Since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, cryptocurrency has slowly reshaped the contours of money and finance—blurring the lines between technology and currency, decentralization and control, speculation and strategy.
That could be by design: longtime Radio Free Pizza gourmets may recall our Bitcoin Pizza Day bulletin in May of last year, in which we explored the recurring theory that Bitcoin may have been created by the American deep state through the cryptography research of the National Security Agency (NSA), linking BTC to: a 1996 NSA paper on “digital gold”; the SHA-256 algorithm that originated with the NSA; and speculation around Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity residing with the cypherpunks who worked with U.S. intelligence. Then, in a January spectacle, we spoke with Golden Monarch of Golden Monarch Domain about the political implications of cryptocurrency. Once an early crypto investor, Golden Monarch now critiques the industry as a scheme co-opted by elites, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies. He traces Bitcoin’s shift from a revolutionary idea to a tool for surveillance and control, noting how figures like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Saylor, and Donald Trump helped mainstream it alongside Wall Street players such as BlackRock and Coinbase, and warns of a coordinated push toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a cashless society.
Since then, dozens of public companies—including Trump Media & Technology Group—have begun adopting digital asset treasury strategies, following MicroStrategy’s example of using corporate reserves and leverage to buy Bitcoin. The trend, fueled by soaring crypto prices and friendlier U.S. policy under President Trump, has attracted firms from energy to consumer goods, though analysts warn the volatility could spark liquidity risks if prices fall.
More recently, the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency on Wall Street resulted in notable fireworks this week as three very different companies—Eightco Holdings, CaliberCos Inc., and QMMM Holdings—all delivered eye-popping stock moves. Each story has its own twist, but they all share one theme: crypto-fueled speculation colliding with shaky fundamentals.
The first jaw-dropping move came from Eightco Holdings (then trading as OCTO) on Tuesday after the company announced a $250 million private placement alongside a $20 million strategic investment from BitMine Immersion Technologies to launch the world’s first Worldcoin (WLD) treasury strategy. The proceeds will fund the adoption of Worldcoin as Eightco’s primary treasury reserve asset, with cash and Ethereum as secondary reserves. The transaction, led by MOZAYYX with participation from investors including World Foundation, Discovery Capital, Pantera, Kraken, and others, also brings Dan Ives—noted Wall Street analyst and AI expert—in as Chairman of the Board. According to the press release, BitMine’s investment is part of its “Moonshot” strategy to support Ethereum-aligned innovations, with leadership citing the World Foundation’s zero-knowledge Proof of Human (PoH) technology as essential for trust in the AI era. Co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI infamy, Worldcoin has already created nearly 16 million PoH accounts across 45 countries using its iris-scanning Orb hardware.
Though the announcement came at 6:48 a.m. EST, shares of OCTO (now ORBS) had been rising markedly for over an hour in premarket trading, surging from $1.81 at 4 a.m. to reach a high of $83.12 in the first hour of the regular session for a 4,487.29% increase. While the combination of a crypto pivot and fresh leadership was enough to spark a frenzy, but beneath the surface, the story looks far less shiny: Eightco has no analyst coverage, and TipRanks’ AI engine rates the stock as only Neutral, with a one-year target of $1.50—a fraction of where it traded post-spike. The AI cites negative cash flow, unattractive valuation metrics, and ongoing capital-raising needs. Accordingly, TipRanks writer Ben Yoffe judged it the definition of a hype-driven rocket, with fundamentals suggesting caution for anyone thinking beyond the next headline.
Of course, ORBS still closed on Friday at $15.24 compared to the previous week’s close of $1.47. Not too shabby, for a company that on 20 August reported net losses of $2.15 per diluted share for the second quarter of 2025.
Next, CaliberCos Inc. stock (CWD) exploded this past Wednesday after the real estate and digital asset management firm unveiled it had taken the first steps in its Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) Strategy, confirming it had completed an initial purchase of Chainlink (LINK) tokens. The initiative calls for consistent, incremental LINK acquisitions funded by cash reserves, an existing credit line, and equity issuance, with the goal of building a material position that generates both long-term appreciation and staking yield. CEO Chris Loeffler emphasized a disciplined, institutional approach designed to ensure proper custody, tax, accounting, and governance infrastructure.
