Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank. Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.” In an interview with Steve Bannon months before his death, Epstein revealed that he had purchased a property in New Mexico—the Zorro Ranch—as a research facility to attract the nation’s top scientists from the former “Manhattan Project” campus in nearby Los Alamos after the U.S. government cut funding for high-energy physics at the end of the Cold War. “In our world, the physical world, there were things that were just unexplainable,” he told Bannon. “I wanted to see if we could build tools so others smarter than me could help investigate it.” The millions of documents published by the Justice Department last month reveal Epstein’s disturbing fascination with eugenic science, expressed through research linked to the intelligence services of multiple governments. Epstein covertly negotiated access to dangerous and ethically dubious technology, between financial elites, often alluding to grand ambitions for reshaping both the human genome and the world order.