Is true digital privacy still possible, or is it time to start lying to our machines?

This episode goes deeper into the science: the inward-facing cameras now mandated under Section 24220 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to track eye movement and drowsiness, the ECG sensors embedded in steering wheels and ballistic cardiography sensors in seatbacks that read a driver’s heartbeat through touch and posture alone, and the millimeter-wave radar in seat belts and Affectiva-style emotion AI that can infer a driver’s stress, fatigue, or mood in real time. No solutions here, just the full picture.

Love is being there on the worst day of someone’s life.

The phone rang late. This was after the 2008 crash, when the calls that came late were never good ones. I was tired down to the bone, and I remember the exact thought that crossed my mind: can it not wait until morning. I did not feel like talking to anyone.

Something inside me overruled.

It was my best friend, and he was not making sense. His business had been built on a strong housing market, and the housing market had just been vaporized. His divorce had finalized barely a year before. Now the last thing holding him up had given way, and he was telling me, in the fractured language of a man at the end, that he did not want to be here anymore.

We still had landlines then. I kept him talking on one line while I called the police on the other, saying the same thing over and over: hold on, I am coming, hold on. I drove through the dark repeating it to an empty car.

I pulled up at the same moment the police did. He was holding a gun to his head.

The officers talked him down. When it was over he grabbed me and did not let go, the way a man holds on when he has just decided, by the width of a hair, to stay alive. The ambulance took him to the hospital and I did not leave his side. It took hours before the staff psychologist could see him. When he finally did, he told my friend something I have never forgotten. You are a statistic, he said. Men like you, in this year, in this part of the country, are dying at rates we have never seen.

A statistic. That was the word the system had for the best man I know, on the worst night of his life.

He survived. He rebuilt the business from nothing. He is doing well now, and I do not just mean the balance sheet.

I am telling you this because of a conversation I had the other day.

Another friend, a Wall Street type, brought him up. We were standing on the grounds of his ocean view estate, and while we talked he bent down to remove a stray pebble from the gravel, then pulled the single weed visible for miles in any direction. Oh, he said. Did he not have “some challenges” at some point.

“Some challenges.”

A gun to his head. Hours in a fluorescent hallway waiting to learn whether my best friend would be admitted to get the help he needed. A doctor telling him he was a statistic. All of it filed, in this man’s mind, under “some challenges”, in the same tone he might use for a stock that dipped and recovered. Then he went back to grooming the gravel. I stood there and felt something I am still feeling weeks later, which is why you are reading this.

Here is what I need you to understand about that moment. He was not being cruel. Cruelty would at least require noticing. This was something colder, and it was not a character flaw. It was a system working exactly as designed.

A certain level of wealth is not just money. It is an empathy removal machine, and the mechanism is simple: it buys distance. Distance from the waiting room, because there is a specialist on retainer. Distance from the midnight phone call, because there is staff for that. Distance from failure itself, because when the market collapsed and my friend lost everything he had built, men like this one were made whole by a bailout. Past a certain number, the core product money sells is the ability to leave any room you do not want to be in. And empathy is the one thing a person can only learn in the rooms they cannot leave.

So of course a near death registers as “some challenges”. This man has spent thirty years scoring the world with one instrument, the market, and the market asks exactly one question: did it come back up? My friend’s business came back up. Ticker recovered. Position closed. The man holding a gun to his own head at midnight appears nowhere in that ledger, and whatever does not appear in the ledger, this class of person has quietly stopped believing is real.

Look at the estate itself. Every blade identical. Every pebble in place. The single weed pulled the moment it dares to appear. That is not gardening. That is a worldview. It is the systematic removal of every visible reminder that things struggle, fail, break, and die. Even his lawn is not permitted to have a bad year. So when a human being in his own circle has one, he no longer owns the category for it. He paid to have the category removed.

And I will tell you the uncomfortable part. Standing on that lawn, for a moment, I fell for it. I always do, a little. The illusion is beautiful. That is its entire job. The weedless grass, the flawless family, the view that says the person who owns it has won. Our whole economy is engineered to make you feel the distance between your life and that picture, and then to sell you things to close a gap that was manufactured in the first place. I have spent my career inside the machinery that runs that trade. I know how good it is at its job. It works on me too. That is what makes me angriest of all. I watched what that picture costs, from a hospital chair, and part of me still wants it.

But here is what the picture leaves out. No one on that lawn was there at the hospital. The ocean view was not on the phone at midnight. The perfect family portrait has never once said hold on, I am coming, hold on.

That is not wealth. It is staging.

Wealth is a friend who answers when every cell in his body wants to let it ring. Wealth is sitting in a fluorescent waiting room until four in the morning so that a man who was called a statistic knows he is not one to you.

It is simple. It costs nothing. And every single one of us can afford it.

Do not fall for the illusion.

If someone you love is in distress: stay with them, or stay on the line. You do not need the right words. Presence is the message. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available every hour of every day, for them or for yourself. If danger is immediate, call 911 and do not leave them alone until help arrives.

Three weeks earlier, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo answered with a tokenized deposit network built on The Clearing House, targeting a 2027 launch and the $2.2 trillion daily wholesale settlement market.

This episode walks through both architectures, why the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts turned stablecoins into an existential threat to bank deposits, how community banks are organizing to avoid another Zelle, and what happens to your privacy when the companies that already track your searches, your shopping, and your dinner orders start sharing a single view of everything you spend. You will not opt in. Your apps will simply swap the rails underneath you.

The episode traces the infrastructure that makes this possible. Modern vehicles carry roughly eight exterior cameras and twelve ultrasonic sensors, continuously streaming driving behavior, location, and cabin data through a real-time architecture designed to handle billions of data points per second. The privacy policy claims anonymization, but warns that opting out of data sharing can cause reduced functionality or inoperability, a threat compared to a smartphone that bricks itself if you turn off location services.

From there, the conversation moves into monetization. Hardware that is already installed, like extra battery capacity or heated seats, is disabled by software and sold back to owners as microtransactions. The 2017 Hurricane Irma incident, in which the company remotely unlocked the restricted battery range for evacuating drivers, is cited as proof that the capacity was always there and simply withheld for revenue. The episode also covers the shift from one-time purchases to recurring revenue: a $ 99-a-month Full Self Driving subscription generating hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue, a $9.99 premium connectivity paywall, and dynamic supercharger pricing that spikes cost based on real-time battery levels and station congestion, extracting the most money at the moment of greatest physical vulnerability.

The episode closes on the insurance-and-repair layer. A proprietary safety score generated by the same company that manufactures the sensors sets insurance premiums, and phantom braking events caused by sensor errors count against the driver with no refund path. Full Self Driving use automatically earns a perfect score, creating a financial incentive to buy the subscription. Repairs are locked behind cryptographic parts authorization and a $ 700-a-year diagnostic tool subscription for independent mechanics. It all ties back to the opening repossession story. The same over-the-air system that delivers convenience can also revoke access, meaning ownership has been replaced by conditional, revocable permission.

In March and April, Consumer Reports asked volunteers nationwide to try something Uber and Lyft likely never expected: open the app, request the same ride at the same time from the same place, and compare what happened. The fares were often very different. Lawmakers from both parties have since sent letters asking for explanations. The companies insist it is just normal competition. This article considers what these companies know about you before setting your price.

Surge pricing told you the market had changed. Surveillance pricing tells the market that you changed, and prices you accordingly.

The forty-dollar question

Let’s begin with the numbers, since they tell the main story.

In Austin, volunteers who requested the same route within minutes saw fares from $25 to $65. That’s a 160 percent difference. In Kansas City, 55 people checked the same Lyft route at the same time and got 29 different prices. In Phoenix, 18 Uber riders saw base fares around $55 to $60, but after discounts, they paid between $41.21 and $56.96. In Atlanta, 37 Lyft riders requested the same trip at the same time. Their starting fares ranged from about $12.93 to $14.99, and after discounts, they paid anywhere from $2.28 to $14.99.

In Florida, one woman was quoted $95 for an Uber ride, while another person checking the same trip at the same time saw a fare of about $65. House Oversight Committee, in a separate review released earlier this year, cited a report showing Uber pricing the same product differently for different customers by an average of 11 percent, with one documented case showing a 221 percent gap between two riders on the same trip, one quoted $76.82 and the other $23.92.

There are also fake discounts. Consumer Reports found that almost 11 percent of advertised “discounts” on both apps were based on inflated reference prices rather than real markdowns. For example, one volunteer, Tessa, saw her fare listed as discounted from $82.08 to $65.95, with a banner saying fares were “lower than usual.” But 40 other riders checking the same route saw prices ranging from $65.93 to $65.99, with no discount banner. Her so-called discount was just the normal price made to look like a deal.

What the companies say, and what researchers found anyway

Both companies deny using your personal data for pricing. Uber says it “does not personalize prices, period,” and blames price differences on real-time market conditions, GPS accuracy, and rapidly changing demand. Lyft has made almost the same statement: “We do not engage in surveillance pricing. Period.”

Consumer Reports designed its test to rule out timing as a factor, requesting rides within minutes or even seconds of each other from the same spot. Derek Kravitz, the lead author, pointed out that Uber and Lyft collect a lot of behavioral data, like how quickly and accurately you type an address. This data could be used to guess how much you are willing to pay. Researchers have seen this before. One study in Chicago found that no two riders, even those requesting a trip milliseconds apart from the same place, were likely to get the same price. Fares were often higher for trips linked to lower-income and mostly nonwhite neighborhoods. Another analysis found Uber charged more for trips starting or ending near expensive hotels.

The architecture underneath the fare

At this point, the story is no longer only about one app. It is about the entire industry.

In July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission began a formal study of what it calls surveillance pricing. This is when companies use your personal data to set a unique price for you rather than a single price for everyone.

The Commission’s staff lists the data used: your location, demographics, browsing and purchase history, device type, battery life, and even how you move your mouse on a screen.

In March, the House Oversight Committee sent letters to Uber, Lyft, Booking, Expedia, and Instacart. They warned that this kind of data can be used to find a consumer’s “pain point,” which is the highest price someone will pay before deciding not to buy.

This request for information is separate from the FTC’s 6(b) study, which has subpoenaed consultancies and tech vendors that create pricing tools for other companies.

This investigation is not focused on rideshare, and there is no evidence that it involves Uber or Lyft. But it does show that this kind of pricing system exists at scale, built by companies most riders do not know about. These systems are built to find the highest price a person will pay, not the price the market would set for everyone.

This is the big change. Surge pricing reacts to things like more riders, fewer drivers, or bad weather. Surveillance pricing, however, is based on who you are, what device you use, how you act in the app, and how easy it is for you to switch to a competitor.

This also explains why most people do not notice. A study found that only about one in six riders checks both apps before booking, and the average price difference between Uber and Lyft for the same trip is about 14 percent. Sticking with one app is a habit that pricing algorithms can exploit to charge you more.

Running it through the test

This newsletter uses a four-part test to distinguish between normal business pricing and what it calls Coercive Capitalism. First, the deal must look voluntary. Second, the customer must get real value, not just the appearance of value. Third, the data you give up in the process must be used against you. Fourth, the cost of leaving must be high enough to be more than a small hassle.

Uber and Lyft meet the first two points. No one makes you use the app, and when it works, you get real value by getting from one place to another.

The fourth point is the hardest to argue with. Two companies control about 95 percent of the market, leaving almost no other choices. The way prices are set is a secret, so riders cannot check or predict them. When you really need a ride, like when it is raining, you are late for a flight, or you are leaving a hospital, you are least likely to compare prices. People who rely most on these services, such as those without a car or with limited flexibility, are least able to check both apps. This is how the K-shaped economy shows up in a taxi fare. Avoiding a $40 extra charge is not the same as being protected from the system that causes it.

The market is not broken here. It is working as it was designed to, and that design is the real story.

Wearable devices are now among the most personal data-collection tools people use. They track more than your phone and collect more biological details than your bank statement. The main federal law that most protects health information was designed for hospitals and insurers, not for companies like Apple or Oura. So, what fills that gap, and how does it hold up when we look at it through the lens of Coercive Capitalism?

“The things you think are healthcare data may not actually be so.” — David Reis, Lahey Hospital and Medical Center

The Murder Case That Started with a Fitbit

In December 2015, Connie Dabate was shot and killed in the basement of her home in Ellington, Connecticut. Her husband, Richard, told police an intruder dressed in camouflage had broken in, tied him to a chair, and shot his wife when she came home early from the gym.

The story had a problem. Connie was wearing a Fitbit clipped to her waistband that morning, and the device recorded her walking roughly 1,217 feet during the window when Richard said she was already lying dead, far more than the 125 feet between her car and the basement where her body was found.

The mismatch helped unravel his account. Richard Dabate was convicted of murder in 2022 and sentenced to 65 years. In 2025, the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the conviction in a unanimous ruling that also affirmed the reliability of the Fitbit data.

At first glance, this seems like a reassuring story—a wearable device helped catch a killer. But if you look at it another way, the same technology that helped convict someone guilty could just as easily be used against an innocent person, or someone involved in an insurance dispute or lawsuit. The point is, the same data that proves guilt can also put you at risk.

Both outcomes are possible because there is no privacy framework for this kind of data. The law most people think protects them was never designed or written with wearables in mind.

Why HIPAA Does Not Apply

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed in 1996 to protect patient information as it moves through the healthcare system.

It applies only to what the law calls covered entities, defined narrowly as doctors, hospitals, health plans, and the vendors working directly on their behalf.

Consumer wearable companies are not included in this definition unless they work directly with a medical provider or insurer for a patient. This is rare because most companies want to avoid the strict requirements of HIPAA.

Your smartwatch can alert you to an irregular heartbeat, track your sleep, log your menstrual cycle, and record your location all day. But legally, none of this is treated as health data, unlike your doctor’s records.

Already Used Against People in Court

This gap has already been tested in court many times, often in ways wearable owners never expected when they started using these devices. The key point is that wearables appear in legal disputes, and the same unprotected data can help or harm you, depending on who uses it.

In a federal product liability case over an artificial hip implant, defense attorneys learned the plaintiff had worn a Fitbit daily and successfully compelled production of his step-count records, while the court allowed more sensitive categories, such as heart rate, sleep, and location, to be redacted as too invasive for the dispute at hand.

In an earlier case out of Calgary, a personal trainer’s own attorney pulled her Fitbit data to argue her post-accident activity had dropped below what would be expected for someone her age and profession, an attempt to use the device in her own favor.

Defense and insurance attorneys note the reverse happens just as often.

Fitness tracker data has been used to dispute where someone was before an accident, challenge whether an injury occurred as described, and undermine a disability claim by showing the claimant was hiking or walking within days of the alleged harm.

None of this needs a hack or data breach. All it takes is a subpoena, since the data was never protected to begin with. This is the real result of the gap: regular legal processes can access your data.

Yes, It Can Be Sold

Wearable data falls outside HIPAA. Most fitness trackers and smart rings are not regulated by the FDA because they are sold as wellness products rather than medical devices. Because of this, the data from your wrist can legally be sold to data brokers, employers, and law enforcement, just like any other consumer data.

