In 2025, Iran crypto militant proxies quietly pushed more than $2 billion through digital assets while most of the market obsessed over ETFs and memecoins. That money didn’t go into yield farms or NFTs; it helped bankroll groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis while routing around US-led sanctions. At the same time, on-chain illicit activity hit a record $154 billion, turning the “crypto is for criminals” talking point from lazy FUD into an uncomfortable partial truth the industry has to actually deal with.
This is not happening in a vacuum. Russia, North Korea, and Chinese money laundering networks have all figured out that blockchains are great for moving value in the open, at scale, and often faster than regulators can respond. While traders watch daily price swings and argue on X about the next Bitcoin target, a parallel financial system for sanctions evasion, cybercrime, and organized fraud has been quietly professionalizing. If you care about where this market is heading long term, you can’t just shrug and say, “But illicit activity is a small percentage.”
Zoom out, and the pattern is clear: geopolitics, cyber operations, and crypto rails are converging. From Iran’s militant proxies to Russia’s ruble-pegged stablecoin experiment and North Korean hacking crews, state-linked actors are now some of the most committed power users of public blockchains. The question is no longer whether crypto is part of geopolitical conflict, but how regulators, exchanges, and serious builders respond without breaking the parts of this technology that actually matter. That same tension is already shaping everything from regulatory debates on privacy to new approaches to on-chain surveillance and compliance.
How Iran Uses Crypto to Power Its Militant Proxies
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not your typical crypto whale. According to Chainalysis data, IRGC-linked entities moved more than $2 billion in crypto in 2025 alone, primarily to route around sanctions and keep militant proxies funded. That figure only reflects entities designated by the US, which means the real number is likely higher once you factor in front companies, shell exchanges, and yet-to-be-flagged wallets. For Tehran, crypto isn’t a speculative asset class; it’s an operational tool sitting in the same toolbox as oil smuggling, front banks, and gray-zone cyber operations.
The basic playbook is straightforward but effective. Proxy groups and sanctioned organizations open or control wallets, receive funds from intermediaries, then cash out through OTC brokers, regional exchanges, and informal value transfer systems. Unlike traditional correspondent banking, there is no need to ask permission from intermediaries who might freeze transfers. On-chain visibility makes tracing possible, but with enough intermediaries and cross-chain hops, attribution becomes a race between analytics firms and the people paid to stay one step ahead. While traders fixate on whether Bitcoin can avoid another nasty sell-off, large chunks of volume in certain regions are moving for reasons that have nothing to do with market sentiment.
Iran’s crypto strategy also has a signaling component. Moving money over open networks is a demonstration that sanctions regimes are porous and that alternative rails exist beyond SWIFT and dollar settlement. When militant proxies and designated entities can still access funding through digital assets, it weakens the perceived leverage of traditional financial restrictions. That doesn’t mean sanctions no longer work, but it does mean they are no longer the single-point chokers they once were. Over time, this dynamic forces policymakers to take crypto infrastructure as seriously as shipping lanes and bank messaging systems.
The $2 Billion Question: What Does “Militant Proxy Funding” Look Like On-Chain?
When you hear “$2 billion in crypto,” it’s easy to imagine a single giant wallet and a few blockbuster transactions. The reality is messier and more distributed. IRGC-linked proxies typically rely on a web of addresses that receive relatively modest flows individually but add up to large sums over time. Some wallets route donations and covert funds through centralized exchanges, others through DEXs and cross-chain bridges, and still others through P2P networks where KYC is aspirational at best. Much like North Korean hacking crews, these actors blend into normal traffic, using the same infrastructure everyone else does—just with more operational discipline.
In practice, this funding can support a mix of activities: procurement of dual-use goods, payments to facilitators and smugglers, support for propaganda arms, and in some cases direct operational costs. Crypto’s global, always-on liquidity makes it convenient for moving money across borders without waiting for banking hours or the goodwill of correspondent banks. The overlap with broader illicit flows is significant—some of the same OTC networks that help launder stolen funds from hacks or scams also process transactions tied to militant proxies. That interconnectedness is exactly what Chainalysis and similar firms try to map when they publish their crypto crime reports each year.
