remit is “growth,” he was happy to tell the audience that, once the Próspera project achieves critical population mass and establishes proof of concept:

[W]e can then scale [GaaS] globally and go from 1 to N. We are talking with governments all around the world in Eastern Africa and different parts of Latin America to be able to create these interconnected zones [Special Economic Zones] with a shared jurisdictional layer.

The planet’s first major public-private interconnected Special Economic Zone (SEZ) enterprise, with its own jurisdictional layer, is nearing completion in China with its Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative. (We’ll cover this shortly.) You may wonder why governments would be interested in a governance system that essentially threatens their existence. But, as we have already highlighted in this series, governments are not in charge. They are marionettes whose strings are pulled by the oligarch class.

China’s government is not a tyrannical oddity. Governments the world over are heading toward implementation of the Agentic State. In fact, in terms of the deployment of Agentic AI, countries like Estonia and Ukraine have arguably exceeded China’s progress.

In Part 1, we discussed the October 2025 Times Radio interview that the head of Palantir UK & Europe, Louis Mosley, gave to seasoned UK journalist John Pienaar. During their discussion, Pienaar said he had spoken to “the tech minister for the government of Ukraine,” who had regaled Pienaar with tales of an “extraordinary new app which seems to do the work of [. . .] many government departments.”

Pienaar put it to Mosley, “We’re looking there at the future of the administration of government, of the working of the state everywhere.” Pienaar was correct. Though he wasn’t familiar with the terms, he was essentially asking Mosley, who is familiar with them, what he thought about the Agentic State operating GaaS.

Mosley responded:

You’re referring to the DIIA app. [. . .] It’s a very, very impressive development. [. . .] The Ukrainians have [. . .] created a way to engage with the state and all kinds of services, ranging from ordering a new passport to obtaining a divorce certificate, [which] can now be done online.

Tellingly, Palantir’s Moseley called DIIA “very, very impressive.” As reported previously by Unlimited Hangout, DIIA didn’t just spring out of nowhere. It WAS developed as an international public-private partnership program. DIIA is an “everything app”—precisely the model that Elon Musk is following in his efforts to transform X (formerly Twitter).

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/05/investigative-reports/ukraines-future-lies-in-the-great-reset/

Assuming the Praxians’ Agentic GaaS project continues to expand, the powerless residents unfortunate enough to live in Musk’s Starbase City—which we’ll discuss it in a bit—and other Praxian city-states will inevitably be subjected to the tyranny of Technocracy. Musk has openly stated he wants to establish the components necessary to implement Technocracy.

Among other quests, Musk seeks centralised control of all populations’ access to money. He has long argued that populations everywhere should be totally reliant on the state. And he has persistently advocated for Universal Basic Income (UBI), which, based on his extremely dubious economic theories, he calls Universal High Income. With his proposed X “everything app”—which is imminently incorporating X money—Musk practically declares that his aim is to comprehensively control “your entire financial world.” X money will become a “node” on the BIS’ finternet.

Musk is in the process of seizing control of how we communicate with each other, quite possibly including our access to the internet. His companies have already virtually captured some countries. In 2023, Ukraine’s digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, referenced by Pienaar above, was quoted as saying, “Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now.”

Mappr, the website that collates maps from around the world, recently used Starlink’s own data to make this case:

SpaceX’s Starlink is now the largest commercial satellite-internet network in history. As of 10 May 2026, its official availability data file lists 166 countries and territories. [. . .] The pattern is striking: Starlink covers more of the world’s land area than any consumer ISP [Internet Service Provider] in history.

The increasingly oppressive surveillance of populations and technological control of human behaviour will eventually enable Technocracy to function as intended, Musk and his fellow Praxians believe. Establishing Technocracy is the Praxians’ objective, and constructing a global Technocracy is the purpose of the multipolar global governance system. Enforcing Technocracy is what global governance does.

Technocratic Agentic Global Governance

Perhaps an illustration would be helpful here.

In October 2024, the World Economic Forum (WEF) set up its specialised think tank, called the Global Government Technology Centre Berlin (GGTC), in order to “accelerate government digital transformation.” Through the GGTC, the WEF brings together “governments, technology leaders, and policymakers to drive innovation and facilitate policy development” to the WEF’s specifications. The WEF is a strategic partner of the UN and the corporate founding partner of the WEF’s GGTC initiative is Capgemini.

Capgemini is a French multinational IT firm that is currently partnered with Palantir to run data mining operations and provide targets to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Using what is effectively a US population-wide digital surveillance and targetting system, ICE hunts, and sometimes kills, alleged illegal immigrants who supposedly present some sort of national security threat to America. With the full approval of the Trump administration, Palantir has brought back the systems it developed on “battlefields” in Ukraine and Gaza and is now using them against the US population. Capgemini is assisting.

In October 2025, exactly one year after that GGTC report, the World Bank (a specialised agency of the UN) and the GGTC co-produced a blueprint report titled “Rethinking Government for The Era of Agentic AI.” But their “Rethinking” was based on a slew of false assumptions. For example, the report suggested that AI can “reason,” which it can’t. It also asserted that AI makes public services faster and more responsive to public needs, which it doesn’t.

All of us who have experienced the frustration of dealing with public-facing AI assistants know these claims are gibberish. AI is clearly being used as the administrative layer to separate the public from the alleged public services they are finding increasingly difficult to access and use. Deployed in this way, AI serves as a filtering and control mechanism that restricts and deters public engagement. Of course, it does not have to be deployed in this way. It could be used as a true public good.

The 2025 World Bank-GGTC report described the Agentic State in all its glory. When, for example, it cited the DIIA app, called the “Digital State” in Ukraine, it included the comments of Mykhailo Fedorov—the aforementioned Ukrainian minister of digital transformation—who said:

The Digital State was our first step. The next is an Agentic State. [. . .]

By realising this vision, Ukraine has already launched Diia.AI, the world’s first national digital agent that provides government services. [. . .]

AI should become the foundation of public administration, from automating routine processes to delivering personalised services for every citizen.

The same report continued:

The Agentic State represents a fundamental reimagining of how government operates. It is not just a matter of deploying individual AI agents within existing structures; it means a comprehensive transformation of public administration itself. [. . .]

Agentic AI can go far beyond the automation of existing processes compared to previous technology trends, and therefore enables entirely new forms of public administration. [. . .]

Agentic systems can reason through ambiguity, learn from results, and operate with genuine autonomy. [. . .]

The Agentic State is not a distant or utopian future vision but an immediate strategic imperative. The technologies required are already commercially available and become increasingly proven at scale.

Actually, it doesn’t sound “utopian,” and, unfortunately, it isn’t “distant,” either. And anyway, from where, we might ask, did this supposed “strategic imperative” to subject us all to AI governance suddenly appear?

Well, the answer, it seems, lies in the fact that we have a brand-new problem: a novel discrepancy between “the speed of law and the speed of life.” This mismatch allegedly manifests itself through “compliance requirements that change too late, enforcement that comes only after harm is done.” The solution, the World Bank and the GGTC tell us, is predictive AI that will “enhance strategic decision-making in the public sector.” How strange a solution is that, seeing as how Agentic AI inevitably dispenses with the public sector.

Nation-states each have their own systems of law that reflect policy objectives and that affect citizens through regulatory codes and enforcement. As noted above, just as the Praxians’ Network Empire will see “AI become[ ] responsible for [. . .] writing laws,” so, according to the World Bank and the GGTC, AI agents will enforce those laws this way:

In the Agentic State [. . .] AI agents continuously translate policy goals into adaptive, real-time regulations. [. . .] Before enacting new policies, agents test them across synthetic populations and digital twins of social systems. [. . .]

Instead of ambiguous text that requires interpretation, laws are also encoded as formal, executable logic. [. . .]

Agents continuously monitor how rules perform in practice, tracking compliance rates, citizen outcomes, equity metrics, and systemic impacts. When policies drift from intended effects or conditions change, agents propose adjustments.

With Praxian companies like Palantir and Oracle sucking up every scrap of data across whole continents, creating synthetic “digital twins” of populations should be a breeze. No need to ask us what we think. No need for policy or law. Just pump out the predictive models and automatically regulate accordingly, using programmable Agentic AI.

Given that there’s no apparent need for law, government policy, or any human “loop” in the regulatory process—although the World Bank and the GGTC do talk about the importance of human decision-making—it isn’t immediately clear where human decisions fit anywhere into the Agentic State model. The humans who program the agents are the only humans who make any decisions. The authors keep stressing that the planned AI Agents are autonomous and keep emphasising the importance of “Human-AI collaboration,” but human autonomy is notably absent:

Regulator [AI] agents enforce system-wide targets, such as pollution ceilings, leverage caps, safety baselines, while firm [AI] agents optimise local operations within those boundaries. Because compliance is monitored in real time, the system itself can self-balance: [AI] agents track collective performance continuously, tightening oversight when thresholds are at risk and relaxing it when conditions are safe. The result is stricter enforcement of overall outcomes.

The Agentic State is a model for AI governance based on outcomes, not on our needs or our interests and certainly not on our wishes. The Agentic State delivers Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS) in so-called smart cities. Praxian oligarchs are trialing GaaS in places like Próspera and intend to advance it further through many other projects, such as Praxis (see Part 1)—”the first Digital Nation”—and Musk’s Starbase and, as we shall see in Part 4, Gaza.

Agentic States in the Middle East

The UAE is another government claiming to lead the world in smart city development. The UAE is a federation of seven emirates, with each having a degree of jurisdictional autonomy. Dubai is the showcase for the UAE Smart City Initiatives.

In the midst of the conflict between the Israeli-US partnership and Iran, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is the Emir of Dubai, announced the government’s two-year plan to run fifty percent of UAE government services using Agentic AI. Reportedly, numerous “experts” were delighted.

ServiceNow’s Innovation Officer Jessica Constantinidis was one such expert. She discussed what the new Agentic State would mean for UAE’s people. “The lived experience shifts from dealing with government to government working around you,” she said, adding that this represents a fundamental change in the “relationship between the country and its people, with AI as the connective tissue.” Indeed it does.

In preparation for the move to the UAE Agentic State, ServiceNow agreed to a strategic partnership with Microsoft to provide Agentic State data cloud storage for UAE citizens’ data, harvested using Microsoft’s Azure platform. Microsoft Azure is the same platform that Israeli Unit 8200 evidently used to develop its tracking and targeting of Palestinians, which might give some UAE residents cause for concern.

Under the UAE system, residency renewals, business licensing approvals—and their denials, of course—will be made automatically, alongside “compliance checks, [control of] citizen communication, fraud detection, and [public] service [provision].” All of these system functions, previously the remit of the government, which could be questioned and scrutinised, will be decided by “a network of coordinated AI agents” operating “behind the scenes.”

According to another expert, Sumeet Agrawal, Vice President of Product Management at Informatica, the UAE Agentic State represents an “invisible government.” Like ServiceNow, Informatica has partnered with Microsoft to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud solutions to deliver what Informatica referred to in 2023 as the UAE’s “intelligent data management cloud.”

As a UN partner, Microsoft is also assisting the UN to use “frontier technology” to enforce its global governance Technocracy. This fact might give UAE residents further reservations about their fast-approaching “invisible government.”

Muscular Global Governance

In the 1990s, the UN announced that a “quiet revolution” had occurred. It explained that its global governance reach had now been extended to the private sector and that “the business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”

A few years later, in 2005, the UN’s special agency, the World Health Organization (WHO), picked up on that theme by announcing that “expectations about the role of government” had changed and that governments’ revised role is now to “create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.” The “quiet revolution,” underway for the past quarter-century, has moved the role of governments, which have always represented the so-called public sector (as distinct from the private sector) to a new status as partners with the private sector. The public sector’s revised role is to establish the “enabling environments” to facilitate private sector “innovation.”

Effectively, then, governments have become “enablers” of multinational corporations’ “innovation.” What this often means is that taxpayers are now investing in—i.e., subsidising—corporate efforts to transform public behaviour, often without public knowledge or consent. While the private sector corporations have to comply with national public sector laws and regulations, the whole point of national public sector “enabling environment” is to engineer the required laws and regulations to “enable” private sector “innovation” to be conducted legally.

As previously covered by Unlimited Hangout, the UN is eager to see nation-states develop and roll out digital surveillance technology, which the UN refers to as “frontier technology.” The necessary enabling environments have been established with this goal in mind.

The UN has also gained new insights from the ideas of Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) and others. It now realises that, rather than continue to try to exert control over national—and often nationalist—populations, it will be easier and more effective to enforce global governance through a network of smart city-states.

Although all governments broadly support the oligarchs’ UN-centric global governance agenda, few are as openly enthusiastic about it as the Chinese government. We can at least appreciate China’s candour. When it launched its Global Governance Initiative (GGI) on September 1, 2025, the Chinese government said:

The GGI is another major initiative proposed by China [. . .] on the direction, principles and path for reforming the global governance system and institutions. [. . .]

China will remain firm in safeguarding the international system with the U.N. at its core and the international order underpinned by international law. [. . .]

We will leverage the platforms provided by the U.N. [. . .] to take active actions with all parties and contribute our thoughts and energy to reforming and improving global governance. Priority will be given to [. . .] the reform of the international financial architecture, AI, cyberspace, climate change, trade, and outer space, and to firmly upholding the authority and central role of the U.N. [. . .]

Humanity has become a closely intertwined community with a shared future. Enhancing global governance is the right choice.

Humanity is excluded from any debate about what its “shared future” is supposedly going to be. The ordinary people are utterly irrelevant to the decision-making process. We are just the intended subjects of global governance.

That said, through the UN’s smart city development partners, such as the C40 Cities partnership network, we have an inkling of what oligarchs want our future to be.

In 2019, C40 Cities published a report in which it described how we will be permitted to live. The report says that, in order to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals:

• Meat and dairy consumption will be banned;
• Daily caloric intake will be set at 2,500 kcal or less;
• Allowable plant-based food will come from “sustainable” multinational corporate mega-farms;
• Private vehicle ownership will be outlawed;
• Flights will be restricted to one short-haul return flight per year;
• No more than three new items of clothing can be bought by each person annually.

According to C40 Cities, consumption of everything, from water to energy, from raw materials to manufactured products, will be monitored, restricted, controlled, and allocated as deemed necessary by our appointed dictators—this is the purpose of Technocracy.