This is not theoretical. The exact legal category wearables fall into already has a documented history of being sold. The FTC has brought enforcement actions against GoodRx, BetterHelp, and the fertility app Premom for sharing sensitive health data with Facebook, Google, and ad networks, despite explicitly promising users it would not. None of those three were wearable companies, but they fall into the same legal category as Fitbit, Oura, and Whoop, and the FTC’s own Health Breach Notification Rule has since been expanded to cover health apps and trackers. Fitbit itself has faced a class action alleging it shared heart rate and sleep data with third parties beyond what users reasonably expected, and Whoop has faced a separate suit over biometric data collection that allegedly omitted the consent and retention disclosures required by Illinois law.

Law enforcement has also already purchased commercial location data, including from wearables, without a warrant, the same loophole long used to buy cell phone location data from brokers instead of asking a judge for it. A peer-reviewed review of wearable privacy practices states this directly: that agencies have used purchased wearable data for location tracking, and that the legal gap allowing it is structural, not an oversight anyone is racing to close.

It is important to look at where this is going, not just where things stand now. In June 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Congress he wanted every American to have a wearable device within four years, a goal he supported with a major advertising campaign. Later, he told Axios that wearables “are not for everyone because of concerns like cost and personal privacy.” In that same report, a privacy attorney repeated the main point: once health data is collected by a wearable, HIPAA does not apply, and only the company’s privacy policy stands between you and a data sale. Privacy advocates and labor groups have also warned that employers could use this data against workers, since there are almost no rules to stop it.

This does not mean a federal mandate is on the way, and Kennedy later stepped back from that idea. What is clear is that the current HHS Secretary has publicly pushed for every American to wear a device, even though there are no clear legal protections in place, and has been campaigning for it.

The Voluntary Pipeline Insurers Built

Insurance companies have created a voluntary and popular way to collect this same information.

John Hancock’s Vitality program rewards life insurance policyholders for meeting step and exercise targets tracked via an Apple Watch or Fitbit, offering premium discounts of up to 25 percent and a heavily subsidized watch in exchange.

Members can claim an Apple Watch for as little as $25 upfront, paying the rest in monthly installments tied to how many workouts they log.

To be fair to the company, John Hancock’s own program materials state plainly that biometric data collected through Vitality will not be used to reclassify a policyholder’s risk level or serve as the sole basis for refusing to reinstate a lapsed policy.

That is a real contractual promise, not a loophole, and it deserves to be described accurately rather than treated as something it is not.

But this is just a promise from one company, for one product, and it could change with a new policy or if the company is bought by someone else.

The real issue is the system itself—a constant stream of your biometric data is sent straight to the company that determines your insurance value. This setup does not go away or disappear just because the current terms seem good. The real result is control: a system can be used in the future, not just now.

This system is important because it could be misused in the future, even if no company is using it that way right now.

The One State that Closed the Gap

Lawmakers in exactly one state have actually closed this gap.

Washington’s My Health My Data Act was enacted because many people believe federal law protects all their health information, much like hospital records are protected. In reality, HIPAA only covers a few types of organizations and leaves data collected by apps, wearables, and websites unprotected. This law aims to fix that gap.

The law gives people in Washington real rights. They can see what health data has been collected about them, ask for it to be deleted, and stop it from being sold without their written permission. This is the practical benefit of closing the gap.

It is the first state law specifically designed to close the HIPAA gap for fitness trackers, period-tracking apps, and wellness platforms.

If you do not live in Washington, none of those rights apply to you.

Right now, your level of protection depends on where you live. This is not how health privacy was meant to work, but when HIPAA was written in 1996, no one expected devices like these to exist.

Coercive Capitalism

This is where the Coercive Capitalism model helps explain things. The gap is not just a mistake waiting for new laws, but a system that works the way the business model wants it to.

The test has four parts, and it is worth defining each one before applying it here.

First, voluntary trade: you choose to wear the device and share its data, usually because it is useful or because someone offers a discount or a free watch in return.

Second, genuine benefit received: the device frequently works as advertised. You walk more. You sleep better. You catch an irregular heartbeat early.

Third, data weaponized back: the same continuous record that motivated or rewarded you becomes evidence the moment your interests diverge from the interests of whoever holds the data, an opposing party in a lawsuit, an insurer reviewing a claim, a prosecutor building a timeline.

Fourth, the cost of leaving is high. Once you have accepted the discounted watch, the lower premium, or have years of your data stored by a company, there is no easy way to undo it. You cannot take back data that has already been collected, and leaving the program usually means losing the benefits that made you join.

If you apply this test to wearable data, it meets all four points. This is what makes it different from a typical privacy issue. People agree to the trade and get real benefits, which is why most do not question it until their data ends up in a courtroom or an insurance file.

For years, millions of drivers enrolled in OnStar, believing they were buying an emergency lifeline: a button that calls an ambulance if you crash in the middle of nowhere. What they actually got was a location tracker pinging their coordinates every three seconds and a behavioral profile, sold without their knowledge, to the data brokers that feed into auto insurance pricing. Those brokers turned ordinary driving habits, hard brakes, speeding, late-night trips, into risk scores, and insurers used those scores to raise premiums, deny coverage, or cancel policies outright, often without the driver ever learning why their bill went up. A finalized FTC order and a record California settlement now confirm, in regulators’ own words, exactly how that happened, and exactly how little it cost General Motors.

“This fencing-in relief is appropriate given GM’s egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust.” — Federal Trade Commission

The Pitch Versus the Practice

OnStar has spent decades building trust on a single promise: if something goes wrong on the road, someone is watching out for you. That promise is why the discovery beneath OnStar Smart Driver came across as a genuine betrayal rather than a technicality.

According to the FTC’s complaint, the enrollment process was confusing and misleading, often happening during the vehicle purchase experience itself, with the pitch framed entirely around helping drivers assess their own habits. Some consumers did not realize they had been enrolled at all. GM later expanded what it collected to include precise geolocation data without giving customers any notice.

The company discontinued Smart Driver across all its brands in April 2024, after a New York Times investigation brought the practice into public view, two years before the FTC’s order became final.

But GM shutting down one program didn’t close the underlying gap. The same year GM pulled Smart Driver, California opened a sweeping investigation into how connected vehicles across the entire industry handle driver data, and that investigation has since produced penalties against Honda and Ford for similar conduct and remains active today.

This is Coercive Capitalism, Not Just a Privacy Violation

Most privacy failures get filed under “didn’t read the fine print.” This one deserves a different name.

Reporting on GM’s enrollment process found that the screen that signed drivers up for OnStar’s emergency rescue service was the same screen that signed them up for Smart Driver’s data collection, with no version of the form that let a driver accept the ambulance button and decline the tracker.

A buyer who wanted out of Smart Driver had to opt out of OnStar entirely, giving up remote diagnostics, software updates, and the rescue service.

That isn’t a disclosure failure you can fix with clearer language. It’s coercion built into the product itself: a genuine need, help if you crash on an empty road, made conditional on accepting something the driver never asked for.

Coercive capitalism doesn’t need you to agree to a bad trade if it can make that trade the only door into the good one.

What “Every Three Seconds” Actually Buys

The granularity here is what turns an abstract privacy concern into something concrete. This wasn’t occasional location data tied to navigation requests.

Regulators found GM’s systems pinging precise coordinates as often as every three seconds, layered with behavioral telemetry: how hard you braked, how fast you accelerated, whether you were speeding, and when.

That combination, location plus behavior plus timestamp, is exactly the input an actuarial model needs to build a risk profile of a specific person’s daily driving life, not a general statistic about cars.

From Your Dashboard to a Data Broker to Your Premium

GM sold that data to LexisNexis and Verisk, both of which operate as consumer reporting agencies under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the same federal framework that governs your credit report.

California's Department of Justice found GM earned roughly $20 million nationwide from these sales between 2020 and 2024. The brokers compiled the telemetry into driver-rating products and marketed them to insurance companies, who folded the resulting risk scores into underwriting and pricing decisions.

The mechanism is fully automated: a data broker’s algorithm correlates braking events, timing, and location against actuarial tables, generates a score, and sells it, all without a human in the loop and without the driver ever being told it happened.

Reporting at the time of GM’s original FTC settlement documented drivers who only learned they had been scored this way when their premiums unexpectedly rose.

The Federal Order: Real Restrictions, No Fine

When the FTC voted 2-0 to finalize its order against GM and OnStar in January 2026, it imposed a five-year ban on disclosing geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies, plus a 20-year requirement that GM obtain affirmative, explicit consent before collecting, using, or sharing connected vehicle data going forward.

That consent now has to happen at the dealership, tied to the vehicle’s VIN, when someone actually buys the car.

The order does not include a financial penalty. GM had already shut Smart Driver down in 2024 in response to public pressure, so by the time the federal order landed, the practical business impact was limited to the consent and reporting requirements going forward.

Separate lawsuits by state attorneys general in Texas, Nebraska, and Arkansas, plus a Florida consumer suit, are still addressing the same underlying conduct.

California’s Record Penalty, and Its Limits

Four months after the FTC order, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the California Privacy Protection Agency, and four county district attorneys announced a $12.75 million settlement with GM, the largest penalty ever issued under the California Consumer Privacy Act and the first CCPA enforcement action built specifically around the law’s data minimization and purpose limitation requirements.

The order requires GM to delete retained driving data within 180 days, absent fresh consent; direct LexisNexis and Verisk to delete the data GM already gave them; and build an ongoing privacy assessment program that is reviewed by the state.

There’s an important nuance buried in California’s own findings: state insurance law already prohibits California insurers from using driving behavior data to set rates, so California drivers were not directly affected by the rate-setting use case the brokers had planned.

That protection does not exist in most other states. The mechanism this investigation describes, vehicle telemetry sold to a broker, scored, and fed into an insurer’s pricing model, remains legal and active wherever a state hasn’t specifically barred it, through whichever automaker’s program is currently running it.

Part of a Three-Year Sweep, Not a Single Bad Actor

GM’s settlement is the third and largest result of a sweep California’s Privacy Protection Agency opened into the connected vehicle industry back in 2023.

The agency fined Honda $632,500 in March 2025 for making it harder for customers to opt out of data sharing than to opt in.

A year later, it fined Ford $375,703 for quietly discarding opt-out requests that customers had already submitted.

GM’s $12.75 million penalty is the same sweep’s most serious finding to date, because unlike Honda and Ford, GM was not just making it hard to opt out; it was selling the underlying driving data itself.

Read across all three cases, the trajectory points in one direction: penalties are getting larger, and violations are becoming more concrete, as regulators dig deeper into an industry built on the assumption that nobody would check.

Why This Isn’t Close to Over

GM’s settlement closes one company’s case, but it does nothing to the underlying incentive.

Under Section 24220 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the federal government has mandated that all new passenger vehicles include advanced impaired driving prevention technology, with enforcement beginning no later than September 2027.

In practice, that means inward-facing cameras tracking eye movement and drowsiness, the same category of hardware GM, Honda, and Ford have already been caught misusing.

Nothing in the law restricts what an automaker can do with that camera feed once the safety check is done.

The federal mandate that’s about to put this hardware in every new car sold in the US contains no privacy backstop on how it gets used afterward, which means the version of this story we’re telling about GM today is the version that’s about to scale, not shrink.

A prime example is the grocery delivery platform Instacart, which faced intense backlash and a $60 million Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement after investigations revealed its AI pricing tools were charging different shoppers up to 23% more for identical items at the exact same time.

As scrutiny mounts against online platforms, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are rapidly adopting Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs) to digitize their pricing.

While grocers tout ESLs as a way to improve operational efficiency, ensure price accuracy, and reduce labor costs, consumer advocates and lawmakers warn that these digital tags could bring the same dynamic, data-driven surge pricing to physical grocery aisles, prompting a wave of new legislative efforts to ban or heavily regulate the technology

Electronic shelf labels and in-store facial recognition are spreading through the country’s largest grocery chains on separate tracks right now. Regulators are only just starting to look at what happens when those tracks meet.

“Two people standing in the same store, buying the exact same item, at the exact same time, could be paying two different prices based on what they’ve told their chatbot. Why? Because an algorithm decided one of them could afford more.” — Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5), May 18, 2026

The signs went up quietly. Small notices, required by New York City law, appeared near the entrances of Wegmans stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn in January. They stated, in clinical terms, that the company collects, retains, converts, stores, or shares customers’ biometric identifiers, including facial recognition, eye scans, and voiceprints. Customers who’d shopped there for years had no idea. The story went viral within days.

Wegmans confirmed the signs were real. The company said it uses facial recognition in a small fraction of stores in communities at “elevated risk” for security to identify people already flagged for misconduct. That part may be true. What the story actually revealed wasn’t Wegmans. It was the silence around it. New York City is one of the only places in the country that requires a business to tell you when it’s scanning your face. So the ACLU asked 20 of America’s largest retailers directly: Do you use facial recognition on customers? Seventeen refused to answer. Lowe’s confirmed it does. Walmart, Kroger, and Home Depot acknowledge the technology buried in their privacy policies, which almost nobody reads.

The Infrastructure Being Built

Electronic shelf labels aren’t new. What’s new is the scale and the speed. Walmart will have them in every U.S. store by the end of 2026, up from roughly 2,300 stores earlier this year. Kroger, Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, Schnucks, and Lidl have already deployed them chainwide. The stated rationale is efficiency, and it’s real: a price change that used to take an employee two days to complete across a 120,000-item store now takes minutes via a mobile app.

Here’s where I stop taking the efficiency framing at face value. In January 2026, Walmart received a U.S. patent for a system that “dynamically and automatically updates item prices.” In March, it received a second patent for using machine learning to forecast demand and recommend prices at scale. Walmart says publicly that it will never use this for surge pricing, and a spokeswoman has said the price you see is the same for every shopper in a given store. I believe that’s true today. What I’m pointing at is the gap between that promise and the patent filings sitting next to it. A company doesn’t usually patent a capability it has no intention of ever using.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 1.2 million grocery workers, launched a national campaign in February specifically to stop this technology before it gets used for what its critics say it was always built to enable.

The Circuit

Electronic shelf labels are one piece. Facial recognition cameras are a second. Loyalty programs are the third, and they’re the one most people don’t think to be suspicious of, because loyalty cards have existed for decades as a discount mechanism. Structurally, that’s not what they are. A loyalty program is a data collection system offering a discount as its user interface. Every scan builds a profile: what you buy, what you almost buy, when you shop, how price-sensitive you are for specific items, and which promotions actually move you. That profile has commercial value on its own. It becomes worth more the moment it can be attached to a face.

Kroger announced plans to use facial recognition for targeted coupons, personalizing prices based on who you are. Customers pushed back hard enough that Kroger said it had no current plans to identify faces at digital displays. Notice what that statement does and doesn’t say. It addresses one specific application. It leaves the rest of the infrastructure exactly where it was.

Here’s what the full circuit looks like once it’s assembled, and I want to be precise that this is the architecture being built, not a system that fully exists in any one store today: a loyalty app identifies you the moment you walk in. Facial recognition cameras confirm it and log what you stop in front of, how long you hesitate, what you pick up, and what you put back. The electronic shelf label in front of you shows a price calibrated to that profile. The person standing next to you, buying the same item at the same moment, may see something different.

Running This Through the Four-Part Test

I have a framework I use across this site to test whether something is actually coercive, not just unfair or unpleasant. I call the broader pattern Coercive Capitalism: systems that don’t force you into anything outright, but engineer your compliance by exploiting the gap between who you are and who you’ve been told you should be. The test itself has four parts, and something has to clear all four before I’ll call it coercive rather than just a bad trade-off. Is the trade voluntary? Did you receive a genuine benefit in return? Is the data you handed over weaponized against you, resulting in a real financial or material cost? And is the cost of walking away engineered to be prohibitive, rather than just inconvenient?