While $2 billion is large in absolute terms, it still represents a small fraction of total on-chain activity in 2025, which was dominated by trading, speculation, and increasingly by institutional flows such as spot Bitcoin ETFs. The real issue is not percentage share but concentration of risk. When the same rails power both legitimate capital markets and sanctioned militant networks, regulators respond with blunt tools that often hit retail users and compliant businesses first. That tension is already visible in mounting regulatory pressure on privacy tools, mixers, and high-risk exchanges.
Why Iran Prefers Crypto Over Old-School Sanctions Evasion
Iran has a long history of working around sanctions using every analog trick in the book—front companies, barter deals, oil swaps, and helpful intermediaries in less-scrutinized jurisdictions. Crypto doesn’t replace those methods; it augments them. Digital assets make it easier to move value in smaller, more frequent increments without triggering the same traditional banking alarms. They also reduce dependence on specific jurisdictions or shell banks that might be pressured or shut down, creating a more flexible and resilient sanctions-evasion stack.
Unlike cash or gold, crypto can be moved across borders in minutes without physically transporting anything. Unlike standard bank transfers, it doesn’t require alignment from multiple financial intermediaries along the way. That said, pseudonymity is not anonymity, and Iran knows it. The reliance on intermediaries—some obscure local exchanges, some OTC desks, some corruption-friendly actors—has only grown. Many of these intermediaries operate in the same gray zones that show up in stories about Russian crypto regulation and cross-border capital flows, where national policy and private incentives blur into each other.
There is also an ideological appeal. Using crypto lets Iran and its proxies claim they are building or joining an alternative financial system separate from the Western-dominated order. This plays well in propaganda and with sympathetic audiences that already see crypto as a tool for resisting centralized control. The irony, of course, is that most of the tools that make this possible—major blockchains, analytics platforms, regulated exchanges—are still built, hosted, or overseen from the same jurisdictions Iran is trying to evade. But geopolitics has never been known for its consistency.
How Much More Is Hidden Beyond US Sanctions Designations?
The $2 billion figure comes with a massive caveat: it is based on US sanctions designations and known IRGC-linked entities. That means it’s a floor, not a ceiling. Any wallets that have not yet been formally linked to Iranian proxies, any front organizations still flying under the radar, and any activity routed through non-US-designated entities simply don’t show up in that total. Given how slowly sanctions lists tend to update compared to on-chain activity, it’s reasonable to assume a sizeable gap between what’s known and what’s actually happening on the network.
Sanctions designations also lag by design. Authorities typically need a high evidentiary standard before naming an entity, especially in politically sensitive cases tied to terrorism or state actors. By the time a wallet or service provider is blacklisted, attentive actors have often already rotated to new infrastructure. Combine this with the global nature of crypto and the uneven enforcement of rules across jurisdictions, and you end up with a persistent cat-and-mouse game. The numbers we see are the parts of the iceberg above the waterline.
This undercounting is not unique to Iran; it also applies to Russian, North Korean, and other sanctioned actors. It mirrors the broader problem of tracking capital in a system where users can spin up new addresses at will and cross-chain liquidity grows by the month. For anyone trying to assess systemic risk—from compliance teams at exchanges to institutions deciding whether to hold BTC on their balance sheets, like in recent corporate accumulation stories—the message is clear. Reported illicit volumes are informative, but no one should mistake them for a full picture.
Russia, North Korea, and the New Geography of Illicit Crypto
Iran’s use of crypto to fund militant proxies is part of a bigger pattern: sanctioned or adversarial states adapting web3 infrastructure faster than most regulators thought possible. Russia, under heavy financial pressure since 2022, has leaned into state-aligned stablecoins and friendly exchanges to keep money moving. North Korea has turned high-profile crypto hacks into a core revenue stream, with 2025 marking its most successful year yet in terms of value stolen. These are not fringe experiments at the edges of the ecosystem; they are now major components of total illicit on-chain volume.
According to Chainalysis, overall illicit crypto activity surged 162% year-on-year in 2025, hitting at least $154 billion. Much of that growth was driven by sanctioned jurisdictions scaling their on-chain operations instead of retreating under pressure. Russia, in particular, accounted for the largest share of illicit activity, partly thanks to a ruble-pegged token that turned into a de facto state-sanctioned laundering rail. North Korea, meanwhile, kept refining its hack-and-launder pipeline, making each new campaign harder to disrupt than the last.
