MIT Technology Review has reported on two distinct stories in its daily newsletter: a cautionary tale involving a cryptocurrency venture its founders claimed was divinely inspired, and a developing roadmap around solar geoengineering research. The first story, concerning a man named Eli Regalado who said he received instructions from God to sell a cryptocurrency, resulting in devastating losses for investors, is the kind of account that sits at an uncomfortable intersection of faith, financial fraud, and the enduring wildness of the digital asset market.
The Regalado case, as MIT Technology Review frames it, is not an isolated curiosity. It belongs to a pattern that has shadowed cryptocurrency since its earliest days of mainstream visibility: the exploitation of trust, community, and in this instance spiritual authority to move money from ordinary people into ventures that cannot withstand scrutiny. What makes the religious dimension notable is not that it is unprecedented — affinity fraud, in which bad actors exploit shared identity to establish credibility, has been documented across religious communities for generations — but that it illustrates how cryptocurrency's structural features make it a particularly efficient vehicle for such schemes. Transactions are largely irreversible. Regulatory oversight remains fragmented. And the speculative culture surrounding digital assets has normalized the idea that any coin, from any source, might be the one that changes everything.
The broader crypto landscape has spent several years oscillating between catastrophic collapse and renewed enthusiasm. The implosion of FTX and its founder's subsequent criminal conviction, the collapse of various algorithmic stablecoins, and the repeated cycles of exchange failures have collectively done something important: they have made the phrase "do your own research" ring hollow as protective advice. Retail investors repeatedly absorb losses that institutional players and early insiders manage to avoid. What the Regalado story adds to this record is the dimension of psychological manipulation dressed in theological language, which raises the threshold for skepticism in ways that standard financial fraud may not.
The likely consequences of cases like this operate on several levels. For the investors who lost money, the immediate harm is financial, and the likelihood of meaningful recovery in cryptocurrency fraud cases has historically been low. Legally, authorities have become more aggressive in pursuing crypto fraud in recent years, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission along with the Department of Justice have expanded their capacity to bring cases. Whether a divine-mandate defense translates into a meaningful legal complication or simply an aggravating factor in sentencing is a question courts will eventually be asked to resolve more explicitly as such cases accumulate. The likely reading is that courts will treat spiritual claims as irrelevant to the mechanics of fraud, but the cultural argument around religious freedom could complicate prosecutorial framing in unpredictable ways.
For the cryptocurrency industry more broadly, each episode of this kind contributes to a legitimacy problem that proponents have struggled to outrun. The industry's advocates have long argued that bad actors are a minority and that the underlying technology is neutral. That argument is not wrong on its face, but the frequency and variety of fraud cases suggests that something in the architecture of crypto markets — the anonymity, the speed, the global reach, the narrative culture of instant riches — actively attracts manipulation rather than merely tolerating it.
The solar geoengineering element of the MIT Technology Review edition points in a different direction but raises its own questions about trust and governance. Solar engineering, broadly understood as deliberate intervention in the Earth's atmosphere to reduce incoming solar radiation, has remained one of the most contested ideas in climate science. The existence of a roadmap — which this suggests is being developed to structure or legitimize research in this area — marks a meaningful moment. The field has faced repeated calls to slow down from scientists and policymakers worried about unilateral action, unintended regional consequences, and the moral hazard of giving fossil fuel interests a reason to delay emissions reductions.
A roadmap implies an attempt to build consensus and process around work that has largely proceeded through small, often controversial experiments. Whether that effort succeeds will depend heavily on who authored the roadmap, which countries and institutions are involved, and whether it carries binding commitments or remains aspirational.
What to watch for in both stories runs along a similar thread: the question of whether governance structures can catch up to technologies and actors that move faster than the institutions meant to oversee them. In cryptocurrency, the test is whether regulators and prosecutors can build deterrence before another wave of retail losses arrives. In solar geoengineering, the test is whether a research roadmap can hold together enough international cooperation to prevent a race toward unilateral atmospheric intervention. Both are, at their core, stories about the gap between what is technically possible and what societies have agreed is wise.
