From Bitcoin Core to the Trump Cabinet: Unraveling Epstein, Peter Thiel, and Putin’s Cryptocurrency Power Network
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From Bitcoin Core to the Trump Cabinet: Unraveling Epstein, Peter Thiel, and Putin’s Cryptocurrency Power Network
Even though Epstein is no longer alive, Silicon Valley’s ideological resistance to regulation—and the dark, unaccountable influence of crypto politics on democratic elections—remain among his most destructive legacies.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: Byline Times
Translated by: TechFlow
Original Link:In Putin’s Orbit: The Crypto Politics of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel
TechFlow Intro: This article reveals how Jeffrey Epstein leveraged his intricate international network to thrust cryptocurrency into the heart of geopolitics. Drawing on recently disclosed emails, it traces the complex web connecting Epstein, Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and senior Russian officials. Epstein not only advised Russia to “leapfrog” into a restructured financial system using Bitcoin but also injected critical funding into Blockstream at a pivotal moment to sustain Bitcoin Core development—and deeply embedded himself in Thiel’s venture capital firm. These early crypto-political maneuvers are now profoundly shaping global democratic elections and struggles for state power through figures like J.D. Vance—constituting Epstein’s most covert and destructive legacy.
In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched its first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into space, the Western world was caught unprepared by a technological and cultural revolution that had gone largely unnoticed for a decade.
In a 2013 email, Jeffrey Epstein invoked the “Sputnik” metaphor to a senior Russian official, stating: “Russia is ahead in finance—and the same could happen now.” He argued that Russia should not merely imitate Silicon Valley and chase Microsoft, Apple, and Google, but instead achieve a “leapfrog development of global society” by “reinventing the 21st-century financial system” through a new kind of currency and securitization.
The Russian official was Sergey Belyakov. After graduating from the FSB (Federal Security Service) spy academy, Belyakov served as a senior advisor to Oleg Deripaska—one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal oligarchs and international proxies. Deripaska himself was a close collaborator of both Epstein and Peter Mandelson, a Labour Party colleague. By 2013, Belyakov had become Deputy Minister of Economic Development of Russia.
Epstein reminded Belyakov that he had helped build America’s derivatives market in the 1970s—a precursor to “more advanced, disruptive securitization schemes made possible by today’s technology.”
Epstein insisted that Russia possessed “unique advantages” for executing the “grand vision” of “creating a new global currency… far larger than any single government project ever conceived—and at its core, not difficult to implement.”
He had reason to believe his words would be heard at the highest levels.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, Epstein revealed: “Putin asked me to attend an economic conference in St. Petersburg. I declined. If he wants to meet, he must set aside genuine dedicated time and privacy.”
Caption: Clues to Epstein’s Kremlin connections
This was no idle boast. Epstein shared this information with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak—who met Putin in person just weeks later and could easily verify the claim through Kremlin channels.
In January 2014, Thorbjørn Jagland—then Secretary General of the Council of Europe—wrote to Epstein saying he planned to meet the Russian president in Sochi. Epstein instructed Jagland to “explain to Putin that there should be a sophisticated Russian version of Bitcoin,” calling it “the most advanced financial instrument globally.”
This is the lens through which to understand the rest of the crypto network built around Epstein, Vladimir Putin, Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon.
Social Capital
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and fellow core member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” alongside Elon Musk, is an ardent crypto enthusiast who values cryptocurrency’s capacity to provide alternatives to government-controlled fiat currencies—declaring, “Bitcoin is what PayPal should have been.”
He had long been a target of Epstein’s.
As early as 2012, Epstein received an email from fintech entrepreneur Ian Osborne suggesting they “grab a drink with Peter Thiel,” calling him “the best person to study money” and linking him to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
In 2013, Epstein urged former Israeli minister Ehud Barak to “spend real time with Peter Thiel.”
By July 2014, Thiel and Epstein were exchanging emails about Bitcoin regulation at the New York Stock Exchange. In September that year, Epstein hosted back-to-back meetings with Thiel and William Burns—the then-Deputy Secretary of State under the Obama administration and current CIA Director.
By 2015, Epstein proposed Thiel as one of the people Belyakov should meet. Acting on Epstein’s suggestion, Belyakov reached out directly to Thiel, who instructed his executive assistant to schedule an in-person meeting for July 2015.
Epstein had multiple interests here. First, cryptocurrency. MIT emails show Joi Ito solicited and accepted donations from Epstein—donations that, after the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed, helped pay salaries for Bitcoin Core developers. Another email thread shows Epstein participated in Blockstream’s 2014 seed round—an infrastructure company developing Bitcoin technologies—and raised his allocation from $50,000 to $500,000 after Joi Ito requested additional shares in the oversubscribed deal.
But just as Thiel was interested in blockchain-based currencies, surveillance, and data systems like Palantir, Epstein joined in—investing $40 million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures. According to Ehud Barak, Thiel and Epstein “co-owned” the firm and jointly invested in the Israeli surveillance technology company Carbyne.
(Peter Thiel’s spokesperson later denied this, stating Epstein was merely a “limited partner [LP].”)
As Epstein and Thiel aligned financially, their political orientations converged too. Both were unusually early and crucial supporters of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. A brief exchange in their emails captures the tone of their relationship. Epstein wrote to Peter Thiel: “I love your exaggeration about Trump—that’s not lying,” then suggested Thiel “come see me in the Caribbean.”