We might think C40’s 2019 report is just another example of unhinged SDG extremism, but that would be wishful thinking on our part. The deployment of “frontier technology” as a mechanism for innovative governance in smart cities, and the development by the BIS of the finternet, makes this unbelievable degree of centralised control over the lives of every individual frighteningly feasible.

To this end, the UN is in the process of reinventing itself as it continues to try to establish its global governance dictatorship. It launched its UN 2.0 remodelling project in 2023 and, at the time of this writing, is holding its third annual 2.0 Conference. The UN 2.0 initiative is centred on delivering what the UN calls the “quintet of change”: data, digital, innovation, foresight, and behavioural science.

Unlike you and me, Microsoft, a UN strategic partner corporation, is included in the discussion about “our shared future.” Microsoft is under no illusions about what the UN is trying to achieve. When rhetorically asking if the global “digital transformation [can] become operating muscle rather than a permanent pilot project,” Microsoft, hoping for the former, wrote:

If UN 2.0 succeeds, it changes who has information, who can act quickly, who sets standards, and who gets to decide what counts as evidence.

Centralising control, at the global level, over “who has information, who can act quickly, who sets standards, and who gets to decide what counts as evidence” is the almost incomprehensible authoritarian despotism that is the proposed UN global governance system. C40 Cities was not spouting hyperbole; it was serious.

This is the same global governance system that China’s government wants to safeguard and improve. When the Chinese government says it seeks “reform,” it means it wants to secure and expand its role. As we are about to discuss, if any government is demonstrating, at scale, that digital technology can potentially become “operating muscle,” it is China’s.

To reiterate a previously made point: the Chinese government isn’t alone in advancing the global governance Technocracy. Also on board for instance, is Iran’s Smart Tehran Programme—the Iranian government’s pilot project to test whether it can succeed in subjecting its own population to the same kind of oppression.

And, like China and Iran, the US government is eager to launch Technocracy nationwide. There are many smart city developments underway throughout the US. Hundreds of established and accelerated startup companies are vying for contracts to build US smart cities and install the necessary frontier technology. In addition, there are hundreds of proposed development sites.

If successful, the Praxians’ Network Empire project will supercharge global governance 2.0. Consequently, the Praxians have found willing partners on all continents.

The Praxians’ approach has found favour with other globalist oligarchs, who agree that enforcing global governance through a network of smart city-states will deliver a more efficient and effective global Technocracy. The oligarchy is offering private sector “governance as a service” (GaaS) not because it is committed to libertarianism but because it is committed to instituting a permanent world oligarchy.

The Purpose of the System

State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs)—see Part 2—such as manufactured wars, fake pandemics, and other various engineered crises are useful oligarchic devices once they are combined with the appropriate propaganda. Our perception of these events, currently under siege by hybrid warriors, can be shaped to convince us to accept whatever policies or emergency measures are needed to move us incrementally closer to our technological enslavement. When the propaganda is successful, these stories can become truisms that no one ever questions.

It is through propaganda that misleading notions such as “there is no single global [financial] rail” and “interoperability is dead” and “we are governed by the government” wend their way into the public consciousness and subsequently become established axioms. The hybrid propagandist’s objective is to engineer public opinion and keep the people engaged in the fake system they are given. We can see this system for what it is only if we pay attention.

As reported by analyst, author, and journalist James Corbett, the aphorism that “the purpose of the system is what it does” (a deduction from the work of Stafford Beer) provides us with a far more useful maxim.

Corbett wrote:

The purpose of the system is what it does. And that is an incredibly simple, yet incredibly powerful observation that we can use to help explain what is actually happening in reality and strip it from all of the rhetoric and political platitudes and pieties that surround systems that are presented to us.

For example, irrespective of who is said to be in charge of the US system of government —a functional oligarchy—Elon Musk has consistently benefited from US taxpayer-funded subsidies and the contracts delivered to him by the system. This is not an accident. Transferring wealth from Americans to Elon Musk and his corporations, thereby empowering him to achieve his objectives, is, in part, the “purpose of the system.”

Bar chart produced by the Washington Post showing the total contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits received by Elon Musk’s companies between 2006 ans 2024 – Source

Musk, who invested at least $277 million into putting Trump in the White House, is a “Dark MAGA” accelerationist who wants us to live in a Technocracy. His family is steeped in the tradition of Technocracy.

As part of his Network Empire-building efforts, Musk is founding his own private city called Starbase in Texas. Arch-Praxian and NRx stalwart Balaji Srinivasan greeted the vote of 283 SpaceX employees to incorporate the city of Starbase with tremendous enthusiasm:

Democracy is creating startup cities. Moving to Starbase was voting with feet. Building up Starbase was voting with wallet. And incorporating Starbase was voting with ballot. This is the future of democracy. Not a two-party system with the illusion of choice. Instead, a 1,000-city system with the reality of choice.

The ambition—shared by the NRx, the stakeholder capitalists, Technocrats like Musk, and the dynastic oligarchs alike—is indeed to construct a “1,000-city system” that forms what Curtis Yarvin calls a “patchwork of realms,” otherwise known as the Network Empire.

Based on the concepts outlined in Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment and utilising Technocracy as a tool for comprehensive social control, the Praxians suggest moving rapidly to a solely private sector governance structure. They openly advocate reticulated Agentic smart city-states that will rapidly grow as regional centres of power, strangling public sector nation-states and stripping them of their resources. Musk’s Starbase is part of that Network Empire project.

If the Network Empire materializes, then, for the first time, actual global governance can be achieved through private sector oligarchs’ unrestricted control of the distribution and allocation of all resources—Technocracy. If that happens, populations will be forced to accept private sector governance out of sheer necessity. Public sector “government,” as we understand it today, will rapidly become obsolete. At least, that’s the idea.

Democracy (which is nonexistent) is not creating modern startup cities, despite what Srinivasan says. Transnational capitalist oligarchs are. In order for Musk to grab the land for his nascent Starbase city, he took advantage of the tax breaks he gleaned by registering Starbase in a Texas Enterprise Zone—a US Special Economic Zone. Musk received the necessary approval to buy US territory from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

In our proposed “shared future,” our dictators will be the hegemons of the “multipolar digital financial order.” They will be the Network Empire’s “small number of people” who program the code and control access to the nodes in order to hold “power unprecedented in human history.” They will be the “founders” of the Network Empire’s smart city-states who will enforce the global governance agenda decided in “off-the-record” enclaves such as Dialog.

Obviously, we cannot afford to participate in the system these people are building. Its purpose is human bondage, pure and simple. Enslavement of the masses is their aim. Enslavement of the masses is what their system does.

China’s Smart City Global Governance Megalopolis

For more than two decades, the Chinese government has been focused on building the surveillance technology infrastructure, through public-private partnerships (stakeholder capitalism), that will ultimately enable the centralised control of all resource allocation and thus of its citizens’ behaviour. This is the essence of Technocracy. Unsurprisingly, Praxian Elon Musk is working with the Chinese government, not against it, to assist their joint development of the “frontier technology” that the UN wants to use to enforce its muscular global governance.

Just as the Chinese government’s civil-military fusion is not unique to China, so the imposition of Technocracy is not unique to China. Technocracy is being pursued by many other governments. The UK government, for example, is also imposing Technocracy on the British. The UK establishment, however, has acted hypocritically and has hidden its intentions.

By contrast, the government of China, as previously noted, has been more honest and open about its plans. As early as 2014, the Chinese State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System declared the following:

Accelerating the establishment of a social credit system is an important foundation for comprehensively implementing the scientific viewpoint of development. [. . .]

Accelerating and advancing the establishment of the social credit system is an important precondition for promoting the optimized allocation of resources [. . .]; and an urgent requirement for improving mechanisms for scientific development. [. . .]

Operational mechanisms are the institutional basis for guaranteeing the coordinated operation of all parts of the social credit system.

Scientifically controlling the allocation and distribution of all resources, and therefore controlling citizen’s behaviour, is the purpose of Technocracy. In announcing its Social Credit System, the Chinese government overtly signaled its commitment to Technocracy.

As we discussed in Part 2, much of China’s technological and economic development has occurred due to central government investment in China’s numerous Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and in the similar Free Trade Zones (FTZs) that often reside within the larger SEZs. For example, the Lin-gang Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ) is located within the Shanghai Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

According to the UN, China’s SEZs and accompanying FTZs are not merely hubs for technological and economic development. They are also trialing new governance structures that will spur advancements in Technocracy.

In its 2023 report on the “China’s Pilot Free Trade Zones,” the UN acknowledged:

The core function of [China’s] FTZ is institutional innovation to improve government service, expand integration (notably in the services sector), advance reform and encourage technology R&D for industrial transformation through policy tests and experiments. [. . .]

The Pilot FTZs aim to accelerate industrial upgrading through the shift towards an innovation driven economy. [. . .] This looked similar to the purpose of [. . .] the five Chinese SEZs. [. . .]

For the FTZs, the focus is using more comprehensive and innovative policy measures, [. . .] advancing “integrated industrial innovation”, and “optimizing enabling environment for industrial development” including facilitating freer flow of factors such as capital, technologies, talents, and data through reforms in various policy areas.

Via policy tests and various governance experiments, “institutional innovation” seeks to create the “enabling environment” for public-private partnerships to carry out the digital transformation. An enabling environment is, more specifically, a “business-enabling” environment, created for the private sector by the public sector.

The European Union’s definition of an “enabling environment” is:

The set of policy, institutional, regulatory, infrastructure, and cultural conditions that govern formal and informal business activity. It includes administration and enforcement of government and national and local institutional arrangements that effect the behaviour of relevant actors.

China’s SEZs and FTZs are developing the necessary frontier technology-based governance systems. They are hubs for integrating Technocracy into governance. As China’s government and Chinese corporations are very much part of the global public-private partnership, its institutional innovations are moving us all closer to the UN’s sought-after smart city-state world and the Network Empire.

The UN’s 2023 report continued:

In Qingdao FTZ, digital technologies such as AI and big data have been applied to establish a smart enterprise registration system. It is envisaged that this will drive much more transparent, efficient and convenient government service which is essential for sustained economic growth and integration into the world economy. [. . .]

Lin-Gang is seeking breakthroughs in ICVs [Intelligent Connected Vehicles], service robots, interactive terminals, intelligent wearables and drones to scale up high-end intelligent terminals and to expand demonstration AI application scenarios by focusing on intelligent manufacturing, smart cities, and digital security scenarios.

The UN went on to explain why the Lin-gang FTZ is of particular interest to the oligarchs who are behind blossoming smart city-based global governance structures:

Lin-gang Special Area allows more developers to participate in the transformation of AI technologies that drives the development of key application fields such as intelligent plants, smart transportation and smart cities [. . .] so as to realize the digital transformation of the whole city.

The Lin-gang FTZ is among China’s many technology sector R&D regions that the Chinese government is supporting to advance smart city technology—what the UN terms “frontier technology.” These deregulated regions are exploring the application of AI and how governance systems can integrate with the technology to develop smart systems, including smart cities.

The Chinese government is proud of its status as a world leader in smart city construction. With its Guangdong—Hong Kong—Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) high-speed rail project, the Chinese state is linking its smart city SEZs and FTZs together to form the world’s first genuine megalopolis.

This gargantuan project is the epitome of the large-scale deployment of the very “frontier technology” the UN desires. The GBA centralises state control over the allocation and distribution of resources to approximately 86 million Chinese people. The GBA is the realisation of the regional smart city-based global governance system pursued by the UN.

A Technate is a society under the dictatorship of a Technocracy. China is close to completing the world’s first mega-Technate, and every other functional oligarchy is looking toward China in the hope of emulating it.

Map showing the extent and scale of China’s Greater Bay Area project – Source

In the political context, one could say that “enabling environments” are the formalisation of functional oligarchy. China’s government is leading the way on this kind of oligarch-led governance. Ultimately, the transnational oligarchs, particularly the Praxians, are eager to see not just Chinese peoples’ behaviour but the entire world’s behaviour transformed, for the Praxians’ benefit.

Needless to say, the Technocracy-led transformation of humanity is also central to the UN’s multipolar global governance agenda. Earlier we noted how Microsoft views the UN 2.0 objectives. Microsoft explained that the UN’s new model of global governance seeks to control all information flows. The UN wants to decree who is allowed to act, what acts are permitted and where. It wishes to control the standards by which all systems, products, and services must comply, and it wants to seize for itself the magical authority to decide what counts as evidence and what doesn’t.

For such a system to flourish, the programmable Agentic State, operating across a network of smart city-states and providing Governance-as-a-Service, is the zenith of enabling environments.

Convincingly Broken Government

To summarise: The UN has been working in partnership with the government of China and with other governments on “institutional innovations” to advance its global governance agenda through a network of smart city-states. The UN’s ambitions coalesce with the Praxian dream of Network Empire.

The BIS provides the monetary layer to assist the UN and the Praxians to realize their goals. Its proposed finternet stands ready to stiffen the “backbone” of the entire new Multipolar World Order. In other words, an international nexus of extremely powerful forces has been formed to implement their shared global agenda.

As we’ll discuss in Part 4, Zionism appears to be controlling the policy decisions of the US government and Zionists are seemingly marshalling the most powerful military and the most powerful economy on earth. True, Zionism is incredibly influential, especially on US foreign policy. But deeper structural forces are using Zionism as a front to absorb public attention and to conceal a far more pragmatic and much less ideological global transformation.

What we’re looking at is the merging of: (1) the oligarchs behind the UN, (2) the oligarchy’s Praxian wing, (3) the Bank for International Settlements, (4) aligned international think tanks, (5) the global corporate network (represented by the WEF, the SPIEF, the ASEAN Private Markets Council (APMC), and so on), and (6) governments everywhere.

All of these entities desperately want the world to accept a new polity based upon Agentic GaaS smart cities. In short, they covet a Network Empire within a Multipolar World Order (MWO).

To implement their plan, though, they need to convince the planet-wide population to adopt the necessary “frontier technology” and eventually choose to live—or at least acquiesce to living—in Agentic GaaS city-state realms. Somehow, they have to persuade us that we’ll benefit by going along with their agenda. Bottom line: They must prove to us that representative democracies are dysfunctional and that Technocracy is the only viable system, the only solution to our woes, the only “order” that can come from chaos.

Ravi Agrawal is a frequent contributor to such globalist gatherings as the WEF’s annual Davos soirée and the Munich Security Council conference. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy (FP). The magazine is closely linked to the West’s Deep State think tank network. It’s therefore fair to say that Agrawal is a mouthpiece for the Anglo-American Establishment.

