The Crypto Grifters Of DOGE
How many crypto grifters does it take to screw up the machinery of state?
"Hubris is one of the great renewable resources." - P.J. O'RourkeI was reading Pro Publica’s excellent reporting on who the various members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team are - you know, the guys currently tinkering with the financial machinery of the whole world and possibly exfiltrating Americans’ sensitive health and tax information so it can be sacrificed in a ritual that reincarnates Elon Musk’s consciousness as The God Of The AI Singularity - and one entry caught my eye.
Gautier “Cole” Killian apparently conducted “blockchain research” and worked at Jump Trading. This seemed possibly incomplete to me.
Jump Trading, for those who don’t know, is a large American “proprietary trading firm”. The details aren’t particularly important here but if you have a vision in your mind of a “Wall Street Trader” as a guy1 who feverishly buys and sells [whatever] based on streams of matrix-like information flowing across 50 enormous flat screen monitors that surround him like a digital cocoon you’re not that far off from what at least some people at a firm like Jump Trading probably do on a day to day basis. Working at a place like Jump Trading2 (not necessarily as a trader) is a pretty typical job for someone with Gautier “Cole” Killian’s credentials to end up in.
But (there’s always a but) this guy had apparently “researched blockchain” in addition to working at Jump Trading. I happen to be somewhat familiar with the fact that Jump Trading has a subsidiary that specializes in trading cryptocurrency, cleverly named “Jump Crypto.”
Now Jump Crypto is not a firm that has exactly covered itself in glory. In fact quite the contrary.
The teams at Jump Crypto are widely regarded by crypto traders I have spoken to as market manipulators extraordinaire, operating with ruthless efficiency and complete disregard for the laws that bind the brokerage accounts of the rest of us mere mortals. I don’t know if those rumours are true or not - or at least none of those rumours have been borne out in court (yet). What has been borne out in court, however3, is the fact that Jump Crypto was intimately involved in the spectacular collapse of Terra/Luna, the largest and most obvious ponzi scheme in human history whose incineration of several aircraft carriers worth of people’s money (~$20-40 billion) in May 2022 destroyed tens of thousands of people’s lives and nearly put the whole crypto industry to the sword4.
Anyways it seemed likely to me that a young man like Cole Killian who a) had “researched blockchain” and b) was willing to help Elon Musk tear out the guts of democracy and replace it with AI moderated tech-fascism “on the blockchain” was probably more likely to have worked at a fraud factory like Jump Crypto than at Jump Trading proper. So I did a little digging… and lo and behold I found this Google cache:
And then I found this profile at something called “Metagov”, which seems very much like something a young “blockchain researcher” with very strange beliefs about things like artificial intelligence, gender norms, and time travel might be involved in.
Whoever created this profile was apparently:
Named Cole.
Researched blockchains.
Worked at Jump Crypto right around the time our Cole would have worked at Jump Crypto.
Founded a company called Lunar Assistant to do [whatever] with the NFT market.
Was a “founding engineer”5 at Glow Savings, which matches the previous screenshot’s abbreviated resumé for someone named “Cole Killian”.
Whether or not they are the same Cole Killian I leave up to the reader. I would just point out that I would consider a resumé entry displaying the words “Jump Crypto” during the time period in question roughly equivalent to one showing the word “Enron” or “Theranos”. It’s like, sure, you can come back from working at a company that was forced to pay a nine figure fine after admitting to severe financial crimes, at least as long as you didn’t work in the fraudy part of the company… but most people are going to raise some eyebrows when you walk in for a job interview6, especially if the job interview is for a role involving touching money.
IN THE DOGE GLOW
Mr. Killian’s purported profile also lists “founding engineer at Glow Savings”. “What is Glow Savings?” I thought to myself. Thankfully there is a Medium blog written by the Glow Savings team that is full of information chronicling the journey of Glow Savings from its birth as a the sparkle in some amoral and avaricious teenager’s mind’s eye all the way to the inevitable "no one could have seen this [incredibly obvious and 100% mathematically certain] outcome [where everyone loses all their money] coming" letter to investors that is the end state of many crypto scams.
Glow Savings, it turns out, was a “crypto DeFi platform built on the Terra/Luna blockchain”. That probably means very little to you so let me summarize by saying that it’s not incorrect to think of it as a ponzi scheme built on top of another ponzi scheme. Obvious ponzi schemes (falsely) marketed as “decentralized” and shilling an infinite amount of “yield”7 to be had if you will “just trust us with your money bro” are a dime a dozen in the cryptoverse, especially back in the pre-memecoin era when Glow Savings launched. The only thing that distinguished Glow Savings from a million other crypto scams is that it was launched on the Terra/Luna blockchain, more properly described by its true archetype: a ponzichain.