Thiel broke ranks with most of Silicon Valley, publicly endorsed Trump, and poured millions into pro-Trump super PACs. Epstein’s correspondence shows he closely tracked polling between Trump and Hillary Clinton, campaign staff appointments, and nominations related to Bitcoin and fintech.
At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Thiel used Trump’s coronation platform to denounce “financial bubbles” and praise “new currencies”—later telling the audience that Bitcoin could serve as “China’s financial weapon” or a hedge against the dollar’s reserve status.
As Russia’s interference in the U.S. election escalated via massive social media campaigns and the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails, Epstein hosted a lunch at his New York townhouse attended by Trump supporters Thiel and Tom Barrack—and Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s seasoned, Kremlin-aligned Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
After Churkin’s sudden death in 2017, Epstein emailed Thiel: “My Russian ambassador friend died. Life is short—eat dessert first.”
“Brexit Is Just the Beginning”
Epstein was a frequent visitor to the UK—not only due to his ties with Ghislaine Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten—but also because he closely monitored British finance and politics.
In recently disclosed documents and emails, he viewed the UK’s June 2016 vote to leave the EU as both a political reshuffle and a financial opportunity—one that could be shorted financially and leveraged politically. As he wrote to Peter Thiel amid the referendum chaos: “Brexit is just the beginning.”
To advance this broader agenda, Epstein devoted substantial time and intellectual resources—not only to his dealings in Silicon Valley and Russia—but also to a major initiative led by Steve Bannon: former Trump campaign manager, White House Chief of Staff, Breitbart publisher, and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica. At the time, Bannon had just lost his White House post and was seeking a new role.
He found his opening in 2017 with “The Movement”—a pan-European populist “movement” initially founded by allies including Nigel Farage’s partner Laure Ferrari and People’s Party leader Mischaël Modrikamen, and originally led by Bannon’s close associate Nigel Farage.
Registered in Brussels, the group’s mission was to unite “populist and conservative movements across Europe” to defend “national sovereignty” and “effective national borders.”
Behind the scenes, Jeffrey Epstein became Bannon’s financier and strategist for this movement—providing financial advice on evading regulatory oversight, arranging travel and accommodation, and introducing key European figures.
During the turbulent Brexit transition period—while Theresa May’s government struggled to devise a Brexit plan acceptable to right-wing Brexiteers—Bannon flew to the UK to organize opposition forces.
In 2018, Bannon told Epstein he was meeting Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Jacob Rees-Mogg to orchestrate their effort to oust Theresa May. Writer Michael Wolff wrote to Epstein, identifying him as the intermediary between Boris Johnson and leadership challengers.
Yet the UK was merely one stop in Bannon’s international populist project. He soon texted Epstein about his broader European ambitions, claiming: “My advisory roles now cover the Front National, Salvini’s League, Germany’s AfD, the Swiss People’s Party, Orban, Terra Lliure, Farage—the May European Parliament elections—we can grow from 92 seats to 200—blocking any crypto legislation or anything else we want.”
By the time Theresa May was replaced by Boris Johnson in 2019, Bannon exulted: “May is gone… We truly crushed them… We’re unstoppable.”
Even then, cryptocurrency never left the agenda. Bannon affirmed: “Cryptocurrency is money; blockchain is Internet 2.0.”
The Legacy of Crypto-Politics
The UK left the EU in 2020. Epstein was arrested and subsequently died in prison. Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) was supplanted by his more domestically focused Reform UK. Yet the lessons about fintech—and its capacity to reshape or subvert democracy—did not vanish.
When Nathan Gill—a close ally of Farage, former UKIP Member of the European Parliament, and Reform UK’s Welsh leader—was arrested in September 2021 on suspicion of accepting pro-Russian bribes, he was actually en route to a Kremlin-backed forum on Russia’s DEG electronic voting system.
He was scheduled to deliver a speech titled “The same technology empowering our cryptocurrencies will transform how we vote,” explicitly linking blockchain to electoral infrastructure.
Subsequently, Farage’s Reform UK became the first UK political party to solicit cryptocurrency donations via an overseas processor not fully regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)—precisely the kind of opaque funding channel anti-corruption experts had warned about.
Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—whose Ohio Senate campaign received heavy backing from Thiel and who echoes Thiel’s grievances against the “Deep State” and globalism—is now central to Trump’s agenda as Vice President and the clearest internal advocate of national conservatism within the administration.
Vance’s rise embeds Thiel’s worldview into the executive branch: a politics that treats technology—notably surveillance firms like Palantir, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies—as instruments of state power and civilizational competition, rather than neutral infrastructure.
Measured against Epstein’s 2013 Sputnik email to Moscow—urging Russia to “reinvent the 21st-century financial system” by creating “a new global currency”—every facet of the crypto-political project is laid bare in Epstein’s files.
Though Epstein is gone, the cryptocurrency infrastructure he helped rescue, Silicon Valley’s ideological resistance to regulation, and the shadowy, unaccountable influence of crypto-politics on democratic elections remain among his most destructive legacies.
Updated February 5, 2026, to include Thiel’s representative’s comment on Epstein’s role in Valar Ventures.
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