Over the last year, Drop Site has been reporting what mainstream outlets won’t: Jeffrey Epstein’s deep ties to powerful figures in the U.S. government, the UAE, and Israel.

Our latest investigation traces those connections back to the Obama administration’s efforts to make a nuclear deal with Iran—revealing Epstein’s role in helping the Treasury Department understand the emerging role of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in financing terrorism and evading U.S. economic sanctions. We’re documenting Epstein’s financial operations and security dealings that implicate governments around the world.

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Today, shipping companies are paying cryptocurrency tolls to Tehran for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, as the Iranian government seeks to shield payments from seizure by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Roughly $8 billion flowed through Iran’s cryptocurrency exchanges last year, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) moves billions more through foreign exchanges like Binance, where Chinese firms can secretly pay for Iranian oil without fear of U.S. retaliation.

More than a decade ago, however, the Iranian government was reluctant to embrace cryptocurrency, suspicious of possible U.S. involvement in the development of Bitcoin. The U.S. was dubious about the technology as well, seeing it principally as a way to sidestep financial controls.

“The U.S. government thinks Iran can use bitcoin to bypass all the sanctions and Iran thinks this is all a game by the CIA,” a spokesperson for CoinAva, Iran’s first crypto exchange, told CoinDesk in 2013. Even so, Iran’s National Cyberspace Center began the process of regulating digital currencies in March 2014, while looking for hedges against the pressure of U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. hesitance around cryptocurrency is evident in the emails of Jeffrey Epstein—a figure who was keenly interested in developing cryptocurrency and consulted on it with the U.S. Treasury Department. Epstein’s interventions came at a time when the U.S. was pursuing a détente with Iran over its nuclear program, and the growth and development of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were beginning to reshape the global financial landscape. (All the emails are linked and available to read on Jmail—the indispensable, searchable inbox of Epstein’s emails that mimics Gmail.)

In August 2014, the same summer Iran began regulating cryptocurrency, Epstein traveled to Washington D.C. for a meeting with the U.S. Treasury Department, as the Obama administration prepared a new round of sanctions on Iran’s energy sector. Epstein was accompanied by Philip West, chairman of Steptoe, a law firm involved in sanctions-related work.

Epstein was more than familiar with the issue of Iranian sanctions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and had extensive experience and interest in clandestine movements of capital. In the early 1980s, Epstein shared a penthouse office with Stan Pottinger, a lawyer who was moving embargoed arms through shell companies to fuel the war between Iran and Iraq. Epstein also worked at one point for Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi, who used poorly regulated financial institutions, like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, to launder money from covert arms sales, in what became known as the “Iran-Contra” affair.

According to Epstein’s notes from the meeting, officials from the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes wanted the financier’s insight into how cryptocurrencies could be used for arms shipments and nuclear proliferation payments.

Epstein was not impressed by the Treasury officials he met, describing them in an email to Joi Ito, the director of MIT’s Media Lab, as “not very bright , very opinionated. ( not an audience i enjoy ).” He later complained to Kathryn Ruemmler, who had recently left her post as Obama’s White House counsel, that the meeting was like “lecturing at Queens community college.”

After the meeting, Epstein returned to Steptoe’s offices to meet privately with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, who had been leading the negotiations to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. The next day, Epstein wrote to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, offering to arrange a meeting between Burns and Thiel. He described Burns to Thiel as “the best and most respected diplomat in the admin.”

The Washington meetings occurred at the exact moment the Treasury and State Departments were trying to maximize leverage during the Iran nuclear talks. After the U.S. and Iran extended the “Joint Plan of Action” in July 2014, a small window opened for the U.S. to ratchet pressure on Iran before a comprehensive deal was signed. The previous year, Epstein had been working closely with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to convince U.S. officials to strike Iran.

One week after Epstein’s visit, on August 29, the Treasury and State Departments jointly announced a new round of Iran sanctions. The package targeted more than 20 people, companies, banks, and vessels accused of supporting Iran’s nuclear program, helping the country evade sanctions, or assisting terrorism.