Run a loyalty card through it. Signing up is voluntary, and the discount is a genuine benefit, so it clears the first two parts cleanly. The third part is where it turns. The same data that earns you 40 cents off cereal is the raw material for a system that can, eventually, decide you’ll tolerate paying more for it. That’s the data being weaponized back against the person who generated it, just routed through a different mechanism than the ones I usually write about here. The fourth part, exit cost, is what makes grocery shopping a different category entirely from airline tickets or hotel rooms. Nobody needs a hotel room. Everybody needs to eat. “Just shop somewhere else” stops being a real option when the largest cha

Who Actually Pays More

This isn’t evenly distributed. The data inputs that feed a personalized pricing model, proximity to competitor stores, purchase history, inferred income, and geography aren’t neutral variables. They map onto the same patterns that have structured economic disadvantage for generations. A system built to charge what it predicts you’ll tolerate will charge people in lower-income zip codes more for the groceries they can least afford to pay for.

Rite Aid is the warning shot for what can go wrong when this kind of system runs unchecked. The FTC banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition for five years in 2023 after finding its system generated false identifications that disproportionately flagged Black and Asian customers as shoplifters, deployed mostly in stores located in communities of color.

What the Industry Gets Right

I want to give an honest account of the other side, because retailers aren’t wrong about everything. Electronic shelf labels solve real operational problems: price accuracy, inventory management, and fewer checkout discrepancies. A UC San Diego study examining more than 180 million product-level price observations across 114 stores found no evidence that electronic shelf labels have led to surge pricing in U.S. grocery retail so far.

I believe that finding. I also think it’s a backward-looking data point about a system being built in the present tense, the same distinction I’d draw about any capability that hasn’t been switched on yet. The retailers argue that personalized pricing would damage customer trust, and that argument only holds if customers know it’s happening. Right now, this industry’s default is non-disclosure, and the Wegmans story is the clearest proof of how wide that gap actually is.

There’s already a documented version of this happening at scale, and it didn’t even need facial recognition. A Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports study found Instacart was showing shoppers as many as five different prices for the exact same item, at the exact same store, at the same moment, with some shoppers paying up to 23 percent more. New York Attorney General Letitia James sent Instacart a formal demand for answers in January. Instacart said it would stop running those specific item-level price tests. Its retail partners can still run their own.

Where the Law Actually Stands

This moved faster than I expected, even a few weeks ago, so here’s the current state, not the one from when this story first got reported.

Maryland was first. Governor Wes Moore signed the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act on April 28, 2026, banning surveillance pricing in food retail, effective October 1. Connecticut followed. Governor Ned Lamont signed HB 5563 on May 27, 2026, making it the second state, also effective October 1. Both laws carve out loyalty program pricing entirely, as long as enrollment is voluntary, which is precisely the mechanism the rest of each law seeks to restrict.

Colorado passed a broader, all-industry ban on May 8. Governor Jared Polis vetoed it on June 2, calling it “overly broad.” A Democratic governor in a blue state vetoing his own legislature’s surveillance pricing bill is worth sitting with. Even people sympathetic to the underlying concern struggle to draw a clear line between surveillance pricing and ordinary personalization. California’s AB 2564 passed the full State Assembly on May 27 and is now in the Senate.

At the federal level, Senators Ben Ray Luján and Jeff Merkley’s Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act would ban the use of surveillance pricing and electronic shelf labels outright in large grocery stores. Representative Gottheimer’s No Rigged Grocery Prices Act, introduced May 19, 2026, as H.R. 8895 with Republican co-lead Mike Lawler, takes a narrower approach, banning the personal-data targeting while explicitly preserving discounts and loyalty pricing. Neither bill has cleared the committee.

The honest summary isn’t “two states banned it.” It’s the two states that acted fastest that both banned the output while leaving the input untouched. Loyalty program data is what would feed a personalized price in the first place; eye scans and price tags are just the delivery mechanism. A law that prohibits the delivery mechanism while exempting the data pipeline that supplies it isn’t a weaker version of a ban. It’s a different thing wearing a ban’s name, and it passed specifically because that exemption was the price of getting industry to stop fighting it. Connecticut moving second, and moving with the same hole in the wall as Maryland, isn’t a sign the approach is converging on something solid. It’s a sign the hole is structural, not a drafting accident; anyone’s likely to close next time, either.

What I’m Watching Next

I don’t think there’s a room where a retail executive and a software vendor sat down to plan a face-scanning, price-personalizing checkout system together. I think a loyalty program made sense on its own. A facial recognition camera for shoplifting made sense on its own. A digital price tag that saves labor hours made sense on its own. Nobody had to conspire for three separately reasonable decisions to add up to an architecture capable of charging two people different prices for the same loaf of bread. That’s the part worth sitting with longer than the outrage over any single piece of it.

What I’m watching for now, and this is the one that actually matters more than any of the others: whether a single state, anywhere, passes a surveillance pricing ban that closes the loyalty-program exemption rather than writing it in. Every bill that’s made it into law so far has needed that exemption to get the industry to stand down. If that pattern holds in California, in the federal bills, in whatever comes after this, then the lesson isn’t that the law is catching up. It’s that the law has found the one mechanism it’s structurally unwilling to touch, the same mechanism that makes the rest of the architecture work in the first place. Secondary to that: whether Connecticut’s price-setting-device disclosure actually shows up on receipts the way it’s supposed to, and whether anyone tests Maryland’s carve-out in court before October 1.

“Real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments.” — USDA contract language, via The Register.

I read that sentence in an actual government contract; the bureaucratic flatness of it is what got me. “Employee seat assignments.” Not a euphemism written to obscure something. Just the plain language of a tool that watches who shows up, where they sit, and whether they’re following the rules.

The contract is real. It was first reported in March 2026, when The Lever and then The Register surfaced the sole-source justification USDA had posted to SAM.gov. The award itself started on May 1, 2026. The Department of Agriculture obligated an initial $3.9 million to build a tool tracking employees’ return to the office. The original justification cited a potential ceiling of $75 million, but the federal spending disclosures for the actual award show a confirmed growth path that tops out at closer to $13.3 million for this fiscal year, which runs through September 30, 2026. Worth being precise about which number is which: $75 million is what USDA’s justification document floated as a ceiling, $13.3 million is what the obligated spending data actually shows so far. No competitive bidding. No other vendors considered. The justification was that only Palantir could deliver it fast enough.

That alone would be a story about one agency and one compliance tool. It isn’t one story. It’s the opening move.

Where the Line Actually Is

Employers have always tracked attendance. Badge swipes, calendar systems, and a manager noticing an empty desk- none of that is new, and none of it is inherently sinister. If “real-time analytics on space utilization” just meant counting occupied desks so an agency could right-size its office footprint, that’s a boring facilities question, not a surveillance story. Taxpayers have a legitimate interest in knowing whether employees mandated back to the office are actually showing up.

That is not what this contract describes. A badge swipe tells you whether someone is in the building. The USDA solicitation requires the capability for “continuous compliance monitoring” with automated alerts “upon detection of “threats or anomalies,” language confirmed independently by two outlets quoting the contract notice directly down to the same slightly garbled grammar, a strong sign it’s lifted verbatim rather than paraphrased. Here’s the distinction worth being precise about: that confirms the contract requires this capability to exist. It does not yet confirm, based on current reporting, that the system is actively running this way on USDA employees today. A contracted requirement and a deployed system are not the same claim, and I’m not going to blur them.

Even as a required capability, though, it’s a categorically different tool than a badge swipe. That is not attendance. That is the contracted capacity for an ongoing behavioral assessment, built by a company whose core product is anomaly detection and pattern flagging, not facilities management. The distinction isn’t “tracking is bad.” It’s between a binary record of presence and a system built to continuously score behavior, generated by a firm whose entire business model is finding what looks unusual in someone’s activity. One tells your employer where you are. The other is built to tell your employer what it thinks you’re doing, all the time, without you ever learning what tripped the flag.

The tool doesn’t need to fire anyone to change behavior. Knowing the capability exists is enough.

The Plan Was Always Bigger Than One Agency

The USDA return-to-office tool sits within a much larger contract umbrella, a $300 million “One Farmer, One File” initiative that consolidates farmer data across agencies and retires roughly 1,000 contractors in favor of automation. The workforce tracking piece isn’t a standalone product. It’s a feature riding alongside a much bigger data consolidation effort.

And it doesn’t stop at the USDA’s door. Reporting confirms that the same contract also kicks off a stated plan to track workers at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. I want to be precise about what’s documented here versus what’s a structural inference. Documented: USDA has the contract, and reporting confirms that SSA and VA are next. Inference, but not a wild one: once a federal vendor builds a tool that works at one agency, GSA contract-sharing rules make it trivial to roll the same tool out everywhere else. That’s not paranoia. That’s how federal procurement actually works. If this tool proves itself at USDA, there’s no structural reason it stops at three agencies. The federal workforce is roughly 2 million people.

This isn’t Palantir’s only federal expansion this year, either. The company also won a $30 million ICE contract to build a system tracking undocumented immigrants and self-deportations, its largest single award from that agency since 2011. And 10 Democratic lawmakers have demanded answers from CEO Alex Karp about Palantir’s alleged role in building a searchable “mega-database” layered atop every IRS database, raising the possibility that tax records could become accessible across agencies far beyond tax administration. The total federal contract value this year has crossed $900 million. The company itself is projecting a more than 60 percent jump in revenue for 2026, driven substantially by government work.

Different agencies. Different stated purposes. Same vendor, same underlying architecture, same year.

Running This Through the Four-Part Test

I built a framework for this site because I kept seeing the same pattern across completely different industries, and I needed a way to test whether something is actually coercive or just unpleasant. The test has four parts: a voluntary trade, a genuine benefit received, data weaponized back as a financial or material instrument against the same person, and an exit cost engineered to be prohibitive.

Federal employees pass the first two parts cleanly. Taking a government job is voluntary, and the paycheck is a genuine benefit. The third part is where the distinction above earns its keep: whether the capability is fully active yet. A system built to generate a continuously updated anomaly record is a much sharper instrument than an attendance sheet, and it would be compliance officers, not the employee, deciding what that record means. The fourth part, exit cost, is what separates this from a corporate badge-swipe system. You can quit a private employer over workplace surveillance and look for another job. Quitting a federal position in a labor market already strained by agency cuts and hiring freezes is a materially different decision. The cost of leaving isn’t abstract. It’s a household budget.

There’s a mental health dimension to this worth naming directly rather than just implying. The Government Accountability Office reviewed 122 studies on digital workplace surveillance and found that it can increase stress, anxiety, and depression, and that it risks employees’ physical health and safety by pushing them to move faster to meet productivity metrics. Eight of those studies found that constant surveillance negatively affects mental health specifically, with continuously monitored workers describing feeling anxious and demoralized. Researchers studying electronic monitoring call this stress proliferation: the damage often comes less from the monitoring itself than from the secondary stressors it sets off afterward, the second-guessing, the anticipatory dread, the sense of being evaluated by a process you can’t see or appeal. Layer that onto a workforce that can’t easily leave, and the exit cost from the fourth part of the test stops being just financial. It becomes a captive population for a documented mental health risk, with nowhere else to go.

That same GAO report contains one more detail worth sitting with. Several federal agencies, including the NLRB, the Department of Labor, the EEOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had previously issued guidance meant to protect workers from exactly these kinds of digital surveillance harms. Since January 2025, GAO has found that those agencies have either rescinded that guidance outright or are reviewing it to align with the current administration’s priorities. The same government that is now contracting for a tool capable of continuous behavioral monitoring of its own employees is, in parallel, walking back the rules that would have governed how such a tool is used.

What I’m Watching Next

I don’t think anyone designed this as a single coordinated plan in a back room. I think a contracting officer at USDA had a return-to-office mandate to enforce, a vendor with existing federal relationships and a promise of fast turnaround, and a procurement process that rewards exactly that combination. Nobody had to conspire. The incentive structure did the rest. That’s the same mechanism I keep finding everywhere else on this site, just wearing a different agency seal this time.

What I’m watching for now: whether reporting or a records request confirms the continuous-monitoring capability is actually running, not just specified in the contract; whether the SSA and VA contracts materialize on the timeline reported; whether GAO or congressional oversight gets a real look at the tool before it scales further; and whether “compliance monitoring” quietly expands past return-to-office into something with sharper teeth.

Economists have a name for it: the K-shaped economy, with two divergent paths running at once rather than a single shared recovery. It traces back to an actual sequence of events. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the response was to flood the system with stimulus and push interest rates close to zero. That money found its way overwhelmingly into assets, stocks, real estate, and anything someone could already own, and the people who already owned those assets got dramatically wealthier, fast.

Then came the inflation that followed, landing hardest on groceries, rent, and gas, the exact expenses that eat up a far bigger share of a paycheck for someone without assets to fall back on than for someone with them. Then came the rate hikes meant to fight that inflation, which made saving more rewarding for people who already had savings, and made borrowing brutally expensive for everyone else. Each stage of the same policy response, meant to rescue the whole economy, ended up running in two different directions depending on which side of the asset line you started on. Nobody designed it to split this way on purpose. It just kept splitting that way anyway, stage after stage, for going on six years now.

Here’s the part I don’t think the people at the top of that split fully feel yet. Insulation isn’t the same thing as immunity. The top of the K is being propped up right now by spending and confidence that ultimately depends on a much larger base of people who are running out of room to spend. When most consumers pull back because they’re maxed out, the businesses serving the top eventually feel it too, just later, and through a different door. Wealth concentrated in a small number of companies and asset classes is concentrated risk, not safety, if any of those names stumble. And a country with this much of its population structurally locked out of building any wealth at all doesn’t stay politically and socially stable forever, which is its own risk to everyone, including the people currently doing best. I’m not predicting a date for when this catches up. I’m saying the math doesn’t support feeling permanently safe up there, and most of the people I know who are doing well haven’t actually run that math.

Five people in my own life are already living on the other side of that split, right now, in ways I have never seen from any of them before.

Five Lives the Index Will Never Count

I’ve started keeping a quiet list. Not of stock tickers. Of people. Five of them, in my own life, right now, living through something I have never seen before in any of them. Every time I describe it to someone in finance, I get the same response. A small laugh. A pat reassurance. We’re not in a recession. We’re not in stagflation. Projected earnings are great. I want to tell you about the five people instead.

The Business That Couldn’t Outrun the Economy

One of them spent most of her life building a thriving business. The last few years broke that. As the business declined, she did the one thing she could: she borrowed against her house, the only real investment she had ever made, the one asset that had quietly doubled in value over thirty years while she put her actual effort into running the business instead of watching a portfolio. She drew against that equity again and again, until there was nothing left to draw against. She has spent months now leaning on the nonprofits that exist to catch women exactly like her, and she is worn down by that in a way I don’t think she has words for yet. This is a woman who did everything the textbook says you’re supposed to do: build something real, work hard, put your equity into the one asset everyone tells you is safe.