In a leading editorial for a 2022 issue of FP, Agrawal wrote:

By the early 1990s, it was difficult to imagine an appealing or feasible alternative [to representative democracy]. But with the turn of the millennium, global sentiment was shifting. As China’s growth accelerated and Western democracies struggled to enact economic reforms, a line of thinking began to emerge that democracies weren’t well-equipped to tackle the world’s toughest problems. [. . .] The world is a difficult place in 2022. But there is value in hunting for solutions to our challenges—however outlandish they may seem at first.

Other articles in the media have been echoing Agrawal’s contention in recent years. They’ve claimed that our perceived system of government is broken and that we can’t trust it any more. In particular, they have persistently alleged that the Trump administration is undermining democracy and have accompanied this assertion with numerous reports concluding that broken representative democratic governments need to adapt to new global realities. This Western propaganda, replete with China-maxxing, gives readers the impression that the West’s system of government needs to be updated lest it succumb to what it alleges to be never ending global crises.

One of the Praxian’s gurus, Nick Land—the author of The Dark Enlightenment and, according to Mark Andreessen, a “patron saint” of Techno-Optimism—currently lives in Shanghai.

In 2017, The Guardian’s Andy Becket wrote a seminal piece on the topics Land had focused on in his his Dark Enlightenment treatise. In his article, Becket noted that when Land arrived in China in 2004 he was deeply impressed by what he subsequently branded “neo-China.” As Becket tells it, Land thought the rapid economic and technological development underway in China was “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known.” In fact, when Land developed the theory that would become the Dark Enlightenment, he already considered China to be an accelerationist society, according to Becket.

Last year Land gave an interview to The Spectator. When he was asked his thoughts on the Trump administration, he responded:

The entire American political system grows out of a Whiggish, English, liberal tradition – law, custom, distance, decentralization. It’s a system designed for power that’s invisible, distributed and procedural.

What Land was referring to was the NRx’s analysis of the social and cultural structural mechanisms through which modern sociopolitical power operates. He and his fellow neoreactionaries call this power structure “the Cathedral.”

Rather than oppose this ideological Cathedral, however, the NRx solution is to convert it into “fungible shares” that can then be bought by anyone with enough cash to own a slice of tyranny. The Praxians have come to believe their own technology companies, including AI firms, can create an Agentic AI Network Empire and thus capture the Cathedral entirely.

It is important to remember that, for the Praxians and for the wider NRx, “dictatorship is good.” Or, as Land is quoted as saying in The Spectator’s 2025 interview, “The best emperor is invisible to society.” With this in mind, Land highlights an important feature of the Trump administration from the perspective of the NRx—and the Praxians:

What’s new with Trump is theatricality, the sovereign as show. But the background operating system, the bureaucracy, the law, the media – all of that stays in place. The show is a symptom of the hollowness of the center. He’s the noise that reveals the emptiness. So in a way he both rejects and confirms the invisible model: he makes the invisible visible by performing the void.

That the invisible “background operating system” stays in place is good news for the NRx, because that’s the part of the power structure they seek to control. What is called representative democracy is the “hollowness of the center”—a hollowness that, in Land’s view, Trump exemplifies.

Trump’s noise “reveals the emptiness” and exposes the “void” that is representative democracy. Even this emptiness is useful to Land, because it shows that the “operating system” is all that truly matters. As Land said: Trump “makes the invisible visible.” Trump’s antics, as unhinged as they seem to be, are perfect as far as the NRx is concerned.

You’ve seen the Praxians described throughout this series as the oligarch faction that currently has the most direct power and influence over the US government—”Praxians in control” (See Part 1). They are bending the Trump administration to their will. Marc Andreessen explained that Praxians support Trump to ensure he is “more favourable” to them and their interests.

One of the Praxians’ objectives is to demonstrate to citizens of the West that representative democracy is broken and needs to be fixed. Their Network Empire solution lies in readiness to “save” us from the inevitable collapse. A Trump administration that appears to be clueless, inept, dangerous, and theatrical to the point of absurdity is very much in the Praxians’ interests.

The Noise that Reveals the Emptiness

Among the many bewildering and nonsensical moves it has made, the Trump administration’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury and start a conflict with Iran was perhaps one of its worst. There was neither a plausible geopolitical necessity nor an identifiable economic rationale for it. Trump and his team couldn’t even manage to publicly agree which arguments to make in defence of their apparent decision to go to war. The world looked on aghast.

On February 28, 2026, Trump said that “major combat operations in Iran” were underway. The stated aim was to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

When Trump pointedly blamed Iran for attacking US interests in the Middle East, he was referring to “Iran’s proxy Hamas that launched the monstrous October 7th attacks on Israel.”

He also accused Iran of being the “world’s number one state sponsor of terror” and added that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”

Then he said that the June 2025 US “Operation Midnight Hammer” had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.”

Next he said Iran posed a nuclear missile threat to Europe.

So, in February 2026, Trump argued that the US needed to “totally . . . obliterate” the Iranian regime’s military and nuclear capability “again” having already “obliterated” the same a few months earlier.

The first time he vowed to do that very thing was in March 2025, shortly before the US launched “Operation Midnight Hammer.” That was when Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, presented the US intelligence community’s (IC’s) official assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Gabbard testified as follows:

The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. We continue to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.

In the days leading up to the 2026 attack on Iran, the leading global news agency, Reuters was one of many Western news outlets to report that the Iranian threat assessment had not changed. Trump’s own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had previously hedged his words, saying that Iran was “on a pathway to one day being able to develop” ICBMs.

The February strikes on Iran occurred while negotiations between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program were ongoing. Future talks were scheduled for Vienna and Washington. If Iran’s nuclear program was the issue, there was clearly no reason to choose the military option at that point.

On March 4, 2026, US congressman Seth Magazina posted a selfie video on Musk’s X platform reporting on a White House intelligence briefing he had just attended. He said the US Secretary of State (Marco Rubio), the Secretary of Defence (Secretary of War Pete Hegseth), and the CIA Director (John Ratcliffe) were among the officials who told the gathered representatives that the US IC still had “no intelligence that Iran was planning to attack the United States.” Magazina added that the Trump administration said it “does not have a plan for what is going to happen to Iran after the war is over.”

Possibly this explains why, shortly after Operation Epic Fury began, Secretary of State Rubio gave a completely different justification for attacking Iran. Rubio claimed the US launched its assault because that was precisely what the Israeli government was going to do anyway. According to Rubio, Israel’s “Operation Roar of the Lion” initiated Trump’s “Epic Fury.”

As reported by Reuters, Rubio said:

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action; we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they [Israel] launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

However, Secretary of War Hegseth gave a different reason. He said Operation Epic Fury was not prompted by Israeli intentions but was, instead, “laser focused” on destroying Iran’s conventional missile and drone manufacturing facilities.

In Part 1, we highlighted that the Praxians’ haphazard digital kill chain, which US forces relied upon, contributed significantly to the murder of Iranian schoolchildren, among many other potential war crimes. Operation Epic Fury was no laughing matter. Nevertheless, the farcical incoherence demonstrated by the Trump administration in the weeks following the launch of the operation was comical.

If we look at the timeline, reported by PBS, of official statements about the anticipated duration of the assault, the impression of a completely clueless US government is hard to avoid.

Initially, former TV personality and serial bankrupt businessman Donald Trump said the operation would last “four to five weeks.” Shortly afterwards, former TV and social media personality Pete Hegseth said “we haven’t stated how long it will take.” A few days after that, Trump echoed Hegseth’s remark, though he insisted it was “his own idea”—which he later claimed came from a feeling in his bones. Mere speculation—which he and Hegseth were chiefly responsible for stoking—did “no good,” Trump insisted. And, with regard to duration, he added, “It’ll be as long as necessary.”

“Necessary” to do what? That seemed to be a reasonable question to ask. For, up to that point, the US government had been unable to clearly specify what the objectives were. And yet its answers were about to get even more confusing.

Declaring tentative victory on March 9, Trump said, “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” Trump didn’t even seem to know whether the government of the nation he supposedly leads was at war or not.

On March 11, Trump was asked if the conflict was a military excursion or a war. He replied “Well, it’s both. It’s both. It’s an excursion that will keep us out of a war.”

Repeatedly claiming the operation was “ahead of our time projections,” while simultaneously saying they had no idea how long the operation would last, Trump finally declared some sort of victory on March 15: “We’ve essentially defeated Iran.”

Throughout the remainder of March, Trump, Hegseth, and other US government officials kept saying how decisively the war, the excursion, or whatever it was, had been won and how the operation had been a “tremendous success.”

On April 1, 2026, Trump totally contradicted all of that celebratory grandstanding with these words:

We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.

On April 5, having already won but not won, Trump took his statesmanship to new heights. He turned to his own social media platform, where he habitually issues threats of war and, supposedly addressing the Iranian government, in reference the Strait of Hormuz, wrote:

Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.

Trump followed up this profanity-laced demand, on April 7, by threatening to exterminate the “whole [Iranian] civilisation,” then again declared “[t]otal and complete victory.”

Remember, Trump announced “his” victory on March 15. A month later, on April 16, Trump observed that the “war in Iran is going along swimmingly [and] it should be ending pretty soon. It was perfect. I mean, it’s perfect.”

By June 20, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz was closed again by the repeatedly defeated and frequently obliterated Iranian government and its forces. The conflict has flared up again as both the US and Iran squabble over control of the Strait of Hormuz. Observably, Trump has been and is detached from reality.

In Part 2, we talked about how, from a military perspective, the idea that the US could possibly conduct Operation Epic Fury in the way it allegedly did is highly doubtful. Added to this, the idea that an erratic, blustering, ill-informed, narcissistic buffoon like Trump actually serves as a functioning “Commander in Chief” of US Armed Forces is both hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. It is a small mercy, perhaps, but when US commanders have to plan a real military operation, they appear to at least have the good sense to eject Trump from their meetings.

In any conflict, war propaganda emanating from combatant governments is normal, but the Trump administration’s consistently incomprehensible rambling wasn’t remotely effective war propaganda. Not only was the propaganda narrative incoherent, the wild claims made were widely known and reported to be completely false.

Prices of everything soared everywhere. People died for no immediately discernible reason. Though, sadly, there were many reasons.

Capitalising on Trump’s Folly

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will, with any luck, eventually bring the conflict with Iran to an end, was signed on June 17, 2026. By early July 2026, US hostilities with Iran spiked again. The restart of hostilities coincided with Trump’s appearance at a NATO summit in Turkey. Trump took the opportunity to complain about other NATO member governments less than enthusiastic endorsement of his Epic Fury fiasco.

Trump also used the NATO summit to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies. He threatened that a further withdrawal of US troops from Europe would leave them vulnerable to alleged Russia aggression. Once again, Trump’s apparent US isolationism provides further narrative justification for a regional balance of power structure in a Multipolar World Order.

Obviously representing the Praxians at the NATO summit, Trump again demanded that the US should be allowed to annex Greenland. Whether he knew it or not, he was effectively promoting the Praxis Nation and the Network Empire.

The Israeli government is not a signatory to the Islamabad MOU. Instead, the governments of Israel and Lebanon have signed a separate US-brokered 14-point framework agreement to potentially resolve Israel’s spurious claim on Lebanese territory. The Islamabad MOU explicitly sets Lebanon as a “front” in the alleged US/Israeli “war” with Iran. Like the US and Iranian governments, the Israeli government also continues to subvert both the framework agreement and the Islamabad MOU with its ongoing and extremely violent occupation of Lebanon.

Chatham House—the Royal Institute of International Affairs—arguably remains the world’s most influential policy think tank. Marc Weller, director of the Chatham House Global Governance and Security Centre, said of the Islamabad MOU:

The 14-point document accommodates virtually the full catalogue of Iranian demands. [. . .] The US is losing its key pressure points, whether economic or military. And Iran’s nuclear obligations are yet to be determined. Other war aims, like stopping Iranian support for proxy forces, do not feature in the instrument. [The US] expressly undertakes to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Iran as required by international law. [. . . .] To extricate itself from its war, the US has been forced back into reliance on international cooperation and the institutions of the international system. And it is being forced to accept, at least nominally, the principles of the international order it had cast aside.

The “international order” of which Weller speaks is the UN 2.0 Multipolar World Order (MWO) built around the Network Empire. It appears that Trump’s military folly has paved the way for the Praxians their extended oligarch partnership to fulfil their ambitions. The Praxians have long sought a US war with Iran, and now (as we’ll cover in detail in Part 4) it is evident why. The deaths of innocents along the way was just more collateral damage in the Praxians’ digital kill chain.

Trump remains prone to threatening Iran, claiming that Iran will “no longer exist” and so on. His many previous utterances on the same theme have already proven to be nothing more than empty rhetoric. The US military actions that result, however, are still lethal for innocent men, women and children.

Despite the war having been “won” by the US many times, and the Iranian government comprehensively defeated on numerous occasions, the fog of war has never been foggier.

On July 6, 2026, the Iranian government possibly breached the current ceasefire agreement by attacking three vessels exiting the Strait of Hormuz that were reportedly not using the Iranian government’s permitted “transit corridor.” The Iranian government has not denied attacking the tankers but, frankly, that doesn’t mean it did.

After the “unknown projectiles” allegedly struck the Qatar and Saudi Arabian registered tankers, the allegations that Iran was responsible came from the government of Qatar. Reuters reported:

Iran’s foreign ministry said Qatar’s accusations were perplexing and that Tehran was diligently fulfilling its commitments but asserted that commercial vessels faced ‌risks for using routes not coordinated with Iran.

The US retaliated by launching further attacks on Iran and the Iranian government responded to this attack by striking targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain are all member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). As we’ll discuss in Part 4, they may have there own reasons for wanting the destruction to continue for a while.

Having started the Epic Fury violence, and engaging in his usual lunatic-fringe style of diplomacy, Trump called the Iranians “vicious, violent people” and labelled them “scum.” He told the press that the Islamabad Memorandum, supposedly underpinning the ceasefire agreement, was over and then indicated that talks would continue.

Journalist and associate editor of The Hill, Niall Stanage, observed that the on-off conflict in the Strait of Hormuz “sent oil prices spiraling, leading to sharp increases in prices at gas pumps across America.” Stanage added:

Prices dropped sharply once the MOU was set and tensions appeared to ease. But the new strikes and Trump’s more bellicose rhetoric caused significant turbulence on energy markets on Wednesday. The price of benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude oil had risen more than 6 percent as of 5 p.m. EDT.