On September 4, Burns, who later served as CIA director under President Joe Biden, and a group of Treasury officials met with Iranian officials in Geneva to conduct the third round of bilateral talks on a nuclear deal. David Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at Treasury, credited the sanctions for “bringing the Iranians to the negotiating table.” Later that month, Burns traveled to New York for more talks with Iranian officials, and he scheduled another appointment with Epstein the same week. After the meeting, Epstein connected Burns and Thiel by email.

In an emailed statement to Drop Site, a spokesperson for Burns said that he recalled being introduced to Epstein and “then met with him once briefly in New York City.” The spokesperson said that Burns “deeply regrets ever meeting with him, and did not know anything about him before those two brief meetings, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector. When Amb. Burns learned about Mr. Epstein’s record not long after those two brief meetings, he was appalled. He never met with him again. They had no relationship.”

The spokesperson also said that Burns did not discuss the Iran nuclear deal or cryptocurrency with Epstein during their 2014 meetings.

Kathryn Ruemmler, Joi Ito, and Peter Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.

“Your Worst Nightmare”

Epstein’s involvement with national security officials during the negotiations with Iran coincided with his own deepening interest in the software engineers researching cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin was originally launched in 2009 with the goal of building a payments system that could operate outside the reach of central banks and state financial intermediaries. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, “retired” on April 26, 2011—ceasing communication with developers and effectively disappearing. The next day, Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin’s lead maintainer, announced plans to discuss Bitcoin at CIA headquarters.

Epstein wanted to meet Andresen and other members of the Bitcoin team ahead of the CIA meeting. With the help of venture capitalist Jason Calacanis, Epstein contacted Amir Taaki, a British-Iranian hacker, soon after Taaki’s launch of “Britcoin,” the first cryptocurrency exchange in the U.K. On June 12, 2011, Epstein emailed Taaki a warning—“amir the bitcoin idea is brilliant,” Epstein wrote, “but i suggest has some serious downsides as i m sure you are aware.” Epstein later met with Taaki’s business partner to discuss fraud and crime on crypto exchanges.

The potential illicit uses of cryptocurrency quickly materialized. In 2011, American hacker Ross Ulbricht launched Silk Road, a darknet marketplace that used Bitcoin to facilitate anonymous drug trafficking and other illegal services. Ulbricht was arrested in the science fiction section of the San Francisco Public Library, on October 1, 2013, after investigators linked his pseudonym, “Dread Pirate Roberts,” to his personal email. The FBI seized the Silk Road domain and shut down the website the day after Ulbricht’s arrest.

Epstein and his circle of friends were closely following the Silk Road investigation. Boris Nikolic, chief adviser to Bill Gates, sent the news to Epstein shortly after Ulbricht’s arrest. “So sad that he made such a stupid mistake,” Nikolic wrote. “A lot of people are going to get indicted,” Epstein replied.

A few months later, Epstein began brainstorming with Italian hacker Vincenzo Iozzo about how to make digital currency palatable to banks and governments, while preserving the privacy of crypto transactions. “The moment you remove anonymity from bitcoin there’s a significant privacy problem,” Iozzo warned Epstein. “Meaning that now everyone knows what you buy/sell through bitcoin, it’s advertisers (among others) sweetest dream but probably your worst nightmare.” An FBI informant later alleged that Iozzo was Epstein’s “personal hacker” who sold cyberweapons to terrorists and governments alike.

Iozzo did not respond to a request for comment.

“Endless Possibilities”

Before meeting with Treasury and State officials in August 2014, Epstein notified various leaders in tech and finance about his upcoming trip—including Brock Pierce, co-founder of Tether, a “stablecoin” whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar. Tether was launched one month prior to Epstein’s visit, (originally named “Realcoin”) as a cryptocurrency token purportedly backed one-to-one with fiat currency reserves.

Tether, whose market capitalization was estimated at $187 billion as of late 2025, has grown to become structurally important to the global economy—surpassing Bitcoin as the most-traded cryptocurrency in the world, and powering a global financial network that also supports money laundering and organized crime. As Tehran seeks to escape the stranglehold of the U.S. sanctions regime, which restricts Iranian entities from accessing dollars for international trade, the Iranian government has accumulated huge quantities of Tether, hundreds of millions of dollars of which were targeted for seizure this April by the Treasury Department as part of its ongoing “Economic Fury” pressure campaign.

