Author | Andrei Jikh
Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Translator | DingDang (@XiaMiPP)
At a recent Eastern Economic Forum held in Russia, one of Putin's closest advisors made a statement that drew widespread attention. He indicated that the United States is preparing to use cryptocurrency and stablecoins to devalue its massive $37 trillion national debt in a way that is almost imperceptible.
His claim is: The U.S. is conspiring to "migrate" this debt into a crypto system, completing a system-level reset through a so-called "crypto cloud," with the end result being that the rest of the world foots the bill.
At first glance, this might sound like a crazy theory. But similar views are not new. MicroStrategy founder and billionaire Michael Saylor has publicly made a highly controversial suggestion to Trump in the past: sell all of America's gold and use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin. Empty the gold reserves entirely, and with the same funds, you could buy 5 million Bitcoins. By doing this, you would demonetize the entire gold asset class. And our rival nations happen to hold large gold reserves. Their assets would approach zero, while our assets would balloon to $100 trillion. The U.S. would simultaneously control the global reserve capital network and the reserve currency system.
But the question is: Is this realistic? Is it actually feasible?
YouTube creator Andrei Jikh, who has 2.93 million subscribers, dedicated a video to breaking down: What exactly did Putin's advisor say? And how exactly could the U.S. potentially devalue its $37 trillion debt using stablecoins and Bitcoin? Odaily Planet Daily has compiled and translated this video.
The first question: Who said this?
The speaker is named Anton Kobyakov, a senior advisor to Russian President Putin, who has held his position for over a decade and is primarily responsible for communicating Russia's strategic narrative at important events like the Eastern Economic Forum.
In his speech, he clearly stated: The United States is attempting to rewrite the rules of the gold and crypto markets, with the ultimate goal of pushing the global economic system into what he calls the "crypto cloud." Once the global monetary system completes this migration, the U.S. could embed its enormous national debt into digital asset structures like stablecoins, and then devalue it to effectively achieve a "debt reset."
The second question: What does "devaluing debt" actually mean? How does it work?
Let's understand this with an extremely simplified example. Assume the entire world's wealth is worth a single $100 bill. I borrow this entire $100, so I owe the entire wealth of the world, and I must repay it.
The problem is, if I repay the debt honestly, I have to give back the original $100 bill. But luckily, I possess a special "superpower"—I control the world's reserve currency issuance rights.
So, instead of returning the original $100 bill, I print a new $100 bill out of thin air.
What is the result? The total money supply in the world goes from $100 to $200, but the quantity of goods, houses, and resources in the world hasn't increased.
The result is that the price of everything starts to rise: real estate, stocks, gold, especially things everyone wants, all become more expensive; what used to cost $1 now costs $2. Everything is more expensive, but the supply of goods remains the same. This is inflation.
Now, when I repay "that $100" to you, on the surface I have fulfilled the debt in full, but in reality, the purchasing power of the money you receive has been halved. I haven't defaulted, but I have devalued the debt by diluting the currency.
Stablecoins are replicating this old playbook
However, what many people don't realize is: This is one of the oldest and most common ways to repay debt in human history. This is also the way the United States has been repaying its debt all along.
Debt devaluation is not the same as default; it doesn't mean not repaying. It simply reduces the real value of the debt through inflation or currency manipulation.
And this method has happened time and again throughout history. It happened after World War II, during the great inflation of the 1970s, and again with the massive money printing after the pandemic.
So, when the Russian advisor says "the U.S. might use cryptocurrency to devalue its debt," he is not revealing a new mechanism, but rather describing an old method that the U.S. has long mastered.
The real change is: Stablecoins can spread this mechanism globally.
It's important to clarify: This is not about directly converting the $37 trillion "into stablecoins," but rather using dollar stablecoins backed by U.S. Treasury bonds as the underlying asset to disperse the U.S. liability structure into the hands of global holders. When the dollar is diluted by inflation, the loss is shared by all holders of these stablecoins.
I want to say something extremely important, an underlying economic fact that many overlook, which is also Jeff Booth's view: The natural state of the economy is actually deflationary. Meaning, if there were only a fixed amount of money in the world, over time, technological progress and increased production efficiency would naturally make goods cheaper. Falling prices are the natural order. But reality is not like that; the world we actually live in does not operate this way. There's only one reason: Governments can create money infinitely.
When new money floods the system, this liquidity must "go somewhere" so it doesn't become worthless. So, it gets poured into things like real estate, stocks, gold, and Bitcoin. This is also why, in the long run, these assets seem to always be rising. But in reality, they are just maintaining their purchasing power, while the currency underpinning everything is getting weaker. It's not that the assets are rising, but that the U.S. dollar is depreciating.
The true value of stablecoins: Distribution + Control
The question is, what if you could extend this superpower? What if you could pull the same trick outside U.S. borders? This is where stablecoins come in.
If the U.S. can already devalue debt through conventional inflation, what more can stablecoins do? The answer is two words: Distribution + Control.
Because when there is domestic inflation in the U.S., the economic pain is immediate: we see higher grocery bills, more expensive housing, rising energy costs, and potentially higher interest rates to cool things down. CPI and consumer price index reports rise, and American citizens become dissatisfied.