Trump’s “bellicose rhetoric” serves as a market signal. The continuation of the threat of all out war, punctuated by occasional kinetic flare-ups, potentially suits all sides.

The Trump administration threatened to revoke its MOU-dependent license agreement to allow Iranian oil exports, thereby strengthening US government claims that it, not the Iranian government, is in charge in the region. The Iranian used the attacks to again highlight the “Zionist aggression on [Lebanon]” and reassert their claim to be able to make “adjustments to the Strait [of Hormuz].”

The purported tanker attacks enabled the weapons manufacturers, the oil giants and other energy companies, the banks and the financial institutions to continue to make record profits from the war.

But more than this, as stressed by Chatham House fellow Nitya Labh—former UN, CEIP, and DARPA—the ongoing intermittent “war” serves to demonstrate the apparent pressing need for better global governance. She wrote:

According to the International Energy Agency, the blockade has created an oil and gas crisis more severe than those of 1973, 1979 and 2022 combined. The battle to control the strait has led to a slowdown in global economic growth, widespread fuel shortages and deepened humanitarian crises around the world. In Sudan alone, shipping disruption has cut off medical supplies to an estimated 20,000 people.

Global instability, economic turmoil, disrupted supply chains and deaths were always the inevitable and seemingly unavoidable consequences of Trump’s Epic Fury, of Netanyahu’s Roar of the Lion and of the Iranian response, Operation Fateh Khyber. The world is coming to terms with a newly manufactured “geopolitical” reality as described by Chatham House:

Disruption to the critical waterway over the past few months has put a spotlight on maritime chokepoints and the vulnerability of international supply chains. It has also shown how the global economy – often imagined as fluid and borderless – is dependent on a few, narrow shipping channels.

Chatham House emphasises that the world is grappling “with the fallout of Hormuz” but adds that “other chokepoints could pose even greater risks.” The worlds supply of semiconductors could be strangled, threatening technological development such as AI. The World’s food supply of grains and soy could be cut off, oil and energy flows could be further disrupted, the battle against international terrorism stymied, and vital international trade corridors severed.

According to Chatham House, military misadventures emphasise the problem. “Major powers selectively interpret or ignore [international] legal obligations.” Global “enforcement mechanisms remain weak or non-existent [and the] global consensus around these mechanisms” is prone to fracture. Mere “crisis prevention” is not enough when “the legal and institutional frameworks, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, are no longer keeping pace with geopolitical realities.”

Therefore, the answer is obvious, is it not?

As Labh’s think tank colleague Marc Weller said, the US government, indeed everyone, now needs to accept “the principles of the international order.” The current Westphalian model is unacceptable and dangerous for the whole planet. Better multipolar global governance is required and we must find solutions, such as new transnational trade corridors that circumvent the “chokepoints.” The re-imagination of global governance through UN 2.0 must succeed.

This is precisely what the Praxians and their oligarch partners want.

In Part 4, we will look at the evidence revealing how construction of the Network Empire in the Middle East is destroying global geopolitical hegemony and eroding nation-states. We will show that the Praxians have been involved in every decision and every step along the path to regional deterritorialization—and that they have a explicit plan for the reterritorialization to follow. The Praxians have positioned themselves as “warrior king” saviours prepared to become the private sector hegemons of the new Network Empire they are planning in the aftermath of the destruction they are accelerating.

The Praxian Genocidal Kill Chain — Part 3.

Download PDF

Shayne Coplan, now the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire, is the public face of what purports to be the world’s largest crypto-powered prediction market – Polymarket. Coplan and his alleged arch-rival, Tarek Mansour of the competing prediction market platform Kalshi, recently buried the hatchet to create a new venture capital firm called 5c(c) Capital, a reference to the section of the Commodity Exchange Act which is currently used to regulate prediction markets. The fund is aimed at bulking up the infrastructure for what has rapidly become an insurgent digital industry.

Since the early days of Donald Trump’s 2nd term, prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have largely been told to police themselves. This comes courtesy of the current head of the (CFTC), Michael Selig, who was previously a lawyer representing major cryptocurrency industry clients. Selig became the CFTC chair only after the Trump administration rescinded the nomination of Brain Quintenz, who then sat on Kalshi’s board and worked for the crypto venture team at Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz has notably backed Coplan’s new prediction market VC firm 5c(c) Capital and is also heavily invested in Kalshi.

During the past couple of years, Polymarket and Kalshi have become important components of reporting on global finance and politics. This is partially due to their extensive cultivation of wide-ranging media partnerships. For instance, in the case of Polymarket, the company now boast partnerships with the Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, as well as Yahoo! Finance, Substack and the live-streaming platform Parti. While these partnerships have been framed as an effort to further legitimize prediction markets, concerns have been raised that these media partnerships could be used to intentionally manipulate these very markets via the implantation of false and misleading stories.

Concerns like these have dogged these new prediction markets just as their star has risen. Insider trading allegations, including from the platforms themselves, have shown how prediction markets can be abused by traders with insider access to market movers and policy makers. Now with Congress trying to get involved, both Polymarket and Kalshi have announced new efforts to work to improve “market integrity” without the need for government intervention. However, the effects of their efforts remain to be seen, as several of the new measures are based on traders self-reporting their conflicts of interests.

Concerns about widespread insider trading have only been exacerbated by both the White House’s open dismissal of those concerns as well as the Trump family’s close ties to both Polymarket and Kalshi. For instance, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is both a strategic advisor to Kalshi and also advises Polymarket. Trump Jr. is also a major investor in Polymarket via his venture capital firm 1789 Capital. The evidence of insider trading on these platforms, particularly in cases where it is directly related to Trump’s “most consequential decisions,” is now widely acknowledged by mainstream media.

While the ascendance, and arguably the normalization, of insider trading are being treated as unintended “flukes” of these markets, there is an argument to be made that they are operating just as intended. Some of the evidence for that argument can be found in what appears to be Polymarket’s true origins.

Despite being nominally founded in 2020, Coplan –– in founding his company –– was admittedly following the model of the Big Tech billionaires he had admired as a teen, particularly those who created their flagship companies by rebranding and privatizing controversial military programs from the George W. Bush era for maximum profit and, seemingly, to advance even darker ambitions.

Previous reports from Unlimited Hangout have explored how Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook gave new life to the Pentagon’s LifeLog program the day it was shut down and how Peter Thiel’s Palantir was created as a privatized version of the Pentagon’s surveillance dragnet program Total Information Awareness. In this two-part series, we now examine how Shayne Coplan appears to have rebranded and privatized yet another failed Pentagon program from that same era.

By following in the footsteps of his admitted idol, Zuckerberg, and backed by funding from Thiel-linked sources, Coplan has managed to resurrect the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), one of the most controversial Pentagon programs from its now defunct Information Awareness Office (IAO). Tellingly, his efforts to launch Polymarket included direct communication with one of the main architects of the PAM program and he was also greatly influenced by another apparent Thiel-linked effort to resurrect PAM that failed.

Importantly, Coplan’s apparent re-brand of PAM –– often referred to in the past as the “Terrorism Futures Market” ––is about more than just reaping mega-profits in an era where insider trading and financial corruption are flourishing with the White House’s blessing. As will be explored in Part II of this series, an ulterior motive directly linked to Coplan’s efforts aims to advance an extremely dystopian governance model that is of great interest to the Big Tech billionaires now closely linked to Coplan and the dominant prediction market companies, such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

A Brief History of American Prediction Markets

The story of prediction markets began in the late 1980s, when a handful of professors teaching at the University of Iowa created what they initially called the Iowa Political Stock Market. As part of their market experiment, university staff and students were recruited to trade contracts on the 1988 U.S. presidential election between George H.W. Bush and his Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis. It quickly became a popular phenomenon in the finance and accounting departments of the University of Iowa, and later expanded far beyond its halls. Under the name of the Iowa Electronics Market or IEM, it soon became open to anyone who wanted to open an account, so long as they completed a one-page application and sent the market operators a check in the mail. By the time the next presidential election took place in 1992, the IEM had received an exemption from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), allowing it to operate without regulation so long as it was run for “solely academic and experimental purposes,” did not use outside advertising, and individual traders were prohibited from investing more than $500.

The premise of the experiment that later became the IEM was that, while voters have no incentive to be honest with pollsters, they would respond to information differently if their own money was on the line. “There is a strong incentive for players in these political markets to process information about the candidates and their conclusions are revealed to us through the markets’ prices,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Steven Feinstein, then an assistant professor of finance at Boston University’s School of Management, as saying. The Wall Street Journal, writing on the IEM in 1995, also noted that one of the ways in which the IEM was particularly useful was because “shareholders can react quickly to developments.” The article also quotes Sheryl Ball, formerly an assistant professor of economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as saying “by watching the political stock market it is possible to gauge the effect of an ad, a policy announcement or an alleged affair on the part of a candidate almost instantaneously.” The idea of using prediction markets as an important indicator of how the public will react to a given piece of information would later serve as a foundational concept for “futarchy” – to be discussed in detail in Part II – which proposes using prediction markets as a new system of public governance.

The University of Iowa professors credited with creating the IEM pictured in 2004. From left to right: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe – Source

After the popularity of the IEM, another iteration of the prediction market was launched in 1994 by Mark James, Sean Morgan and Robin Hanson. Robin Hanson was a researcher into Artificial Intelligence, Bayesian statistics and other topics for military contractor Lockheed as well as NASA in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and is also credited with creating the concept of “idea futures” after being inspired by IEM’s success. Per Hanson, “idea futures” would see the harnessing of market principles to “predict a wide range of political, social and technological outcomes.” Hanson has also claimed to have led the development of the first internal, corporate prediction market in 1990 for Xanadu Inc.

Despite what he lists on his CV, it appears that Hanson did a significant amount of his work for NASA, not as a direct employee, but rather as a contractor via the private company Sterling Software. Hanson does not publicly list his past employment with Sterling on his CV, but his publications from this period reveal his status as a Sterling employee while it contracted for NASA.

Sterling Software was largely run by Dallas-based billionaires Sam Wyly and his brother Charles. The Wyly brothers were closely associated with the political fortunes of George W. Bush, counting among his largest political donors from his gubernatorial campaigns and into his presidential runs. The Wylys obtained the NASA contracts, on which Hanson worked, through Sterling’s controversial acquisition of Informatics General Corporation in 1985. Sterling’s de facto hostile takeover of Informatics was made possible by the criminal bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was closely tied to the Savings and Loans crisis of that era and criminal activities tied to both intelligence agencies and the Bush family. Notably, during the Drexel-backed efforts of the Wylys to seize control of Informatics, Charles Hurwitz, the mob-adjacent corporate raider with significant ties to the most notorious actors of the Savings and Loans crisis, took a 13.3% stake in the company to facilitate Sterling Software’s takeover. While Hanson was merely employed by Sterling a few years after the Informatics takeover, it is worth noting that he would later help the Pentagon design what is arguably the most controversial prediction market of all time during George W. Bush’s presidency and would also later greatly influence Elon Musk, the brother of Sam Wyly’s son-in-law Kimbal Musk. The Musk-Hanson relationship is discussed in Part II of this series.

After leaving (for a time) government contract work, Hanson created the Foresight Exchange in 1994. Foresight has been described as “the world’s first web-based betting market,” but managed to evade U.S. regulatory scrutiny by using play money (called “credibills”) that could be exchanged for prizes. Hanson’s co-founders of Foresight Exchange, Mark James and Sean Morgan, were employees of the Canadian government-funded Alberta Research Council (now known as Alberta Innovates). James and Morgan became interested in Hanson’s 1992 paper that outlined the concept of “idea futures” and decided to make Hanson’s ideas a reality. Hanson had written that paper as a visiting researcher for the Foresight Institute, which was founded in 1986 to promote the development of nanotechnology, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and longevity research. These interests would bring the Foresight Institute close to the “philanthropic” interests of tech billionaire Peter Thiel by the early 2000s and the institute has since been credited with spurring Thiel’s early interest in investing in AI companies.

While the IEM was focused largely on electoral campaigns, Hanson’s Foresight Exchange was seemingly the first iteration of the modern prediction market, whereby the outcome of any query could be bet upon. For instance, archives of Foresight’s old website show that it dealt with, not only US and UK politics, but also Religion and “New Age” phenomena; Scientific queries dealing with Medicine, Space, Physics, and the future of Computing; and issues dealing with Arts and Entertainment, such as Television and Movies.

A 1990s era billboard advertising the Hollywood Stock Exchange – Source

Movies were, incidentally, the focus of the world’s next prediction market, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). Founded in 1996, HSX was described by the New York Times as a “virtual stock market of fake stocks and fake money with such a fanatic following that players are offering hundreds of real dollars to buy a make-believe portfolio.” It was created by two men who were, at that point, best known as veterans of Wall Street but have since become better known for other pursuits. For instance, HSX co-founder Max Keiser went on to become best known for his early, and often eccentric, evangelism of Bitcoin, while the other co-founder, Michael Burns, is now best known for his top role at Lionsgate Films.

In 2001, the HSX, along with its critically important patents, was acquired by Cantor Fitzgerald, the American financial services firm long helmed by the current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick and Cantor had planned to do away with HSX’s “play money” and lead the push to turn speculation on movie performance into “real money” via commodity futures contracts. In other words, they sought to pioneer a “film futures” market.

Paul G. Anderson explained the concept of Cantor’s proposed film futures market as follows:

Unlike the various physical commodities that trade on futures exchanges, such as corn, oil, and wheat, the relevant commodity in a film futures contract is an intangible financial instrument–DBOR–whose final value is tied directly to the domestic box office revenue from ticket sales of the underlying motion picture. Thus, any film futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell DBORs at the agreed-upon price, regardless of its market value at the time that cash settlement is due. In this respect, film futures are akin to futures contracts for stock indexes, United States treasury bonds (“T-bonds”), and other ‘nontraditional’ commodities that are commonplace on most futures exchanges.

Cantor’s initial push for the film futures market was closely related to the efforts of the Republican-led Congress to pass the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2001, a law which facilitated –– among other things –– the “exotic trading instruments” that later played a significant role in the 2008 economic crisis. Roughly four months after acquiring HSX, Cantor Fitzgerald’s main location in New York City was obliterated during the 9/11 attacks, with Lutnick being among the small handful of survivors who happened to be out of office when the towers were struck. As a result of the massive loss of employees and company assets, Lutnick’s efforts to merge “play money” prediction markets with futures trading were delayed until roughly 2007, when he and Cantor began to revive their prior efforts to pursue film futures.

