Easy Money Was Easy For Someone

GM, Welcome Back to The KillChain

On April 17, 2026, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money opened in limited theatrical release. The book it is adapted from, Easy Money, has been in print since 2023. Ben McKenzie has spent that time arguing a coherent case: that crypto is mostly a casino, mostly a fraud generator, mostly a wealth transfer from retail holders to insiders, and that its only durable use cases are gambling and crime. He has named names. He has walked through the math. He has been right about most of it.

This newsletter has been right about most of it too.

The Tether reserve fraud documented across 2016 to 2018, where the dollar peg was a representation 72.4% of the trading days. The Bitfinex $850 million hole patched with reserves the same day they were verified at Deltec. The Trump family memecoin run we covered as the oldest play in DeFi the week it broke. The Drift Protocol exploit exposed Circle's enforcement posture. The ongoing institutional capture of every regulatory body that touches the asset class. McKenzie's book named the patterns. The KillChain has named the operators.

Where we part company with him is a single sentence in the documentary press tour: "Crypto really only has two use cases that I've seen, which is gambling and crime."

That is a claim a serious person should not make about an instrument. It is a categorical statement about a tool. The same sentence works just as well with the word "cash" substituted in. It does not become true when you substitute. It becomes obviously, embarrassingly false. The reason it becomes obviously false is the reason McKenzie's analysis stops short of the question that actually matters.

The question that matters is not whether crypto attracts criminals. Every liquid instrument attracts criminals. Cash is the global champion of criminal settlement and has been for centuries. The DEA's most recent National Drug Threat Assessment documents Mexican cartels still preferring cash for purchases inside Mexico, with bulk-cash smuggling corridors moving tens of billions of dollars across the southern border every year. HSBC paid $1.9 billion in 2012 for laundering Sinaloa cartel proceeds through the formal banking sector. Chainalysis estimates illicit on-chain volume at roughly 0.14% of crypto activity. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates global money laundering at 2 to 5% of world GDP, almost all of it routed through fiat rails.

The instrument is not the problem. The instrument is never the problem.

The question that matters is why people who are not criminals keep reaching for an alternative.

Between February 2020 and March 2026, the M2 money supply in the United States expanded from $15.5 trillion to $22.7 trillion. That is $7.2 trillion in new dollars. A 46.5% expansion in 6 years. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet ballooned past $9 trillion at peak and currently sits at $6.6 trillion. Every dollar that existed in 2020 now buys 78 cents of the goods and services it bought then. A worker who earned $60,000 in 2020 needs $76,800 today to hold even. Most workers did not get that raise.

This is the easy money trade. It was easy for someone. It was not easy for the person holding the dollars.

The top 10% of U.S. households own 89% of all equities. Corporate stock buybacks are projected to hit $1 trillion in 2025, fueled by the corporate tax cut. Roughly 80% of CEO compensation is equity-linked. Layoffs compress costs. Buybacks compress share counts. Both push earnings per share up. The compensation formulas reward both ends of that math, and the people on the receiving end of the formulas are not the people whose names show up in the layoff filings.

In April 2026 alone, Meta announced 8,000 job cuts. Microsoft offered buyouts to roughly 8,750. Block laid off nearly 4,000 in February citing AI integration, and the stock jumped the next trading day. Tech-sector layoffs in 2026 have crossed 92,000. The cumulative number since 2020 is approaching 900,000. The S&P 500 is at or near record highs through the same period.

The instrument that records all of this is the dollar. The wage earner gets paid in dollars that buy less every year. The asset owner gets paid in dollars that appreciate against the wage earner's stagnant income. Same instrument. Different position. Different outcome.

This is the disconnection between fiat and value. The fiat is fine. The fiat is doing exactly what it was engineered to do. The disconnection is between what people were told they were holding and what they were actually holding.

That is the missing chapter in Easy Money. The book is about the casino. It is mostly correct about the casino. It does not address the building the casino was built to compete with.

In Argentina, where the official inflation rate measured 43.5% in mid-2025 after running over 200% the year before, more than 100 businesses in Buenos Aires now accept stablecoins as direct payment. Local payroll providers have built entire operating models around paying Argentine workers in USDT or USDC because the peso loses meaningful purchasing power between paydays. Argentine households priced out of dollar-denominated bank accounts under capital controls reach for stablecoins because they cannot reach for dollars.

In Turkey, where the lira has shed more than 80% of its value against the dollar across the last 5 years and 2024 inflation averaged 58.5%, the USDT/TRY trading pair topped Binance's global volume charts at $22 billion in 2024 and now accounts for more than half of all Bitcoin trades on local exchanges. Turkish stablecoin usage equaled 3.7% of national GDP. That is not gambling. That is a population voting against its own currency with a payment instrument.

