Editorial Hello
Howdy everyone. Welcome to Day 2 of the great AI-assisted compilation experiment. Today’s edition wasn’t as frictionless as I had hoped, but hopefully a few “vibe coding” refinements should ease the process by next week. As a reminder, this editorial bit is human written.
Today’s lead story is that a former Circle engineer is suing the Trump family and Steve Witkoff, alleging that their World Liberty Financial (WLF) stablecoin business violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause. That’s the provision of the US Constitution designed to prevent foreign governments from buying influence over American officials through gifts, payments, titles or other financial benefits. The lawsuit centres on two UAE-linked transactions, including the use of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin to facilitate a $2 billion investment in Binance.
Readers, however, may remember that WLF is already embroiled in a separate, substantial lawsuit brought by Justin Sun, the Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire and founder of the TRON blockchain. That dispute concerns WLF's decision to freeze his WLFI tokens, and it has escalated into competing lawsuits.
None of this is good. However, I can’t shake the admittedly crazy thought that the brazen grifting in plain sight serves a secondary purpose, whether intentionally or not.
Consider the following: If a new Bretton Woods agreement were to be structured today, how would international powers go about it? Could it really, in the digital era, be done the way it was done in 1944? Or would you need the core structures beta-tested and market-tested within the constructs of some sort of digital sandbox, with real but limited capital allocated to the experiment?
More on where I’m going with this in the “deep thoughts” section beyond the paywall:
