AVANTI FINANCIAL GROUP SET TO PREMIERE CRYPTO BANK. A bank capitalized by and optimized to deal in cryptocurrencies may be just around the corner. The Avanti Financial Group, based in Longwood, FL, says it has raised $44 million so far in its funding efforts.
Companies including Coinbase, Binance.US, Morgan Creek Digital, Madison Paige Ventures, AP Capital, and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments have all invested in the bank start-up.
“Our roadmap includes offering API-based U.S. dollar payment services for wires, ACH and SWIFT; issuance of our tokenized, programmable U.S. dollar called Avit; and custody and on-/off-ramp services for bitcoin and other digital assets,” said Avanti founder and CEO Caitlin Long.
“Avit” would represent a mediating “stable coin” pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. Avanti has no plans of becoming a consumer exchange and will be for institutional investors only.
Long noted that the firm has received over 2,500 would-be customer inquiries since announcing plans to gain bank charter approval. Avanti was founded in 2020 as a Wyoming bank, compliant in bridging U.S. dollar payments and digital assets such as Bitcoin. It is only the second crypto company to earn that status, following Kraken Financial, which received a bank charter in September 2020.
BITCOIN IN FOR A WILD RISE ACCORDING TO MICROSTRATEGY CEO. Bitcoin, the first and most widely adopted cryptocurrency, has recently wavered repeatedly between the $45,000 and $60,000 range, after a dizzying climb over the past 14 months.
It seems everyone has a prediction and a “bet” of one kind or another on what the future holds for Bitcoin to cryptos in general. Government authorities tied to profligate inflation of the U.S. dollar, including Janet Yellin, have talked down Bitcoin and other cryptos, for obvious reasons. Bill Gates chimed in with characteristic elitist control freak concern.
Others, including Elon Musk and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, have made no bones about their enthusiasm for decentralized digital currencies resistant to government control and inflationary policies.
This past week, the CEO MicroStrategy, a NASDAQ-listed intelligence firm, staked his company’s reputation on a prediction that Bitcoin was destined to see some heady future gains in value.
“I can see bitcoin going to a million. I can see it going to $5 million,” said Michael Saylor. “Because if it simply replaces all the indexes as a monetary index money, why shouldn’t it go to $100 trillion in market cap or something?”
Saylor’s comments, made in an interview with FamilyOffice, are extremely bullish, to say the least. But others, including the CEO of Kraken Financial, the first chartered crypto bank in the U.S., have also predicted eventual price rises of Bitcoin to at least $1 million.
The head of MicroStrategy said he expects Bitcoin to continue to outperform top tech and entertainment-related stocks like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. Those stocks have little chance of growing by a factor of ten from their current point, though they will perhaps triple in value over time, says Saylor.
In contrast, he noted that Bitcoin has several factors which point to much more explosive upside potential. He said the Bitcoin network is the dominant one in the cryptocurrency space, and that “everybody decided it’s the network.” He also pointed out that it’s “growing 200% a year every year for 12 years running. That’s the signal.”
According to the market intelligence specialist, Bitcoin is underpriced. Its current valuation of $1.2 trillion is far below what he sees as a “$200 to $300 trillion addressable market.” He also pointed to a huge and obvious problem it’s fixing: over-inflated, fiat currencies being issued by central banks.
MicroStrategy has made no secret that it has been buying Bitcoin throughout the cryptocurrency’s bull run. The firm currently holds 91,326 coins, valued at over $4.76 billion.
SMART CITIES WILL BE DIGITAL PRISONS. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, “It was the best of intentions, it was the worst of ideas…”
Unaccountable, billionaire-funded organizations are leading the charge to “smart cities” designed to comprehensively model behaviors and control the activities of inhabitants. That’s according to Derek Boze of the Last American Vagabond news blog and reported in Blacklisted News.
The purpose of architectural engineering is… well, engineering humans. Lofty-sounding utopian goals include ending “systemic” racism, (i.e., racism that can’t be established via traditional notions of evidence and common sense), overcrowding (fueled by immigration, not actual American citizen birth rates), and crime (most prevalent in urban areas controlled by leftists peddling further “solutions” like smart cities).