Shares of CWD surged immediately with the announcement, rising from $2.20 at 7:30 a.m. EST to reach a high of $56.06 in the next hour-and-a-half—a 2,452.73% increase—before selling off for the rest of the day to close regular trading hours at $9.11, up 130% on the day. Besides these gains, Caliber’s announcement also allows it to claim bragging rights as the first Nasdaq-listed company to center its treasury policy on Chainlink. Investing.com reports that Loeffler called it a “disciplined, institutional approach” to building a LINK position, with funding coming from a mix of cash reserves, an existing credit line, and equity issuance. Over time, Caliber intends to expand its holdings, generate yield through staking, and give shareholders direct exposure to the Chainlink ecosystem. That positioning at the intersection of real assets and digital assets sparked huge investor enthusiasm, but it also raises questions about long-term execution and the risks of mixing corporate balance sheets with volatile crypto assets.
CWD’s surge certainly reflects the growing investor appetite for corporate crypto plays. However—like the aforementioned Yoffe wrote about ORBS—Investing.com cautions its readers that fundamentals and follow-through will matter more than the initial headline. But after closing the previous week at $2.07 and finishing on Friday at $7.79, the company has still had similar success despite having also reported in August second quarter losses amounting, in its case, to $3.87 per diluted share.
But the wildest of the past week’s “crypto pivot” trades was QMMM Holdings, a Hong Kong-based digital media advertising and virtual avatar technology company, that on the same day announced its strategic expansion into the cryptocurrency sector with plans to integrate artificial intelligence and blockchain to build a decentralized data marketplace and crypto-autonomous ecosystem, enabling AI-driven analytics to support traders and power automated agents for tasks such as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) treasury management, metaverse experiences, and smart contract security. As part of this initiative, QMMM will establish a diversified cryptocurrency treasury targeting Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, with an initial goal of $100 million. CEO Bun Kwai said the move underscores QMMM’s commitment to innovation, regulatory compliance, and ecosystem partnerships as it seeks to bridge the digital economy with real-world applications.
That day, QMMM’s shares opened regular trading hours at $14.95 and rose through as many as ten trading halts to a high of $303.00 in the last hour of trading, rocketing as much as 3,816% before sliding back in after-hours and over the rest of the week. Of course, it was an amazing run—but such gains look especially anomalous knowing that, as Anders Bylund reported for The Motley Fool, QMMM raised only $8 million in June by nearly quadrupling its share count, and before this week, it was fighting off delisting notices with shares as low as $0.54. That makes the funding ambitions look shaky at best, and the sudden market cap leap to nearly $5 billion looks hard to justify. Indeed, the setup feels eerily similar to the 2016 wave of companies pivoting to “blockchain” just to juice stock prices. Many of those stories ended in collapse, and skeptics argue QMMM could meet the same fate without a real business plan.
QMMM’s pop may go down as one of the year’s biggest, but in Bylund’s estimation, it also screams “buyer beware.” Unless management shows credible execution, the long-term outlook is highly questionable—and we have little guidance from the company, from which the most recent earnings available extend only to 31 March 2025, having been made available in August, with estimated losses of $0.17 per diluted share for twelve trailing months. Nonetheless, after closing the previous week at $7.60, QMMM ended Friday’s regular session at $73.28, showing again that speculators don’t care too much about fundamentals.
But these strategic decisions from (formerly?) small-cap companies might reflect a great deal of care about the fundamentals of the global monetary system, which Taylor Kenney outlined for ITM Trading this past week.
Here, Kenney presents claims that Anton Kobyakov, a senior advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has exposed a U.S. scheme to manage its $37 trillion debt burden, having stated at the Eastern Economic Forum that the U.S. plans to move its debt into cryptocurrency, devalue it, and then reset the system with gold revaluation. Kenney warns this would impact not just cryptocurrency users but the entire dollar system, affecting savings, retirement funds, and paychecks.