But stablecoins are different. Because stablecoins typically hold their backing reserves in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, the demand for dollars and U.S. debt can actually increase as stablecoin adoption grows, making the whole thing self-reinforcing. When USDT and USDC are widely used globally, they are essentially holding an IOU backed by U.S. Treasury bonds. This means U.S. debt financing is "invisibly outsourced" to global users.
So, if the U.S. devalues its debt through inflation, the burden doesn't just fall on U.S. citizens; it gets "exported" globally via the stablecoin system. Then inflation becomes a tax collectively borne by all global stablecoin holders. Because their digital dollars also lose purchasing power. Technically, today's system is similar. Dollars are everywhere in the world, but stablecoins will become a larger market and will exist on people's smartphones.
Another piece of the puzzle is that stablecoins can appear neutral because they can be created by private companies, not just the government. This means they don't carry the political baggage associated with the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department. According to the proposed Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act (referred to here as the "Genius Act" in the original, likely a translation choice), only approved issuers, such as banks, trust companies, or non-bank companies that can obtain special approval, can issue regulated, dollar-backed stablecoins in the U.S.
If Apple or Meta wanted to, they could theoretically issue their own currency, say a so-called "Metacoin." What's really needed isn't a technological breakthrough, but political permission. To be blunt, by currying favor with the power center and investing enough capital, one could potentially get a pass.
It is precisely for this reason that stablecoins would play such an important role in the process of U.S. debt dilution. They essentially provide a level of control "close to that of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)", but without needing to carry the highly sensitive CBDC label globally.
The fatal problem with stablecoins: Trust cannot be fully verified
But the problem is, the rest of the world isn't buying it. We've seen this from the behavior of central banks continuously buying gold on a large scale.
Stablecoins claim to be pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar or U.S. Treasury bonds. In theory, every stablecoin in circulation should be backed by $1 in cash or an equivalent value of Treasury assets. But the practical problem is: Neither individuals nor foreign governments can independently audit these reserves with 100% certainty.
Tether and Circle publish reserve reports, but you must trust the issuers themselves, and you must trust the auditing firms, and these institutions are almost entirely within the U.S. system. When it comes to a trust issue involving trillions of dollars, this in itself is an extremely high barrier for nations.
Even if blockchain technology in the future enables real-time, transparent auditing of stablecoin reserves, this does not solve the deeper problem—the U.S. always has the power to change the rules.
History has given a clear warning. The U.S. government once promised that dollars could be exchanged for gold at any time, but in 1971, the Nixon administration unilaterally severed this convertibility. From a global perspective, this was nothing less than a complete "rule flip": the promise remained, but its fulfillment was ended with a "just kidding."
Therefore, a digital token system built on "just trust us" will find it difficult to truly win the world's trust. Technically, nothing can stop the U.S. from making a decision regarding stablecoins in the future similar to the dollar's decoupling from gold. This is the fundamental reason for the widespread high vigilance towards the new generation of digital currency systems globally.
So, the next question is: Will the U.S. actually do this in the end?
In my opinion, this possibility not only exists, it is even inevitable. The U.S. is already experimenting with this idea, just not in the way we've heard about.
For example, Michael Saylor has publicly advised Trump and his family, advocating for the U.S. to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve. His idea was: If the U.S. sold its gold and instead bought Bitcoin on a large scale, it could not only suppress the price of gold and weaken competitors like China and Russia, but also push up the price of Bitcoin and reshape the U.S. balance sheet.
But ultimately, this did not happen. On the contrary, during Trump's term, this idea about a U.S. Bitcoin reserve remained just a mentioned concept, never becoming reality. U.S. officials clearly stated they would not use taxpayer money to buy Bitcoin, and at least on the public level, no related actions were seen. So, I don't think it will happen in the way Michael Saylor publicly suggested.
However, this doesn't mean the story ends here. Because, the government doesn't necessarily have to be directly involved for it to participate. The real "backdoor path" lies in the private sector.
MicroStrategy has de facto become a "Bitcoin public company," continuously accumulating Bitcoin under Michael Saylor's leadership, now holding hundreds of thousands of coins. So the question arises: Would it be safer and more low-key for a publicly traded company to完成 (complete) the large-scale hoarding of Bitcoin first, rather than the government buying directly?
Doing it this way would not be seen as a central bank operation, nor would it immediately trigger global market panic. And when Bitcoin is truly established as a strategic asset, the U.S. government could completely gain exposure to Bitcoin indirectly through means like taking equity stakes or acquiring controlling interests—just as it has held partial ownership in companies like Intel before. Such precedents already exist.
Rather than publicly selling gold, gambling on trillion-dollar Bitcoin trades, or强行 pushing a stablecoin system, a smarter approach more in line with the U.S.'s consistent style is to let private enterprises conduct the experiments first. When a certain model proves effective and becomes too important to ignore, then the state level can absorb and institutionalize it.
This method is more隐蔽 (covert), gradual, and offers more "plausible deniability," until one day, it all officially surfaces.
Therefore, the core point I want to express is: There are many ways this could happen, and it likely will happen. That Russian advisor's judgment is not without basis—if the U.S. truly attempts to fundamentally address its national debt problem, then some form of digital asset strategy is almost an inevitable choice.
