Jeffrey Epstein saw promise in Bitcoin — and its far-right supporters

The tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails and files released on January 30th tie the infamous pedophile, sex trafficker, and influence peddler to elite figures across the tech industry. The world of cryptocurrency is no exception. Epstein’s connections are intriguing, disturbing — and worth mapping closely.

With his interest first piqued as early as 2011, Epstein was ahead of the game on crypto. The financier understood it as a tool for clandestine payments and shady international finance, and found prominent community members more than willing to welcome him. Bitcoin wasn’t even invented until 2009, which means all of Epstein’s crypto connections formed after his 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of a minor.

Between 2011 and 2019, Epstein invested in major crypto exchanges and software development firms. He grew close with one of the most influential yet troubling figures in the field, Tether cofounder Brock Pierce. Epstein even forged ties with Bitcoin’s core development team and mused about changing the technology of Bitcoin itself.

But while Epstein courted established crypto players, less reputable branches of his network — notably those tied to Vladimir Putin’s Russia — promoted sketchy investments and likely contributed to massive investor losses during the 2018–2019 height of speculative crypto-mania. Most stunningly, it now appears that one of Epstein’s most eager recruiters worked in crypto marketing and PR, repping both major fintech firms and fly-by-night crypto schemes… while also allegedly scouting women for him to victimize.

Epstein’s interest in Bitcoin also aligned with his support for far-right politics. Bitcoin grew from the anarcho-libertarian “cypherpunk” movement, which dreamed of money free of the elite corruption that Epstein has come to represent. But most of the players Epstein supported, including the now publicly traded Coinbase, aligned instead with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s authoritarian and bigoted “tech right” — seemingly in part thanks to Epstein’s influence.

There’s no evidence Epstein succeeded in shaping crypto’s underlying technology, but his backing for its most extreme political tendencies has had major long-term impacts. That includes strengthening firms that have since become massive channels for funding to Donald Trump — himself, of course, extensively tied back to Epstein.

Brock Pierce: “I had a Great Time With the Girls”

The most ominous and significant of Epstein’s crypto connections was also likely his first: Brock Pierce.

Pierce is a cofounder of Tether, a so-called “stablecoin” that uses blockchain tokens to track US dollars. Epstein met him at the Mindshift Conference held on Epstein’s private island, Little St. James in 2011. A representative for Pierce told the The Hollywood Reporter that Pierce did not know who Epstein was at the time. Mindshift was organized by a literal illusionist named Al Seckel, and emails uncovered by Protos seem to show that Epstein viewed the event as a disaster. He found Pierce one of the event’s few bright spots.

Based on the emails, Pierce and Epstein grew closer over the course of 2011 and 2012, and by March of 2012 Pierce was apparently aware of Epstein’s real passion. “I had a great time with the girls,” Pierce appeared to email Epstein. Just two months later, Epstein offered to arrange a meeting between Pierce and “my new Russian” in Los Angeles. Pierce also appears to have met with Epstein and former Harvard president Larry Summers at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to discuss crypto at some point between 2008 and 2015.

Before meeting Epstein, Pierce had already faced allegations of involvement with the abuse of minors and possession of child sexual abuse material as a young executive at Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), an internet startup, in the early 2000s. In a 2014 letter about the incident, Pierce wrote that one accuser, Michael Egan, had used allegations against Pierce and director Bryan Singer “to extort money.” Pierce was never charged, and Egan later dropped allegations against other Hollywood figures. But Egan’s claims against Singer, who was closely associated with DEN, stood — and were later joined by other accusations.

Incredibly, it may have been Pierce who connected Jeffrey Epstein to Steve Bannon, with whom Pierce had a business relationship dating back to 2005. While the origins of the Epstein-Bannon relationship are still murky, Pierce and Epstein appeared to discuss Bannon in December 2016 emails, in which Epstein refers to Bannon as a “pretty smart puppet master.” That’s well before what was previously understood to be the first link between Bannon and Epstein, a dinner arranged by author Michael Wolff in October of 2017.