Lutnick hired Rich Jaycobs, a derivatives specialist, and together they mounted a Congressional charm offensive. By 2010, they had managed to get approval from the CFTC. However, due to Congressional opposition related to the 2008 economic crisis and also from the Motion Picture Association of America, their efforts were for naught. The negative mood, both in Congress and beyond, saw a clause added to the Dodd-Frank Act (a.k.a Wall Street Reform Act) that saw the domestic trading of film futures explicitly banned. While his efforts to legalize “real money” prediction markets alongside Howard Lutnick may have failed, Rich Jaycobs has since become the Head of Market Expansion for Shayne Coplan’s Polymarket.

DARPA Discovers Prediction Markets

Robin Hanson, the inventor of Idea Futures who had helped create the Foresight Exchange, got his biggest break to expand on his ideas and develop a new prediction market just a few months before Cantor Fitzgerald acquired the Hollywood Stock Exchange with the hopes of building an unconventional futures market. That break came courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense (now the Department of War) and its sub-agency, DARPA.

Sometime in the year 2000, Michael Foster, a DARPA program manager working on quantum computer research backed by the National Science Foundation, learned of Hanson’s efforts as well as those of the IEM. Foster then “convinced colleagues at DARPA that their agency should fund research into prediction markets that could potentially be used to guide public policy decision-making.” This was notably years before Hanson “independently” developed his ideas of “futarchy,” which posits using prediction markets as a system of public governance. These ideas and their relevance today are discussed in Part II of this investigation.

DARPA was also interested in prediction markets for other reasons, as some of the agency’s managers also “believed a prediction market could serve as an aggregation mechanism capable of bypassing bureaucratic and political obstacles to information sharing” among U.S. national security agencies. This “belief” is directly related to efforts of those same national security agencies immediately after the 9/11 attacks to blame the “siloeing of information” within agencies for the supposed “failure of imagination” that allowed the attacks to occur despite the ostensible efforts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. This is, of course, despite the copious evidence pointing to the direct involvement of intelligence agencies in the 9/11 attacks and in the efforts to stifle any meaningful investigation into those attacks. Nevertheless, the intelligence community’s own narrative, backed by intelligence-linked contractors like Oracle’s Larry Ellison, was that extensive information sharing between federal agencies and their main contractors was necessary to prevent another 9/11-style attack from occurring.

These narratives set the stage for the deployment of intelligence-linked software programs that were promoted as solving these problems, first of Christine Maxwell’s Chiliad (Christine is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister) and followed by Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Then-CIA Chief Information Officer Alan Wade was closely connected to the origins of both Chiliad and Palantir. He had also been a close working partner of the DARPA office that would later host the surveillance program Total Information Awareness (TIA), a Palantir predecessor, as well as the DARPA-backed prediction market Hanson would help create.

In May 2001, DARPA issued a request for proposals, one of which was called “Electronic Market-Based Decision Support.” According to an archived version of the proposal, the request sought applicants that could “design one or more markets to predict events in a limited domain of interest to the DoD” and then subsequently manage that market. Contracts related to this project were awarded to two companies, one of which was Neoteric Technologies and Net Exchange. Neoteric was a military contractor specializing in information technology and artificial intelligence, which subcontracted a company called Martek to handle this specific proposal. Martek was a private company composed largely of the architects of the IEM. Net Exchange was a company that focused on combinatorial markets, i.e. markets in which bundles of items are bought and sold, and, in applying for DARPA funding, sought to create a combinatorial prediction market. Hanson, then teaching at George Mason University, as well as another George Mason professor, David Porter, were recruited to work for Net Exchange’s program, which would later become known as the “Policy Analysis Market,” or PAM. Hanson served as the system architect for PAM. Also consulted on this project was the team of Tradesports.com/InTrade –– an Ireland-based prediction market funded by Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller and Rupert Murdoch. Its then-chief executive John Delaney, who later died while scaling Mount Everest in 2011, told the UK’s Evening Standard that it had additionally offered DARPA and PAM its “data, service and assistance.”

A year later, in 2002, Michael Foster’s DARPA program “Futures Markets Applied to Prediction” (FutureMAP), which had included the Hanson-affiliated PAM, was placed within a newly created office at DARPA called the Information Awareness Office (IAO). The office had been created at the behest of John Poindexter, known simultaneously for being the highest-ranking Reagan administration official convicted in relation to the Iran-Contra scandal and also for being the “godfather” of modern surveillance. Poindexter was subsequently hired as a DARPA executive and put in charge of the new office he had lobbied for, IAO. IAO’s flagship program, Total Information Awareness (TIA) –– an unprecedented surveillance dragnet that sought to develop predictive applications for national security and law enforcement similar to “pre-crime” –– was also Poindexter’s brainchild. The IAO also housed various projects aside from TIA, such as Foster’s FutureMAP program, of which Hanson’s PAM was part.

Just like TIA, the goal of PAM and FutureMAP at large was “avoiding surprise and predicting future events.” Whereas TIA sought to predict terrorist and criminal activity before it could occur through mass surveillance of Americans’ daily activities, PAM focused on using “market-based techniques” for similar ends. However, in the case of PAM, its efforts to predict events included, but went far beyond terrorist activity. PAM also sought to focus on global and regional political stability, predicting the timing and impact of emerging technologies, predicting the outcomes of advanced technology and “other future events of interest to the DoD.” Hanson has noted that other areas of interests had also included “growth rates or oil prices.”

TIA and PAM, along with the vast majority of the programs housed within the IAO, were intended to interface. Put differently, PAM and other IAO programs were created with the intention of being directly connected to TIA and to each other in order to improve the accuracy of predictions. This is even reflected in the logos of PAM and TIA. The IAO/TIA logo, which has since become infamous, shows a one-eyed pyramid surveilling the entire Earth, flanked by the phrase “science is power” in Latin. The PAM logo places the pyramid within the letter A and that pyramid, like the TIA pyramid, is also surveilling the Earth, while also shooting out a beam from its opposite side that touches a market graph.

PAM involved not only Hanson and the DARPA contractor that employed him, NetExchange, but also intimately involved The Economist magazine’s Economists Intelligence Unit (EIU). Though most know The Economist for its media publications, the EIU offers its services to businesses and governments and provides them with forecasting and advisory services. They offer, among other services, reports on the economic, political and business environments in 205 countries to help their clients “understand how the world is changing and how that creates opportunities to be seized and risks to be managed.”

According to the now archived PAM website: “The Economist Intelligence Unit is working with Net Exchange to collect and process the data on which the securities in PAM are based, and then to assess the value of the securities when they mature.”

Coincidentally, around the time that the EIU was becoming involved with DARPA and PAM, Lynn Forester de Rothschild and her husband Evelyn de Rothschild –– who boasted close ties to figures like Henry Kissinger, Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons –– sought a significant 26.9% stake in The Economist parent company, which was finalized in 2003.

Reportedly due to the high cost of the EIU’s services per country, the designers of PAM decided to focus on eight Middle Eastern nations for their prediction market experiment: Turkey, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Egypt. The intention was to have select participants engage in trading activities every 3 months for a 2 year test period to determine the prices for five different parameters for each nation. These parameters included: “U.S. financial involvement in each, U.S. military activity in each, that nation’s economic growth, level of political instability, and its own military’s activities.” Traders were also expected to predict values for common economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product as well as “security indicators” such as casualties resulting from terror attacks in the West and casualties of the U.S. military. The chosen traders could also trade futures on future events that might occur within any of the eight Middle Eastern nations.

Hanson expanded on this in an article he later wrote about PAM and its efforts, stating:

[T]raders would be allowed to predict millions of combinations of the parameters, such has how moving U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia would affect political stability there, how that would affect stability in neighboring nations, and how all that might change oil prices. Similar trades could, for example, have predicted the local and global consequences of invading Iraq, had the markets been ready then.

Initially, the goal was to have the select traders who would use PAM be employees of U.S. federal intelligence agencies. However, this became complicated by the legal barriers around “conditional transfers of funds” between federal agencies. Instead of having employees of different intelligence agencies compete, PAM then sought to recruit its traders from a single intelligence agency. However, no agency reportedly showed enough interest. As a result, they decided to open the market to select members of the public, which they were only able to do because, as agents of the DoD, they were technically exempt from anti-gambling laws.

The architects of PAM had intended to launch test operations in September 2003, with a full launch planned for January 2004. However, that timeline was interrupted when PAM became the target of significant Congressional and media criticism in July 2003, which saw PAM become publicly branded as the “Terrorism Futures Market.” The backlash against the “Terrorism Futures Market,” i.e. PAM, was arguably intensified by earlier scrutiny of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program that, like PAM, was housed under the Poindexter-run Information Awareness Office (IAO) at DARPA.

On July 28, 2003, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) held a joint press conference where they criticized DARPA for “spending millions of dollars on some kind of fantasy league terror game,” which they argued was “absurd and, frankly, ought to make every American angry.” Those sympathetic to PAM’s ambitions later pointed out that Wyden and Dorgan had held their press conference when DARPA’s public relations manager was “out of the office and unreachable, thus depriving that agency of a chance to offer a timely and informed response to the senators’ allegations.” A day later, the New York Times described PAM as “an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.” Following the Times’ lead, a litany of negative articles quickly appeared in the nation’s press shortly thereafter and, on July 29, 2003, the Pentagon announced that it would “abandon” its plans to make PAM a reality. Public and Congressional concern over both PAM as well as TIA resulted in Congress cutting the funding for the IAO office entirely via legislation that was signed into law in September 2003.

Hanson has since expressed his views on the events that led to the shuttering of PAM and seems to regard the efforts of Wyden and Dorgan as somewhere between misguided and outright dishonest. In addition, in a 2021 interview with Richard Hanania, Hanson also expressed his view that PAM had largely failed because, two years after 9/11, people were no longer afraid enough. He stated the following about what he described as his “betting market publicity fiasco in 2003” (i.e. the shuttering of PAM):

This was soon after 9/11 and just two years later. People looked at the betting markets and said, “Oh, you’re betting on death. That’s terrible. You have to shut them down.” If they were really scared of terror attacks, if they were actually feeling a large degree of threat they would have said, “To heck with this rule against betting on death. Let’s turn on these markets. Let’s find out where the attacks are going to be so we can stop them.

Privatizing the Information Awareness Office

While it seemed that the IAO and its controversial projects had been offed by a responsive Congress, it would emerge just a few years later that TIA was never actually shut down despite being defunded by Congress. Not only were various aspects of TIA and other IAO projects “covertly divided” among U.S. military and intelligence agencies, but the core surveillance software that TIA had planned to wield began to be developed by the private company now known as Palantir, with considerable help coming from John Poindexter himself as well as the CIA’s Chief Information Officer at the time, Alan Wade. Wade had notably been one of Poindexter’s main allies and collaborators on TIA prior to its “defunding” by Congress.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/12/investigative-series/palantirs-tiberius-race-and-the-public-health-panopticon/

In 2020, Unlimited Hangout detailed the numerous parallels between TIA and Palantir and noted the following:

At the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was immediately controversial, leading it to change its name in May 2003 to Terrorism Information Awareness in an apparent attempt to sound less like an all-encompassing domestic surveillance system and more like a tool specifically aimed at “terrorists.” The TIA program was shuttered by the end of 2003.

The same month as the TIA name change and with a growing backlash against the program, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Thiel, however, had begun creating the software behind Palantir months in advance, though he claims he can’t recall exactly when. Thiel, Karp, and other Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the company had been founded in 2004, despite the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel directly contradicting this claim.

Also in 2003, apparently soon after Thiel formally created Palantir, arch neocon Richard Perle called Poindexter, saying that he wanted to introduce the architect of TIA to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. According to a report in New York Magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”

In addition to the above parallels, there is also the added fact that Palantir’s supposedly novel “selective revelation” functionality, an alleged privacy safeguard, as well as Palantir’s “immutable log” concept are not novel at all and were clearly borrowed from TIA. It is also of note that Palantir’s software stemmed from an anti-fraud algorithm called Igor, created by Thiel and Max Levchin at the company they co-founded, PayPal. In a controversial conversation with Charlie Rose in 2013, Levchin explained that “when we were working on security and anti-fraud measures at PayPal [i.e. what would become the basis for Palantir], we collaborated with every imaginable three and four-letter agency and those were some of the best, most productive relationships I’ve had as a business person.” [emphasis added]

While Poindexter’s own role in the privatization of TIA into what is now Palantir was recently noted, the CIA and its Chief Information Officer Alan Wade were also intimately involved in privatizing TIA. As Unlimited Hangout also reported:

Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006.

The money was certainly useful. In addition, Alex Karp recently told the New York Times that “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.” A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade.

The CIA would continue to be intimately involved with Palantir well past this point. In fact, they became connected to such an extent that it is perfectly reasonable to argue that they are, for all intents and purposes, a CIA front company. For instance, following the In-Q-Tel investment in Palantir shortly after it was incorporated in 2003, the CIA was Palantir’s sole client until 2008 and, as Alex Karp had stated, CIA analysts were always the company’s “intended clients.” One of Palantir’s top two engineers at the time, Aki Jain, recalled making hundreds of trips to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009 where the CIA tested and “tweaked” Palantir’s products. Palantir has since gone on to become a contractor to all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and, of course, much more.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/

At the same time that Peter Thiel was devising the privatization of TIA with his fellow Palantir co-founders, John Poindexter and Alan Wade, he was also suspiciously present in the apparent privatization of yet another DARPA project called LifeLog. LifeLog, at DARPA, was overseen by Poindexter’s close friend Douglas Gage, though it was not housed under the formerly Poindexter-run IAO office as TIA and PAM had been. LifeLog aimed to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”

As Unlimited Hangout noted in 2021:

The information that LifeLog gleaned from an individual’s every interaction with technology would be combined with information obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the person saw and said, as well as biomedical monitors that gauged the person’s health. […]

Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog,“have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.” 

At the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA were not connected, despite their obvious parallels, and that LifeLog would not be used for “clandestine surveillance.” However, DARPA’s own documentation on LifeLog noted that the project “will be able . . . to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task,” which acknowledged its potential use as a tool of mass surveillance.

The cloud of scandal that had enshrouded TIA and PAM soon came for LifeLog. For instance, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists told Wired at the time that “LifeLog has the potential to become something like ‘TIA cubed.’”