Doing Everything Right, Still Underwater

Another is divorced, raising her children on her own. She is well employed, the kind of job that looks solid from the outside, but it’s the kind of job that comes with a paycheck and nothing else, no stock options, no equity, none of the wealth-building extras that start layering on top of a salary further up the ladder. Almost everything she earns goes toward getting her children into school: grants applied for, scholarships chased down, student loans signed for in her own name on top of theirs. That’s the actual front she’s fighting on, and there’s nothing left over for her own future once that fight is paid for. She’s one of roughly a quarter of American adults who now put groceries on a credit card and carry the balance forward, not for anything extravagant, just food, while that balance quietly compounds in the background of a life that, by every external measure, looks like she’s doing everything right.

A Retirement Spent on Everyone Else

Someone close to me has reached the age she always pictured as retirement, and instead spends every spare dollar holding up her grown children, who are underemployed in ways that don’t match the educations or expectations they grew up with. She never invested herself. After her divorce, she remarried someone with a 401(k), which means whatever security she has now isn’t really hers; it’s borrowed from her husband’s retirement account instead of built from her own decades of work. She covered one of her children’s weddings. Another lost a job and now has an apartment that isn’t actually affordable without her stepping in. A third, well into adulthood, still depends on her outright. None of this shows on the surface. She isn’t struggling in any way that a stranger passing her on the street could see. But she is one serious illness away from watching the entire structure come down at once, hers and three other adult lives stacked on top of it.

What Survival Left Behind

Someone else I know is in her sixties. She lost her job a few years ago, and has spent that stretch living at a pace her savings were never built to support. What’s left is disappearing faster than she can slow it down, and none of it was ever invested. She survived an abusive relationship, and the weight of that history is part of why she can’t bring herself to hand what’s left to a financial advisor. She has also lived through financial abuse directly, the kind where someone else holds the money and the power that comes with it, which is its own quiet way a woman arrives at sixty having never invested a dollar without ever really choosing that for herself. Right now, I’m the one helping her stop the bleeding: getting her enrolled in SNAP, connecting her to food banks, writing her a resume after years outside the workforce, and working to get her health insurance down from two thousand dollars a month to something she can actually afford through a state program. She is one diagnosis away from watching all of it collapse at once.

What Caring for Her Mother Cost Her

And one more spent two years caring for her own mother through a serious illness, setting aside her own life to do it, quietly draining what little she had until there was nothing left. Then she got sick herself. She is fighting that illness right now while homeless, on a waiting list for housing that runs years long, the kind of wait that assumes she has years left to wait it out. I’m not going to add more detail than that. Some things don’t need it to land, and this person deserves better than becoming a case study.

All five are women. None of them were ever taught that investing was something they were supposed to do, not as a household practice, not as a system, not even as an idea worth raising at the table. For most of their lives, money and markets were coded as something men handled, demonstrated to sons rather than daughters, and discussed in conversations they weren’t part of. That’s not a personal failing on their part. It’s a generation of women who were never given instructions, arriving now at the exact moment in life when not following them comes at the highest cost.

The Road Ahead

When I bring any of this up with people who work in finance, the reaction is almost uniform. The small laugh, like I’ve said something quaint. Look at the data. We’re not in a recession. Earnings are strong. The laugh is the part that gets to me more than the disagreement. It’s not the laugh of someone who’s weighed these five lives against their own data and concluded I’m wrong. It’s the laugh of someone for whom these five lives were never on the table to begin with, not a contested data point, just unthinkable.

I don’t think that makes them bad people. I’ve sat with this for a while now, and I keep landing somewhere less satisfying than “they got rich and stopped caring.” It’s closer to a blind spot that correlates with where someone sits in the economy than to a character flaw. The advisors and analysts laughing at me are, almost by definition, standing on the upper part of the K-shaped economy I write about constantly on this site.

Their clients are doing fine because their clients can afford to have a financial advisor at all. That’s not a representative sample of anything except who currently has assets large enough to be worth managing. The data they’re citing isn’t fabricated. Unemployment really is low by the headline number. Earnings really are growing in aggregate. But aggregate numbers are built, almost by design, to reflect the people and companies with the most weight in the average, and the five people on my list have none. Add to that a few years of recession calls that turned out wrong, soft landing after soft landing, and you get a profession that’s trained itself to hear “things are bad” as noise rather than signal, even in a moment when the signal might actually be real.

I’m not telling you we’re in a recession. I genuinely don’t know if that’s the right word for what’s happening. What I know is that I have never, in all the years I’ve known these five people, watched this many of them hit a wall at the same time. That’s not a forecast. That’s a count.

None of the advisors I know personally sees any of this in their daily lives. Not the business that couldn’t outrun the economy, not the credit card balance that’s just groceries, not the retirement spent on three adult children, not the abuse survivor counting down half a million dollars, not the woman who gave two years to her mother and got sick herself in return. None of it ever crosses their desk. Their actual daily evidence is whatever their own clients tell them, and their clients can afford a financial advisor in the first place.

It makes me wonder when the economy is finally coming for them, too. They keep telling me to invest heavily, stay the course, ride it out. Meanwhile, I’m the one looking at the cracks they’re not tracking: the federal government now pays more in interest than it spends on the entire military, with that bill projected to double within a decade. A bond market that never actually recovered from its worst year on record, sitting on the exact same conditions that caused that crash. Private equity firms holding trillions in losses they haven’t admitted to yet, with a wave of funds forced to sell in the next two years, whether the market cooperates or not. A trillion dollars in office building loans are coming due this year at rates that don’t work anymore for half the buildings carrying them. A real question about whether the hundreds of billions being poured into AI infrastructure is actually turning into profit fast enough to justify it, one that lenders themselves are already pricing in as risk. A two-trillion-dollar private lending market that international regulators have openly admitted they cannot fully see into. And a freshly signed peace deal in the Middle East that both sides are already describing differently within days of signing it.

I don’t think the people telling me to stay fully invested are immune to any of that. I think they’re standing closer to the edge of it than they realize, and the only reason it doesn’t feel that way to them yet is that none of it has reached their desk.

Fall is when several of these pressures land at once, even without anything new going wrong. Some of that damage is already locked in. Wholesale prices are running at 6.5% while consumer prices sit at 4.2%, and that gap typically takes two to six months to fully reach store shelves. It hasn’t closed yet, which means autumn already has built-in room to get more expensive before it gets less expensive, independent of any fresh shock. Layer the situation in Iran on top of that. The peace deal signed in June gives itself sixty days to fully resolve, putting the real test right around mid-August, and the two sides are already describing what they agreed to differently within days of signing it. If it breaks, as the spring ceasefire did, oil heads back toward $100 a barrel quickly, adding a second source of upward price pressure on top of the first.

October 1 marks a real shift, too, just not the one most people assume. SNAP itself isn’t being eliminated. What actually changes that day is the federal government cutting its share of states’ administrative costs for the program from 50% to 25%, handing states a much larger bill just to keep the program running. States facing that bill are already warning they may have to tighten eligibility or shrink benefits to absorb it, a slower, state-by-state squeeze rather than one clean nationwide cut. None of that needs a single dramatic headline to hurt people. It just needs each state quietly making the same impossible choice, on its own timeline, mostly invisible to anyone outside it. It’s the five women on my list, and millions like them, who feel an energy shock and a shrinking safety net first and hardest. The upper-K mostly reads about a state budget fight in the news and moves on.

The rules themselves are broken right now, and rebuilding a financial life around what I’m actually seeing, instead of what I’m being told, is going to be tricky. More judgment call than formula. More navigation than a fixed route. But tricky isn’t the same as impossible, and after watching what happened to five women who tried to do this alone, I know I don’t want to navigate it without help either.

A quick closing thought. I debated for a long time whether to write this at all, because I never want anyone in my life to open this newsletter and recognize themselves in a stranger’s worst year. I’ve changed enough details here that I don’t think they will. But I needed to say this somewhere, because I’m tired of being laughed at for noticing something that five people I love are living through, whether anyone in finance believes it or not.

Stay Aware,

Pam

I read the Citizen Lab’s technical analysis last week, and I had to put my phone down for a second. Not because the finding was a surprise, exactly. But seeing it laid out this plainly, ICE drawing a circle on a map and pulling the movement history of every device inside it, no warrant, no judge, just a purchase order, still landed harder than I expected.

Here’s the part that should bother you: the data came from your weather app, navigation app, and the app that found you a parking spot. You didn’t hand this to a federal agent. You tapped “allow” on a permissions prompt in under a second, the way all of us do, and somewhere down the line, that tap collected your location data and revealed your habits, interests, and almost every other aspect of your life to federal agents.

In this report, I uncover how a geolocation surveillance system called Webloc uses ad-based data to monitor hundreds of millions of people worldwide, sourced from consumer apps and digital advertising.

“This is probably unconstitutional. Usually, if law enforcement wants to take your phone and is interested in getting your location data, they would need a warrant, but because the law has not kept up with technology, there is this loophole that effectively has allowed law enforcement to purchase location data, which is highly sensitive, without getting a warrant first.”

-Don Bell, Policy Counsel, Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight

The Contract

On April 9, 2026, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published the technical breakdown that confirmed what 404 Media had already reported back in January: ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit had quietly signed a no-bid contract with Penlink, a Nebraska surveillance company, in September 2025. Two products: Webloc and Tangles. Up to $2.3 million, running through this September.

ICE called the tools “essential.” “An integral part” of its mission, in their words. In April 2026, DHS handed Penlink another $2.9 million on top of that. This isn’t a pilot program anymore. It’s a relationship.

A DHS spokesperson told Newsweek, “ICE does not purchase illegal information. ICE only utilizes tools it has legal authority to use.” I’ll let you weigh that against everything below.

How Webloc Works

I want to walk you through this slowly, because the mechanics are the whole story.

Webloc started life at Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli surveillance firm that Penlink absorbed in a $200 million private equity deal in 2023. It pulls location data from mobile advertising identifiers, GPS, Wi-Fi signals, IP-based location data, and the exhaust fumes of basically every app on your phone. Citizen Lab’s research found Webloc customers extend well beyond ICE, including Hungarian intelligence and the national police of El Salvador.

An ICE agent opens a map. Draws a shape around an area, a neighborhood, a city block, or the address of a specific building. Webloc returns every device that passed through that shape during whatever time window the agent picked. Then it follows individual devices outward from there, inferring home addresses, workplaces, and the places you go often enough that a pattern emerges.

Penlink’s own marketing copy calls Webloc a “digital intelligence package for national security.” I’ll let that phrase sit there for a second.

Tangles, the Companion Piece

Tangles is the social half. It scrapes the open web and pulls data from social media APIs, stitching together someone’s post history, comments, keywords, location tags, photos, and connections. It can detect faces, identify people, gauge the sentiment of their posts, and flag an account for a watch list.

Run together, Webloc tells ICE where your phone has been. Tangles tells them who you are once they’ve found you there. That combination, an integrated location-plus-social package, is reportedly why ICE picked Penlink over competitors in the first place.

The Legal Theory

In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court said the government needs a warrant to get your cell-site location records from a phone carrier. Settled law. Should have closed this door.

Except the government found a side door: the commercial data broker market. NPR’s reporting on this loophole lays out the argument plainly: because location data collected by apps flows through advertising networks and gets sold by brokers, the government claims you “voluntarily” disclosed it to a third party, so you have no remaining expectation of privacy in it. What the government can’t legally seize, it can simply purchase.

One privacy advocate put it to NPR this way: nobody would accept police paying a landlord for a spare key as a substitute for a warrant to search a house. This is the digital version of that same move.

ICE’s own internal legal memo, obtained by 404 Media, applies exactly this logic to Webloc and concludes no warrant is needed. Civil liberties groups don’t buy it. The ACLU has said plainly that nobody carrying a phone consented to a permanent government record of everywhere they go. Don Bell’s quote above says the same thing in plainer terms: probably unconstitutional, and the law just hasn’t caught up to the technology yet.

Who Actually Built This

Cobwebs, the firm behind both tools, got banned from Meta in 2021 during a crackdown on surveillance-for-hire companies. Meta’s own investigation found Cobwebs clients had used the tools against activists, opposition politicians, and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico. That’s the company whose technology now sits inside a U.S. federal contract.

In 2023, Spire Capital bought Penlink and merged it with Cobwebs, pairing Penlink’s telecom interception tools with Cobwebs’ location and social surveillance products, for $200 million. ICE had actually worked with Penlink once before, a smaller $2.4 million contract back in 2018 for telecom analysis software. This is an old relationship getting a lot bigger.

ICE has contracted with Penlink before. In 2018, the agency signed a $2.4 million contract for Penlink’s telecommunications analysis software.

Congress Noticed. Congress Has Done Nothing About It Yet.

72 Democratic members of Congress, led by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, sent the DHS Inspector General a letter in March 2026 asking for an investigation. Rep. Shontel Brown led a separate letter the month before, calling it “mass surveillance of entire communities or city blocks.” Wyden’s office had asked ICE for a briefing back in October 2025. ICE scheduled it for February. As of early March, they still hadn’t shown up.

The House passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act in April 2024. Two years ago. It would require a court order before the government buys this kind of data from brokers. The Senate hasn’t touched it.

This Isn’t Just an Immigration Story, and That’s the Point

Webloc doesn’t check citizenship before it maps a neighborhood. Every phone inside the perimeter gets swept up: the undocumented worker, sure, but also the citizen walking a dog, the journalist on assignment, the activist headed to a meeting, the patient walking into a clinic on that block.

The tool doesn’t know who you are. It only knows where your phone was.

That’s where Tangles makes it worse. Once a device gets flagged from a location sweep, Tangles can pull that person’s entire social footprint, photos, connections, keywords, whatever they’ve posted publicly. A citizen who happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time can end up in a federal file built entirely from data they generated themselves, using apps that promised them nothing more sinister than convenience.

I keep coming back to this: the commercial data market doesn’t ask why you want the data. It asks whether you can pay. ICE can pay. So can any other agency that decides your neighborhood is worth watching.

The apps that collected this told you it was to improve your experience, serve better ads, and remember your preferences. All true. Also incomplete. The same data that found you a parking spot is now sitting in a marketplace, available in bulk, to any government agency willing to write a check and lean on a legal theory nobody who tapped “allow” ever agreed to.

You weren’t told this was possible. The permissions prompt didn’t mention it. I’d bet most of the engineers who built those prompts didn’t picture this either.

Why I Call This Coercive Capitalism

Coercive Capitalism is my shorthand for systems that don’t force compliance; they engineer it by widening the gap between what people think they’re agreeing to and what they’re actually giving up. This story is about as clean an example of that as I’ve come across.

The apps offered something real: navigation, weather, ride-sharing, and retail discounts. People said yes. The benefit wasn’t fake. A weather app that knows where you are gives you a better forecast. A navigation app that tracks your route saves you real time. These trades were genuine.

The cost was a location permission, tapped through in under a second, the way permissions prompts are designed to be tapped through. That’s the actual bargain people made. What the prompt never said was where the data would travel after that.

It didn’t stay with the app. It moved into the advertising ecosystem, where brokers packaged and resold it. ICE didn’t hack a single phone. It went shopping in a marketplace built for car dealerships and retailers, and found federal agencies welcome there too.

And here’s the piece that, to me, seals it: you can’t get your data back. You can’t claw it out of the broker pipeline once it’s in. The instant you tapped “allow,” it entered a system with no exit. Nobody who traded their location for a discount or a faster route home agreed to be surveilled by immigration enforcement. But the architecture made it possible anyway, and the law simply hasn’t caught up.