Epstein’s interest in cryptocurrency was seemingly fueled by his continuing relationship with Pierce. In May of 2013, Pierce emailed Epstein about his efforts to buy the Japan-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. The same year, Epstein enrolled in a general “Introduction to Cryptography” course offered online by Stanford. The course included “methods that ensure both confidentiality and integrity” in encrypted messaging and specifically covered public-key cryptography, a fundamental building block of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Also in May of 2013, Epstein emailed a third party about a possible new cryptocurrency in connection with Pierce, which Epstein describes as “Bit coin without the seediness.” This may have been a reference to what would become Tether. Pierce has said he had no operational role at Tether after 2015, but the firm has faced considerable criticism since then for misrepresenting the holdings backing Tether, and was fined $41 million in 2021 by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Tether has grown into the world’s largest dollar stablecoin, and much or all of the $185 billion in conventional dollar reserves backing its tokens are custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald — owned by another Epstein contact, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, until the recent transfer of control to Lutnick’s sons.

Pierce did not reply to requests for comment sent by The Verge.

Making Bitcoin “More Private”

The latest Epstein dump has also revealed his 2014 investment in Blockstream, a cryptocurrency development firm headed by one of the field’s pioneers, Adam Back. Back has since described the investment as coming through a fund run by Joichi Ito, in which Epstein was a limited partner.

Blockstream cofounder Austin Hill can be seen in the emails tentatively arranging a visit to Epstein’s Little St. James island, appearing to write in an April 2014 message that “Fri/Saturday on the island are still possible.“ On April 19th, 2014, Epstein told another crypto developer, Amir Taaki, that he’d had “Andy Back [sic]… on my island this weekend.” Blockstream, Back and Hill have not confirmed or denied these visits took place. Blockstream did not reply to a request for comment on Back’s relationship with Epstein.

Back was one of the early “cypherpunks” who laid the groundwork for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Back’s “Hashcash” paper is cited in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, and Back is among the pioneers sometimes suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the still-pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. Blockstream and Back have played significant roles in shaping the development of Bitcoin over the past 15 years.

It has been known since 2019 that Epstein also donated at least $525,000 to the MIT Media Lab, which used some of those funds to support developers working on the Bitcoin protocol. In a 2015 email, disgraced former MIT Media Lab head Joichi Ito describes using Epstein’s gift funding to move quickly to bring several of those core developers in-house at the Media Lab. Ito refers to this as “taking control” of the developers.

The Media Lab’s funding of Bitcoin developers is particularly eyebrow-raising because of Brock Pierce’s indirect role in that takeover. The independent nonprofit Bitcoin Foundation had funded Bitcoin core developers until Pierce was elected director of the foundation in May of 2014. Members of the foundation soon began resigning because of the existing abuse allegations against Pierce, and within a year, the foundation had collapsed, laying off 90% of staff and announcing that it was “effectively bankrupt.”

This collapse, triggered by an Epstein friend, enabled the Media Lab, using Epstein’s funds, to “take control” of Bitcoin core developers.

These events have led to loose speculation that Epstein was trying to influence Bitcoin development. But Bitcoin’s 2018 “block size war,” a fierce debate over the amount of data that Bitcoin should be able to process, highlights how challenging this would have been. Bitcoin is an open-source protocol similar to email, not a single software package sold by a company, so changes can’t be unilaterally imposed by any single entity — even the “core” development team. When the “big block” side of the block size conflict ultimately lost, they simply split from Bitcoin and started their own cryptocurrencies. The threat of these “forks” makes major, unilateral changes very difficult.

The new emails show Epstein did have substantial discussions about the direction of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency development with Vincenzo Iozzo, who is believed to have been the “personal hacker” described as working for Epstein by an FBI informant. One of Epstein’s hobby horses was the creation of “Sharia compliant” digital currencies for use in the Middle East. Iozzo did not reply to a request for comment by The Verge by press time.

But Iozzo’s conversations with Epstein include inaccuracies — most significantly, the idea that Bitcoin is “anonymous.”

In fact, Bitcoin is pseudonymous: while real names aren’t attached, the network keeps a public record of all accounts and transactions, making it fairly easy for professional analysts — including those at major US government contractors like Chainalysis — to triangulate the real-world identities of active users. Amazingly, Epstein’s conversations with Iozzo circa 2014 partly revolve around the desire to “remove anonymity” from Bitcoin.