The aggregate picture is sharper than the country snapshots. Stablecoins processed $33 trillion in transaction volume in 2025. Strip out automated trading and wash activity and you are left with roughly $9 trillion in genuine economic transactions. That figure is 5 times PayPal's annual payment volume and over half of Visa's throughput. Real-world stablecoin payments specifically, excluding speculation, doubled in 2025 to $400 billion. Business-to-business stablecoin payments grew 733% year over year.

The remittance corridors tell the story most plainly. The global remittance market is worth roughly $900 billion annually. Western Union's fees can reach 6% of the transfer amount. A stablecoin transfer on Stellar, Polygon, or Tron costs less than 10 cents regardless of the amount sent. A worker in Houston sending $500 home to Guatemala loses $30 to Western Union. The same worker loses 10 cents to a stablecoin rail. The Western Union CEO publicly acknowledged in April 2026 that stablecoins are faster and cheaper, and the company is now building its own stablecoin product to compete with the very instrument McKenzie says only criminals use. The largest legacy money transmitter on the planet has read the field and chosen the side McKenzie's book is arguing against.

The de-banking pattern inside the United States is the same story in a different costume. Between 2022 and 2024, at least 30 digital asset companies lost banking access through what the House Financial Services Committee documented as Operation Choke Point 2.0. The FDIC issued pause letters to roughly 24 banks engaged in crypto-related activities, instructing them to halt new digital asset services. Custodia Bank's CEO Caitlin Long publicly testified to being repeatedly de-banked. Founders of Uniswap, Ripple, and Gemini lost personal banking access. None of them were charged with crimes. The pressure was applied through informal supervisory channels precisely because formal channels would have required process the targets could have fought.

That is the position the McKenzie thesis cannot account for. Most people are not turning to crypto to gamble. They are reaching for it because the formal banking system is no longer a neutral utility. It is a chokepoint with a viewpoint, and the viewpoint shifts with whoever is in office.

The casino is real. The KillChain has covered it.

Memecoin manias are liquidating retail accounts at scale. Leverage products engineered to harvest unsophisticated traders. FTX collapsing $8 billion in customer funds while Sam Bankman-Fried was on the cover of Forbes. The Tether reserve fraud across 2017 and 2018 that we walked through last Saturday. The Trump family memecoin run we covered as a textbook insider distribution the week it broke. The Drift Protocol exploit exposed Circle's enforcement posture. The pump-and-dump celebrity shilling industry has run unchecked for the better part of a decade.

McKenzie names these patterns. He names them well. The FTX section of Easy Money is one of the cleaner contemporary accounts of what happened inside that organization. The Tether chapter, written before the 2026 KPMG audit, documents the reserve history accurately. The catalog of celebrity endorsements is a useful map of regulatory failure.

We do not dispute any of it. This newsletter has paid the bill on most of it in the form of subscribers who arrived after watching one of those frauds unfold and decided they wanted intelligence rather than hype.

The disagreement is narrower than it looks. The diagnosis of the casino is sound. The error is in the conclusion that the casino is the entire building. The casino is the corner of the building closest to the street. It is the part visible from the sidewalk. The reason people walk past the casino into the building anyway is what the book never quite addresses.

That is the part this newsletter exists to address. Not because crypto is a solution. Because understanding why people are reaching is the prerequisite to evaluating any instrument they are reaching for, including the one we are still all paid in.

Every instrument has a set of people who can stop you from using it. The question is who, under what process, with what recourse.

For dollars in a U.S. bank: your bank can freeze the account at its own discretion under its terms of service. OFAC can designate you. FinCEN can order that your assets be reported and held. The IRS can levy without a judicial proceeding. Civil asset forfeiture can take cash from you on the side of a road with no charge filed, and U.S. agencies seize roughly $5 billion in assets per year, the majority of which are seized without a criminal conviction. Operation Choke Point 2.0 demonstrated that the executive branch can pressure private banks to deny service to legal businesses through informal channels, and that the pressure works.

For USDT, as we walked through last Saturday, Tether can blacklist your wallet at the request of any of the more than 340 law enforcement agencies across 65 countries it works with, without a judicial order, notice to the holder, or a defined appeal mechanism beyond emailing a compliance team.

For Bitcoin held in self-custody, there is no central authority that can freeze the asset itself. The on-ramps and off-ramps to fiat can be choked. Your seed phrase can be subpoenaed under contempt risk. Your hardware can be seized. The asset itself cannot be unilaterally frozen because it has no administrator who can call a function on your wallet.

These are different risk profiles for different instruments. None of them is risk-free. The instrument that is most heavily concentrated in your savings, your retirement, and your wage is the one that has been losing 4.14% per year of purchasing power since 2020 and has the longest list of authorities who can freeze it on short notice. That instrument is the dollar.

McKenzie's book argues that crypto is an inferior substitute for the dollar. The argument assumes the dollar is a fixed reference point against which alternatives can be measured. The dollar is not a fixed reference point. The dollar is moving. It is moving in a particular direction. The direction benefits a particular position. The people on the wrong side of that position have noticed.