The loophole isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system. Webloc is just what that system looks like once a federal agency decides to use it at scale.

A quick closing thought. If this piece made you want to put your phone down, too, you’re not alone. I’ve heard from enough of you over the past months to know I’m not the only one who feels this way about what’s happening to all our data. That’s part of why I keep doing this.

Regards,
Pam

I lease a Tesla. I’m a techy. I wanted the over-the-air updates, the Full Self-Driving, the speed that comes from a car that gets smarter every time it downloads something overnight. I leased before Elon Musk became a political figure, before he built DOGE, before he reached into Social Security records and federal employee files that were never his to touch. I didn’t think I was leasing a coercive machine.

When I signed my lease, I thought I was choosing a car. Instead, I was choosing a relationship with a company that gets to decide, after the fact, how much of that car I actually get to use.

Tesla did not just build an electric car. It built the first fully realized proof of concept for an economic model where the product you pay for becomes the instrument used to extract more money from you after the sale. Every mechanism is already in the vehicle I drive every day: data harvesting, behavioral scoring, algorithmic pricing, parts locking, and the legal infrastructure to defend it all.

I trade my privacy for a premium experience. That data flows back into a closed financial system that determines what I pay. The exit cost is engineered to be prohibitive. And if I ever push back, Tesla’s own lawyers will argue in federal court that I should have known better.

The Surveillance Platform I Park in My Driveway

My car has nine cameras, internal and external, running continuously. It collects GPS coordinates, biometric eye and face tracking, steering and braking telemetry, and in some configurations, full cabin audio. When I park it, Sentry Mode holds 360-degree coverage of everything around it. I like that. It feels like the car is looking out for me.

I camp in it too. Last Labor Day, I skipped a hotel for my niece’s wedding and slept in the back of my Model Y instead, and it turned into one of my favorite travel discoveries. I felt safer locked inside a car with cameras watching for intruders than I ever did in a tent. I loved the panoramic view of the trees and the stars through the glass roof, and the temperature control kept the cabin perfect all night. Knowing those cameras were rolling gave me peace of mind. I never stopped to think that the same footage protecting me could just as easily be turned around and used against me.

Tesla’s privacy notice says camera recordings “remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” Former employees told Reuters that the internal tool they used at work could pinpoint exactly where a recording was made, which meant it could also reveal where an owner lived.

“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties.” — Former Tesla employee, Reuters, April 2023

Between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared sensitive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras through an internal messaging system, according to interviews with nine former employees. One described footage of a man approaching his vehicle completely naked. Others described scenes of intimacy captured inside vehicles and at private homes. The material moved through Tesla offices through private chats, seen by scores of employees.

I read that and felt something shift. The privacy policy promised anonymity. What customers actually got was an audience.

I tolerate this arrangement, the same way most owners do, because the surveillance never feels like surveillance. The updates arrive overnight. The cabin is sleek. The car feels like a gift, not a monitoring device. Tesla’s own policy makes the underlying coercion explicit anyway: owners can technically opt out of data sharing, but the policy warns that doing so may reduce functionality, cause serious damage to the vehicle, or make the car inoperable. Opting out of surveillance on a car I pay for every month could break it. That is not consent. That is a closed loop with one exit, and the exit costs everything I have already paid to get in.

The Insurance Algorithm That Watches How I Drive

Tesla launched its own insurance product in 2019. Instead of using driving history, age, or ZIP code, it prices premiums off a proprietary Safety Score, 0 to 100, generated in real time from the car’s own sensors. Depending on driving style and mileage, premiums can swing by up to 50 percent.

There is a conflict of interest here with no parallel in traditional insurance. The same company that builds the sensors, writes the scoring algorithm, and collects the premium benefits when the measurement is wrong. And the measurement has been wrong, repeatedly. Owners were hit with higher premiums after phantom braking events and false Forward Collision Warnings, triggered when the car’s sensors detected hazards that did not exist. In Illinois, Shawn Schneider sued Tesla because his premiums rose due to false collision warnings that the Safety Score then counted against him. The Safety Score was beta software at the time. If it was not reliable enough to ship as finished software, it was not reliable enough to decide what to pay every month.

Tesla quietly removed Forward Collision Warnings from the Safety Score in April 2025, after the complaints and litigation piled up. No refunds went out for the premiums already collected under the flawed metric.

Then came Safety Score 3.0, which hands drivers a perfect 100 whenever they use Full Self-Driving. The more I use FSD, the higher my score, the lower my premium. Now, Tesla discounts my insurance for using the feature I pay for.

The Battery I’m Paying for but Can’t Touch

My own car has this same locked door. Tesla offers me an Acceleration Boost for $2,000 that drops my 0-to-60 time from 4.8 seconds to 4.2 seconds, on a motor that was already under the hood, fully capable of that speed the day I leased the car. The car I drive has performance built into it that I’m not allowed to use unless I pay Tesla again, after the sale, for something I already own.

The same locked door appears throughout the lineup. Certain Tesla models, including the standard-range Model Y built at the Fremont factory, ship with long-range battery hardware already installed. The cells, the management hardware, the full capacity, all of it is sitting in the car at delivery. A software enclosure blocks the owner from a portion of it. To unlock the range that is already physically present, Tesla prompts owners through the touchscreen to pay $1,500 to $2,000.

In September 2017, as Hurricane Irma approached Florida, Tesla temporarily unlocked that restricted capacity for owners in the evacuation zone, adding about thirty miles of range. It was praised as generosity. It was also an accidental confession. Those cars could always drive those thirty miles. Tesla had been withholding that capability from paying customers until a hurricane made the restriction impossible to defend publicly. A family’s ability to evacuate had been, until that moment, a line item in a revenue model.

The mechanism follows the car everywhere. If a previous owner paid for Full Self-Driving and later sells the car privately, Tesla can remotely strip the software the instant the title changes hands. The new owner has to buy it again. And for salvage vehicles, cryptographic VIN locking means that once a car is declared a total loss and rebuilt, Tesla permanently disables Supercharger access for that vehicle, no matter its mechanical condition or whether it passed state inspection.

The Day a Login Could Lock Me Out

I lease, which means the title sits with the financing company, not with me. But the access sits with Tesla, regardless of whose name is on the paperwork, and that is the part that should worry every owner and every lessee equally.

A Tesla owner posted a detailed account describing how Tesla Financial failed to process his cashier’s check. When the account showed as delinquent in Tesla’s system, the company remotely revoked his vehicle access and sent a tow truck to his workplace. He was repossessed in the parking lot, in front of his boss, for a car he had already paid off in full weeks earlier. The car was eventually returned. Tesla never apologized.

That is not a billing error. Billing errors happen everywhere. What that story documents is the infrastructure underneath it: Tesla can revoke access to a vehicle remotely, instantly, and without warning, based entirely on the accuracy of its own internal accounting. When that accounting is wrong, you find out standing in a parking lot.

The Odometer Might Be Lying

For a century, an odometer measured one thing: how many times the tire turned. It was mechanical and objective, and every warranty calculation in the industry was built on that assumption.

A class action lawsuit filed in California alleges that Tesla’s odometer is not physically tied to miles traveled at all. Instead, it estimates distance using energy consumption, driving behavior, and predictive modeling. The lead plaintiff, Nyree Hinton, said his car logged 72.35 miles a day from March to June 2023, despite a routine of about 20 miles a day. His 50,000-mile warranty expired in July 2023. After that, his daily usage suddenly read lower.

The suit alleges the predictive software inflates readings by up to 117 percent, pushing owners past their warranty mileage early and into repair bills of $10,000 or more. Based on the filing, the estimated annual benefit to Tesla from the practice runs around $3.99 billion. Federal law makes odometer tampering a crime. The case is pending.

I don’t yet know whether my car’s reported mileage reflects my actual driving. I’m starting to log it by hand, and I’d encourage anyone reading this in a Tesla to do the same.

The Repair Shop That Doesn’t Exist

Once a Tesla’s warranty runs out, on schedule or accelerated by an algorithm, the owner faces a repair market with exactly one participant. Ford and GM both give independent shops standard access to EV diagnostics through OBD-II ports. Tesla doesn’t. Cryptographic parts locking means even a functioning part pulled from another Tesla may not be recognized by the car’s computer.

One Cybertruck owner who damaged his vehicle on a washed-out road couldn’t take it anywhere but Tesla, because independent shops lack the systems to calibrate the air suspension, and the replacement parts were locked to prevent third-party sourcing. The repair bill came to more than $34,000, with over $21,000 of that attributable to locked parts alone.

What I Didn’t Know I Signed

I leased this car before Musk became a political figure who built DOGE and reached into government systems, holding Social Security numbers, medical records, and bank account information belonging to people who never consented. I didn’t connect those two facts when I signed. I do now.

There’s another layer to this I haven’t said out loud yet. When the car drives itself, I talk to Grok. I use it to think through research, test arguments, and work out pieces like this one before I write them. I know Grok is built by the same person who built this car. I know every one of those conversations is feeding a profile of how I think, what worries me, and what convinces me. I call this Confessional Data, the unscripted, vulnerable things people say to a chatbot that they would never type into a search engine. It’s the same data behind a wave of departures at OpenAI and Anthropic this year, where researchers cited the industry’s pivot toward advertising inside those conversations as a reason they could no longer stay. I keep talking to Grok anyway, because it’s useful, and because stopping doesn’t feel like it would actually protect me from anything. That’s the trap. Coercive Capitalism doesn’t need you to be unaware. It just needs the convenience to outweigh the discomfort every single time you decide whether to keep going.

The four-part test I use for every Coercive Capitalism investigation applies directly to my own driveway. I made a voluntary trade. I got a genuine benefit, the speed, the software, and the over-the-air updates, I actually enjoy. My data is now used as a financial instrument against me, through Safety Score pricing and an odometer that may be running fast on its own schedule. And the exit cost is real: leasing or owning, I cannot easily walk away from a car, a payment, and a repair monopoly built to keep me inside it.

I still like the car. That’s the uncomfortable part of writing this. The features that make it feel different from every car I’ve owned before are the exact same features that make it watch.

A quick closing thought. My lease is up in a few months. I have the option to buy this car outright, and I’m tempted. I love sleeping under the stars in it, I love the speed when I pay for it, and I love the updates that arrive while I sleep. Writing this didn’t take that pull away. It just made me see the actual terms of the relationship I’d be signing up for permanently. I’m still deciding, and I suspect most of you are weighing some version of the same tradeoff, privacy against convenience, in your own life. That’s exactly why I keep doing this.

Stay Aware,
Pam

Everyone knows China built a social credit system. What almost no one knows is that the United States is building one now. Last night, the Senate passed $70 billion to accelerate it. They called it border security.

I just finished the chapter of the book I’m writing.

The one where I lay out, as plainly as I know how, how I came to understand that the United States is building a social credit score on its own citizens.

I set it down and opened the news. The Senate had passed a $70 billion bill overnight. Immigration enforcement, the headlines said. AI and machine learning for border security.

I know what that means. I spent two decades inside the payments infrastructure that feeds it.

The border has nothing to do with it.

The bill that passed the Senate overnight is called the Immigration Enforcement Funding. That is not what it is.

It is $70 billion passed through reconciliation, a procedural mechanism that bypasses the normal legislative process and requires only a simple majority. No filibuster. No extended debate. No requirement that the public fully understand what is being funded before the vote is called.

Buried inside it is a line item for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Customs and Border Protection. $3.5 billion. The headlines did not mention it. The immigration framing ensured that.

I noticed it because I know what AI and machine learning mean when deployed by an agency whose biometric database already holds more than 325 million identities, including fingerprints, facial images, iris scans, palm prints, and voice prints, including US citizens, processed at 400,000 transactions per day, and currently being upgraded to absorb 500 million. It does not mean faster passport scanning. It means automated identity scoring, including behavioral pattern recognition. Financial surveillance integrated with travel history, phone data, and commercial records purchased from data brokers.

It means the payments infrastructure I spent two decades helping to build is about to get a $3.5 billion upgrade. And the people it is being built to process are not migrants crossing the border.

They are you.

The contractor running that infrastructure is Palantir.

Palantir’s name is familiar. What it has built inside America’s enforcement infrastructure is not.

The company has worked with ICE since 2008. Between 2008 and 2021, ICE awarded Palantir $186.6 million in contracts, making it the agency’s third-largest contractor. That was before the current administration. Since January 2025 alone, Palantir has signed over $81 million in new technology contracts with ICE.

In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security signed a $1 billion blanket purchase agreement with Palantir covering five years, with no competitive bidding required. CBP, ICE, FEMA, and CISA can place orders directly, on demand. No procurement process. No public review.

Here is what that money buys.

Palantir operates a platform called ImmigrationOS, designed to combine passport data, Social Security records, IRS information, Medicaid records, and license plate reader data into a single operational profile. A separate tool called ELITE, Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, maps that data onto an interface described by the agents who use it as kind of like Google Maps. When an officer selects a neighborhood, the system displays the density of people it has flagged. When the officer selects an individual, it generates a dossier: a photograph, date of birth, last known address, and an Address Confidence Score between 0 and 100, indicating how certain the algorithm is about where you live.

ICE agents now have access to profiles on 20 million people through this system. Accessible from an iPhone. In the field. In real time.

That data includes your Medicaid records. Not because you crossed a border. Because you used a government health program, and that data is now feeding an enforcement algorithm.

This is not a new capability being built from scratch with reconciliation funding. It is an existing infrastructure being industrialized. Palantir has been here since 2008. What is new is the scale, the AI layer, and the removal of any remaining pretense that this is about the border.

The clearest illustration of what Palantir is and what it is willing to do is a story most people have forgotten.

In 2018, roughly 4,000 Google engineers signed a petition, and at least a dozen resigned in protest over Project Maven, a Pentagon program using AI to analyze drone surveillance footage. The specific fear was not abstract. Engineers understood that they were building a system capable of identifying a human face from a drone feed in real time and handing that identification to a targeting system. The distance between surveillance and strike was a single automated step. That was the line they would not cross. Google walked away from the contract. Palantir picked it up. That contract, worth a few million dollars when Google dropped it, has since grown to a $13 billion program.

Palantir then built the same capability for domestic use and called it immigration enforcement. ELITE does not use drones. It uses a database. But the function is identical. Identify the person. Generate a dossier with a photograph. Assign a confidence score. Hand it to the enforcement agent with a daily arrest quota.

The engineers who refused built nothing. Palantir built a $13 billion targeting infrastructure on the foundation of their refusal, then brought the same logic home.

You may be thinking this does not apply to you. You are a citizen. You have documents. You have nothing to hide.

That is what more than 170 Americans thought before they were detained.

Since January 2025, more than 170 US citizens have been taken into custody by immigration agents. In many cases, agents rejected documentary proof of citizenship because a phone app said otherwise. Birth certificates presented on the street were not enough. The algorithm outranked the document.

The app is called Mobile Fortify. It scans your face in real time and searches it against 200 million images stored across government databases that the ACLU describes as notoriously error-filled. DHS has used Mobile Fortify more than 100,000 times nationwide. It does not ask for your consent. It does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens at the point of collection. It retains your facial image and fingerprints for 15 years, whether or not you were ever arrested or charged with anything.