This raises the question of whether Epstein, mistakenly believing Bitcoin was protecting him, might have used the cryptocurrency in any of his activities.

While Epstein himself moved at the higher end of the crypto world, he appears to have put at least two of “his Russians” to work in the trenches: former pro-Putin activist Masha Drokova (aka Masha Bucher) and Russian Olympic snowboarder Maria Prusakova (aka Masha Prusso). Epstein’s emails appear to show both women helping place deceptive media coverage to repair Epstein’s reputation, while using the same tactics and personnel to pump sketchy cryptocurrency investments.

Drokova and Prusakova were just one node in an apparently vast network producing and placing puff pieces about Epstein: one of Prusakova’s collaborators, Sarah Austin, has stated Epstein had “thousands of publicists.” Drokova reportedly joined Epstein’s reputation laundering operation in 2017, and soon incorporated the firm M&A PR Studio. Drokova and Prusakova appear to have placed dozens of articles with loosely supervised “contributor networks,” including Forbes, The Next Web, and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post and Thrive Global.

These networks were built to publish independent journalistic contributions with minimal editorial oversight, but they have been widely abused by fraudsters and low-rent marketers to disguise advertising as reporting. In addition to evidence of direct payments to their network of contributors, pieces placed by writers tied to Prusakova and Drokova show clear signs of promoting specific clients. In one particularly blatant case, a since-deleted writeup about Davos, bylined by Sarah Austin, included links to rental apartments that sources say were managed by Prusakova.

Epstein’s emails indicate that another infamous blurb in The Next Web may have been engineered by Drokova. The piece approvingly shared Epstein’s views on Bitcoin… without mentioning his 2008 conviction. Dylan Love, author of that piece, appeared to email Epstein one month before its publication, saying that “Masha [Drokova] has made it clear that she wants me to write something about you.” In another email surfaced by Forbes, Epstein orders a $25,000 payment to Drokova and says she should “feel free to give some to Dylan.”

In 2017, Epstein forwarded himself a copy of a similar piece published at The Huffington Post and praising Epstein’s science funding while omitting mention of his crimes — and authored by a writer who also published a puff piece about Drokova herself at Thrive Global.

Since Epstein’s death, Drokova has continued to build a profile in Silicon Valley as head of the firm Day One VC, including being named to Forbes “30 under 30” list in 2019.

Day One’s investments include Sam Altman’s creepy eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency Worldcoin (Now simply “World”). On February 9, Drokova posted an apology to X for her two-year association with Epstein, admitting only to making a few introductions, work she claims was “unpaid.” Drokova wrote that she “was naive; I didn’t dig deep enough early on.” Drokova also claimed that Epstein “made me think I could be safe from the regime” after leaving Putin’s youth movement and moving to the US.

But many have questioned whether Drokova really turned her back on Putin — and indeed, the recent emails appear to show her asking Epstein for introductions to “adequate Russian oligarchs” to invest in her venture fund.

Masha Prusakova is a much darker Epstein-crypto nexus. Prusakova competed for Russia in snowboarding in the 2006 Winter Olympics, and Olympic news site The Inquisitor found that her Olympic accreditation documents appear in the latest Epstein email release. Prusakova later studied law with Epstein’s apparent financial support, and also appears to have personally met Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen in Paris on Epstein’s order.

By no later than 2013, Prusakova was allegedly discussing helping Epstein recruit women. In a 2013 email, Prusakova appears to write that she has “three cute and smart friends whom I can bring to your house” and that “Sometimes I think that I am your Paris based Ghislaine Maxwell.” In the same email, Prusakova discusses her prospects for admission to study law at Cornell. This is one of a few documents in which Prusakova’s name appears to have been redacted by the DOJ after the initial release, but the attribution has been preserved by archives including Jmail.

Epstein appears to have later paid for some of Prusakova’s law studies at UC Berkeley from 2016–2019: In 2019 messages cited by The Inquisitor, Prusakova refers to “willingly and knowingly, indirectly, putting girls in danger” while recruiting “assistants” for Epstein as “the price to pay for Berkeley.” She continued to ask Epstein for work as a lawyer.