Unlimited Hangout’s reporting on the topic continued as follows:

The firestorm of criticism of LifeLog took its program manager, Doug Gage, by surprise, and Gage has continued to assert that the program’s critics “completely mischaracterized” the goals and ambitions of the project. Despite Gage’s protests and those of LifeLog’s would-be researchers and other supporters, the project was publicly nixed on February 4, 2004. DARPA never provided an explanation for its quiet move to shutter LifeLog, with a spokesperson stating only that it was related to “a change in priorities” for the agency. On DARPA director Tony Tether’s decision to kill LifeLog, Gage later told VICE, “I think he had been burnt so badly with TIA that he didn’t want to deal with any further controversy with LifeLog. The death of LifeLog was collateral damage tied to the death of TIA.”

Fortuitously for those supporting the goals and ambitions of LifeLog, a company that turned out to be its private-sector analogue was born on the same day that LifeLog’s cancellation was announced. On February 4, 2004, what is now the world’s largest social network, Facebook, launched its website and quickly rose to the top of the social media roost, leaving other social media companies of the era in the dust. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main reason why Facebook was able to so quickly rise to “the top of the social media roost” was thanks to the early involvement of Peter Thiel and his close associates in the company. As noted recently, Thiel had been working to privatize TIA as Palantir with his co-founders as well as John Poindexter, Doug Gage’s close personal friend, the very same year he became involved with Facebook.

Unlimited Hangout’s previous reporting on Facebook’s origins revealed that Thiel, as well as Facebook’s first president –– Thiel associate Sean Parker, were critical to Facebook’s commercial success. Facebook’s success, in turn, has also proven critical to the success of Palantir:

A few months into Facebook’s launch, in June 2004, Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Sean Parker onto Facebook’s executive team. Parker, previously known for cofounding Napster, later connected Facebook with its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. As discussed, Thiel, at that time, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect controversial DARPA programs that had been dismantled the previous year. Notably, Sean Parker, who became Facebook’s first president, also had a history with the CIA, which recruited him at the age of sixteen soon after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. Thanks to Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added to its board. Parker maintained close ties to Facebook as well as to Thiel, with Parker being hired as a managing partner of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006.

Thiel and Facebook cofounder Moskovitz became involved outside of the social network long after Facebook’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founders Fund becoming a significant investor in Moskovitz’s company Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook cofounders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for a handful of US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community. In the case of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Palantir was also involved in utilizing Facebook data to benefit the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign. 

Facebook has also proven extremely beneficial to another Thiel and national security state-linked company, the facial recognition firm Clearview AI, whose facial recognition database was largely compiled by scrapping images off of the social media platform.

Given Thiel’s intimate involvement in resurrecting controversial DARPA surveillance programs from the early 2000s, i.e. TIA and LifeLog, it is important to note that Thiel and his network were also intimately involved in the creation and success of two later efforts to resurrect the Policy Analysis Market –– the prediction market platform Augur and, more recently, the prediction market company Polymarket.

Enter Shayne Coplan

Shayne Coplan, the eventual founder of Polymarket, was raised in New York City, the only child of two South African college professors. He was raised, however, solely by his mother, with Shayne later describing his father as a “mad scientist” who studied panic disorders. Growing up middle class, Coplan developed a “major itch” at a young age to make money, which reportedly drove his early interest in file-sharing websites as well as, later, the nascent cryptocurrency industry.

As he developed this “itch” to aggressively pursue wealth, Coplan simultaneously developed an obsession with the background and early rise of early 2000s tech entrepreneurs who went on to be billionaires, specifically Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Coplan was smart, yet unmotivated and felt like he didn’t stand out enough to compete alongside his peers by conventional means. He would later tell New York Magazine: “I think having a background that was so uncredentialed, it was very clear to me I was a goner if I was gonna go the path everyone else was going and just try and compete there.” Coplan ultimately determined that he would have to emulate his role models much more closely if he truly wanted to follow their example and reap the rewards.

This mindset soon pushed a 16-year-old Coplan to pursue an internship at “what was then one of the city’s hottest startups,” Genius –– a lyric and web-annotation company originally known as Rap Genius. Coplan had repeatedly attempted to contact Genius’ co-founders, who ignored his emails. This led him to travel straight to Genius’ offices where he successfully pitched himself to the people actually running the company. Christopher Glazek, then-executive editor of Genius, later wrote that: “Within minutes [of meeting him,] I learned that Shayne possessed near-encyclopedic knowledge of major tech entrepreneurs, and he eagerly volunteered to add annotations to the Wikipedia pages of Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook] and Travis Kalanick [Uber].”

During the course of his Genius internship, Coplan became “the site’s top expert on the Facebook founder.” Notably, Genius was a 2011 Y Combinator company. That same year saw Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel become intimately involved with the startup incubator. Milner was an important early investor and advisor to Facebook. Conway’s significant connections to the people behind Facebook are discussed later in this article. 2011 was also the year that Sam Altman, widely recognized as a Peter Thiel protégé, became a partner at Y Combinator. Altman would later take over the leadership of the incubator in 2014.

In 2014, Shayne Coplan discovered Ethereum and participated in its initial coin offering (ICO) that same year. He subsequently developed “a financial incentive to support Ethereum’s progress.”A since-deleted biography of Coplan states that Coplan moved to San Francisco some time in 2016 to intern at Chronicled, which Coplan described as “one of the first venture-funded Ethereum startups.” There, he says, he was “immersed amongst a team of blockchain-obsessed tinkerers, and it was there where his eyes were opened to the vast possibilities of decentralized applications.” According to past press releases, one of Chronicled’s goals as a company included “creating a world in which physical and digital experiences are fully synchronized by offering a turnkey solution to securely register any asset identity, from art to automobiles to drones to secure shipping containers and pharmaceuticals, to the blockchain.”

Shayne Coplan’s now deleted biography from his time as TokenUnion’s CEO – Source

One of Chronciled’s main investors at the time was Pantera Capital, whose co-Chief Investment Officer was Joey Krug around the time that Coplan interned at Chronciled. Krug, a Thiel Fellow who had co-founded the Ethereum-based prediction market Augur, would subsequently join Thiel’s Founders Fund. There, he would become a crucial early investor in Polymarket. Krug, Augur and their significance to this story are explored later in this article.

Armed with glowing recommendations from his former superiors at both Genius and Chronicled, Coplan was admitted to NYU to study computer science and began attending in 2016. However, he quickly became bored and disillusioned. He eventually dropped out halfway through his second semester to “pursue blockchain projects full time.”

Shortly thereafter, in 2017, Coplan subsequently created a company called TokenUnion, which offered rewards for holding either Ethereum or ERC20 tokens. It initially framed itself as “the world’s first Etherum-based savings account.” TokenUnion was originally founded as TokenBnk and one of its former employees, Yash Patel, has claimed that this company was the direct predecessor of Polymarket. Notably, one of the domains used by TokenBnk/TokenUnion –– tokenunion.io –– now redirects to union.market, another Coplan domain. The shift in TokenUnion domains over the years –– from tokenbnk.com to tokenunion.io to union.market and finally to poly.market and polymarket.com –– seems to suggest that Patel was right. Lending further support to this theory is the fact that all of those domains now redirect to Polymarket.

A screenshot of Yash Patel’s LinkedIn, which describes TokenBnk as the predecessor to Polymarket – Source

Oddly, any discussion of TokenUnion is absent from essentially every media profile of Coplan that has been written since Polymarket achieved breakout success a few years ago. All of those media profiles paint Coplan’s success as derivative of pure luck and assure the reader that Polymarket began in 2020 with no real predecessor. In one of those recent media profiles, Coplan asserted he had picked the union.market because of a New York eatery he enjoyed at the time. Though he acknowledges union.market was focused on yield-bearing digital assets, neither he nor the article make any mention of his company TokenUnion. This is despite that the relationship, documented above, between the tokenunion.io and union.market domains. One must wonder why TokenUnion has seemingly been ripped out of the narrative, not just by the mainstream media stenographers chronicling Coplan’s and Polymarket’s rise, but also by Coplan himself.

One of the reasons that TokenUnion has seemingly been erased from current narratives about both Coplan and Polymarket may lie in the TokenUnion’s close partnership and integration with Bancor. Bancor was created by Guy and Galia Benartzi, the nephew and niece of long-time and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Galia Benartzi, immediately prior to creating Bancor, had been a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, where she helped lead the firm’s investments in Israel. One of the main tokens showcased in TokenUnion’s promotional material is Bancor’s BNT token and Bancor is listed among its small list of official partners. TokenUnion’s whitepaper also touted its “integration” with Bancor as one of its platform’s main advantages.

Bancor advisor Lou Kerner was also a TokenUnion advisor, alongside Jim Haft, with whom Kerner created CryptoOracle. CryptoOracle was founded in 2017 and, at the time its founders advised Coplan’s TokenUnion, it focused on supporting “early-stage blockchain firms.” This strongly suggests that CryptoOracle had backed Coplan’s company, which later claimed to have “raised millions in a private presale” from undisclosed sources. Like Bancor, CryptoOracle is also listed as a TokenUnion partner.

Kerner has major connections to the Israeli tech start-up scene, which even former Mossad directors have noted is stuffed with Israeli intelligence veterans and which –– per official Israeli policy –– is full of Israeli intelligence fronts posing as private companies in order to execute projects that were previously performed “in-house” by the Israeli intelligence apparatus. Kerner, who boasts close ties to AIPAC, previously led the Israel Founders Syndicate and is a current advisor of the Israeli Blockchain Association. Kerner is also partnered in an Israeli tech incubator alongside Glilot Capital. Glilot Capital was created by two Israeli military intelligence veterans who invest specifically in “entrepreneurs who emerge from the elite Unit 8200” signals intelligence unit, often likened to Israel’s equivalent of the NSA.

Kerner is notably also a renowned expert on Facebook, not unlike Coplan himself, and claims to have once been offered a quarter of Facebook’s shares by an unknown (but clearly major) Facebook shareholder. He has since declined to specify the extent of his Facebook holdings. Kerner has claimed to have unsuccessfully pitched Mark Zuckerberg to sell him a significant stake in Facebook while Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard. This suggests that another very early investor or figure at Facebook aside from Zuckerberg (e.g. Sean Parker, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, etc.) had tipped Kerner off to the social media company very early on. Since then, Kerner has also become an investor in Palantir, the privatized TIA that is chaired and was co-founded by Peter Thiel. Kerner previously worked at Bill Gross’ Idealab, the first institutional investor in the Thiel-founded company PayPal. In addition to Kerner, CryptoOracle’s other co-founder Jim Haft as well as another CryptoOracle employee, Jim Dix, are also listed as TokenUnion advisors. Dix is notably listed as a former SEC prosecutor and was previously a vice president at Deutsche Bank.

Notably, Kerner is not the only Bancor advisor who was also an advisor to Coplan’s TokenUnion. Steve Nerayoff, considered the legal architect of Ethereum’s 2014 ICO, was simultaneously an advisor to Bancor and to TokenUnion. An archived version of TokenUnion’s website refers to Nerayoff as the “co-creator” of Ethereum.

A screenshot showing the Advisors to Coplan’s TokenUnion in 2018 – Source

Prior to Ethereum’s ICO, the Ethereum white paper, published by Vitalik Buterin in 2014, made note of an alternative consensus mechanism to Proof of Work (PoW) –– which had been popularized by Bitcoin and Ethereum 1.0. This alternative consensus mechanism was called Proof of Stake (PoS).

Proof of Stake removes the “mining” of digital assets via large amounts of compute of specific hashing algorithms and instead creates a randomized lottery system that selects validators based on the weight of shares held in the system –– in this case, how much ETH one holds in a staking contract. Instead of PoW rewarding a Bitcoin miner with transaction fees for “finding” the next block of transactions based purely on how many hashes they can compute, PoS rewards ETH validators with transaction fees in the form of more ETH, the amount of which is based on how many ETH you already own. While the mechanics are novel in their own right, the reality of such a system is that large capital allocators within the ETH system have a larger stake on consensus simply for holding the asset, in addition to generating yield on their stash of tokens simply for holding them.

Prior to the Fall 2022 transition to PoS, termed “The Merge,” the Ethereum Foundation worked closely with stealth start up and Palantir-subcontractor Antithesis to test the new consensus mechanism. In addition, one of the main forces behind the Ethereum blockchain’s move to PoS was Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who had been promoting PoS since at least 2017. Buterin is also a Thiel fellow who was closely connected to the founding and development of the Ethereum-based prediction market platform Augur, which was co-founded by another Thiel fellow, Joey Krug.

However, long before Ethereum allowed token holders to earn yield on their ETH stacks via PoS, projects like Bancor and Coplan’s TokenUnion allowed token holders to earn ETH for simply holding ERC-20 (i.e. ETH-based) tokens –– such as the Augur token REP. Augur’s REP and Bancor’s BNT were both advertised on TokenUnion’s website.

The TokenBnk homepage as it appeared in 2017 – Source

In addition, as CEO of TokenUnion, Coplan attended and was a featured speaker at high-profile blockchain and crypto-related conferences alongside executives at major firms like Meta, Microsoft, R3, Visa, Pantera Capital and so on. At the World Blockchain Forum conference in November 2018, Coplan’s speech was titled “the Napsterization of Finance.”

Some time between 2018 and 2019, Coplan contacted Augur’s co-founder Joey Krug, both to complain about Augur’s interface and to pitch him on investments. Krug “made up a random target volume of $5 million a week and told Coplan he would invest if he reached it” with his proposed prediction market venture.

Around this same time, in 2019, Coplan also reached out to none other than Robin Hanson, the system architect of DARPA’s PAM. Coplan, that year, claims to have first stumbled upon a Hanson paper entitled “Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?” That Hanson paper being the most inspirational to Coplan is notable as it is the paper where Hanson proposes a system of governance based on prediction markets, called futarchy. After reading this paper, per New York Magazine, Coplan proclaimed to Hanson “in a verbose email with multiple block paragraphs that he wanted ‘to be the person to bring prediction markets to life.’” Hanson, who was also advising Joey Krug’s Augur at the time, is said to have largely “brushed off” Coplan.

Coplan went on to “officially” create Polymarket in June 2020, reportedly due to the Covid-19 crisis forcing him to alter course for his previous project “Union Market” and Coplan having recently been inspired by the work of both Hanson and Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. As the story goes, Coplan then went on by himself and built Polymarket alone “in his bathroom.”

