Tag: Tether

ECP NetHappenings Brock Pierce starts Tether

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ESSAY

@0xSweep https://x.com/0xSweep/status/2050586670366687723

The man who co founded the world’s largest stablecoin was arrested by Interpol in a Spanish villa with guns, machetes and child pornography

His name is Brock Pierce

If you’ve ever held USDT, the $140 BILLION stablecoin that settles more daily volume than Visa in some months you’ve used a product he co founded

Brock Pierce was a Disney child actor. He starred in The Mighty Ducks, D2, and First Kid

At 16 he met a 40 year old businessman named Marc Collins Rector

Collins Rector was building Digital Entertainment Network. A pre YouTube streaming platform funded by David Geffen, Microsoft, and Dell

They raised $60 MILLION and were planning a $75 MILLION IPO

At 17 Pierce was VP at a base salary of $250,000

Pierce, Collins Rector, and Collins Rector’s boyfriend lived together in a 12,600 square foot mansion in Encino

The mansion hosted parties attended by Hollywood’s A list: Bryan Singer, David Geffen and Gary Goddard

DEN’s flagship show “Chad’s World” was co-written by Collins Rector, produced by Pierce, and targeted “gay and questioning teen boys”

In October 1999 a young man filed a lawsuit alleging Collins Rector had sexually molested him for three years starting at age 13

The IPO collapsed

In July 2000 three more former DEN employees filed a sexual abuse lawsuit naming Pierce, Collins-Rector, and Shackley together alleging rape, assault, drugging of minors and death threats

Collins Rector was indicted for transporting minors across state lines for sex

All three men fled to Spain

Interpol arrested them in Marbella in 2002. Guns, machetes, and child pornography were found in the house

Pierce was released without criminal charges. Collins Rector pleaded guilty to eight counts of child enticement and registered as a sex offender

The civil lawsuits against Pierce were “dismissed and/or settled out of court.”

He settled with at least one plaintiff for $21,600. He has consistently denied all allegations

In 2014 Pierce co-founded Tether originally called Realcoin

Tether became the largest stablecoin in crypto. By 2019 USDT was processing higher daily volume than Bitcoin itself

Tether has never been audited by a Big Four firm. Their first audit attempt with Friedman LLP was abruptly disbanded in 2018 with no explanation

In 2021 Tether settled with the New York Attorney General for $18.5 MILLION over misrepresenting their reserves

The connections kept growing

Pierce founded Blockchain Capital. In that role he helped Jeffrey Epstein become an early investor in Coinbase

He spoke at Epstein’s “Mindshift” conference in 2011 – three years AFTER Epstein had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor

In February 2026 the US Department of Justice released emails from Epstein’s files. One email from Pierce to Epstein read: “a boat in Antigua full of amazing Ukraine’s finest” was waiting for him

The system runs on USDT. USDT was built by Brock Pierce. And Brock Pierce has answered the same questions about the same allegations for a quarter century

ECP NetHappenings Epstein helps Bannon build MAGA and Brock Pierce

Brock Pierce Tech Figure In Dot-Com Child Sex Scandal Was A Clinton Global Initiative Member

ECP NetHappenings I shouldn’t ever stop telling and sharing the Story about @ErikVoorhees

NEWS BYTES

THIS is how it is done! THIS is the economic power Democrats MUST learn.
A grocery store CEO was fired for treating employees “too well” – so 25,000 workers emptied shelves across 71 stores and refused to work until the board rehired him
Sales dropped 95% in six weeks.

Multibillionaires and democracy are fundamentally incompatible.
A system based on equal voices cannot survive when a handful of individuals have enough wealth to buy the megaphone, the politicians, and the rules

There it is: confirmation that Melania was an illegal immigrant.
“The Woman Who Knows Too Much”
Amanda Ungaro says Paolo Zampolli abused her, seduced her when she was underage, recruited girls for Epstein, had a hold on Melania (who worked as an undocumented immigrant for
Trump.
She is willing to testify.

Bard College President resigns after it was revealed he made 25 visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse.

China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) officially issued an injunction instructing Chinese firms and citizens to ignore U.S. sanctions related to the purchase of Iranian oil.

China openly defies US sanctions!
China says it does not recognize USsanctions on Iranian oil purchases and will not comply with them.

FCC votes to ban all Chinese labs from certifying electronics sold in the US due to national security concerns — ruling would affect 75 percent of US-bound devices

Santiago @svpino
30 agents every AI Engineer must build.