From a market perspective, this “dark liquidity” doesn’t move prices the way ETF flows or macro news do, but it absolutely shapes regulatory and institutional behavior. It feeds into decisions around stricter KYC, more aggressive blacklisting, and closer scrutiny of any service touching high-risk jurisdictions. As we’ve seen around major macro events like the US CPI releases and Fed meetings, regulators are increasingly treating crypto as part of the core financial system rather than a quirky sideshow. Illicit activity at this scale forces that shift even faster.
Russia’s Ruble-Pegged Stablecoin and the Rise of Sanctioned Rails
Russia’s introduction of a ruble-pegged token, reportedly moving at least $93 billion in transactions, was less a DeFi experiment and more a geopolitical statement. By pushing a state-aligned stablecoin, Moscow effectively created a parallel settlement layer that could reach into the global crypto ecosystem while staying anchored in its own currency. The token’s volume became the single biggest driver behind the surge in sanctioned entities’ on-chain activity, dwarfing the impact of isolated hacks or scam rings in other regions.
This stablecoin infrastructure offers Russia several advantages. It normalizes on-chain payments within its own economy, it gives friendly or opportunistic intermediaries a standardized rail for moving value, and it makes sanctions enforcement more complex by blending domestic uses with cross-border flows. For analytics firms and regulators, separating legitimate ruble payments from sanction-evasion routes is a non-trivial challenge. That’s especially true when liquidity flows through a mix of compliant and non-compliant venues, often in jurisdictions where enforcement is uneven at best.
More broadly, Russia’s experiment shows what happens when a major power decides to use crypto rails as an integral part of its sanctions response, not just a side hustle. It foreshadows a world where more states could issue semi-official tokens or align with specific stablecoins as part of their financial strategy. For market participants, this adds yet another layer of complexity when evaluating counterparty risk, especially in cross-border trades or when interacting with lesser-known venues that might quietly plug into these rails.
North Korean Hackers: From One-Off Heists to Industrial-Scale Theft
North Korea’s relationship with crypto has evolved from opportunistic hacks into something much closer to an industrial operation. In 2025 alone, DPRK-linked groups were responsible for roughly $2 billion in stolen funds, setting a new annual record. These were not simple rug pulls or phishing scams; they involved sophisticated social engineering, supply-chain compromises, DeFi protocol exploits, and multi-stage laundering pipelines. Each successful campaign not only refills the regime’s coffers but also funds further development of offensive cyber capabilities.
The laundering side has grown just as advanced. North Korean crews have cycled through mixers, cross-chain bridges, lightly regulated exchanges, and P2P networks, constantly adapting as enforcement tightens. Each takedown or sanction on a service simply pushes activity to the next weak link. As a result, the same flows that start as hacked DeFi treasury funds can pass through some of the same networks used by Iran’s militant proxies or Russian-linked actors. Illicit crypto has become less about isolated national stories and more about a shared, global grey-market infrastructure.
For the broader ecosystem, this scale of theft does more than damage specific protocols or unlucky users. It erodes institutional trust, invites heavier-handed regulation, and complicates narratives around crypto as “neutral” infrastructure. When policymakers look at the mix of ETF-driven adoption on one side and DPRK-driven hacks on the other, they are understandably skeptical. That tension is already influencing how new products—whether tokenized assets, cross-chain bridges, or even emerging privacy layers like those being explored in Cardano’s Midnight architecture—are evaluated by regulators.
China’s Money Laundering Networks and the Professionalization of Crypto Crime
While Iran, Russia, and North Korea grab most of the headlines, Chinese money laundering networks (CMLNs) quietly became one of the dominant forces in crypto crime by 2025. These are not loosely organized Telegram groups; they are structured organizations offering “laundering-as-a-service” to anyone willing to pay. Building on models like Huione Guarantee, they provide a full menu of services: moving funds across borders, cashing out into local currencies, masking transaction origins, and even supplying the infrastructure to run large-scale fraud and scam operations.
This professionalization changes the nature of on-chain risk. Instead of one-off bad actors improvising flows, you get repeat players with dedicated operations teams, compliance shields, and tested playbooks for crossing regulatory boundaries. They are happy to service everyone from romance scammers and malware crews to sanctioned entities and militant proxies. In effect, they operate as the equivalent of shadow banks for the crypto era, just without the bland corporate logos and annual reports.
