Empire

The Ghost Ledger is (Almost) Live

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The real Ghost Ledger that is.

The Clarity Act failed to pass cloture yesterday on the Senate floor.

The core idea behind the Clarity Act is to clearly define how the government would approach different types of cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects, and give specific roles to the regulatory agencies, including new authority for the CFTC to be a watchdog for crypto spot markets. — CoinDesk

Senator John Kennedy believes the bill isn’t dead. He said he wasn’t surprised by the vote, but that “it’s gonna have to wait until the lame duck session.”

It was unlikely that Democrats would approve anything that President Trump could point to as a victory this close to midterms, in spite of the fact that they essentially got all of the changes to the bill they asked for.

This bill does not specifically apply to Bitcoin, which in my article Bitcoin Brain, I defined as something of a blockchain red herring. This bill is about the rails underneath the coming financial system. It never mentions ISO 20022 (the messaging standard the banks have already moved onto) but it decides which tokens are securities under the SEC and which are digital commodities under the CFTC, which is the question the SEC and CFTC already answered for the ISO 20022 coins like XRP in a joint interpretation this March — this bill would write it into law.


Running a validator or staking to secure a network would not, on its own, count as a securities transaction. Exchanges couldn’t pay yield on stablecoins just sitting in your account, but rewards tied to actually using them would still be allowed. Clear rules of the road — the thing institutional money has been waiting on.

The SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have stated that they are moving forward with their own regulations and rules on the implementation of this technology into the financial system.

Adoption is inevitable.

Along with the ‘mainstreaming’ that is going on, certain influencers seem to have gotten the call that the time to inject this into the collective consciousness has arrived. Including Alex Jones. Alex famously states that he predicted 9/11. My question in response to that is, who gave him that information? He’s been a vessel for seeding information prior to significant events for decades, and now he has this to say:

This is ironic to me, as The Art of the Empire’s in-universe conspiracy podcaster, Dax Winters, interviewed a man who created a technology not dissimilar from the XRP Ledger. It happens in chapter 16 of The Ghost Ledger, book one of The Art of the Empire series.

In some ways, it feels like the book has either predicted this, or memed it into existence. Of course, I say that with all due humility.

And for those interested, the first draft of its anticipated sequel, Project Naked Sky, has been completed, with a launch date that may still make the end of the year. The surge in post-production work on the manuscript is partly to blame for the reduction in publishing on this site the past few days. 

Check out Dax Winters of The Dax Winters Experience interviewing Jonah Kaplan of SunChain Ledger from The Ghost Ledger for a little humor, and a breakdown of the possibilities offered by distributed ledger technology:

The Dax Winters Experience #1206: THE ALCHEMIST – Featuring Jonah Kaplan 

Dax leaned into the desk; fingers interlocked.

“Tonight’s conversation isn’t about Bitcoin. It’s not about Dogecoin. It’s not about your favorite meme token of the month. It’s about what happens after all that. When crypto doesn’t just interrupt the financial system, it becomes it.”

He tapped the desk lightly. No theatrics — just message.

“My guest tonight isn’t trying to build a fanbase. He’s trying to rewire the financial nervous system of the entire world. If he’s right, we’re looking at the end of capital bottlenecks, settlement delays, and debt as we know it. If he’s wrong… he’s just the smartest lunatic I’ve ever had on.”

He smiled faintly.

“Either way, you’re going to want to pay attention.”

The screen split.

On the left: Dax in perfect studio lighting, sharp and composed. On the right: a dim office space — a converted lab turned cryptographers sandbox, cluttered but functional, lit by half-watt fluorescents and the soft blink of diagnostic LEDs.

Jonah Kaplan looked like he’d been dragged off a quantum rail project mid-debug.

Faded hoodie. Wireframe glasses. Hair half-tied back. He was scribbling on a tablet with one hand and adjusting something off-screen with the other when he noticed the stream was live.

“Jonah,” Dax said, grinning. “You’re with us.”

Jonah looked up. “One sec. The cooling node on the validator rig just threw a spike. Probably nothing, but I’d rather not start a fire during the interview.”

He leaned out of frame. A sharp metal clack, then silence.

“There we go,” he said, slipping the tablet off. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude.”

“No worries,” Dax said. “You’re famously terrible at introductions. So, I’ll do it.”

He turned slightly toward the camera.

“This is Jonah Kaplan. Some of you know the name. Most of you have no idea how close this guy came to getting disappeared by the same people who now host blockchain conferences for G7 countries. He built the SunChain Ledger. He’s the architect behind its native token, the RAY protocol. He walked away from a classified DARPA lab project in 2014 and started uploading pseudonymous whitepapers that half the industry dismissed — until his code started exposing all the warts in commercial payment rails.”

Dax leaned back, letting that settle.

“He’s not here to pump anything. He’s here because he understands what the world is choking on — and what might clear the air.”

He turned to the screen. “Jonah. Let’s cut through the buzzwords. What is SunChain?”