This is the most comprehensive and practical book on AI Engineering that I’ve ever seen.
I can’t think of a single use case that they didn’t cover here:

1. The autonomous decision-making agent
2. The planning agent
3. The memory-augmented agent
4. The knowledge retrieval agent
5. The document intelligence agent
6. The scientific research agent
7. The tool-using agent
8. The agentic workflow system
9. The data analysis agent
10. The verification and validation agent
11. The general problem solver agent
12. The code generation agent
13. The security-hardened agent
14. The self-improving agent
15. The conversational agent
16. The content creation agent
17. The recommendation agent
18. The vision language agent
19. The audio processing agent
20. The physical world sensing agent
21. The ethical reasoning agent
22. The explainable agent
23. The healthcare intelligence agent
24. The scientific discovery agent
25. The financial advisory agent
26. The legal intelligence agent
27. The education intelligence agent
28. The collective intelligence agent
29. The embodied intelligence agent
30. The domain-transforming integration agent

I also read 50 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know by Imran. Same vibe.
Here is the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4t5ystE

20 Claude Code tips:

1. Esc+Esc: Rewind your session to any previous checkpoint; treat it as free undo so you can let the agent attempt risky changes.

2. CTRL+V: Paste a screenshot directly into Claude Code.

3. CTRL+G: Open your editor to compose long prompts instead of typing them in the terminal.

4. CTRL+R: Search your prompt history.

5. /rewind: Roll back changes to a checkpoint, then give more specific feedback and try again.

6. /rewind → “Summarize from here”: Pick a checkpoint and compress only the messages after it, keeping the valuable earlier context intact.

7. /insights: Generate a usage report, then attach it to a Claude session and ask for lessons to improve your workflow.

8. /memory: Save personal preferences that should persist across all your projects.

9. /statusline: Permanently display how much context you’re currently using.

10. cat error.log | claude “fix this”: Pipe errors straight in instead of copy/pasting, giving the model way more context.

11. .claudeignore: Add this file to your project to list paths the agent shouldn’t read or modify.

12. #: Start a message with # to save it as a persistent instruction in your CLAUDE .md file.

13. “ultrathink”: Drop this word anywhere in a prompt to bump the model’s effort to HIGH for complex reasoning tasks.

14. /diff: Open an interactive viewer for uncommitted changes and per-turn diffs.

15. /effort max: Use this when you want to maximize Claude’s abilities (it’s expensive!)

16. /loop: Schedule a recurring task locally.

17. /schedule: Like /loop, but the job runs in the cloud and not locally.

18. claude –worktree: Spin up a session in an isolated git worktree so you can run more Claude instances in parallel.

19. /sandbox: Run Claude in a sandbox with file and network isolation.

20. /voice: Activate voice input and hold the space bar to speak your prompts.

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ECP NetHappenings Tether has frozen $3.3 billion across 7,268 wallets

THIS IS WHY WE BITCOIN

AND DON’T DO SHITCOINS

ESSAY

Sweep @0xSweep
https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2048026064228638964

Tether has frozen $3.3 billion across 7,268 wallets and they just added $344 million more

On April 23, 2026 Tether froze $344 million in USDT across two Tron wallets in coordination with the US Treasury and OFAC, tied to sanctions enforcement against Iran

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department “sanctioned several wallets linked to Iran” and would “trace the money Tehran desperately tries to move out of the country”

It’s the biggest single freeze in stablecoin history and it happened in one transaction

Whether the target deserved it or not is not the point, the point is that one company made $344 million vanish from two wallets without a judge, a warrant or an appeal and this was not the first time

Since 2023 Tether has blacklisted 7,268 wallets and frozen a combined $3.29 billion

In 2025 alone they froze $1.26 billion and permanently burned $698 million of it, meaning the original holders did not get their money back, the tokens were destroyed and new USDT was minted to wallets controlled by the government

Only 3.6% of blacklisted wallets ever got unfrozen

33.7% of the addresses had zero balance when they were frozen, which means Tether is freezing the wallets that received the money, not the ones that stole it and most of the time the innocent person holding the money ends up losing it

The mechanism is one line of code called addBlackList that only Tether can call

There is no court order, no appeal process, no warning and once the function executes all your USDT transfers revert at the block level

This works on every chain Tether deploys to, Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Avalanche, TON, Celo and Cosmos

Even cold wallets get frozen, offline hardware does not protect you because the freeze happens on the smart contract, not on your device

Tether also has a second function called DestroyBlackFunds that burns your tokens and mints new ones to a government wallet and once they use it the tokens are gone forever

Paolo Ardoino said “USDT is not a safe haven for illicit activity” which sounds reasonable until you read Tether’s own Terms of Service