Claiming to be the lead engineer on a scammy crypto “project” like Glow Savings is pretty bad. Launching a scammy project to “make yield accessible everywhere” on Terra/Luna? That puts you in a special category of crypto grifter some call “the fucking idiots”.
Without going into the details (see my old piece if you want them) Terra/Luna was mathematically doomed from the jump. Every economist or mathematician who looked at the algorithm behind this hot piece of garbage screamed from the rooftops for years that this shit was never going to work and if you fuckwads don’t cut this shit out you’re going to hurt a lot of people.
LUNA and UST”.Needless to say, the fuckwads didn’t listen (or, far more likely, didn’t care) and ended up hurting a lot of people. There were suicides. More importantly for our story the Glow Savings engineers, of whom someone named Cole Killian appears to have been a “founding” member, didn’t listen. In fact as “founding engineer” one suspects Cole Killian bears a lot of responsibility for choosing the Terra ponzichain as the best platform on which to “buidl”8 the Glow Savings “protocol”9. In so doing he revealed himself as someone with functionally zero mathematical or situational awareness despite being the recipient of a fancy mathematics degree from a very prestigious university10.
NOT FROM TREES
Before or possibly concomitant with his time at Glow Savings our friend Cole also worked on NFT11 technologies… Also on the Terra/Luna ponzichain.
There are two possible explanations for all this: our friend Cole Killian is either A) not a smart person or B) an amoral monster with an eye for how to separate suckers from their money. Given the fancy degrees in mathematics and computer science I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he fits into category B (I could be wrong!).
In my (informed) opinion, anyone who has worked on or with a litany of financial cringe that includes tooling for NFT scams, building “DeFi” yield farms, failing to see the Terra/Luna ponzi for what it was, and a tenure working with the creeps at Jump Crypto should be banished for life from the financial services industry tout suite. What they should not be doing is tinkering with the plumbing that drives the entire global economy and/or beaming Americans’ confidential data up into the great Elon in the sky. But that’s where we are.
Good luck America.
SEMI-RELATED POSTUMS OF SCRIPTUMS
Gavin Kliger, another one of Elon Musk's junior tech bros currently coding up a storm in the US governments' secure facilities, has a Substack. You'll never guess what he likes writing about.
Edward Coristine, another DOGE bro, has a work history that is a whole lot dodgier than anything our boy Cole Killian did in his life as a crypto grifter or Gavin Kliger did defending members of Congress with questionable sexual histories. Brian Krebs has the details here.
Marko Elez, a 25 year old member of DOGE, just resigned after a slew of (not very) old posts where he unabashedly endorsed things like eugenics and anti-Indian racism were exposed. Do you know how hard it is to post stuff so filled with racist bile that you get fired from DOGE? (UPDATE: Elez has been rehired by DOGE)
I feel like I’m beginning to see a pattern here…
NATIONAL ANTHEM OF DOGE
It’s usually a guy.
As I unfortunately did briefly a long time ago.
Or at least in a settlement.
All of the impressive crypto company implosions that followed on through the summer of 2022 up to and including the world famous FTXplosion can claim the Terra/Luna fiasco as their primum movens. If you want more details I wrote about the collapse of Terra/Luna in a more humorous style befitting the grimness of the subject matter when I was first starting this blog.
Not a title I've heard before. Usually at a tech company either you are or aren’t a founder and some of the founders are engineers.
My favorite “I worked at a sketchy company and now need to get a job again” story was an ex-Theranos employee whose resume looked roughly like this:
[2013-2015] Company XYZ (Analyst)
[2015-2018] Theranos (Data Scientist)
[2019-Present] Great Western Trail (Bicyclist / Personal Development)
Crypto speak for what tradfi (“traditional finance”) normies might call “interest” or “returns”, like on your savings account.
Yes, crypto bros really say “buidl”. Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager which is now run by a crypto bro named Larry Fink, has even launched a stablecoin called BUIDL.
Crypto bro for “app”.
I happen to have some of these myself so I feel very confident making statements like these.
This is like watching cancer metastasize in its host.
Another masterpiece. Damn, this is all profoundly disturbing.