But the actual proscriptions for city designs and “features” are anything but utopian. They would diminish privacy, do away with the dignity and incentives of property ownership, and curtail freedom of movement. If that sounds a lot like the lockdowns of 2020 with some bread and circus bells and whistles, you’re getting the idea.
Billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos via his media mouthpiece The Washington Post, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, and partners at the U.N. all have a hand in pushing the Smart City agenda. In fact, it’s part of the so-called “Great Reset,” predicated on a very old communist paradigm. The radical fever-dreams of Marx and acolytes like Vladimir Lenin systematically rejected everything of the organically established, evolved order of life. The motivating epicenter of their history-poisoning cult has always been to “make everything new,” according to the artificial mental constructs created by their grandiose and often tragically absurd visions.
And “making everything new,” dressed up with technocratic capabilities and innovations, is what the Great Reset and the Smart City are all about. As Derek Boze outlines:
A Smart City is promoted as an urban environment which “uses data and emerging technologies to improve the quality of life for citizens, share information with the public, drive economic growth and build a more inclusive society.” This city would involve the use of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and drones to “improve citizens’ lives and solve the challenges of today while preparing to address those of tomorrow.”
What could go wrong with a human existence monitored by drones and artificial intelligence, where all actions are digitally captured and used to decide and dictate allowed behaviors and activities? Everything, when one considers that smart cities are really designed to further separate the masters of the universe who control it and those being controlled.
Quickly Being Prototyped And Rolled Out
“Smart Cities” aren’t just fodder for books, whitepapers, and conjecture. Components and protocols are being designed and even implemented right now. In November 2020, not wasting the opportunities presented by the largely elite manufactured COVID crisis, the WEF selected 36 cities to “pioneer a new global policy roadmap for smart cities developed by the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance” (GSCA).
Pioneer cities include Barcelona, Spain; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; London, United Kingdom; Mexico City, Mexico, and San José, United States.
A major feature of the Smart City is the invasive use of technology to surveil, control, and collect information from citizens. As described by the GSCA:
To support their booming urban populations, many cities have come to rely on the internet of things (IoT)—that is, the world’s ever-expanding network of connected devices—to collect, share and analyze real-time data on urban environments. The data gathered using IoT technologies are helping these “smart cities” to combat crime, reduce pollution, decrease traffic congestion, improve disaster preparedness, and more. However, it is also raising growing concerns about privacy, security, and other risks.
What’s not built into the technological surveillance and data collection envisioned by the “pioneering” program? Traditional Constitutional limits on privacy or respect and attention to legal, long-established human freedoms.
Other components of the Smart City include controlling human activities via “sustainable development” and considerations of “equity.” These terms really mean limiting the ability of average people to work, innovate, and create wealth for themselves, and controlling what wealth they do manage to create.
In that vein, living quarters, the ability to acquire and use land, and the ability to transact freely for mutual benefit to accrue wealth and satisfy desires and demands of fellow citizens will no longer be in the hands of citizens themselves. The idea of contracting and interacting in relative freedom isn’t a feature of the Smart City.
As for the governance of the comprehensive impositions? Well, that would be handled by the GSCA and the WEF of course, funneled down to local authorities. Think of the “comprehensive plan” rubric, familiar to anyone who has attended a few, local town or city council meetings over the past two decades. These proscriptions from higher authorities and funders have radically changed the process of deciding land use and regulations from a citizen to local legislator approach, to a higher authority to local legislator system of control.
And the top-down, undemocratic design of the Smart City is perhaps the ultimate tell that the whole concept isn’t really about improving the lives of average citizens. They really have no say or input, regarding the far away, global entities and authorities designing and pushing it.
The mega-powerful technocratic elites and privileged political and government authorities won’t be subject to the same limitations and protocols as the inhabitants trapped in the dystopian landscape of AI-powered city prisons. They almost certainly won’t be the ones living in them. They will have grand escapes, with scads of private property and total privacy.
The goal of the Smart City is to systematically reduce, in the near future term, the nuisance of non-essential masses, given to over-consuming, and defiling the earth via physical occupation and despoliation, carbon emissions, spread of disease, etc. And in the only slightly longer scheme of things, perhaps via genetic intervention and more explicit and stringent birth rate control, the Smart City is designed to eliminate the problem entirely.
