Steve Keider

Lutnick on the Hot Seat, Yet Again This week Swan Bitcoin filed an ex parte application in the Southern District of New York seeking court authorization to subpoena Cantor Fitzgerald and its former CEO, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick @HowardLutnick, under 28 U.S.C. § 1782. The discovery would support foreign proceedings against the @Tether-appointed directors of Swan's joint mining venture, 2040 Energy: Tether Chairman and controlling shareholder Giancarlo Devasini and Bitfinex CEO JL van der Velde. According to the filing, in mid-2024 a group of Swan's own employees, led by then-CIO Raphael Zagury @alphazeta and working with Tether's now-CIO Zachary Lyons, secretly conspired with Tether to gut the joint venture. The filing states that Zagury's planning notes, found on Swan's corporate servers, laid out a coordinated mass resignation to be executed with "legal cover from Tether," referencing "Giancarlo [Devasini] side conv[ersation]s" and declaring that "Rain and hell fire needs to start." Zagury and Lyons are now both Tether-appointed directors at public company Twenty One Capital ($XXI), majority-owned and controlled by Tether, and fronted by @jackmallers. The filing states that on August 8, 2024, thirteen Swan employees resigned within hours, and that thousands of confidential documents were downloaded from Swan's systems. According to Swan, Tether replaced Swan within days with Proton, a new entity run by the same defecting employees and contractors. In December 2024, the Tether-appointed directors approved a related-party sale of 2040 Energy mining assets to a Tether subsidiary at what Swan alleges was a significant undervalue. The application targets Cantor and Lutnick because of their proximity to these events. According to the filing, in the weeks before the mass resignations, Devasini introduced Swan CEO Cory Klippsten to Lutnick to discuss a planned Swan IPO. Swan subsequently shared confidential mining data and IPO materials with Cantor. The filing notes that after the mass resignations and asset diversion, Cantor broke off contact with Swan without explanation. Cantor subsequently served as investment banker on a series of Tether-related transactions, according to the filing, including acting as placement agent for Tether's investment in Rumble and providing a SPAC for Twenty One Capital $XXI. Separately, the filing cites an independent Edison Group report noting that Tether sold Northern Data's mining subsidiary to Devasini-directed entities at a "50%" discount compared to precedent transactions, as part of the precedent to sell Northern Data to Rumble. The filing also surfaces Klippsten's many contemporaneous notes from conversations with Devasini. According to those notes, Devasini told Klippsten that Lutnick, then a private citizen, had claimed to have "managed to kill every bill about stablecoins" in Congress and was "working full time for Tether." A public UCC filing from October 2025 shows Tether as collateral agent for all assets of Dynasty Trust A, the Lutnick family trust that is the majority owner of Cantor. Bloomberg recently reported that Dynasty Trust A borrowed an undisclosed sum from Tether to finance its acquisition of Lutnick's ownership stake. The full filing is available here: scribd.com/document/10174…

@sbaratelli @nvidia @openclaw most folks will want as much intelligence as possible, and open models aren't there yet.

x.com/i/article/2035…

It appears that @Tether has a lien on all @howardlutnick family assets, including their majority stake in Cantor. And apparently Tether lent the Lutnicks money at the same time Howard was going to bat for them in DC to change the Genius legislation, clearing the way for Tether to have access to the US banking system despite being offshore with no audit.

ANNOUNCING FOUNDER & CEO OF @ELEKTRONENERGY RAPHA ZAGURY AS A BITCOIN 2026 SPEAKER ⚡️ "Bitcoin is the best saving technology ever invented." - @alphazeta ✊