Section 8.15 says Tether can freeze your tokens “as required by applicable law or where Tether, in its sole discretion, determines it is prudent to do so”

Which means whenever they want

Tether works with 340 law enforcement agencies across 65 countries and has helped process 2,300 investigations

In April 2025 a Texas firm called Riverstone Consultancy sued Tether after it froze $45 million of their money at the request of the Bulgarian Police and the suit alleges Tether bypassed every legal procedure required

A foreign police force can freeze an American company’s balance through Tether before a single court has reviewed the case

You hold a dollar token issued by an unaudited company legally based in El Salvador that can erase your balance on request from any of 340 agencies in 65 countries and the only thing required is one function call

The banks you avoid needs a court order, an appeal process and an FDIC insurance claim to freeze your account

The stablecoin that replaced them needs none of those things.

ECP NetHappenings President Day 1000s Protest Trump Musk

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On Presidents Day, thousands of Americans nationwide protested against the Trump-Musk administration.

The felon in the White House just banned the use of the word felon while inside the White House.

BROLIGARCHY

“We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 6, 1941

Republicans, are a threat to our safety and national security.
This is a coup, do not obey in advance.

@RepMarcyKaptur 
Where does the accumulated debt of this country come from? It comes from Republican Presidents going back to Ronald Reagan.
3/4 of the accumulated debt of this country is due to Republican Presidents who didn’t pay for their spending—so much for Republican’s being the party of fiscal responsibility.

SECURITY — AMERICANS AGAINST THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

NEXT TIME A REPUBLICAN TELLS YOU THAT “SOCIAL SECURITY IS BROKE,” REMIND THEM THAT PRES. BUSH “BORROWED” $1.37 TRILLION OF SOCIAL SECURITY SURPLUS REVENUE TO PAY FOR HIS TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH AND HIS WAR IN IRAQ… AND NEVER PAID IT BACK.

Goldman Sachs reported owning $1.558 billion worth of BlackRock and Fidelity Bitcoin ETFs — MacroScope

Trump Media authorizes investing in crypto assets.

KEEPING SILENT WILL NOT PROTECT YOU
CALL YOUR CONGRESS PEOPLE EVERY DAY
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member ENTER ZIP CODE

About a Third of Project 2025 Has Already Been Implemented

A conversation with Adrienne Cobb, who is tracking objectives agency by agency.
https://heatmap.news/politics/project-2025-tracker

“DOGE wanted access to SSA’s sensitive files, and the acting commissioner wouldn’t give it, and she was replaced,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.
“There is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is.”

Follow Justin Wolfers from UMich for actual fact-based takes on the situation: just 89,000 recipients of social security over 99, in a country of 330 million. Which is about the number you would expect! We have that many old people. It is not fraud.
And here’s the number of RECIPIENTS of social security in each age bucket with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by @elonmusk.


@RBReich
813 US billionaires held a record $6.72 trillion in wealth at the end of 2024.
The bottom 50% of Americans held roughly $3.9 trillion in wealth.
When 813 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.

JOE LUBIN

ALERT: @LeaderJohnThune just introduced a bill to permanently repeal the estate tax.
He says he’s doing it for farmers. But only the 50 biggest farming operations in America paid ANY estate tax in 2020.
It really amounts to a $2.7 TRILLION tax handout for billionaires.
Wow.

Judd Legum @JuddLegum
1. OSHA has ordered the digital and physical destruction of 18 publications on workplace safety practices, according to an email obtained by Popular Information.
The email says the publications have been removed from the web and tells staff that physical copies should be “disposed of or recycled”

Trump Official Destroying USAID Secretly Met With Christian Nationalists Abroad in Defiance of U.S. Policy
Marocco has leadership roles at both the State Dept. and USAID — two agencies that sidelined him during the first Trump administration after he was accused of undermining U.S. foreign policy.
This time, he answers to few besides Trump himself.
https://www.propublica.org/article/usaid-peter-marocco-state-department-bosnia-serbia-diplomacy-trump-foreign-policy

Big Balls wants to see your tax returns.

Weird that we can’t see the President’s tax returns but a bunch of Peter Thiel’s teenage Nazis can rummage around in ours.

Wellfare Queen Shitler All seven of Elon Musk’s companies — X, xAI, Neuralink, Starlink, the Boring Company, Tesla and SpaceX —have netted a combined $20 billion in US government contracts and subsidies, according to the Financial Times.

How Elon Musk is benefitting from his role at DOGE.
He is targeting agencies that have investigated his companies or could impede his plans to including banking at X.

