Author | Andrei Jikh
Compiled by Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Translator | Dingdang ( @XiaMiPP )
At a recent Eastern Economic Forum in Russia, one of Putin's closest advisors made a statement that has attracted widespread attention. He stated that the United States is preparing to use cryptocurrencies and stablecoins to devalue its massive $37 trillion national debt in a virtually imperceptible manner.
His claim is that the United States is plotting to "migrate" this debt into an encrypted system, using a so-called "encrypted cloud" to perform a system-wide reset, with the ultimate result being that other countries in the world will have to pay for it.
At first glance, this might sound like some kind of crazy theory. But similar ideas are not new. Michael Saylor, founder of MicroStrategy and a billionaire, once publicly made a highly controversial suggestion to Trump: sell all of America's gold reserves and buy Bitcoin. Simply emptying the gold reserves would allow the same amount of money to buy 5 million Bitcoins. This would demonetize the entire gold asset class. Meanwhile, our rival countries hold massive gold reserves. Their assets would approach zero, while our assets would swell to $100 trillion, and the US would simultaneously control the global reserve capital network and reserve currency system.
But the question is: Is this realistic? Is it really feasible?
Andrei Jikh, a YouTube blogger with 2.93 million subscribers, broke down in a video what Putin's advisors actually said and how the US might devalue its $37 trillion debt through stablecoins and Bitcoin. Odaily Odaily compiled and translated this video.
The first question is: Who said these words?
The speaker, Anton Kobyakov , is a senior advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a position he has held for over a decade. His main responsibility is to project Russia's strategic narrative at important events such as the Eastern Economic Forum.
In his speech, he explicitly stated that the United States is attempting to rewrite the rules of the gold and crypto markets, with the ultimate goal of pushing the global economic system into what he calls the "crypto cloud." Once the global financial system completes this migration, the United States can embed its massive national debt into digital asset structures such as stablecoins, and then achieve a de facto "debt zeroing" through devaluation.
The second question: What exactly does "debt devaluation" mean? How does it work?
Let's use an extremely simplified example to understand this. Suppose that the entire world's wealth is only worth a $100 bill. I borrow all $100, so I owe the entire world's wealth, and I must repay it.
The problem is, if I honestly repay my debt, I have to return the $100 intact. But luckily, I possess a special "superpower"—I control the issuance of the world's reserve currency.
So instead of restoring the original $100 bill, I printed a new $100 bill out of thin air .
What was the result? The total amount of currency in circulation in the world increased from $100 to $200, but the amount of goods, houses, and resources in the world did not increase.
The result is that the price of everything starts to rise: real estate, stocks, gold, and especially things that people want all become more expensive; what used to cost $1 now costs $2. Everything has become more expensive, but the supply of goods remains the same. This is inflation .
Now, when I return "that $100 bill" to you, I appear to have fully fulfilled my debt obligations, but in reality, the purchasing power of the money you receive is reduced to only half . I haven't defaulted, but I 've devalued the debt by diluting the currency.
Stablecoins are replicating this old script.
However, what many people don't realize is that this is one of the oldest and most common ways of repaying debt in human history. It's also how the United States has consistently repaid its debts.
Debt devaluation is not the same as default, nor does it mean non-payment. It simply reduces the real value of debt through inflation or currency manipulation.
This pattern has occurred time and again throughout history. It was true after World War II, during the Great Inflation of the 1970s, and again after the massive monetary easing following the pandemic.
Therefore, when a Russian advisor says that "the United States may use cryptocurrency to devalue its debt," he is not revealing a new mechanism, but rather describing an old method that the United States has long mastered.
The real change is that stablecoins can spread this mechanism globally.
It needs to be clarified that this is not about "directly converting" $37 trillion into stablecoins. Rather, it involves using dollar-denominated stablecoins with US Treasury bonds as the underlying asset to distribute the US debt structure among global holders. When the dollar is diluted by inflation, the losses are shared by all holders of these stablecoins.
I want to discuss something extremely important, a fundamental economic fact that many people overlook, which is also Jeff Booth's view: the natural state of the economy is actually deflation. This means that if there were only a fixed amount of currency in the world, over time, technological advancements and increased production efficiency would naturally lead to lower prices. Price decreases are the natural law. But reality doesn't work this way; the world we live in doesn't operate this way. There's only one reason: governments can create unlimited amounts of money.
When new currencies flood the system, this liquidity must "find a place" to avoid becoming worthless. So, it's invested in assets like real estate, stocks, gold, and Bitcoin. This is why, in the long run, these assets seem to always appreciate. But in reality, they are merely maintaining their purchasing power, while the currency that underpins everything is weakening. It's not that the assets are appreciating; it's that the dollar is depreciating.
The true value of stablecoins: distribution + control
The question is, what if you could extend this superpower? What if you could take the same trick outside the United States? That's where stablecoins come in.
If the US can already devalue its debt through regular inflation, what more can stablecoins do? The answer is two words: distribution and control.
Because when there is inflation in the United States, the economic pain is immediate: we will see higher grocery bills, more expensive housing, rising energy costs, and potentially higher interest rates. As CPI and consumer price index reports rise, Americans will become dissatisfied.