In February 2025, DHS quietly rescinded its own facial recognition safeguards, removing what the agency had previously described as the most extensive protections of any federal agency. No announcement. No public comment period. The protections simply disappeared from the agency website.

Agents have used this technology not just during enforcement operations but at protests and neighborhood gatherings. They have filmed journalists. They have scanned the faces of people watching arrests from the sidewalk. Lawyers have described clients who were taken into custody after the app failed to identify them correctly, and agents treated the failure as confirmation of suspicion rather than evidence of error.

This is the system the reconciliation bill funds at scale. Not a pilot program. Not a proposal. A system already running 100,000 scans and expanding, now with $70 billion behind it and zero privacy impact assessments filed this year to document what it is doing or to whom.

The question is not whether this infrastructure could be used against citizens.

The question is what you call it when it already has been.

Now follow the money.

In July 2025, Congress passed the GENIUS Act, and the President signed it into law. The headline was stablecoin regulation. The mechanism was something else.

Under the GENIUS Act, private stablecoin issuers are required by law to maintain procedures to block, freeze, and reject transactions. That is not a future risk. That is the text of the statute. A private issuer operating under US law already has the legal obligation and the technical capability to turn your money off.

This is not theoretical. Tether has already frozen over $4.4 billion in USDT in coordination with US law enforcement, including a record $344 million freeze in April 2026. The freeze switch exists, and it has been pulled.

The same month Congress banned a government-controlled digital dollar for being a surveillance threat, it created a private digital dollar with the same capability built into the law.

I spent two decades inside the payments infrastructure. I know what this architecture is. A payment rail that can be frozen on instruction, conditioned on behavior, and restricted by score is not money in the way Americans have understood money. It is a permission system. You are not spending. You are requesting approval to spend.

Now place that next to what Palantir is already running. A system that collects your identity, your biometrics, your Medicaid records, your financial transactions, your location, and your associations, and generates a score. An invisible score. One you cannot see, cannot contest, and cannot appeal.

The social credit system that everyone was warned China was building does not live in Beijing. It lives in the gap between those two infrastructures. The enforcement layer that scores you. The payment layer that acts on the score. When those two systems are fully connected, your money becomes the enforcement mechanism. Not a fine. Not an arrest. Your money simply stops working. At the grocery store. At the pharmacy. At the gas pump.

No warrant. No court order. No appeal.

That is what I understood watching the coverage of Trump’s trip to Beijing in May. The press was watching a trade negotiation. I was watching two countries compare notes on an architecture they are both building toward the same end.

The Senate just passed $70 billion to fund the next phase of the American version.

The chapter I finished yesterday was not a warning about what might happen.

It was a description of what is already here.

The financial system is quietly splitting into two kinds of digital dollars. One is backed by your bank and insured by the federal government. The other is not. Washington is currently in the middle of a fight over which one gets to pay you more. And neither side is fighting on your behalf.

“No one is going to bow down to this guy.”

- Jamie Dimon, referring to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, May 2026

Two Products. Very Different Rules.

The U.S. financial system is now officially drawing a line between two types of digital dollars that look similar on the surface but operate under fundamentally different rules.

A stablecoin is issued by a private company such as Circle, Tether, or PayPal, or by any licensed issuer under the GENIUS Act, and is backed one-to-one by reserve assets such as Treasury bills, cash, or government money market funds. Stablecoin issuers must redeem tokens within two business days under the new FDIC proposed rules. They cannot be represented as paying interest or yield. They are not deposits. They are not FDIC insured.

A tokenized deposit is different. It is your existing bank balance, the same dollars already in your checking or savings account, represented as a programmable token on a blockchain. It is issued by a licensed bank. It is subject to the full range of banking regulations, including anti-money laundering requirements, consumer protection rules, and prudential oversight. The FDIC confirmed in April 2026 that tokenized deposits meeting the statutory definition of a deposit receive identical treatment under federal law as any other deposit type.

The practical difference is that if Circle collapsed tomorrow, stablecoin holders would join a line of creditors. If JPMorgan’s JPMD encountered trouble, deposit holders would be insured by the federal government up to $250,000, the same as they are today.

The Yield Fight, Explained

The stablecoin market currently stands at roughly $300 billion, dominated by Tether at approximately $185 billion and Circle’s USDC at approximately $75 billion. That is $300 billion sitting outside the traditional banking system, not earning deposit income for any bank.

Banks noticed. Under the GENIUS Act, stablecoin issuers were already barred from directly paying interest to token holders. But platforms including Coinbase and PayPal quickly structured rewards programs that functioned economically like yield but were not technically labeled as such. PayPal was offering 3.7% annually on PYUSD. USDC holders were earning more than 4% through exchange reward programs, compared with the national average savings account rate of approximately 0.40%.

The CLARITY Act, currently being debated in the Senate, is Washington’s attempt to draw a harder line. The current draft prohibits yield on idle stablecoin balances, which is the passive return your savings account is supposed to provide. Activity-based rewards tied to transactions, payments, and platform use remain permitted, provided they are not economically equivalent to interest on bank deposits. The SEC, CFTC, and Treasury are directed to define that boundary within twelve months of enactment.

Banking trade groups argued that yield-paying stablecoins threaten the deposit base of community and regional banks, which fund local mortgages and small business loans. That argument has genuine merit on its own terms. What it does not address is why the protective response was to limit what consumers can earn rather than to require banks to compete.

The FDIC comment period closed June 9, 2026. The statutory deadline for all three agencies to finalize GENIUS Act regulations is July 18, 2026. The CLARITY Act itself has no statutory deadline but is under pressure from the 2026 midterm election calendar, which means a Senate Banking Committee markup must occur before August recess, or the legislation will stall until after November.

Two Threats, One of Which Cannot Be Legislated Away

Dimon’s stated objection is regulatory equivalence, not competition. If a platform is effectively paying deposit interest and holding customer balances, it should be subject to the same rules as a bank, including capital requirements, liquidity standards, anti-money laundering obligations, and deposit insurance frameworks. That argument is coherent and consistent with how he has talked about this publicly for years.

But there are two distinct threats here, and the CLARITY Act addresses only one.

The first is stablecoin issuers such as Circle, Coinbase, and PayPal offering yield on balances that compete directly with bank deposits. The CLARITY Act debate is the response to that threat, and the yield prohibition in the current draft reflects the banking industry’s influence on how the legislation is being written.

The second threat is harder to fight in any legislature. If X Money, Elon Musk’s financial platform built into a social network with 600 million users, offers 6% on balances that function like a checking or savings account, while the average U.S. savings account pays 0.40% and many bank accounts pay close to nothing, the rational consumer response is to move their money. Not because they understand stablecoins or blockchain infrastructure, but because 6% is more than 0.40%. That kind of deposit migration, at scale, does not just hurt JPMorgan’s yield income. It drains the deposit base banks use to fund mortgages, small-business loans, and consumer credit. That is the systemic risk Dimon keeps referencing when he warns the system will eventually blow up. It is also a risk that no amount of lobbying on the CLARITY Act will fully address, because X Money is not primarily a stablecoin issuer. It is a platform, and platforms do not need congressional permission to grow.

What JPMorgan Built While Dimon Was Complaining

In June 2025, JPMorgan filed the trademark for JPMD, its tokenized deposit product. In November 2025, it became the first U.S. bank to issue a dollar deposit token on a public blockchain, enabling clients to make instant money transfers via Coinbase’s Base blockchain at any hour.

In his April 2026 annual letter to shareholders, Dimon described stablecoins, smart contracts, and tokenization as direct competitive threats to traditional banking. He said JPMorgan must accelerate its blockchain infrastructure through its Kinexys unit, the rebranded version of its former Onyx division, or risk losing fee income and deposits to faster, blockchain-based competitors.

JPMorgan has also been running pilots that turn government bonds and money market funds into blockchain-based tokens that can be used as collateral in near real time.

Dimon’s stated objection is regulatory equivalence, not competition. If a platform is effectively paying deposit interest and holding customer balances, it should be subject to the same rules as a bank, including capital requirements, liquidity standards, AML obligations, and deposit insurance frameworks. That argument has genuine merit. What it does not resolve is why JPMorgan is simultaneously building JPMD, its own tokenized deposit product, to compete on the same terrain.

What This Means for Ordinary Consumers

For most consumers right now, tokenized deposits and stablecoins are not yet products available to them directly at retail scale. JPMD is currently available to institutional clients. Most stablecoin products require crypto infrastructure, a wallet, and an exchange account, which most American consumers lack.

What is being decided in Washington now, however, is the architecture of the system that will be available to consumers within the next several years: who issues it, who insures it, who profits from the float on your balance, and under what circumstances you can be denied access.

The yield prohibition does not affect only crypto enthusiasts. It sets the terms under which any future digital dollar product, bank-issued or otherwise, can compete for your savings. Right now, those terms favor institutions over individuals.

This article is part of the research behind Aware Trade: The Rise of Coercive Capitalism, a forthcoming book on programmable money, artificial intelligence, and the fight for a human future. If you want to be notified when the book is ready, subscribe below

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Sources

Legislation and Regulation

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. GENIUS Act Requirements and Standards for FDIC-Supervised Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuers. April 10, 2026. federalregister.gov.

Mayer Brown. FDIC Proposes GENIUS Act Rules: How Do They Compare to the OCC Proposal? April 28, 2026. mayerbrown.com.

CoinDesk. Stablecoins Won’t Get Any Kind of Deposit Insurance Under GENIUS Rules, Says FDIC Chief. March 11, 2026. coindesk.com.

CoinDesk. Clarity Act Text Lets Crypto Firms Offer Stablecoin Rewards While Shielding Bank Yield. May 1, 2026. coindesk.com.

White House Council of Economic Advisers. Effects of Stablecoin Yield Prohibition on Bank Lending. April 2026. whitehouse.gov.

Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan

CoinDesk. Jamie Dimon Says JPMorgan Must Move Faster as Tokenization Reshapes Finance. April 6, 2026. coindesk.com.

CoinDesk. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon Says Stablecoin Issuers Paying Interest Should Be Regulated as Banks. March 3, 2026. coindesk.com.

CoinDesk. ‘The Banks Will Not Accept It’: Dimon Escalates Battle Over Stablecoin Rewards in CLARITY Act Debate. May 29, 2026. coindesk.com.

Fortune. Jamie Dimon Says JPMorgan Chase Bitcoin Stablecoins Blockchain. July 2025. fortune.com.

Barchart. Jamie Dimon Once Called Bitcoin a Fraud. Now JPMorgan Is Quietly Making Blockchain History. barchart.com.

Industry and Market Context

CCG Catalyst. Your Deposits Are Going Digital. April 29, 2026. ccgcatalyst.com.

Crypto in America. Stablecoin Yield Deal Clears Path for Clarity Act Markup. May 2026. cryptoinamerica.com.

The Block. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Says Stablecoin Yields Should Face Bank-Style Rules. March 3, 2026. theblock.co.

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life. If it involves money, it will be on our platform -- money, securities, or whatever. So it is not just like sending $20 to my friend. I am talking about, like, you will not need a bank account.”

-- Elon Musk, all-hands call with X workers, October 2023.

What X Money Actually Is

X Money is a financial platform embedded in X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, with 600 million users.

X Money launched in limited external beta in March 2026, following a closed internal beta that had been running since at least May 2025. A full public rollout to all X users is targeted for mid-2026, but has not been confirmed as complete as of the date of this investigation.

The product features are straightforward.

A 6% annual yield on deposits. A 3% cash back metal Visa debit card personalized with your X handle. Zero foreign transaction fees. Peer-to-peer payments via Visa Direct. FDIC-insured deposits held by Cross River Bank, up to $250,000 per person. Direct deposit capability that would allow you to replace your bank’s routing number with X’s. An AI spending assistant from xAI.

X has secured money transmitter licenses in more than 40 states and registered with FinCEN, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The banking infrastructure is real. The product is real. The yield is real, at least for now.

The architecture being built around it is also real, and it is what this investigation is actually about.

The Good: What X Money Gets Right

The 6% yield is not a promotional teaser. It is a direct challenge to an American banking system that has spent decades paying depositors as close to nothing as it can get away with while earning significantly more on their money.

The national average savings account rate is approximately 0.40%. The federal funds rate has been significantly higher. The spread between what banks earn on deposits and what they pay depositors represents hundreds of billions of dollars annually that flow to bank shareholders rather than to the people whose money funds the system. X Money, by offering 6%, is forcing a conversation that the banking industry has successfully avoided for years: Why are American depositors paid so little for the use of their money?

The FDIC insurance is genuine. Deposits are held by Cross River Bank, a federally insured institution. Your money up to $250,000 is protected the same way it is in any bank account. The Visa partnership means peer-to-peer transfers run on established, reliable infrastructure rather than a proprietary rail that could fail.

For consumers currently earning 0.40% on their savings, X Money represents a meaningful financial benefit for most. That is worth acknowledging clearly before everything else.

The Bad: What X Money Gets Wrong

The banking infrastructure on which X Money is built carries its own documented risks.

Cross River Bank, the FDIC-insured institution holding X Money deposits, received an FDIC consent order in 2023 for unsafe and unsound practices related to fair lending.

The order prohibited Cross River from entering into new partnerships with third parties or offering new credit products without FDIC approval. Cross River has said it has addressed the issues identified in the examination. Senator Warren flagged the enforcement history in her April 2026 letter to Musk, noting that the institution responsible for holding consumers’ funds had a documented record of regulatory concern.

X Money is not available in New York or Massachusetts, two of the largest financial markets in the United States.

New York state legislators sent a formal letter to the Department of Financial Services requesting the denial of X’s money transmitter license, citing Musk’s history of hostility toward regulators, vulnerabilities in X’s identity verification system, and the allegation that DOGE staff accessed CFPB competitor data that could benefit X Money. A denial by New York’s DFS would significantly complicate national rollout and could prompt scrutiny from other state regulators.

The 6% yield is variable. X has not disclosed the full terms and conditions governing when and how that rate can change. A yield 15 times the national average requires either a subsidy, which is unsustainable, or an investment strategy with its own risk profile. Neither has been disclosed publicly.

The product’s terms of service had not been fully published as of the date of this investigation. Consumers are being invited to move direct deposits into a platform without knowing the complete rules governing their money.

The Rail Nobody Tells You About

X Money’s current product is fiat. Your balance is dollars. Your deposits are held at Cross River Bank. Your FDIC insurance is real. None of that is in dispute.

What is not disclosed, what nobody in the consumer-facing marketing for X Money or any similar product explains, is what happens to your dollars between the moment you send them and the moment they arrive.

X Money moves money through Visa Direct. Visa, the same company whose partnership gave X Money its payment infrastructure and its debit card, is simultaneously building the stablecoin settlement layer that is replacing traditional correspondent banking for an increasing share of transactions. In April 2026, Visa announced that its stablecoin settlement pilot had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate, up 50 percent in a single quarter, and was now operating across nine blockchain networks. When Visa settles a transaction, it is increasingly doing so on blockchain infrastructure rather than through traditional banking rails.

The consumer sees dollars. The infrastructure moves stablecoins.

This is not specific to X Money. It is the direction the entire payment system is moving, and it matters because the properties of stablecoin rails are different from the properties of traditional rails in ways that are invisible to the person whose money is moving through them. Stablecoin rails are programmable. They can carry conditions. They can execute smart contracts. They can refuse a transaction before it completes based on logic embedded in the settlement layer. Traditional correspondent banking rails cannot do any of those things.