“The endgame here seems to be controlling every single apparatus of the federal government directly out of the White House. And that’s just never been how we’ve understood executive power,” says Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown.

Eggs and coffee around 20 percent more expensive. Airplanes crashing. Mass layoffs. Tariffs. Data breaches. Shutting down energy projects. Letting food and medicine rot. Either they are really shitty at helping you, or you are not the one they want to help. @brianschatz

FDA EMPLOYEES REVIEWING MUSK’S NEURALINK BRAIN IMPLANT WERE REMOVED IN DOGE FIRINGS – SOURCES
Who’s gonna trust Neuralink now?

To summarize: Elon Musk, in his government capacity, went into the FAA and fired hundreds of air traffic controllers. Now two weeks later, Elon Musk, in his capacity as CEO of SpaceX, is in the FAA looking to privatize the very jobs he eliminated

Silicon Valley billionaire and douchebag venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a Trump donor, openly argues in support of oligarchy.
Anti-Christ Andreesen is wrong. Yes, he is. One element is that the rulers are constantly propagandizing, fueling division amongst the masses, to prevent them from organizing and people fall for it.
He says “democracy is always and everywhere fake”.
He thinks it’s good that (broligarchy) capitalist oligarchs like him rule the US.
Here is anti-christ Marc Andreesen – one of the many technocrats influencing Trump’s 2nd admin – discusses how he came to the conclusion that humanity is destined to be ruled by elites. These technocrats see themselves as the “counter-elites” to the progressives. https://x.com/DBrozeLiveFree/status/1891591178887266769

Since we’re on the topic of government waste, Donald Trump’s joyride around the Daytona 500 cost American taxpayers around $5,000,000. Elon Musk is running everything while Trump is distracted by shiny objects wasting your tax dollars.

BITCOIN –> Texas Senate holds public hearing on Strategic Bitcoin Reserve legislation: “Bitcoin has become a recognized asset in the financial markets.”

TRUMP MEDIA HAS AUTHORISED BITCOIN AND CRYPTO PURCHASES – BLOOMBERG

EDUCATION –> Mark your calendars! #PSW25 is coming next week, Feb 24–28, 2025! Join us in celebrating public schools & the amazing educators, staff, parents, and school board members who support students every day.

If Vance hoped to persuade his audience, rather than simply insult it, he failed. Indeed, his speech backfired spectacularly, convincing many listeners that America itself is now a threat to Europe. In the throng outside the conference hall, a prominent German politician told me: “That was a direct assault on European democracy.” A senior diplomat said: “It’s very clear now, Europe is alone.” When I asked him if he now regarded the US as an adversary, he replied: “Yes.” https://www.ft.com/content/11f121f9-391c-4597-93f7-f12894e1b79d

—> Tether Co-Founder Is Working on Yield-Bearing Stablecoin Rival: BBG

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Drug Trafficker Maximilien de Hoop Cartier

Purported member of the Cartier family and five Colombian nationals charged for their roles in international money laundering and narcotics conspiracies.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “The charges brought today demonstrate this Office’s commitment to prosecuting international drug traffickers and piercing complicated money laundering networks seeking to exploit the U.S financial system. As alleged, Maximilien de Hoop Cartier, Leonardo de Jesus Zuluage Duque, Erica Milena Lopez Ortiz, and Felipe Estrada Echeverry were members of a network that laundered millions of dollars’ worth of drug trafficking proceeds using cryptocurrency and the U.S. financial system. Cartier is additionally alleged to have committed a series of financial offenses while working with this money laundering network that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of unlawful transactions. I commend the efforts of our law enforcements partners and the career prosecutors from this Office who work tirelessly to investigate and disrupt these money laundering and drug trafficking networks. We will continue to relentlessly protect the U.S. financial system from exploitation.”

…. conspiring to commit money laundering based on their alleged participation in a network that laundered millions in Tether (a stablecoin connected to the U.S. dollar), which constituted the proceeds of drug trafficking, through the U.S. to Colombia.  CARTIER is also charged with money laundering, bank fraud, engaging in a monetary transaction in property derived from bank fraud, and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business based on CARTIER’s system of U.S.-based shell companies and bank accounts that he used to operate an unlicensed over-the-counter cryptocurrency exchange.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/purported-member-cartier-family-and-five-colombian-nationals-charged-their-roles

The Cartier brand was family-owned until 1964, when grandson Pierre passed away and his heirs decided to sell the business.

The Cartier name is still making headlines today, but in a different medium. Instead of master jeweler, Maximilien de Hoop Cartier is producing fine beverages.