However, that is the official narrative we have been told of Coplan and his early interactions with figures like Krug and Hanson. As demonstrated thus far in this article, another key part of this official narrative around Coplan and Polymarket is a lie. Coplan did not come out of nowhere with Polymarket in 2020 with no real prior footprint or industry connections. Coplan, well before 2020, was speaking at high-profile conferences alongside top executives at some of the biggest companies in the industry while also attracting, per TokenUnion’s own claims, millions in private funding and advisers and partners with clear and obvious ties to both the private and public sector of Israel and significant ties to top people in the early Ethereum network.

In order to paint Coplan’s success with Polymarket as an anomaly and manufacture the appearance of “luck,” TokenUnion has been written out of the narrative. Given this effort to obfuscate Polymarket’s apparent predecessor company, of which Coplan was CEO, one cannot help but wonder what else has been intentionally left out of the story.

Courting the “Thielverse”

Coplan’s aforementioned, years-long obsession with the trajectory of Silicon Valley billionaires, particularly Mark Zuckerberg, is worth dwelling on in detail. During the time that Coplan was a “top expert” on Zuckerberg and prior to officially founding Polymarket, several reports had been circulating about the parallels between DARPA’s LifeLog and Facebook, including the unusual coincidence that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was formally shuttered.

It’s not clear if Coplan knew of such claims or not, but his apparent obsession with Zuckerberg’s –– and Facebook’s –– rise, as well as his professed desire to imitate that trajectory, suggests that he may have been aware of such claims and how they may have factored into Zuckerberg’s professional success. Though, in the event he was not, Coplan surely was aware of the crucial role played by Sean Parker and his associate Peter Thiel in Facebook’s early success and the company’s ability to become the dominant social media company.

If Coplan was to emulate his hero, he surely would need to find his own Sean Parker. However, evidence suggests that Coplan not only sought to emulate Zuckerberg during Polymarket’s formative period, but also Parker as well. As noted earlier, prior to founding Polymarket, Coplan had given a speech at the World Blockchain Forum in 2018 called “The Napsterization of Finance” while serving as the CEO of TokenUnion. Shortly after formally creating Polymarket in 2020, Coplan would claim that Polymarket was at the vanguard of ushering in “the napsterization of finance.”

In order to “napsterize” finance and hold that as a central goal to your business strategy, one must know a considerable amount about the company Napster and what it would mean to “napsterize” an industry. Given that Parker infamously founded Napster after the CIA made efforts to recruit him as a teen, Coplan surely saw both Napster and Parker as models to follow, especially given that Parker was also the first president of Facebook and crucially brought Facebook its first big name investors (e.g. Peter Thiel), thus making him critical to the success of Coplan’s admitted idol, Mark Zuckerberg.

Sean Parker, A Link Between Worlds

Sean Parker was born in 1979 in Fairfax Country, VA to an advertiser and an oceanographer. While plenty has been written about Parker, surprisingly few writers have been explored the interesting, and relevant, background of his father.

Bruce Parker Jr., Sean’s father, spent years working for various government oceanic institutes across the United States, including stints as the chief scientist of the National Ocean Service in NOAA, a director of the Coast Survey Development Laboratory, and a former director of the World Data Center for Oceanography, among others. During his time at the NOAA (from 1974 through October 2004), his department worked closely with the CIA in a data sharing effort spearheaded by Vice President Gore known as Project Medea. Parker’s then-boss at the NOAA, D. James Baker, was a critical part of Project Medea’s team.

Years later, in 2009, Parker Jr. became an active member of the Edge Foundation, founded by John Brockman and largely financed by Jeffrey Epstein. He even penned an introduction for an Edge Special Event! in 2011 titled When We Cannot Predict, in which the first sentence claims that “Prediction is the very essence of science.”

Prior to his time at NOAA, Parker worked directly with the United States Navy, including a summer at the U.S. Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory, and two years supplying the Department of Defense with data as an oceanographer at the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office. Notably, the NOAA and the Navy have long partnered frequently on “joint ventures” whereby NOAA technology and data are used for both military and civilian objectives (i.e. “dual-use”).

Sean’s grandfather –– water skiing pioneer Bruce Parker Senior –– had his own history with the Navy, helping them train porpoises in the Caribbean. The water ski schools owned and operated by Parker Sr. were partnered with Harry Conover, whose modeling agency was seeded by former U.S. president Gerald Ford and whose wife at the time, Candy Jones, later became the earliest MK-ULTRA whistle-blower years before the Church Committee exposed the CIA project’s existence.

While his father’s lengthy career at the NOAA and the Navy likely saw him brush up against the intelligence community and intelligence assets at times, Sean Parker’s own trajectory would see him interact much more closely with those groups. According to a 2011 Forbes profile on Sean Parker, the FBI raided the 15 year old then-hacker for illegally hacking into websites associated with government services and a Fortune 500 company. He was ultimately let off with community service. During his community service sentence, Parker described meeting a “punk-rock princess” –– with whom he lost his virginity –– as an “incredible cosmic irony.” Parker furthered it was “the most romantic experience of my life,” and that he only met her “because I’d been raided by the FBI.” As the story goes, shortly thereafter, Parker was then recruited by the CIA himself after his success at a local computer science fair.

Parker has claimed that, when presented with the CIA’s offer, he chose instead to work at Mark Pincus’ startup FreeLoader. He later joined the DC-based internet service provider UUNet –– a company that claims to have been the first commercial internet service provider (ISP) that employed many former members of DARPA who had built an early iteration of the internet know as ARPA-NET. Parker’s former boss Mark Pincus later founded the juggernaut Facebook game company Zynga, which at one point accounted for around 10% of the social media giant’s income. Pincus would also come to work with and invest alongside Parker –– including in Polymarket –– after making critical, early investments in several earlier Parker-linked companies, such as Napster and Facebook.

Napster co-founders Sean Parker (left) and Shawn Fanning (right) in 2012 – Source

Around the same time Parker began programming at UUNet, Microsoft acquired a 13% in the company. In an August 2011 email to Jes Staley, Jeffrey Epstein implied that Parker –– including his teams at Facebook and Spotify –– were affiliated with “Gates and his entourage.” While Parker should have been in high school, he instead earned “$80,000 his senior year,” and “wasn’t going to school.” According to Parker, “I was technically in a co-op program but in truth was just going to work.” It was during this period that Parker met fellow teenager Shawn Fanning online, and alongside a couple friends, founded the quick-to-fail “internet-security firm” Crosswalk. While not much is available about the firm online today, seemingly, the general concept was that two hackers –– Sean and Shawn –– would share their expertise on breaking into online systems with companies looking to strengthen their cybersecurity.

After his senior year, and with his “co-op program” earnings in hand, Parker put off pursuing college to fly out to San Francisco and co-found the pioneering music-sharing site Napster with Fanning. Parker referred to his time at Napster as “Napster University,” explaining “it was a crash course in ­intellectual property law, corporate ­finance, entrepreneurship and law school.” Parker furthered that “some of the e-mails I wrote when I was just a kid who didn’t know what he was doing are apparently in [law school] textbooks.” Despite Napster eventually succumbing to a deluge of high-profile litigation, Parker’s model for disregarding bureaucracy and legislation in the pursuit of technological disruption was established by the young founder’s indifference to the legal context surrounding his company’s services.

Ron Conway, a nearly investor in PayPal and Google, among other stalwarts, met Parker and Fanning at the onset of Napster, and has backed practically every Parker project since. Fanning later referred to Conway as “like family to me,” explaining that he is “such a big part of who I am today.”

However, not every Parker-backed venture was a success, such as the failed start-up Plaxo, which sought to auto-update a person’s email-based address book and was later called a “precursor to social networking.” Parker was infamously forced out of that company in 2004.

Shortly after being kicked out of Plaxo, Parker saw a simply designed website –– “thefacebook.com” –– on the computer owned by his roommate’s girlfriend, who was then attending Stanford. Parker immediately emailed its creator Mark Zuckerberg, much like he had once done with Fanning, and offered to help him with his website.

Matt Cohler, who joined Facebook shortly after Parker, noted the similarity himself: “Napster and Facebook are two of the most significant companies in the history of the Internet and in both cases Parker spotted them earlier than anyone — other than the people who invented them.” By June 2004, Parker had moved into the infamous Facebook villa and became an essential player in the construction of the juggernaut Facebook –– now Meta –– is today.

While Conway decided to initially pass on investing due to concerns with Parker’s then-failing Plaxos contact book company, the second person they called –– early PayPal employee and Pincus’ long-time friend Reid Hoffman –– was too busy founding LinkedIn and instead connected the duo with his former boss Peter Thiel. Thiel quickly invested and joined the board. Joining Thiel and Hoffman was Hoffman’s close friend and Parker’s former boss Mark Pincus.

Forbes later referred to Parker as an early “Facebook’s business veteran” who “helped the college-aged Facebook founders network around Silicon Valley, set up routers and meet benevolent investors like Thiel, Hoffman and Pincus.” Forbes also quotes Zuckerberg as stating that “Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company,” suggesting that –– without Sean Parker –– Facebook’s enormous success may not have materialized at all.

Parker, Zuckerberg and Thiel went on to change the internet and paved the way for further exploration of the concepts of digital identity, digital content distribution, digital community and even digital currency –– all essential pillars of the now-blossoming prediction market industry. In 2005, Parker was accused of possessing cocaine during a house party at a rental under his name, and although he was never charged, he was essentially forced off of the Facebook board. Despite this, Thiel has claimed that he does not “think Sean ever really left Facebook” and has continued “to be involved in many ways.”

The next year, in 2006, Parker was hired by Thiel and became a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund. There, he famously courted and advised the team behind Spotify to legally commercialize the digital music industry –– succeeding exactly where Napster “failed.” Thiel reiterated his admiration for Parker, referring to him as “a brilliant entrepreneur who is somehow transforming the United States and yet is not understood by society.”

From left to right: Ken Howery, Peter Thiel and Sean Parker of Founders Fund in 2006 – Source

Not long after, Parker stated that: “It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.” This idea is similar to those expressed by Parker’s boss Thiel, who has described technology as a way to exert “unilateral change” on the world, and is therefore an “incredible alternative to politics.” Given that Thiel views technology as the most effective way to exert unilateral change on a society and as a way to bypass public consent, his view that Parker, and his companies, have been key to “transforming” the United States takes on increased significance.

One should also consider the early role of Parker and Thiel at Facebook alongside their respective connections to the American National Security State. Parker had early run-ins with the FBI and was sought out by the CIA. As detailed earlier in this piece, Thiel was also actively working to privatize at least some programs of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office at the time Parker contacted him about “thefacebook.com.” Having just privatized DARPA’s TIA program into Palantir, Thiel, and perhaps Parker, certainly saw in Facebook a company that could be molded to serve as more than just a social network. Thiel likely saw its utility as an analogue for the shuttered sister project of TIA, LifeLog, particularly given the fact that Thiel was known to have been meeting with John Poindexter, the close friend of LifeLog’s project manager Douglas Gage, during this time.

Thiel’s fondness for Parker, and his belief that Parker has played a major role in “transforming” the United States, may lie in Parker’s outsized role in developing what we could call the “napsterization” model for a given industry that many Thiel-linked ventures have since followed. Parker’s Napster, even though it failed, was able to test the regulatory environment and determine what was needed for a successor to emerge as a dominant, de facto monopoly in that industry with the blessing of regulators. In the case of Napster’s successor, Spotify, it was Parker –– then at Thiel’s Founders Fund –– who spotted a worthy vessel for his ultimate ambition that began with Napster. Subsequently this “napsterization” model has been applied in several Thiel-linked companies, including Facebook itself via its attempts to launch its Libra stablecoin, as detailed previously by Unlimited Hangout.

For example, Facebook itself faced many legal battles during its formative years, and thus employed many heavy hitters with ties to the public sector as legal counsel, including former State department official Jennifer Newstead, who had previously helped draft the Patriot Act. Another Facebook lawyer, Ted Ullyot, had worked in George W. Bush’s White House before Facebook.

Ullyot himself was suggested to Zuckerberg by Paul Cappuccio, a lawyer who had successfully represented AOL in landmark litigation regarding EU approval –– an outcome that helped globally enshrine American-made interests during the Internet’s proliferation. Both Cappuccio and Ullyot worked at Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm hired to defend Jeffrey Epstein, while Cappuccio helped Parker and Thiel deregulate and disrupt the electronic cigarette market as the general counsel for the now-bankrupt NJOY –– the first eVape company to receive FDA approval.

This “napsterization” model is evident in Coplan’s comments about TokenUnion, which he once referred to as an “economic experiment” that “could ultimately prove to be an integral part and one of the leading methods of storing value in the token ecosystem of tomorrow.” It is certainly interesting that Coplan would be able to attract millions of dollars in seed funding from figures such Lou Kerner and become deeply partnered with Bancor for something that was seen as an “economic experiment” and not a viable, for-profit company. That is, of course, unless the goal of both Coplan and his backers at TokenUnion was economic experimentation with the goal of “napsterizing” major aspects of this industry with a focus on the Ethereum ecosystem. Notably, in a recent media profile, Coplan was asked if he viewed Polymarket as a “technological descendant” of Napster, to which Coplan said “there are parallels.”

While Coplan was building the Ethereum-focused TokenUnion, the Ethereum-based prediction market platform Augur was taking off. Advised by Ethereum co-founder Vitalk Buterin and Robin Hanson and financed in part by a Thiel fellowship, Augur eventually “failed” to succeed in creating a globally successful prediction market. Developed and maintained by the Forecast Foundation non-profit, Augur had hinted–– before it became largely relevant and Krug left the foundation –– that it would offer a “widely anticipated for-profit spin-off.” Shortly after Krug stopped working on Augur, he joined Sean Parker at Thiel’s Founders Fund.

In keeping with the “napsterization” model, Krug and Founders Fund, with lessons learned from Augur, would become early investors and advisors to the for-profit Polymarket. Krug has since commented on the “symmetry” between the evolution of Napster into Spotify, via Sean Parker at Founders Fund, and the evolution of Augur into Polymarket, via Krug’s role at Founders Fund.

Joey Krug: Augur, Ethereum and Market Force Divination

Joey Krug, born in 1995, began mining Bitcoin in his bedroom in May 2011 ––at around 15 years old. By late 2013, Krug was inspired by a recent price surge to pursue cryptocurrency more seriously, and began a bitcoin club at his university, eventually founding a bitcoin point-of-sale company. In 2014, Krug teamed up with his college friend Jeremy Gardner and a computer scientist named Jack Peterson to put together a decentralized prediction market called Augur. Augur was inspired and derived from a Bitcoin-based project called TruthCoin. The first version of the white paper for TruthCoin was published in December 2013 by Paul Sztorc.