Jonah nodded once, as if flipping a mental switch.

“It’s a distributed ledger system optimized for frictionless settlement. Global, instant, trustless.”

“Okay,” Dax said, “Talk to me like I’m a CFO. What’s it actually do?”

“It replaces the financial middle layer,” Jonah replied. “All of it. No more days-long wire transfers. No more Swift. No more needing Visa to approve a purchase at midnight on a weekend. If I send money to you across the world — it settles instantly. No bank has to ‘clear it.’ The validators handle that.”

“And what are validators?”

“Decentralized nodes,” Jonah said. “No central server. No third-party clearinghouse. Each node verifies transactions independently. If enough of them agree — the network accepts it as true. The transaction locks in.”

“Why does that matter?”

Jonah’s eyes lit slightly.

“Because right now, we have trillions of dollars locked in escrow accounts. Corporations, banks, governments — they all keep money parked just to cover delays and settlement lag. SunChain removes the lag. That capital comes back online.”

Dax whistled softly. “You’re saying it frees up—”

“Global liquidity,” Jonah said. “That’s the first domino.”

Dax leaned back. “But hang on — for the folks at home who think blockchain is just internet monopoly money — break it down real simple. What is this thing?”

Jonah’s eyes lit up slightly, shifting into teacher mode.

“Think of it like a ledger — a record book. But instead of one bank keeping their own private ledger that only they control, this ledger is copied across thousands of computers worldwide. Every transaction gets recorded on all of them simultaneously. You can’t forge an entry because everyone has the same copy. You can’t delete history because it’s written everywhere at once. And you can’t shut it down because there’s no central office to raid.”

“So, it’s like if everyone in town had an identical copy of the same checkbook, and they all had to agree before any check cleared?”

“Exactly. Except the whole world is the town. And once something’s written, it’s there forever.”

Dax nodded. “And the RAY token?”

“We called it RAY — Reciprocal Asset Yield. Because that’s what this is. Not interest. Not speculation. But a mutual return. You bring value into this ecosystem — RAY makes sure it’s reflected back.”

Jonah adjusted his glasses before continuing.

“It does that because it’s the transfer medium,” Jonah said. “You use RAY to bridge currencies, move value, tokenize assets. And I don’t just mean money. Real Estate. Commodities. Contracts. A shipment of wheat. An intellectual property license. A national bond. If it can be tracked or priced — it can be tokenized and traded 24/7 with no intermediary.”

“You’re talking about a 24/7 global trading desk for everything,” Dax said.

“Yes,” Jonah said. “On-chain, in real time, with zero counterparty risk.”

“Debt?” Dax asked.

Jonah didn’t blink.

“Already solved.”

“No shit? Go on.”

“We tokenize it. The U.S. doesn’t need to owe China anymore. Think Digital Treasuries issued as blockchain assets — fully transparent, interest-bearing, with built-in terms. America can sell that debt on a global market instantly. Anyone in the world can hold a piece; sovereigns, investment banks, retail traders. You remove the geopolitical hostage element — and you gain velocity.”

Dax narrowed his eyes.

“What about the fifty billion RAY tokens still locked up in escrow? You’re telling me SunChain Labs doesn’t control more than half the total supply?”

Jonah didn’t flinch.

“That escrow exists for a reason — over-the-counter sales, seeding the ecosystem, supporting startups that build on our rails. Those coins are time-released. No dumping, no market shock. Structured allocation only.”

Dax cocked his head to the side.

“To who?”
 Dax pressed him.

“Is it major banks? Remittance networks. Institutional partners. I’ve heard some big players are already under NDA. But I’ve seen names — Western Union, Wall Street firms… even the Fed has been floating the idea of replacing SWIFT.”

Dax shook his head slightly and continued.

“I mean, all of that said, RAY is sitting there at thirty-seven cents right now. Some people think it’s a dead coin.”

The left side of Jonah’s mouth curled slightly.

“There are real-world use cases for RAY, including the ones you just alluded to. Several adoption agreements are waiting on regulatory frameworks. I can’t comment beyond that.”

Dax paused. A silence, weighty and measured, then he spoke.

“Let me tell you who’s trying to hold them.”

The lighting on Dax’s side of the screen dimmed a touch. The studio map shifted — red pulses overtaking blue on the LED screen.

“You think the people at the World Economic Forum haven’t heard this pitch? You think the bankers don’t want real-time settlements — as long as they decide what settles and who gets to transact?”

He held up a finger.

“CBDCs. Central Bank Digital Currencies. Sound familiar? Same tech. Different leash. Instead of open, neutral, and voluntary — it’s mandatory, programmable, and surveilled. You post the wrong meme? They freeze your account. You didn’t take your booster? You can’t board the train.”

Jonah stayed silent. He knew this part of the conversation was de rigueur for a Dax show appearance.

“This interview isn’t about crypto,” Dax said, turning back to the lens. “It’s about control. Either we build a system that liberates… or they’ll build one that enslaves.”

