As I am sure most of you are aware of by now, earlier today the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice announced that they have reached a plea agreement with Binance and it's CEO CZ for breaking anti-money laundering laws brought forth by the CFTC. Purportedly helping Hamas finance their operations via their exchange. The plea deal entails that CZ pays a $50M dollar fine personally to the CFTC and Binance pays more than $4.3B in fines. The largest fine ever levied by the Justice Department on a single corporate entity.

When you take a step back and survey the field, this move makes sense and is a win-win for all parties involved. The market is eagerly awaiting the approval of the spot bitcoin ETFs that have filed and are sitting on the desk of the SEC. The SEC's comments to date have been clear that their biggest worry at the moment is "off-shore" exchanges manipulating the price of bitcoin. Binance is the largest exchange in the world and has successfully operated outside of the purview of the United States government until today. With this plea agreement, the off-shore price manipulation problem is solved, CZ is able to get away with a relative slap on the wrist, and the Treasury and the Department of Justice are able to LARP about how they're protecting consumers at the end of the day.

The result of all of this will be the spot bitcoin ETFs getting the green light, regulatory enforcement precedent that will be used to pressure companies in the space to make the experiences of their users much worse, and CZ getting a clean exit back stage where he will likely operate Binance from the shadows and reap the massive benefits that will come with the next bull market without spending the rest of his life locked in a cage.

This is a classic misdirection move that comes with the corrupt pay-to-play mechanisms that have become all too common in our fiat dominated world. The Treasury and the Department of Justice don't actually care about protecting consumers. What they care about is the perception that they are actually doing something beneficial by "taking care of Binance". Nothing makes this clearer than the fact that they have focused in on "terrorist financing" as the activity that they are preventing. If the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice truly cared about the end consumer they would have lambasted Binance for leading their users to financial slaughter by incentivizing them to burn their hard earned money on altcoin speculation. The focus on "terrorist financing" allows them to pretend that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the medium of exchange of choice for terrorists, which will enable them to single out and scrutinize the industry even more moving forward.

This is a pure projection play because if the Treasury or the DoJ actually cared about preventing money laundering and terrorist financing they would investigate themselves. It is very convenient that they are able to pick on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies when we live in a world in which Jeffrey Epstein's client list is withheld from the public, there is no accountability for the $100B+ in taxpayer money that has been siphoned off to Ukraine, politicians are currently running 2024 election campaigns with dollars overtly stolen from FTX users, and the Pentagon just failed yet another audit and can't account for $3.8 TRILLION of military equipment. $3.8 TRILLION is 5.34 times larger than the current bitcoin market cap. And that is only one part of the government. We haven't even mentioned the black box that is the "Inflation Reduction Act", or the COVID PPP loans, or the black box budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. If these people actually cared about money laundering or protecting US consumers they would be aggressively investigating themselves.

An introspective investigation is obviously off the table. The only move these scummy decrepit dying institutions have left is projecting their own guilt on others and manifesting scapegoats that can lead people away from the scent of their rotting corrupt corpses. And that is exactly what we saw today with the Binance plea deal. The Treasury and DoJ get to make it seem like they are doing good work, CZ and Binance get to live another day, and the cronies at BlackRock get the cover they need to open up the floodgates to their ETFs.

Stay frosty out there, freaks.

Final thought...

It's crazy how lazy they're getting.