By 2018, though, Prusakova had also cofounded Crypto PR Lab, a firm that pitched crypto stories to myself and other reporters between 2018 and roughly 2020. These were largely sketchy crypto projects capitalizing on that era’s boom in so-called “Initial Coin Offerings.” In a text exchange from April of 2019, Prusakova appears to share a link to an article under her own byline at Thrive Global, while updating Epstein on third-party interest in acquiring Crypto PR Lab.

Whether that sale was completed is unclear, but Prusakova soon transitioned to staff roles at crypto firms. For a period from 2021–2022, she was head of events at Polygon — a blue-chip project by crypto standards.

Drokova did not respond to questions about her relationship with Epstein. Prusakova has scrubbed her online presence, and her most recent known employer, AethirCloud, did not reply to a request for comment.

The money at the end of the world

Whatever Epstein’s agenda, he would have found directly manipulating Bitcoin’s code difficult. But funding the worldview behind it appears to have continued furthering Epstein’s geopolitical goals of mass unrest and elite impunity, even after his death.

Mt. Gox collapsed before Pierce and Epstein could invest in that exchange, but in 2014, Pierce facilitated a $3 million early investment by Epstein into Coinbase, now the largest crypto exchange in the United States.

As detailed by Decrypt, emails between Pierce and Epstein show that Fred Ehrsam, who cofounded the crypto exchange with CEO Brian Armstrong, sought a face-to-face meeting with Epstein before accepting the investment in 2014, when the firm was valued at $400 million. At its current value of $51 billion, Epstein’s $3 million Coinbase stake would be worth more than $380 million. Ehrsam has not commented publicly on the disclosures, and Coinbase and Ehrsam did not reply to requests for comment from The Verge by press time.

Coinbase has since imposed its own strain of Epstein’s “anti-woke” agenda on its employees, hired spyware makers who helped target journalists, and become a nexus of right-wing political funding in the US. The firm implemented a corporate gag order on the discussion of politics at work in 2020. This was widely believed by employees to be intended to quash discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of George Floyd, paralleling Epstein’s efforts to delegitimize #MeToo and other “woke” resistance to elite abuses.

In 2018, Coinbase faced massive backlash from its user base when myself and other investigators highlighted their hiring of former members of the far-right spyware firm Hacking Team. Hacking Team had sold surveillance and spyware to authoritarian governments including Sudan, and their software was used by Mexican cartels to target journalists. Epstein expressed support for Peter Thiel’s attacks on journalism in the US, now legible as part of a broad strategy by powerful men to evade accountability.

Hacking Team was named a “Corporate Enemy of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders in 2013, and a 2015 hack of the firm showed CEO David Vincenzetti habitually ending emails with the Italian fascist slogan “boia chi molla” — “death to those who surrender.” Members of the Hacking team at the time claimed the contents of the hack were “not true,” but the Italian government soon revoked their international trade license.

After the hiring of former Hacking Team members became public knowledge, Coinbase removed them, with CEO Brian Armstrong citing “a gap in our diligence process” for their hiring. Notably, Epstein is also linked to international spyware via Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert, who has been suspected of distributing compromised spyware called PROMIS.

Most substantively, Coinbase spearheaded the formation of the Stand With Crypto activist front and the Fairshake political action committee. According to Follow the Crypto, Fairshake and two other closely linked cryptocurrency PACs spent a reported $131.5 million in 2024 races, with $85.1 million going to support Republicans and just $48.3 million going to Democrats.

Bitcoin is intended, among other features, to thrive when states — and with them, democracy — begin to fail. Its reputation as “digital gold” is rooted in right-wing ideas including Austrian economics and hard-money “goldbug” beliefs.

This dark worldview may have appealed to Epstein and his compatriots as much as any technological innovation. “Brexit, just the beginning,” he emailed Peter Thiel in 2016. “Return to tribalism,” he wrote of his predictions for the future. “Counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances … Finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

But Epstein wasn’t just making predictions — he was setting goals and working to foster instability he thought he could profit from. In 2018 and 2019, for instance, Epstein strategized with Steve Bannon about supporting far-right European politicians including Marine Le Pen.

This has all too much in common with the paranoid narratives of decline that suffuse Bitcoin culture — and the accompanying anti-democratic politics, fraud, and deception that seem designed to make those grim visions a reality.