The same month as the launch of Tether, Epstein began investing in Bitcoin’s core infrastructure. On July 15, Epstein and Ito made a $500,000 seed investment in Blockstream, after inviting the blockchain startup’s co-founders to Little St. James island. Blockstream helped shift the Bitcoin ecosystem from “peer-to-peer electronic cash,” as originally envisioned in Nakamoto’s 2008 whitepaper, to a “global reserve currency” and settlement layer for “tokenized” financial assets like stablecoins. When Epstein invested in Blockstream, one Bitcoin traded at roughly $600.

Four days after his Treasury visit, on August 25, Epstein helped coordinate an October follow-up meeting between Anne Shere Wallwork, senior counselor for strategic policy in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, and MIT’s Ito. Epstein wanted Ito to loop him into the MIT-Treasury talks, and he coached Ito to inform the Treasury officials that he and Epstein “share one mind” on their views of crypto regulation.

Iozzo shared information with Epstein to help him prepare for talks with Treasury officials, sending him an example of the Treasury Department seizing money sent from Denmark to Germany for a batch of Cuban cigars, under the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, on the grounds that the transaction violated the U.S. embargo against Cuba. “Think about the endless possibilities for practical jokes in this area,” Iozzo wrote.

“Much Deeper Pockets”

Epstein had a keen eye for the downstream political implications of new technologies, and he surrounded himself with key figures in the fields of artificial intelligence and genetic research. Recognizing promising opportunities in cryptocurrency, he activated many of the same political, academic, and research networks to take early advantage of blockchain-based financial channels.

In September 2014, Tether Holdings Limited was formally incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Weeks later, shortly before the Treasury follow-up call, Epstein emailed his U.S. Virgin Islands attorney Erika Kellerhalls, asking her to amend banking certificates “so that we can bank Bitcoin.”

After a conference call between Epstein, Ito, and Wallwork on October 15, Iozzo wrote an email remarking on the irony that Epstein, an expert at hiding money, was pushing “for more regulation and treasury for more openness.” The conversation reminded Iozzo of an old Soviet joke about two propaganda newspapers: “In Pravda (Truth) there is no news, in Izvestia (News) there is no truth.”

The first Tether stablecoins were issued the same month, and Epstein quickly got to work cultivating Pierce’s project. On October 28, he helped connect Pierce to Larry Summers, treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and economic adviser to the Obama administration, to assist with setting up the dollar-token rail. A few days later, on November 2, he connected Summers to Ito, to support the Bitcoin initiative at MIT.

The FBI’s seizure of the Silk Road marketplace was followed by a regulatory crackdown in China, blocking yuan deposits to crypto exchanges. In early 2014, Mt. Gox, the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world at the time, halted trading and withdrawals—the company claimed over 850,000 bitcoins had been stolen, worth more than $100 billion at bitcoin’s peak last year. The convergence of crises caused the Bitcoin price to collapse.

Epstein and his circle took advantage of the crisis to push for a friendly regulatory regime for digital currency. After the fall of Mt. Gox, Coinbase, a regulated U.S. crypto exchange, differentiated itself as a secure, compliant intermediary. In December 2014, Pierce invited Epstein to join a fundraising series for Coinbase, describing the investment opportunity as “the most platinum plated deal in the space.” Pierce also introduced Epstein to Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and they made plans to meet. Epstein ultimately invested $3 million in Coinbase’s Series C round through a Virgin Islands entity.

By 2015, the network Epstein had connected was crystallizing into real institutional collaboration. Wallwork invited Ito to a January 2015 “virtual currency event” at Treasury, jointly hosted by the Office of Domestic Finance and the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. The private event was designed to educate senior government officials about virtual currency and identify areas of “regulatory uncertainty” as the industry matured.

The crashing Bitcoin price created an existential crisis for the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit industry body created to fund development on the core Bitcoin protocol and give the currency institutional legitimacy with regulators and the press. The foundation held much of its reserves in Bitcoin, and due to reckless spending ran out of money during the 2014 crash.