This newsletter does not exist to tell anyone what to hold. We do not give financial advice. We give intelligence on the instruments themselves: who controls them, who profits from them, who can stop you from using them, and what the actual risk profile looks like once the marketing is stripped off.

The casino corner of crypto deserves every word McKenzie has written about it. The rest of the building deserves a hearing the book did not give it.

Stay sharp. Stay solvent. Trust no one, including us.

7,000+ operators subscribe to The KillChain because the sanitized version of crypto coverage isn't worth the bandwidth. Every Saturday you get the kill chain beneath the week's biggest stories, traced in plain English, including the institutional positioning and regulatory theater the compliance department would rather you not see. From a former Senior Special Agent who spent 20 years building cases against the architects of schemes the industry now treats as legitimate strategy.

Forward this edition. The name that came to mind reading it is about to learn this the expensive way. Save them the tuition.

BTC: $77,913.31. Up 0.09% from $77,840.05 last week.

Price held the $76,000 floor through the sentiment swing. Strategy added 3,273 BTC for $255 million on April 27, bringing holdings to 818,334 BTC, roughly 3.9% of total supply against Saylor's 5 to 7% target. He is buying through both directions of sentiment. The $79,000 to $80,000 resistance cluster remains unbroken on a fourth attempt.

Trigger: A daily close above $80,000 with confirming ETF inflows opens the path to $82,000 to $84,000. A daily close below $74,000 invalidates the structure and forces downgrade to Watch.

Fraudfather Rating: Fraudfather is Accumulating (unchanged)

ETH: $2,285.90. Down 1.35% from $2,317.28 last week.

Last week's Hodl rating required ETF flow reset and ETH outperformance versus BTC. Both deteriorated. ETH spot ETFs posted $21.8 million in outflows on April 28 led by ETHA, then $87.73 million in outflows on April 29 led by FETH. ETHA losing leadership is the read. ETH underperformed BTC by 1.44 percentage points this week.

Trigger: Five consecutive sessions of ETH ETF net inflows with ETHA reclaiming leadership returns to Hodl. A weekly close below $2,150 with continued FETH and ETHA redemptions forces downgrade to Reduce.

Fraudfather Rating: Watch (downgraded from Hodl)

SOL: $83.47. Down 3.16% from $86.19 last week.

The April 1 Drift exploit drag is structural at 30 days out. Solana TVL contracted from $9 billion to $5.5 to $6 billion and has not recovered. US spot SOL ETF combined assets fell from a March peak near $937 million to $801 million on sustained outflows. Carrot Yield Protocol wound down operations as direct Drift exposure. Price has closed below the $85 floor for the first time in the post-Drift recovery window.

Trigger: A weekly close above $90 with TVL recovering past $7 billion and no new exploit headlines returns to Watch. A weekly close below $78 or any new Solana DeFi exploit forces downgrade to Avoid.

Fraudfather Rating: Reduce (downgraded from Watch)

On April 27, Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan publicly confirmed his company is building a stablecoin product to settle global transactions outside SWIFT. He cited speed and cost. The largest legacy money transmitter on the planet, operating in a $900 billion remittance market, has read the field and chosen the side McKenzie's book argues against.

Legacy money transmitters do not pivot toward instruments they believe are doomed. They pivot toward instruments that are eating their lunch. Western Union is the second major legacy player to cross over after PayPal launched PYUSD in 2023. The structural bid for compliant stablecoin issuers is accelerating as competitive pressure mounts. Citi, JPMorgan, and BNY Mellon are the next watch targets.

Friday May 1: OCC stablecoin NPRM comment period closed. Submitted comments will shape implementing regulations and grandfathering provisions. First of three federal regulator windows on the GENIUS Act.

July 18: Statutory deadline for federal regulators to promulgate final implementing regulations. The freeze mechanism language and grandfathering provisions are the load-bearing items.

Ongoing: Tether-OFAC freeze cycle. Any new wallet designation expands the precedent set on April 23. Watch the DOJ press release feed.

The KillChain Disclaimer

Not Financial Advice. The KillChain provides market intelligence for educational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice. References to "accumulation zones," "buy levels," or trading language describe analytical frameworks, not recommendations to buy, sell, or hold any asset.

You're In Command. You alone are responsible for your investment decisions. Consult a registered investment adviser or qualified professional regarding your individual circumstances. Do your own research. Verify everything. Trust no one, including us.

Crypto Is Volatile and Risky. Digital assets are highly speculative. You can lose some or all of your investment. Past performance doesn't predict future results. Markets can go to zero. Regulatory landscapes shift. Exchanges fail. Wallets get hacked. If you can't afford to lose it, don't invest it.

We May Hold Positions. The FraudFather and KillChain contributors may hold positions in assets discussed. We're sharing analysis as market participants, not acting as your fiduciary, broker, or adviser. Our interests may not align with yours.

Stay Sharp. Stay Solvent. This newsletter is for sophisticated readers who understand risk management and personal responsibility. We provide intelligence. You make decisions.