As these networks scale, they intersect more frequently with mainstream liquidity venues. Funds may pass through legit exchanges, OTC desks, and even protocols with strong reputations, briefly touching clean rails before moving back into the shadows. This is where analytics, KYC, and regulatory coordination either hold the line or fall behind. It is also where the industry’s internal contradictions surface: we want deep global liquidity and composability, but we also want to keep hostile states and organized crime out. Balancing those objectives is becoming more difficult by the quarter.
From Wallets to Wrenches: When Crypto Crime Turns Physical
For years, critics complained that crypto crime was “just numbers on a screen.” That’s no longer true, if it ever was. As digital assets have grown more valuable and more visible, the line between on-chain theft and real-world violence has thinned. Chainalysis and independent researchers have documented a sharp rise in physical attacks on crypto holders, kidnappings, and robberies where the goal is not stealing a watch but draining a wallet. In 2025, reported physical attacks and violent crypto robberies grew triple digits, a predictable outcome when people publicly flex seven-figure holdings tied to easily transferable keys.
That shift has important implications for how we think about crypto security. It’s no longer enough to worry about smart contract bugs or exchange insolvencies; users now have to consider whether their public on-chain footprint paints a target on their backs. “Wrench attacks”—forced transfers under physical threat—are no longer theoretical jokes but a recurring motif across multiple jurisdictions. At the same time, law enforcement is still catching up to these patterns, often treating such cases as one-off robberies rather than part of a broader, tech-enabled trend.
The connection between on-chain crime and real-world coercion goes beyond one-off robberies. Human trafficking operations, forced labor scams, and cross-border smuggling increasingly rely on crypto rails for payments and proceeds distribution. Many of those flows are funneled through the same laundering networks that handle North Korean hacks or Iran-linked transfers. As regulators debate how hard to crack down on privacy tools at events like the SEC’s privacy roundtables, they are doing so in a context where privacy is both a human right and a shield used by some of the worst actors in the ecosystem.
Why Public Wallet Exposure Is Now a Real-World Risk Factor
One of the more uncomfortable lessons of 2025 is that public wallet exposure is an underrated personal security risk. Many high-profile wrench attacks start from simple OSINT: a visible ENS name tied to a real identity, screenshots flexing PnL, NFTs associated with doxxed social accounts, or even on-chain analytics dashboards that make it trivial to see who holds what. Once a target is identified, attackers do not need advanced malware or zero-day exploits; they just have to find the human behind the keys and apply enough pressure.
This is a predictable side effect of the “social everything” culture in crypto, where people are encouraged to build public brands around their addresses, trading histories, and NFT collections. That same visibility which helps projects and influencers build audiences also gives criminals a curated list of who to target. Even basic operational security—separating public identities from high-value wallets, using multisig, avoiding unnecessary flexes—remains surprisingly rare among retail users.
From a systemic standpoint, this creates a feedback loop. As more high-profile attacks surface on social media, regulators feel increased pressure to “do something,” often pushing for tighter surveillance or restrictions that primarily affect law-abiding users. If the industry wants to avoid overreactions that stifle innovation, it has to take user safety seriously on its own terms. That includes better tooling, default privacy options, and more realistic user education, not just abstract sermons about “self-custody is responsibility.”
Human Trafficking, Coercion, and the Dark Side of On-Chain Transparency
Chainalysis and other investigators have highlighted growing links between on-chain flows and human trafficking operations, especially in regions where labor scams and forced work in fraud compounds have become widespread. Crypto plays multiple roles in these setups: it can be used to pay recruiters, collect scam proceeds from victims worldwide, and pay off corrupt officials or facilitators along the logistics chain. The same addresses that handle payouts to low-level workers may also interface with large laundering operations that bundle and move funds at scale.
On-chain transparency theoretically makes it easier to trace these flows, and in some cases it does help build strong evidentiary trails. But transparency doesn’t automatically equal enforcement. Many of the jurisdictions where trafficking-linked operations are based lack the capacity or political will to act decisively. Cross-border cooperation remains slow and patchy, giving criminals a significant time advantage.