As the Bitcoin Foundation wrestled with insolvency, Ito lured the Bitcoin protocol engineers to MIT, including Andresen. In April 2015, Pierce was named chairman of the foundation’s board—days later, three leading Bitcoin developers left the foundation and joined MIT Media Lab’s new Digital Currency Initiative. “MIT is a better place to support the development,” Pierce told the Los Angeles Business Journal, blessing the handoff. “They have much deeper pockets than we have.”

MIT Media Lab received $525,000 in gifts from Epstein between 2013 and 2017 to support Ito’s discretionary work. Epstein’s contributions helped Ito “step into the vacuum” and swiftly recruit the core Bitcoin team to the Media Lab. Ito reported to Epstein on April 25, sharing news of the successful coup: “Used gift funds to underwrite this which allowed us to move quickly and win this round. Thanks.”

“Dollar Hegemony on Blockchain”

A decade later, the cryptocurrency industry’s regulatory issues have not been solved, while its political role continues to expand in a legal gray area.

In early April 2026, Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told journalists that Iran would be implementing a new gated control over the Strait of Hormuz. “Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” Hosseini explained. Iranian authorities are reportedly using an office on Qeshm Island to convert payments to rials or route them to foreign accounts, to protect funds from seizure.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Foreign Assets Control has reported that Iran is increasingly using stablecoins and other digital assets to buy and sell weapons, conduct international trade, and transfer funds to other countries and entities banned from the U.S.-led economic order. The U.S. government has retaliated with seizures of digital wallets, including the April 24 confiscation of an estimated $344 million in cryptocurrency the Treasury Department claimed was linked to Tehran.

Epstein died in August 2019, before stablecoins became an explicit plank of American monetary policy, and before Bitcoin developed into a tool in this geopolitical game of cat-and-mouse. But his strategy for regulatory capture has kept maturing since his death: dollar-pegged tokens moved crypto liquidity outside the banking system, while stablecoin issuers’ reserves pulled the same activity back into dollars and U.S. Treasury bills.

Meanwhile, as the Treasury Department continues to target Iran-linked cryptocurrency wallets, one close personal contact of Epstein has continued to shape cryptocurrency policy in the current White House: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the longtime head of Cantor Fitzgerald, was Epstein’s occasional business partner and next-door neighbor in New York.

Lutnick’s firm, a major Federal Reserve primary dealer in U.S. Treasuries, has also become a major player in Tether, agreeing to take custody of Tether’s U.S. Treasury reserves in 2021. By the end of 2025, Tether said its Treasury exposure exceeded $141 billion, and Tether’s CTO has claimed 99% of its Treasury-bill portfolio was held with Cantor.

In a 2025 interview, Lutnick called Epstein the “greatest blackmailer ever” and told the New York Post that Epstein had extorted money from his rich associates by filming them getting massages at his residence. Lutnick claimed he cut ties with Epstein after a 2005 visit to Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan.

Documents published by the Justice Department contradict Lutnick’s statements: Lutnick and Epstein maintained correspondence until at least 2018. Lutnick and his family even traveled to the U.S. Virgin Islands for a 2012 lunch at Epstein’s private island. Shortly after the visit, the two men signed a contract to invest in Adfin, a payments processing platform. In January 2026, the Justice Department published, deleted, then restored an undated photograph of Epstein and Lutnick on Epstein’s island. In a closed-door interview with members of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Lutnick admitted visiting Epstein’s island in 2012 and called his decision to do so “inexplicable.”

In July 2025, with guidance from Lutnick and the White House digital-assets working group, Lutnick helped pass the GENIUS Act, which exempted foreign Treasury-backed stablecoin issuers, like Tether, from audit requirements. In the 12 years since it was created, Tether has never undergone an independent audit to prove its stablecoins are fully backed by dollar reserves.

During his commerce secretary nomination hearing, Lutnick was asked about a Wall Street Journal report alleging that Tether owner Giancarlo Devasini promised associates Lutnick would use his political influence to kill legislation that could hurt the company. Lutnick denied the claims—but his comments hinted at the critical role that Tether has come to play in the global economy, telling lawmakers, “the U.S. Congress should be careful not to undermine dollar hegemony on blockchain through legislation.”

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