When your fiat dollars move through stablecoin settlement infrastructure, the programmability of that infrastructure is present whether or not you are holding a stablecoin. The conditions that could be attached to a transaction exist at the rail level, not just the token level. You do not need to hold a stablecoin for your money to be subject to the architecture of programmable money.

There is a second layer to this. The GENIUS Act includes a specific carveout that allows private commercial companies like X to issue their own payment stablecoin without some of the approvals and guardrails that apply to publicly chartered commercial banks. Senator Warren asked Musk directly in her April 2026 letter whether X Money plans to exploit that carveout and issue its own stablecoin. Musk has not answered publicly. What is documented is that X was actively exploring stablecoin integration into X Money as recently as June 2025, and that the GENIUS Act carveout makes that integration legally straightforward for a company in X’s position.

If X Money transitions from a fiat wallet backed by an FDIC-insured bank to a stablecoin wallet backed by X Corp. itself, the federal insurance protection disappears.

FDIC Chair Travis Hill confirmed in March 2026 that stablecoin deposits are explicitly not covered by deposit insurance under the GENIUS Act.

The user interface would look identical. The same app. The same balance. The same metal debit card. The underlying protection, the thing that stands between your money and a platform failure, would be gone.

The FDIC insurance that protects your deposit at Cross River Bank protects you if the bank fails. It does not protect you from conditions embedded in the settlement rail that processes your transaction, and it does not protect you if X converts your fiat balance to a stablecoin balance through a terms of service revision you clicked through without reading. Those are different layers of the same system, governed by different regulatory frameworks, with different levels of consumer protection at each layer.

X Money is fiat. Its rails are not entirely. The stablecoin layer is coming. And the distance between the product you can see and the infrastructure running beneath it is closing faster than the regulatory framework governing either of them.

The Dirty Secret: The Question Nobody Has Answered

Here is the question X has refused to answer publicly: What happens to your money if your account is suspended?

This is not a hypothetical concern. In March 2026, X suspended hundreds of millions of accounts globally in a single automated sweep triggered by a bug in its spam filter. The platform acknowledged the error and said 99 percent of accounts were restored. One percent of hundreds of millions is a significant number of people who temporarily lost access to a platform they used.

X has suspended accounts for political content. It has suspended accounts for violating terms of service in ways users did not understand or anticipate. It has suspended accounts because of automated systems that misidentified normal behavior as spam. It suspended accounts en masse in Brazil in 2024 in a dispute with the country’s Supreme Court, with access restored only after X paid a $5.2 million fine and complied with court orders.

If X Money is your direct deposit destination, if your paycheck routes to X, if your savings live in your X Wallet, and your account is suspended for any reason, what happens to your money?

X has not said.

The FDIC insurance protects your deposits if Cross River Bank fails. It does not protect your access to your funds if X restricts your account. The insurance covers the bank. It does not cover the platform. Those are two different things, and the distinction matters enormously if you are considering X Money as a primary financial account.

The people who have the most to gain from X Money’s 6% yield, people who are currently earning 0.40% and who have limited access to other high-yield alternatives, are also the people who can least afford to have their financial access disrupted by an algorithmic content moderation decision they had no ability to predict or contest.

The Structural Problem: One Person, Two Roles, Zero Oversight

The most significant concern about X Money is not the product itself. It is the circumstances under which it was built and launched.

Elon Musk was a senior adviser to the President of the United States while simultaneously building X Money. In that government role, working through DOGE, he oversaw the effective dismantlement of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that the 2024 CFPB rule had positioned to supervise digital wallet and payment platforms processing more than 50 million transactions annually. X Money, at scale, would clearly meet that threshold.

DOGE staff accessed CFPB systems that contained confidential data belonging to X Money’s competitors, including PayPal and Cash App, which had been subject to CFPB enforcement actions.

The CFPB, like any federal agency in an enforcement proceeding, holds highly sensitive trade secret information provided by the companies it investigates. Senators Warren and Schiff formally wrote that Musk was potentially gaining access to confidential corporate data that could give X an unfair advantage over its competitors.

No one has been able to independently verify what data DOGE accessed or what has been done with it. The CFPB, having been effectively rendered dormant, is not in a position to investigate. The agency designed to protect consumers from exactly this kind of conflict of interest was disabled by the person who had the conflict of interest.

Musk also, according to Senator Warren’s letter, backed legislation that led to the GENIUS Act, which created regulatory carve-outs benefiting X Money’s operations. He influenced the regulatory framework governing his own industry while serving in government. He dismantled the oversight body that would have applied that framework to his product. Then he launched the product.

This is not alleged. It is documented in congressional letters, regulatory filings, and public statements. What remains unknown is the full extent of what DOGE accessed and whether any of it influenced X Money’s development or positioning.

The WeChat Question

Musk’s stated vision for X is to become what WeChat is in China: the single app through which people manage their social lives, communications, commerce, and finances.

He has said this explicitly and repeatedly. He has also called it “kickass” and suggested X simply copy the model.

WeChat has more than a billion users. It processes more transactions than any payment system in China. It is also the platform through which the Chinese government monitors communications, restricts access to services, and enforces behavioral compliance. The app is where you talk to your friends. It is also where the government can see what you said and, if necessary, freeze your spending.

The WeChat comparison is not alarmist when Musk himself makes it the explicit model. The question it raises is straightforward: if X becomes the platform through which you manage your entire financial life, and if X is operated by a single person who has demonstrated a willingness to remove access without notice, who has established a pattern of using the platform to enforce his own political preferences, who has embedded himself in government in ways that have eliminated the oversight body that would have governed his financial platform, and whose payment infrastructure is moving onto programmable stablecoin rails. What recourse do you have when something goes wrong?

The answer, at present, is: not much.

What You Can Do

If this investigation raised more questions than it answered, that is by design. Episode 5 of the Aware Trade podcast goes deeper. We follow the thread from X Money to Smart Cashtags to orbital compute and name what is being built before it is finished. Listen at awaretrade.com.

This article is part of the research behind Aware Trade: The Rise of Coercive Capitalism, a forthcoming book on programmable money, artificial intelligence, and the fight for a human future. If you want to be notified when the book is ready, subscribe below

Subscribe now

Sources

Product and Launch

ALM Corp. X Money Goes Live in Beta: 6% APY, Visa Debit Card, and Peer-to-Peer Payments. March 11, 2026. almcorp.com.

Seeking Alpha via MSN. X Money Nears Launch with High-Yield Perks, Regulatory Gaps. April 27, 2026. msn.com.

Yahoo Finance. What to Know About X Money, Elon Musk’s Fintech App That Claims to Pay 6% on Savings. April 6, 2026. finance.yahoo.com.

KuCoin. X Money Offers 6% APY, Challenging Traditional Banks. April 30, 2026. kucoin.com.

Stablecoin Rails

Visa. Visa Accelerates Stablecoin Momentum: Adding Five Blockchains for Settlement. April 29, 2026. investor.visa.com.

Fireblocks. Stablecoins 101: A Payments Professional’s Guide to Fiat-Backed Crypto. May 2026. fireblocks.com.

Bessemer Venture Partners. Stablecoins: From DeFi Primitive to Global Financial Infrastructure. April 22, 2026. bvp.com.

Regulatory Concerns

Unchained. Warren Accuses Musk of Dismantling Consumer Watchdog to Clear Path for X Money. April 16, 2026. unchainedcrypto.com.

Payments Dive. Warren Pounds X Money Plans. April 15, 2026. paymentsdive.com.

Senate Banking Committee. Letter to Elon Musk re X Money Launch. April 14, 2026. banking.senate.gov.

Senate Banking Committee. Warren Presses Musk Ahead of X Money Launch. April 14, 2026. banking.senate.gov.

The Record. DOGE’s God-Tier Access to CFPB Data Opens Door to Market Manipulation. February 27, 2025. therecord.media.

American Banker. Warren: Musk Can Knock His Competitors Out with CFPB Data. February 12, 2025. americanbanker.com.

Banking Dive. Warren, Schiff Ask CFPB to Oust DOGE. February 19, 2025. bankingdive.com.

Blockchain News. Elizabeth Warren Targets X Money Launch, Questions Musk on Stablecoin Plans. April 15, 2026. blockchain.news.

New York Licensing

NY Senate. Lawmakers Push to Block Elon Musk, X from Operating as a Money Transmitter in New York State. May 7, 2025. nysenate.gov.

Vixio. Deny X Money Transmitter Licence or Face Dire Consequences, New York Lawmakers Warn. May 9, 2025. vixio.com.

Cross River Bank

Banking Dive. FDIC Orders Cross River to Correct Unsafe Lending Practices. May 2023. bankingdive.com.

American Banker. FDIC Order Against Cross River Bank Is a Warning on Fintech Alliances. May 2023. americanbanker.com.

Account Suspensions

Roboin Blog. A Summary of the X Account Ban Wave in March 2026. April 10, 2026. roboin.io.

Wikipedia. Blocking of X in Brazil. wikipedia.org.

Aware Trade Investigations

Aware Trade. The Dollar on the Blockchain. awaretrade.com.

Aware Trade. China Tested It on a Billion People First. Now It Is Coming to Your Wallet. awaretrade.com.

Aware Trade. What Your Bank Does Not Want You to Know About Digital Dollars. awaretrade.com.

China spent a decade building programmable money from the inside out, starting with government vouchers, welfare payments, and lottery payouts. The United States is now building an equivalent system through private companies instead of a central bank. The infrastructure is different. The outcome for ordinary people is the same: money that knows what you are allowed to do with it, before you try to do it.

“The PBOC is no longer waiting for organic demand.” Spendnode, reporting on Reuters, May 30, 2026

How China Did It

The People’s Bank of China launched e-CNY pilots in 2019. For years, adoption lagged. The digital yuan faced stiff competition from WeChat Pay and Alipay, which dominate China’s cashless transaction landscape.

The PBOC’s solution was not to improve the product. It was to make it unavoidable.

Government salaries in pilot cities began to be paid in digital yuan. Transit subsidies were issued as e-CNY vouchers. Healthcare reimbursements landed in digital wallets. The citizen did not choose programmable money. The government routed money through it.

The programmability lives in the digital yuan itself, not in how it was sent. A government salary may arrive unrestricted. A consumption voucher may be coded to expire in 30 days, restricted to grocery merchants, and invalid at businesses on a government watchlist. The recipient cannot tell the difference by looking at their balance. They see a number. They do not see the conditions attached to it.

That is the architecture of selective, invisible control. The threat is not that every transaction is restricted today. The threat is that the infrastructure can restrict any transaction at any time, without the holder knowing until the payment fails.

Rather than compete with WeChat Pay and Alipay, the PBOC pressed them to accept digital yuan on their platforms. The app the consumer sees is the same. The money moving underneath it is different. The private platforms were not replaced. They were colonized.

What the U.S. Is Building

The United States does not have a central bank digital currency. What it has instead is a fragmented landscape of private instruments converging on the same functional outcome as China’s digital yuan, with no single institution accountable for the result.

To understand what is being built, it helps to separate two things that are usually discussed together: what the new money is, and how it moves.

The Money

There are two distinct instruments currently in circulation or active development for U.S. consumers. They look identical at the point of payment. They are not the same thing.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins are tokens issued by private companies, pegged one-to-one to the dollar and backed by reserves held by the issuer, typically short-term Treasury bills. They are not FDIC-insured. The GENIUS Act requires reserves to be held in high-quality liquid assets and subjects issuers to federal oversight, but the money itself remains private.

• USDC is issued by Circle, with about $80 billion in circulation. Circle describes USDC explicitly as programmable money. The programmability is a feature, not a side effect.

• USDT is issued by Tether, with about $190 billion in circulation. Tether is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands with no U.S. regulatory oversight.

• PYUSD is issued by PayPal, extending programmable dollar payments to its existing consumer base of hundreds of millions of users.

• RLUSD is issued by Ripple, targeting cross-border institutional payments and building on Ripple’s existing correspondent banking relationships.

• USD1 is issued by World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture owned by the Trump family. It launched in March 2025 and has attracted over $2 billion in investment, including a $2 billion purchase by an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. USD1 operates under the GENIUS Act framework, a law the Trump administration championed and signed, and whose implementing rules the Trump Treasury is currently drafting. The people who wrote the rules are among the primary beneficiaries of the rules.

No two stablecoins are interchangeable. Each carries different reserve practices, terms of service, and relationships with the federal government.

Tokenized deposits

This is your existing bank account balance, represented as a programmable token on a blockchain. Unlike stablecoins, tokenized deposits are FDIC-insured up to $250,000, and the issuing bank can borrow from the Federal Reserve, which reduces run risk. JPMorgan’s JPMD is the leading example. They currently operate only at the institutional and wholesale levels, not yet available for retail consumer spending. But they are coming.

The Rails

The instruments above move through three distinct systems. None of them is the money itself. All of them shape what the money can do and who can access it.

Platform wallets

X Money, PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App currently hold conventional fiat dollars at a partner bank. The wallet is the interface. The money underneath is still conventional. What is changing is the settlement infrastructure beneath that interface.

Meta is developing stablecoin payments across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which would move the stablecoin layer from back-end settlement into the consumer-facing balance itself. When that transition happens, the number on the screen will look identical to what it is today. What changes is who issued the money, what conditions may be embedded in it, and what protections apply if something goes wrong.

The wallet layer adds something the money layer alone cannot provide. A conventional bank sees your transactions. A platform wallet includes your transactions, social graph, posting history, follower connections, and behavioral data accumulated over years of platform use. Once your money lives inside a platform, the platform controls the conditions of access. The resulting dependency is not accidental. It is the product.

Card networks

The card networks are not managing blockchains. They are building bridges between the traditional payment system and the emerging stablecoin infrastructure, positioning themselves to remain relevant during a transition that could ultimately make them optional.

Since December 2025, Visa has been settling some interbank obligations in Circle’s USDC over the Solana blockchain at a $7 billion annual run rate. Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion in March 2026 to build an equivalent stablecoin settlement infrastructure. American Express, as a closed-loop network that directly owns the relationship with both cardholders and merchants, has greater structural control over any transition to stablecoin settlement than open networks do. Its CEO acknowledged stablecoins as a viable alternative for payments in 2025.

The coercive dimension of the card networks is already visible in the existing system. A merchant who violates Visa’s acceptable use policy loses access to the rails, without legislation, judicial review, or public accountability. The stablecoin transition does not eliminate that power. It transfers it to whoever controls the new settlement layer, under terms that have not yet been written.

FedNow

This is the Federal Reserve’s instant payment rail, enabling near-instant transfers, running 24 hours a day, connecting customers across thousands of financial institutions. It is not programmable money. It is fast money within the existing banking system. FedNow is the only rail in this list that is publicly owned, federally accountable, and carries no embedded compliance logic beyond existing banking law. It is also the rail that the fewest Americans have heard of.

The Acceptance Gap

Only about 6 percent of U.S. merchants currently accept stablecoins directly as a native payment method, with the largest concentration in online gaming, VPN services, luxury goods, real estate, and travel. Your grocery store, pharmacy, gas station, and landlord almost certainly do not.