Kenney discusses (at ~1:14) how President Trump signed the Genius Act, creating regulatory frameworks for stablecoins: cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the dollar. While publicly presented as innovation to keep the U.S. competitive, Kenney suggests this legislation could be the foundation for using stablecoins as a “lifeline” for U.S. debt, while also referencing concerns (similar to those that Golden Monarch expressed about CBDCs) that stablecoins could be a “Trojan horse” for financial control over Americans, potentially limiting freedom and privacy.
Since U.S. debt exceeds $37 trillion, Kenney notes (at ~2:12) the country faces a “buyer’s crisis” with foreign central banks dumping treasuries and moving to gold, indicating declining trust in the dollar. This creates higher yields and interest rates, making it harder for the U.S. to manage its debt. Kenney suggests stablecoins backed by U.S. treasuries could create artificial demand for U.S. debt, providing a needed lifeline for the system.
Elaborating on Kobyakov’s claim, Kenney observes (at ~4:03) that once enough U.S. debt is tokenized into stablecoins, they could be depegged or devalued: for example, instead of maintaining a 1:1 ratio with USD, they might be revalued at 1:0.50, causing holders to lose 50% of their wealth while significantly reducing the U.S. debt burden without officially declaring default. This devaluation would affect all dollar-denominated assets, including savings, retirement funds, and paychecks—echoing some of the historical U.S. financial maneuvers that Kenney details (at ~4:59), including gold confiscation in the 1930s—when President Roosevelt revalued gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce, effectively reducing the dollar’s purchasing power by 41%—and a U.S. “default” in the 1970s when President Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold, after which Americans lost half their purchasing power to inflation over the following decade. Kenney suggests these events demonstrate how gold provides true wealth protection during currency devaluations.
Kenney goes on to discuss (at ~6:53) Kobyakov's claim that the U.S. is trying to “rewrite the rules with gold,” referencing U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent’s discussions about gold revaluation and a Federal Reserve research note from last month on how nations have used gold revaluations to help pay off debt. The presenter suggests a possible two-pronged approach: first, offloading debt into stablecoins before devaluing them, and, second, implementing an official gold revaluation to restore trust in the American system, potentially driving gold prices to “tens of thousands of dollars.” Accordingly, Kenny predicts (at ~8:02) that public awareness of this alleged scheme could accelerate central banks’ historic pace of gold buying as nations position themselves for a financial reset. She predicts countries might rapidly offload U.S. treasuries while BRICS+ nations could make strategic moves to position themselves at the center of a new financial system, and quotes Kobyakov saying “the world is moving away from fiat money and dividing into zones”—or, perhaps we might say, regional blocs.
Certainly, any efforts to offload U.S. debt into stablecoins (and there devalue it) would make Bitcoin’s hypothesized origins with the NSA into a masterstroke of geopolitical maneuvering that would allow the U.S. to maintain its preeminence in the global financial system. In that case, the three companies profiled above would be getting ahead of the game, and investors would be wisely rewarding them for it. One wishes, of course, that the U.S. would prioritize real needs like reparations and healthcare over digital currency hype, as Golden Monarch advocated in January, but it seems worldwide financial dominance is the deep state’s greater priority, as it has been since long before the NSA or anyone else introduced cryptocurrency to the public.
But regardless of any speculations about Bitcoin’s origins, the week’s wild stock surges and the warnings about a looming U.S. debt reset all point toward the same truth: cryptocurrency is no longer a sideshow, but a central theater in the struggle over the future of money. Whether deployed as corporate hype, institutional hedge, or geopolitical lever, digital assets are now woven into the fabric of global finance, where questions of trust, power, and survival collide. The challenge, then—for investors, citizens, and states alike—is to discern whether crypto represents a path to liberation, or merely a tool of control in disguise.