Stablecoins are different. Because stablecoins typically hold reserves in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds , the demand for the dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds can actually rise as stablecoin adoption increases, making the whole thing self-reinforcing. When USDT and USDC are widely used globally, they are essentially holding a digital IOU backed by U.S. Treasury bonds. This means that U.S. debt financing is being "invisibly outsourced" to global users.
Therefore, if the US devalues its debt through inflation, the burden will not only fall on US citizens but will also be "exported" globally through the stablecoin system. Inflation then becomes a tax that all stablecoin holders worldwide are forced to bear, as their digital dollars lose purchasing power. Technically, the current system is similar. Dollars are distributed globally, but stablecoins will become a much larger market, existing on people's smartphones.
Another piece of the puzzle is that stablecoins can appear neutral because they can be created by private companies, not just governments. This means they don't carry the political baggage associated with the Federal Reserve or the Treasury. Under the Genius Act, only approved issuers, such as banks, trust companies, or non-bank companies that can obtain special approval, can issue regulated, dollar-backed stablecoins in the United States.
If Apple or Meta wanted, they could theoretically issue their own currency, such as the so-called "Metacoin." What's truly needed isn't a technological breakthrough, but rather political permission. To put it bluntly, as long as they curry favor with the core of power and invest enough capital, they could potentially obtain the necessary approval.
This is precisely why stablecoins play such an important role in the process of diluting US debt. They essentially provide "near-central bank digital currency (CBDC) level control" without having to bear the highly sensitive label of CBDC globally.
The fatal flaw of stablecoins: Trust cannot be fully verified.
The problem is that other countries in the world are not buying it. We have already seen this in the continued large-scale gold purchases by central banks around the world.
Stablecoins claim to be pegged 1:1 to the US dollar or US Treasury bonds. In theory, each stablecoin in circulation should correspond to $1 in cash or an equivalent amount of Treasury bond assets. However, the reality is that neither individuals nor foreign governments can independently audit these reserves with 100% certainty.
Tether and Circle issue reserve reports, but you must trust the issuer and the auditing firm, almost all of which are within the US system . When it comes to trust issues involving trillions of dollars, this is an extremely high barrier to entry for nations.
Even if blockchain technology can enable real-time, transparent auditing of stablecoin reserves in the future, it will not solve the deeper problem— the United States will always have the power to change the rules.
History has already provided a clear warning. The US government had promised that the dollar could be exchanged for gold at any time, but in 1971, the Nixon administration unilaterally severed this exchange channel. From a global perspective, this was tantamount to a complete "rule-flipping": the promise remained, but its fulfillment was ended with a dismissive "joke."
Therefore, a digital token system built on the premise of "please trust us" will find it difficult to truly win the world's trust. Technically, nothing can prevent the United States from making a similar decision regarding stablecoins as it did with the dollar's decoupling from gold. This is the fundamental reason for the widespread global vigilance towards next-generation digital currency systems.
So, the next question is: Will the United States ultimately actually do this?
In my view, this possibility not only exists, but is even inevitable. The United States is already testing this idea , just not in the way we've heard about.
For example, Michael Saylor publicly advised Trump and his family to establish a strategic reserve of Bitcoin. His idea was that if the US sold gold and instead bought Bitcoin on a large scale, it could not only suppress gold prices and weaken competitors such as China and Russia, but also drive up Bitcoin prices and reshape the US balance sheet.
Ultimately, this didn't happen. Instead, during Trump's term, the idea of a US Bitcoin reserve remained merely a mentioned concept and never materialized. US officials explicitly stated they would not use taxpayer money to purchase Bitcoin, and at least publicly, no such action was observed. Therefore, I don't think it will happen in the way Michael Saylor publicly suggested.
However, this doesn't mean the story ends there. Because government involvement isn't always about direct government involvement. The real "backdoor" lies in the private sector.
MicroStrategy has effectively become a publicly traded Bitcoin company, continuously accumulating Bitcoin under the leadership of Michael Saylor, and currently holds hundreds of thousands of coins. This raises the question: is it safer and more discreet for a publicly traded company to first accumulate large amounts of Bitcoin than for a government to directly purchase it?
This approach would not be perceived as central bank intervention, nor would it immediately trigger global market panic. Furthermore, once Bitcoin is truly established as a strategic asset, the US government could indirectly acquire exposure to Bitcoin through equity investments or controlling stakes—just as it has done with companies like Intel, a precedent already in place.
Rather than openly dumping gold, gambling trillions of dollars on Bitcoin transactions, or forcefully pushing for a stablecoin system, the smarter, and more consistent with its usual approach, is to let private companies test the waters first. Once a model has proven effective and become too important to ignore, it can then be adopted and institutionalized at the national level.
This approach is more covert, gradual, and "denialist," until one day, everything officially comes to light.
Therefore, my core point is that there are many ways this could happen, and it is very likely to happen. The Russian advisor's assessment was not unfounded—if the US truly intends to address its national debt problem at its core, then some form of digital asset strategy is almost inevitable.