For legitimate crypto businesses, the spread of this kind of activity is another reputational landmine. Exchanges and platforms that fail to invest in compliance and forensics risk becoming unintentional conduits for some of the worst abuses associated with digital assets. Those that lean into stronger controls and analytics, on the other hand, can both reduce risk and position themselves for a more regulated future. The same forces driving institutional adoption of Bitcoin as a macro asset—documented in coverage like long-term price outlooks—are also driving institutional expectations around compliance.
Why “Illicit Is Only a Small Share” Misses the Point
A common industry talking point is that illicit transactions make up only a small percentage of total crypto activity. Statistically, this is correct and Chainalysis goes out of its way to emphasize it. But focusing on percentages misses the material reality: $154 billion in illicit volume is systemically significant, even if it’s just a few percent of overall flows. That much money, moved by that many bad actors, is enough to shape regulation, drive enforcement priorities, and alter how the entire asset class is perceived by policymakers.
The analogy to traditional finance is instructive. Money laundering and fraud make up a tiny share of global banking volumes, yet AML and KYC rules dominate how banks operate. Crypto is on the same trajectory, just on an accelerated timeline. As more stories surface about sanctioned states, militant proxies, and violent crime using on-chain rails, the political space for “light-touch” regulation shrinks fast.
If the industry wants to keep permissionless innovation alive, it has to stop hiding behind percentage arguments and start engaging with the absolute scale of the problem. That means supporting credible analytics, building privacy tools that can coexist with compliance, and accepting that some business models—especially those built on looking the other way—won’t survive. The alternative is a future where only tightly surveilled, institutionally controlled versions of crypto thrive, and everything else gets pushed to the margins.
Regulators, Privacy, and the Future of On-Chain Enforcement
The collision between Iran’s crypto militant proxies, Russia’s stablecoin rails, North Korea’s hacking, and rising physical crime has dragged regulators into a space they barely understood a few years ago. Suddenly, crypto is not just a speculative asset class; it’s a live-wire intersection of national security, consumer protection, and financial stability. As a result, regulatory responses are moving from fragmented, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction experiments to more coordinated strategies that treat certain on-chain risks as global priorities. Privacy tools, high-risk exchanges, and cross-border stablecoin flows are all squarely in the crosshairs.
We are already seeing this in the form of tougher enforcement actions, more detailed guidance for VASPs, and political theater around “crypto and terrorism” every time a major incident hits the headlines. Privacy technologies face particular scrutiny. Efforts like the SEC’s privacy roundtable highlight just how hard it is to balance legitimate privacy needs with law enforcement imperatives, especially when state actors are clearly abusing open networks. Some regulators lean toward outright bans on privacy tools; others push for selective compromise, such as mandatory view keys or regulated front-ends.
Meanwhile, the industry’s own evolution complicates the picture. Institutional interest in digital assets—helped along by developments like longer-term Bitcoin outlooks for 2026—means more political capital is now tied up in making crypto “safe enough” to integrate into traditional finance. That pressure does not always align with the cypherpunk roots of the space, but ignoring it is not an option. The balance struck over the next few years will determine whether crypto remains meaningfully permissionless or ossifies into a more surveilled version of legacy finance.
Analytics Firms as Gatekeepers of Legitimacy
Whether people like it or not, companies like Chainalysis have become gatekeepers for what counts as “clean” versus “tainted” coins in much of the regulated crypto world. Their risk scores and address attributions are used by exchanges, custodians, and sometimes law enforcement to decide which funds move freely and which get frozen or reported. When reports show billions flowing through Iran’s militant proxies or Russia’s sanctioned rails, those findings don’t just sit on a blog; they feed directly into policy choices and internal risk models.
This gatekeeping role raises obvious concerns. Attribution is probabilistic, not perfect, and errors can have serious consequences for innocent users whose funds are mislabeled. There is also limited transparency into how certain determinations are made, creating a black-box dynamic that sits awkwardly in a space supposedly built on open ledgers and verifiability. Yet in the absence of better alternatives, most serious institutions are not going to ignore these tools; they are going to lean on them more heavily.
From one angle, this is the cost of playing in the same arena as nation-states and large financial institutions. If crypto wants access to deep global liquidity and mainstream adoption, it cannot avoid interacting with the compliance and risk frameworks those players bring. The challenge is ensuring that analytics power is checked by due process, competition, and some measure of accountability, rather than becoming an unchallengeable oracle that quietly defines who gets to use the financial system.