The gap is being bridged invisibly through stablecoin-linked debit cards. If you hold USDC in a wallet linked to a Visa or Mastercard debit card, you can spend it anywhere those cards are accepted. The stablecoin automatically converts to fiat at the point of sale. The merchant never knows a stablecoin was involved. You may not know either unless you read the fine print on your card agreement.

The Benefit Delivery Pathway

The most concrete domestic example of programmable money is already in place. SNAP benefits are loaded onto EBT cards and can only be used for approved food items at approved retailers. The money is already programmed. The architecture is just legacy card infrastructure rather than blockchain.

In March 2025, a presidential executive order eliminated federal paper checks. By September 30, 2025, all federal benefit payments will be delivered electronically only. The last analog alternative for the most vulnerable recipients was removed.

The GENIUS Act created the legal framework for a private stablecoin issuer to take over benefit delivery functions with significantly enhanced programmability. Three things happened in sequence. The legal framework for private programmable money was created. The paper check alternative was eliminated. The discussion of routing government payments through stablecoin rails became public and documented. No one announced a plan to program your benefits. The infrastructure to do it was assembled quietly, one defensible step at a time.

The Same Architecture, Different Logos

The right question for consumers is not who issues the money. It is who controls the programming.

In China, the answer is the People’s Bank of China. In the United States, the answer is whoever issues the stablecoin or tokenized deposit, subject to GENIUS Act compliance requirements, subject to government requests made under laws that do not require judicial review, and subject to whatever the terms of service say on the day they change.

China’s system is legible. One instrument. One issuer. One institution to hold accountable. The U.S. system is not. Three instruments with different issuers. Multiple rails with different operators. Dozens of private companies each embed their own compliance logic into money that looks identical at the point of payment. No single institution is accountable for the aggregate result. No disclosure requirement tells the consumer which instrument they are holding, what conditions are attached to it, or what rules were triggered when a transaction failed.

The digital yuan did not replace WeChat Pay and Alipay. It was embedded within them as a second kind of money, invisible to the user and programmable by the state. Watch for the same pattern here. The app is the same. The yield is better. The terms of service changed while you were not reading them. The money underneath is different.

This article is part of the research behind Aware Trade: The Rise of Coercive Capitalism, a forthcoming book on programmable money, artificial intelligence, and the fight for a human future. If you want to be notified when the book is ready, subscribe below

Subscribe now

Sources

Institutional and Government

Federal Reserve. Banks in the Age of Stablecoins: Some Possible Implications for Deposits, Credit, and Financial Intermediation. December 17, 2025. federalreserve.gov.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Future of Payment Infrastructure Could Be Permissionless. November 2025. newyorkfed.org.

Brookings Institution. What Are the Differences Between Payment Stablecoins and Tokenized Bank Deposits? April 14, 2026. brookings.edu.

People’s Bank of China via State Council. China Unveils New Framework for Digital Yuan Management. December 29, 2025. gov.cn.

JSM. China Unveils New Framework for Digital Yuan (e-CNY) Operations and Ecosystem. January 8, 2026. jsm.com.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. Treasury Announces Federal Government Will Phase Out Paper Checks on September 30th. August 2025. treasury.gov.

U.S. Code, Title 7, Chapter 51. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Issuance and Use of Program Benefits. govinfo.gov.

American Bankers Association. Federal Electronic Payment Mandate. 2025. aba.com.

Industry and Press

Spendnode. China Broadens Digital Yuan From Lottery Draws to Fiscal Spending. May 30, 2026. spendnode.io.

Retail Banker International. Stablecoins Slowly Emerge as Real-World Payments Method. May 2026. retailbankerinternational.com.

Payments Dive. How Stablecoins Are Finding a Foothold. February 17, 2026. paymentsdive.com.

Deloitte. How Stablecoins Could Power the Next Era of Retail Payments. May 2026. deloitte.com.

Seoul Economic Daily. Tokenized Deposits vs. Stablecoins: UK, US Clash Over Digital Currency Future. June 1, 2026. sedaily.com.

PYMNTS. Karen Webster’s 2026 Trends: Tokenized Deposits vs. Stablecoins. January 7, 2026. pymnts.com.

CCG Catalyst. The Future of Money: Stablecoins, Tokenized Deposits, and the New Payment Rails. March 31, 2026. ccgcatalyst.com.

The Block. China to Let Banks Pay Interest on Digital Yuan to Drive Adoption. December 29, 2025. theblock.co.

Ainvest. China’s Digital Yuan 2.0: Strategic Implications for Financial Infrastructure. December 29, 2025. ainvest.com.

On March 26, 2026, Fortune reported that Iran was already charging tolls in yuan for oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The channel carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. The United States could not stop the transaction. Two months later, the Bank for International Settlements announced that Project Agorá, the Western world’s answer to China’s rival payment network, had passed its simulation phase and was preparing to move to real money. Neither event received mainstream coverage. Together, they mark a turning point in the contest to determine whose rules govern global finance for the next century.

"When foreign governments stop buying US Treasuries, yields rise, mortgage rates spike, and the cost of financing American life, public and private, goes up." Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates

How the Current System Works

SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative that serves as the backbone of international finance. More than 11,000 financial institutions use it to communicate payment instructions across borders. It does not move money. It moves messages. Banks on both ends hold the actual funds, and SWIFT tells them what to do with those funds. The process takes days. Fees accumulate through chains of correspondent banks. Every institution in that chain runs its own compliance checks, sometimes reaching different conclusions.

More importantly, SWIFT is controlled by Western institutions and subject to Western law.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The West responded by blocking selected Russian banks from SWIFT and freezing Russia’s central bank assets. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated the goal directly: to stop Russia from conducting most of its financial transactions worldwide. Russia held $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves. The sanction froze access to them. The ruble fell by more than 50 percent.

The West learned that control of financial messaging infrastructure is among its most powerful geopolitical tools. Every other country learned that dependence on that infrastructure is a permanent vulnerability.

Both lessons produced the same response: build something new.

China’s Cross-Border Layer: mBridge

The sanctions on Russia accelerated the development of a parallel network that was already processing real money.

It is called mBridge. It connects the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. It settles transactions in 15 seconds, without SWIFT, without correspondent banks, and without a public cryptocurrency in sight. It has now settled over 4,000 cross-border transactions worth roughly $55 billion. China’s digital yuan accounts for an estimated 95 percent of total volume.

mBridge runs on a permissioned distributed ledger, which means it uses blockchain technology but is controlled entirely by its participating central banks. In Bitcoin, anyone can validate a transaction. In mBridge, only the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the UAE central bank, and the Saudi central bank can validate. The ledger is distributed in name. The power is centralized in practice.

Every transaction that runs on mBridge embeds Beijing’s compliance rules.

The BIS understood what this meant. It stepped back from mBridge in 2024, citing concerns that the platform could be used to bypass international sanctions. It then shifted its focus to building the Western alternative.

The Western Answer: Project Agora

On May 27, 2026, the BIS announced that Project Agorá had completed its simulation phase and was preparing to move to real-value transactions. The announcement received no mainstream coverage.

Agorá involves the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Canada has since joined. The private-sector participants include JPMorgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, UBS, Mastercard, Visa, SWIFT, Euroclear, Standard Chartered, Santander, Mizuho, and others.

The platform enables what the BIS calls atomic, multi-currency settlement. A transaction either completes entirely or fails entirely. No float. No partial state. No reversals after the fact. Compliance checks run once, embedded in the transaction itself, shared across participating banks rather than duplicated at every step.

The system runs on two layers. Tokenized commercial bank deposits on one layer. Tokenized central bank reserves on the other. Each central bank operates its own ledger, preserving national control over individual currencies while connecting to a shared infrastructure for cross-border settlement.

This is not a faster wire transfer. This is money that can be programmed to refuse. Money that checks whether conditions are satisfied before it moves. Money that carries its own rules.

The financial system has never had this capability before. Now it does.

The Petrodollar Underneath it All

Since the 1970s, oil has been priced and settled in US dollars. That single arrangement is the foundation of dollar dominance. Countries need dollars to buy oil. That creates permanent global demand for the dollar, which funds the American deficit and underwrites American financial power.

That arrangement is shifting

In 2024, Saudi Arabia did not formally renew its commitment to pricing oil exclusively in dollars. The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen from 71 percent in 1999 to roughly 57 percent today. A growing share of Saudi oil sold to China is being settled in yuan. India is settling Russian crude purchases in Chinese yuan and UAE dirhams, bypassing the dollar entirely.

China is not challenging the dollar’s role in oil pricing. It is building an alternative to the dollar’s role in settling it. If you control how oil is settled, you eventually influence how it is priced.

The exit infrastructure was being built before it was needed. Then Iran closed the Strait.

The Proof of Concept

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began strikes against Iran targeting its nuclear and ballistic missile program. Iran’s Supreme Leader was killed. Iran launched counter-strikes and closed the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade.

Since mid-March 2026, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has charged ship operators up to $2 million per vessel to transit the strait. Payment accepted in Chinese yuan, routed through Kunlun Bank via CIPS, outside SWIFT, or in Bitcoin.

On May 27, 2026, the same day the BIS announced Agorá’s progression, the US Treasury designated Iran’s so-called Persian Gulf Strait Authority as a sanctions target.

The designation is the limit of what the US can do. It cannot block yuan-denominated transactions running through the Chinese banking infrastructure without sanctioning China itself. The alternative rails are no longer being tested in simulations. They are moving money through the most strategically important waterway on earth, in an active conflict, in a currency the United States cannot block.

Every successful yuan-denominated transaction that clears outside the dollar system is simultaneously a technical proof of concept and an institutional precedent. It normalizes non-dollar settlement. It lowers the cost of the next transaction.

The Expansion

mBridge is not staying where it is. With India chairing BRICS in 2026, there is a formal proposal to link the central bank digital currencies of member nations for cross-border trade and payments. That would connect China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others. Roughly half the world’s population. Roughly a third of global GDP.

A parallel global monetary infrastructure. Not theoretical. In construction.

On the other side, Agorá is adding participants and moving toward real-value transactions. Two systems are expanding toward each other.

What This Means For Your Money

The outcome of this contest is not abstract. It lands differently depending on who wins.

If Agorá wins

The dollar remains the dominant reserve currency. The US keeps its ability to enforce sanctions. Western compliance rules stay embedded in global trade. But your borrowing costs still rise. Agorá is a multi-currency system designed to settle trade in local currencies, gradually reducing the volume of transactions that require the dollar as an intermediary. Even a Western win softens the structural demand that has kept American borrowing cheap for decades. The dollar remains dominant. It becomes less indispensable. That difference is felt slowly, then all at once

If mBridge wins

The consequences land on your kitchen table. Foreign governments no longer need dollars to settle trade. Demand for US Treasuries falls. The government pays more to borrow. Higher Treasury yields mean higher mortgage, auto, and credit card rates. The dollar weakens. Imports become more expensive. Inflation becomes harder to control. And there is a deeper consequence: Beijing’s compliance rules become the architecture of global trade. Not Washington’s. Not Brussels’. Beijing’s. Every cross-border transaction runs on Chinese infrastructure and is shaped by Chinese political conditions.

If neither wins outright

This is the most likely scenario. Two systems run in parallel, each dominating its own bloc. That fragmentation is itself a loss for dollar dominance. A monopoly on financial infrastructure is becoming a duopoly. American leverage declines even without a decisive Chinese victory. Your borrowing costs rise either way. The question is by how much and over how long.

Here is what neither official narrative will say plainly: Agorá and mBridge are not opposites. They are not freedom versus control. There are two versions of the same thing: money that executes rules automatically before a transaction is permitted, without human review or appeal. The difference is only in which rules get encoded. The dollar’s dominance was never purely political. It was infrastructural. What is being contested now is the infrastructure of the next century. Not with armies. With rails.

This article is part of the research behind Aware Trade: The Rise of Coercive Capitalism, a forthcoming book on programmable money, artificial intelligence, and the fight for a human future. If you want to be notified when the book is ready, subscribe below.

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Sources

Institutional and Government

Bank for International Settlements. Project Agorá: Unified Ledger for Cross-Border Payments. May 27, 2026. bis.org.

Bank for International Settlements. mBridge: Exploring Multi-CBDC Arrangements for Cross-Border Payments. 2024. bis.org.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. Economic Fury Targets Illicit Oil Revenue Fueling Iran’s Military. May 27, 2026. treasury.gov.

U.S. Department of State. United States Sanctions Iranian Financial and Shipping Networks. May 2026. state.gov.

European Commission. Statement by President von der Leyen on Further Measures to React to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. February 26, 2022. ec.europa.eu.

Paradigm. GENIUS Act Rulemaking Tracker. 2026. paradigm.xyz.

Legislation and Regulation

FinCEN and OFAC. Proposed Rule: GENIUS Act Anti-Money Laundering and Sanctions Compliance Requirements. April 2026. treasury.gov.

American Bankers Association. ABA and State Association Letter Requesting Extension of GENIUS Act Comment Deadline. May 6, 2026. aba.com.

FDIC. FDIC Extends Comment Period on Proposal to Establish GENIUS Act Application Procedures. February 6, 2026. fdic.gov.

Geopolitical and Conflict

Atlantic Council. Inside Tehran’s Toll Booth. April 2, 2026. atlanticcouncil.org.

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Council on Foreign Relations. U.S. Continues Economic and Diplomatic Pressure on Iran. April 21, 2026. cfr.org.

Asia Times. Iran’s Hormuz Yuan Play a Direct Hit on the Petrodollar. March 25, 2026. asiatimes.com.

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Fortune. Iran Is Already Charging a Toll, in Yuan, for Oil Sold Through Strait of Hormuz. March 26, 2026. fortune.com.

VinciWorks. The Compliance Fallout from the 2026 Iran War. March 1, 2026. vinciworks.com.

Monetary System and Petrodollar

Quant Network. China’s e-CNY Pivot to Tokenized Deposits. March 2026. quant.network.

IMF Notes No. 26/01. Tokenization and the Future of Money. April 2026. imf.org.

Yahoo Finance. Dalio Warns Dollar Faces Long-Term Decline, Will Underperform Gold and Yuan. January 7, 2026. yahoo.com.

City Creek Mortgage. Today’s Mortgage Rates in May 2026. May 2026. citycreekmortgage.com.

Technology and Infrastructure

BIS. mBridge Ledger: Technical Architecture. 2024. bis.org.

Financial Planning Association. How Ripple XRP Is Building a Bridge to the Future of Cross-Border Transactions. September 2025. financialplanningassociation.org.

Nexo. What Is XRP Used For? Cross-Border Payments Explained. February 27, 2026. nexo.com.

Citi Institute. Stablecoins 2030: Web3 to Wall Street. November 14, 2025. citigroup.com.

BRICS and Expansion

Rio Times Online. BRICS 2026 Complete Guide. May 2026. riotimesonline.com.

Modern Diplomacy. RBI’s Digital Currency Proposal for the BRICS 2026 Agenda. April 21, 2026. moderndiplomacy.eu.

CoinDesk. India Pushes Digital Rupee Through Welfare Pilots as BRICS CBDC Plan Takes Shape. April 24, 2026. coindesk.com.

Asia Times. BRICS Laying First Tracks for New Global Payment System. February 6, 2026. asiatimes.com.

The Defense News. BRICS Develops New Cross-Border Payment System Capable of Handling 20,000 Transactions Per Second. February 18, 2026. thedefensenews.com.