Interestingly, only three years before the renewed interest in cryptocurrency-based prediction markets, DARPA’s sister agency — the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which is responsible for “pay[ing] for experimental projects for the U.S. intelligence community” — announced they were launching “a four-year, $50 million program” that would pay people willing to predict major world events. This program, known as Aggregative Contingent Estimation, or ACE, was headed by Jason Matheny. After running ACE and, later, IARPA as a whole, Matheny launched the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) with a $55 million grant he received from the Open Philanthropy Project –– co-founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The ACE program officially ended in June 2015, shortly after Krug formalized the non-profit entity tied to Augur development –– the Forecast Foundation.

Soon after the launch of the Ethereum network in 2014, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin approached Krug. Buterin had recently received a Thiel fellowship to further the development of Ethereum. Buterin convinced Krug to develop what would become the prediction market Augur, not on Bitcoin as originally planned, but on Ethereum. Buterin argued that doing so would allow Krug to take advantage of a more expressive smart contract programming language than what was then available on Bitcoin.

Joey Krug (right) gives a presentation including a slide showing Augur’s logo alongside the logos of DARPA’s failed PAM and Intrade, which once collaborated on PAM – Source

Krug and his team, now counting Buterin as an advisor, then founded the Forecast Foundation in Estonia in December 2014 as a non-profit entity meant to further develop the Augur platform. Another advisor, Ron Bernstein, was the co-founder of InTrade, which previously had partnered with DARPA to provide data for their PAM experiments. Bernstein’s Tradesports.com, which had acquired InTrade in 2003, had leased the technology to the Forecast Foundation behind Augur in exchange for REP tokens created during their groundbreaking fundraiser –– leading Tradesports.com to amass a large ETH stake after it converted its REP token holdings into ETH.

Interestingly, during this same time, Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner posted in 2015 that some on the Augur team were “speaking to a few several-letter agencies” to “help them understand the technology we’re building.” Gardner went so far as to say that “the DoD, DARPA, and CIA are huge fans of Augur” and the prediction market platform it sought to build. Upon leaving Augur in a messy lawsuit, Gardner joined Blockchain Capital –– an influential cryptocurrency venture firm founded by Tether co-founder Brock Pierce, which features prominently in The Chain series.

Notably, the Augur team soon added the architect of DARPA’s failed PAM prediction market, Robin Hanson, as an advisor. The Augur logo notably bears significant similarities to the logos of DARPA’s failed TIA and PAM projects (i.e. a “one-eyed” pyramid). In fact, a profile on Augur from 2018 notes that Krug, one of his co-founders, and two unnamed Augur advisors (one of which was likely Hanson) had explicitly decided to make the Augur logo “a pyramid, with three points converging upon an all-seeing eye.” This, among other similarities, suggests that Augur was an effort to resurrect PAM, particularly given that, in a few short years, Thiel’s tentacles would extend deeply into Augur and were already present, indirectly, via Buterin’s Thiel fellowship.

In the fall of 2015, the Forecast Foundation and Augur operated the first ever initial coin offering (ICO) on the Ethereum blockchain with their token REP. Reports from October 2015, during its ICO, claim that Augur was courting “four major banks,” in addition to a partnership with IBM Watson in efforts to develop a “closed-source alternative” to Augur. This fundraising method, analogous to the initial public offering (IPO), came to dominate the remainder of the decade in the cryptocurrency space –– leading its pioneer Krug to eventually join two of the most influential investing firms in the industry, Pantera Capital and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In June 2016, Krug himself was awarded a Thiel Fellowship to further develop Augur. The next year, he joined Dan Morehead’s Pantera Capital as a co-chief investor officer (CIO) in 2017.

In a June 2017 post published on his Medium announcing his Pantera appointment, Krug specifically noted that this would help solve a dire need for liquidity on Augur, even stating that Pantera would be actively trading on it:

Once Augur is out, we can even trade on it, which will increase liquidity and be good for everyone. There are no set allocations for anything in the fund, it is all about capacity and what we can spend the money on that is the best investment/most profitable.

If a million people show up day one of Augur’s full release, then there is probably no need (or edge) for us to trade. But if it does not happen, we will trade as long as we have an edge. This is not altruism: we are not planning to lose money to attract users to Augur! However, since we have an edge even in markets like bitcoin, we will almost certainly have an edge on Augur markets for quite a while.

In July 2018, Augur released its primordial iteration based upon the native Ethereum network token, ETH, and its REP token that had been created during its groundbreaking ICO. According to Krug, version one of Augur was “a very slow, expensive, difficult to use version” and left users exposed to varying price fluctuations of tokens. As the Augur blog noted in 2021, version one was “the first real world deployment of a free and open prediction market,” which “allowed the community to test many hypotheses and ideas that had been written about for decades prior by many academics, software engineers and free-market information enthusiasts.” In other words, it was an economic experiment.

Version two of Augur, launched in 2020, replaced the unit of account with a stablecoin, specifically using DAI –– an algorithmic stablecoin managed by MakerDAO. Despite version two solving a lot of issues from version one, it “became clear that Augur was too resource-intensive to live fully on Ethereum mainnet.” Due to this and because of the evolution of externally-traded Augur shares on existing automated markets, the Forecast Foundation was “ultimately” led to launch Augur Turbo in 2021. Augur Turbo partnered with oracle provider Chainlink and Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) Polygon –– both infrastructure partners that Polymarket would utilize only a few years later.

These decisions to move towards L2s and stablecoins were anything but trivial. In fact, Krug himself has expressed that, without cryptocurrency, prediction markets would be unable to function. According to Krug, two of the main pillars of the prediction market industry at large –– a 24/7 global, internet-based market and (practically) irreversible transactions –– helped “unlock” prediction markets’ ability to function and succeed.

In a traditional online betting market, with legacy financial rails such as credit cards, there are few legal protections for book makers to successfully fend off scams in the event of a market loser claiming that their losing bet was made fraudulently. The credit card company ultimately becomes the oracle of the pay-out, meaning that it solely holds the decision to settle the funding transaction even after the event the bet is predicated on has passed. Cryptocurrency also helps market makers circumnavigate laws such as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits “gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection with the participation of another person in a bet or wager that involves the use of the Internet.”

For example, a user could bet $100 that the United States will win the World Cup, and even after the team is eliminated and the terms of the bet are closed, said user could phone their credit card company and claim the bet was made fraudulently and ask for their funds to be returned. In contrast, when a bet such as this is made using stablecoins in the form of a smart contract, even prior to completion of the terms of the bet, the payouts are already funded and set to be distributed. Unfortunately, the use of cryptocurrency alone does not completely remove the need for trust in such a scenario, with a smart contract innately requiring an oracle to feed the correct market outcome data, which then triggers the payouts. This issue, known colloquially as the oracle problem, and how it relates to Polymarket’s legal standing and centralization is to be discussed in greater detail in Part II of this investigation.

While still at Augur, Krug received an email from Shayne Coplan describing ideas to improve Augur, and sent further repeated investment pitches for Pantera’s then-CIO to consider. Krug explained that “prediction markets are one of the hardest types of start-ups to build,” and that while “there have been dozens… none of them hit escape velocity.” As noted earliuer in this piece, the Augur co-founder told Coplan that if he could create a prediction market that reached a target “volume of $5 million a week,” then he would invest.

During and after his time at Augur, Krug participated in many advisory roles within the cryptocurrency industry, notably including a 2019 appointment to the advisory board of a novel dollar stablecoin project called Ampleforth. Ampleforth was created to develop a dollar stablecoin that fluctuates its supply based on external information, like the consumer price index (CPI), in order to stabilize purchasing power.

This project brought Krug’s expertise in cryptocurrency-based prediction markets alongside giants of the retail-service data industry, including former employees of Google, Uber and Facebook –– all companies that have notably pioneered data-driven “predictions” as part of their commercial products. For example, one former Uber employee who joined Ampleforth, Aditya Sarawgi, worked on “Uber Places” which necessitated “auto-complete search, destination prediction and current location prediction,” and became “the primary engineering point” during a “multi year maps contract between Google and Uber.”

Uber was notorious for hiring former intelligence officers, including former CIA, FBI and NSA employees, and it reportedly “amassed a high-functioning corporate espionage force.” Its founder, Travis Kalanick, was a fellow peer-to-peer data pioneer, having developed a program similar to Napster called Scour before he led a hostile, technology-driven takeover of the world’s taxi industry. As noted earlier, Kalanick was the other tech billionaire that Coplan closely studied, in addition to Mark Zuckerberg, and was the other figure alongside the Facebook founder that Coplan has acknowledged he sought to emulate.

Kalanick and his company’s utter dismissal of the current legislative environment while building the disruptive ride sharing business would go on to greatly influence Coplan’s indifference to the law (i.e. Coplan’s “act first, apologize later” model) while Polymarket was breaking ground during (and before) the 2024 election cycle. The similarities between Napster, Facebook, Uber and Polymarket include their legal disruption-as-a-service business models and their formative operations within a regulatory gray-area –– if not simply illegal. Other areas of overlap are discussed below and in Part II.

Alongside Krug on Ampleforth’s board sat members of the Hoover Institute, an eventual technical project manager of Facebook’s stablecoin project Libra, and an early, influential Facebook employee Sam Lessin. Lessin was a former classmate of Zuckerberg’s at Harvard, who sold his company to Facebook and formally joined the company in 2010. Lessin also played a crucial role during the company’s founding as his father, Wall Street banker Robert Lessin, “took Zuckerberg around New York to meet with venture capitalists and executives in the finance and media industries” after their spring semester in 2004.

Krug, having joined Thiel’s Founders Fund in April 2023 to formally partner with both Thiel and Sean Parker to help shape “the next decade of Founders Fund’s crypto strategy,” promptly led a $45 million investment round in Polymarket. The investment was announced in 2024, shortly after Coplan met the fabled “$5 million a week” mark.

In a December 2025 interview, Krug described Augur as failing while Polymarket has succeeded mainly because “the timing was just wrong” and “we were way too early.” Krug furthered that “hopefully we inspired some people to build in the space,” and that “maybe Augur is Napster and Polymarket is Spotify.”

The Napsterization of Everything

The story has been carefully crafted over the past few years that a young college drop-out named Shayne Coplan, after being inspired by Austrian economists and Robin Hanson, founded Polymarket in mid-2020 completely alone and then “built his company in his bathroom.” As detailed extensively in this article, there is plenty of background information and key data points that have been clearly left out of this story in order for this particular narrative of Shayne Coplan’s and Polymarket’s origins to take hold.

This narrative bears many similarities to the stories that have been woven regarding the origins of major Big Tech firms, whose founders Coplan explicitly hoped to emulate. In many of those cases, these founders are said to have built their companies “in their garage” or something similarly humble, only for it to trickle out years later that their companies’ success stories were only made possible by funding provided by U.S. intelligence or similarly shady organization and groups.

In the case of Coplan, despite efforts made to obfuscate his past, he was clearly immersed in networks within the cryptocurrency agency with ties to Israel and Israeli intelligence well before he founded Polymarket. During this time, he talked about the “napsterization of finance,” only to have the venture capital firm of Napster’s Sean Parker and crypto prediction market pioneer Joey Krug be among the first backers of Polymarket. Krug claims that Polymarket was successful where others were not because of its preferable “user interface.” In reality, it was Coplan’s connections to the networks he developed while running TokenUnion combined with his careful study and emulation of Sean Parker of Napster, Travis Kalanick of Uber and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook that made Coplan and his company a success.

If there is a pattern emerging from this disruption nexus of prediction market makers, peer-to-peer data pioneers, and social network founders, perhaps it is the brazen disinterest in upholding the law during their respective incubation and early growth periods. Due to the proximity of these businesses to the ideas that stemmed from the likes of DARPA and the U.S. intelligence community, it is arguable that these companies were silently given a free pass to build where others could not, and quickly gained an insurmountable market share from being the first movers in an otherwise illegal market. But regardless of a hypothetical, State-sponsored get-out-of-jail-free card, these generations of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest quite literally changed the limits of their industry by changing the rules of their regulators.

Parker’s Napster was blatantly illegal, as was Kalanick’s Uber, and yet both models survived in their own way –– Uber stopped paying fines on behalf of drivers and started lobbying local, state and federal government, while the Napster founder funded and advised Spotify into becoming the largest music streaming service in the world. A willingness to “break the rules” while building a company combined with teaming up with the “right” people, invariably tied to the military, intelligence or both, is the recipe that Coplan studied and then followed in building Polymarket.

As both Krug and Coplan have alluded, Polymarket’s path seems closer to the Napster-into-Spotify model, in which Augur built the infrastructure and demonstrated the market demand for the product that Polymarket is now delivering. The similarities between the companies of this nexus are immense; young founders were raided by the FBI; the companies had employees who boasted working –– likely collaborating –– with the intelligence community; they started as companies that potentially offered illegal services; they were advised and funded by the Thiel, Conway and Pincus network at a young age; they rode waves of political favors and regulatory tide shifts towards eventual legitimacy; and finally, many of them seem to be awfully similar to the same family of controversial projects once housed at DARPA.

Another argument to be made is that the government –– whether demonstrated by actions of various legislative agencies, court systems and law enforcement –– was only feigning resistance to these founders and companies. Under the cover of fines, raids and court summons, these intelligence and military-backed technology companies were painted as outsiders fighting against the legacy systems, while in actuality pursuing the very interests of the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Indeed, as this article makes clear, the military and intelligence community have long been fans of prediction markets, whether PAM, Augur, or now, Polymarket.

With Polymarket’s odds now capable of moving the stock market, manipulating the media and even influencing elections, the real architects of the explosion in prediction markets have a new tool that allows them not only unprecedented predictive power, but also unprecedented abilities to insider trade while they seed select narratives and alter our digital reality.

As will be explored in Part II, the fact that both Joey Krug and Shayne Coplan were inspired specifically by Robin Hanson’s work on futarchy, which proposes using prediction markets as a system of public governance, is highly significant. Perhaps even more significant is the fact futarchy is already taking hold in significant ways under the current administration, a turn of events that is particularly jarring considering that the President’s son is both invested in and advising Polymarket.

As broached here but explored in greater detail in the next part of this investigation, Polymarket’s success heralds a new era for both finance and for governance –– one where the house always wins.

The Secret History of Polymarket – Part 1.