Privacy Tech After Iran, Russia, and DPRK
Every time a report highlights how much sanctioned activity flows through digital assets, privacy tools get dragged into the spotlight. Mixers, privacy coins, stealth addresses, and emerging privacy layers all face the same core accusation: they make it too easy for bad actors to hide. Developers counter that privacy is a fundamental right and a security necessity, especially in a world where public holdings can get you kidnapped. Both sides are correct, which is why the policy debate remains stuck in an uncomfortable stalemate.
Some projects are experimenting with design choices that aim to square this circle: privacy by default for users, combined with optional or regulated disclosure mechanisms for institutions and law enforcement with proper warrants. Concepts like view keys, selective disclosure proofs, and compliance-friendly privacy layers—echoed in discussions around networks like Cardano’s Midnight and upgrades such as Obscura-style privacy hardforks—are early attempts at this balance. None of them fully resolve the underlying political tension, but they at least acknowledge that “add a mixer and call it a day” is not a sustainable path.
In parallel, regulators will likely push for stricter obligations on venues that touch privacy-enhanced assets, from centralized exchanges to on-ramps and custodians. That doesn’t necessarily mean a total ban, but it does mean higher compliance costs and more friction for privacy-first users. The future of privacy in crypto will be determined less by clever cryptography alone and more by whether these tools can be framed as compatible with, rather than hostile to, the rule of law.
Exchanges, Compliance, and the Shrinking Room for “See No Evil”
Not so long ago, plenty of exchanges and OTC desks treated KYC and transaction monitoring as optional extras. Those days are ending quickly. As data piles up about Iran’s militant proxies, Russian rails, and DPRK hacks, regulators have a much easier time arguing that platforms failing to implement strong controls are effectively assisting sanctioned entities. High-profile enforcement actions and license withdrawals send a clear message: if you want to operate at scale, you have to take compliance seriously, even if that annoys your most privacy-maximalist users.
This shift is already visible in tighter licensing regimes across major hubs and in stories about regional players exiting markets with tougher rules, similar in tone to coverage of exchanges reacting to stricter oversight in places like Japan and the UAE. The pattern mirrors broader changes we’ve seen in topics like proof-of-reserves expectations: what started as a voluntary trust signal is becoming a baseline expectation. Over time, the difference between “regulated exchange” and “offshore casino” will become starker, and so will the associated risk profiles for users.
For serious builders and long-term investors, this is not entirely bad news. A more robust compliance environment, if implemented intelligently, can help reduce the share of flows driven by outright crime and hostile state actors, making the ecosystem more palatable to large pools of capital. The risk, of course, is that clumsy rules overshoot and crush useful experimentation. Navigating that edge will define which jurisdictions become real hubs and which end up as regulatory backwaters.
What’s Next
The rise of Iran’s crypto militant proxies, Russia’s sanctioned stablecoin rails, and North Korea’s industrialized hacking amounts to a simple truth: crypto is now infrastructure in geopolitical conflict, whether the industry likes it or not. That status will not disappear just because some investors would prefer to focus on halving cycles and ETF inflows. Instead, we should expect national security narratives, sanctions policy, and on-chain analytics to play an even larger role in shaping how this market evolves. In the same way that macro data and Fed policy drive risk assets, state behavior on-chain is becoming a core structural force.
For builders, investors, and everyday users, that means adjusting expectations. Compliance, surveillance, and policy fights around privacy will remain front and center, even as the market debates whether Bitcoin will see another major leg up in 2026. Tools that help ordinary users protect themselves—both from sophisticated on-chain crime and from basic physical threats—will matter just as much as the next yield innovation. The industry’s credibility will increasingly hinge on whether it can address the very real abuses of its infrastructure without surrendering the open, permissionless qualities that made crypto worth building in the first place.
The uncomfortable but necessary mindset shift is to stop treating illicit activity as a PR issue and start treating it as a design constraint. Protocols, apps, and businesses built in the next cycle will have to assume that hostile states, organized crime, and opportunistic attackers are all active users of the same rails. Designing for that reality—technically, economically, and politically—is the only way to avoid a future where crypto is either smothered by overregulation or written off as an ungovernable playground for the worst actors. Somewhere between those extremes is a more mature ecosystem, still open but far more resilient, where the benefits of transparent, programmable money outweigh the risks we’re seeing today.