He tapped the desk once more. Quiet.

“You have the map now. Choose your path wisely.”

The screen faded to black.

Capital Punishment

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One of the more surreal articles I read in the last decade explained how some nations would move toward negative interest rates for personal bank accounts. Meaning the money you have in checking and savings, you could lose an ever increasing % of it annually for not spending or investing it, according to the whims of the ruling class. And if you did invest it, you would be taxed on its unrealized capital gains.

It sounded absurd, but if you want to see the truly unimaginable enacted into law, you usually have to look no further than the European Union.

This isn’t a new idea either. The European Central Bank, the institution that sets monetary policy for the eurozone, ran a negative deposit rate from June 2014 until the middle of 2022. The banks passed the bill down. By July 2021, 372 German banks were charging negative interest, and what started as a fee on large corporate balances had spread to private accounts of any size. Denmark’s Jyske Bank did it to its retail customers too. Europeans have already had money pulled out of their accounts for the crime of leaving it there.

Fresh off its grotesque new rollout, the “Migration Pact“, which forces quotas of foreigners into European nations, or charges €20,000 per migrant for turning them down, the protectors of liberal democracy continue to spread peace and prosperity with an iron fist: 

As the EU is now interested in personal savings accounts, no doubt dismayed by the fact that the individual wealth of their nations is seeking to extricate their capital to places that are less ideologically punitive in their approach to personal finances.

Notice what the solution never is. It’s never lower taxes, fewer regulations, or an economy someone would actually want to park capital in. The money isn’t leaving because Europeans are financially illiterate. It’s leaving because they can do math. So rather than create nourishing conditions, they’d rather cage it in. 

Something that will be possible when the EU moves to a Central Bank Digital Currency is baking into the currency negative interest rates, and even expiration dates on the funds, forcing people to spend their money before it becomes irredeemable. Using it to force stimulus and investment, and increasing their ever tightening control over the native populations they continue to subjugate.

My view on Cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology, and Decentralized Finance, is that it has both the power to financially liberate, or ensnare a people, depending on who is, and how it is, finally implemented.

It’s critical when the transition takes hold that competition, individual rights, personal choice and national sovereignty are the driving forces behind it, not technocratic enslavement.

A Thousand Pieces

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Newly declassified intelligence documents were the centerpiece of President Trump’s address to the nation last night — documents detailing Chinese interference in our elections, widespread vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure, and declassification of materials exposing that the CIA had this information beginning in 2018 and withheld it from the President during his first term.

“The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them…. The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him.” —President Donald Trump (via Newsweek)

Meddling in a foreign nation’s elections (as the CIA has done for several decades) is either an attempted or successful coup, depending on the result, both of which are tantamount to an act of war.

Journalists accepting payment from a foreign adversary to slander a sitting president is giving comfort and aid to an enemy. An act of treason.

The President also spoke about FBI investigations into voter fraud, directing Director Kash Patel to reopen the bureau’s 2020 case into a Michigan voter registration drive — canvassers in the Muskegon area allegedly signed registration forms in other people’s names and submitted fraudulent registrations for voters who don’t exist, and were paid in gift cards per the number of applications. He also cited a DHS review identifying more than 275,000 noncitizens registered to vote across just four states.

For the many of us who were aware of the 2020 heist as it took place, and lived through the most destructive administration in American history as a consequence of it, this has been a long time coming.

The question is not whether the allegations in these declassified documents truly happened, it is the same question that we had in the weeks preceding January 20, 2021. Will President Trump cross the proverbial Rubicon, and do whatever is necessary in his power as Commander-in-Chief to restore the republic?

That is the singular lens by which I view this administration and have done so since the second term began. While my reaction to the day-to-day news and operations of the second Trump Administration vary widely, ultimately what it will be defined by is whether President Trump was willing to assert his power to expose the depths of corruption in our intelligence agencies, in our media, and within our elected officials — how they have all been influenced and compromised by foreign nations, and then take steps to remedy that for the future of the United States.

That, in partnership with returning us to a nation of citizens, would be an extraordinary course correction for America. They are, however, not the only issues plaguing the nation.

For that to happen, this would need to be the first step in a series of bold and decisive actions which are not inhibited by negative coverage from the very press who was alleged to have been compromised. And not subject to the wavering public opinion polls that may come out of it. This must be done without reservation or purpose of evasion, head on.

As long as foreign influence by nations such as China, Russia, and Iran is at the forefront, there will continue to be an elephant in the room regarding the foreign nation that demonstrably has, without question, the most influence over our elected officials, their policies, and our media.

As far as the CIA is concerned, it has been functioning as an apparatus outside of executive oversight to the detriment of American sovereignty, and the stability of the world, for several decades. The essential aspects of intelligence gathering can be done by other salvageable three letter agencies and through military intelligence.

There is but one solution for the Company, and it was reportedly stated by President John F. Kennedy in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, that he would splinter the CIA “into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”