By Whitney Curry Wimbish

Copyright prospect

This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

Illustrations by Joseph Goegh

JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – The shuttle bus rolls beneath the Teton Range. The afternoon is warm and bright. The scene is dreamlike, with aspen trees and tall grasses and round hay bales stacked in neat rows. A black horse and foal are in the center of a field and raise their heads in unison to watch the group drive past. Elk leap over a fence to walk among grazing cattle, then leap out again, free.

The scene makes me catch my breath. I turn to the other passengers, ready to say, “Did you see that?” But my seatmates in the black Mercedes van are all glued to their phones. They work in crypto, they’re heading to the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium at the Four Seasons Resort and Residences Jackson Hole, and there’s no time to look out the window.

They stay locked on those phones even as they commiserate. One man reminisces about how convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX once ran a conference and gave his company $15,000 to spend. He sighs. That was awesome. Another offers an update on his company. “Everyone is trying to create these walled gardens,” he says, “and we’re trying to create a public good.” The company presented their idea to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Treasury last month: What if you could create a basket of assets that perfectly tracks inflation? The regulators “were super stoked,” he says.

“Ugh, the SEC,” says another man. His company just hired two former SEC employees, and they can’t give clear “yes” or “no” answers to anything. They’re great, but “I just want to work in tech where people are really cracked out,” he sighs. Unfortunately, they’re the ones with expertise in TradFi—traditional finance—and that’s where all the money is.

The shuttle stops at the resort, where the cheapest rooms cost more than $1,000 a night and tickets for the invitation-only conference went as high as $10,000. The crypto guys agree to meet at the gondola later, where decals of American BTO, Kraken, and the Solana Policy Institute are stuck to the windows, blocking the view.

With lawmakers in both parties falling all over themselves to win their favor, you can understand the crypto elite’s delusions of grandeur.

Jackson Hole is a playground for the rich, but that’s not why Anthony Scaramucci’s company, SALT, is holding a blockchain symposium there. Wyoming is the underappreciated heart of the American cryptocurrency boom; lawmakers have passed more than 50 industry-friendly laws over the last eight years, more than anywhere else in the country. One established the Wyoming Chancery Court for business-related litigation, similar to the chancery court system in Delaware. With wide-open spaces and twice as many cattle as people, Wyoming’s political leaders want to base the entire state’s economy on crypto.

The executives, lawmakers, regulators, and even a member of the Trump family who congregated here were in party mode. Fresh off buying Washington, D.C., with hundreds of millions of dollars in the last election, crypto’s elite celebrated the passage of one industry-written federal law, and two others in the works. They gloated about owning the SEC, Federal Reserve, and most of all the White House. They heaped scorn on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), former SEC chair Gary Gensler, and anyone else who wants to pump the brakes on what proponents say is an inevitable takeover. It’s the Pax Cryptomanica, haters be damned.

They spoke, too, of the public-mindedness of their industry and how it will benefit Wyoming, though they were short on specifics. One man insisted that his cryptocurrency company, which he had recently relocated to the state, would help regular people, but couldn’t say how, exactly. Would it create more jobs? No. Would it fund any social programs? Not exactly. But somehow it would get cash into people’s hands who needed it the most, the details of which would be worked out later.

Then he offered to send me an amethyst from a mine he owns. I declined, per the Prospect’s policy against accepting gifts of gems.

“THANK YOU FOR GETTING RID OF SHERROD BROWN!” exclaimed Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott (R-SC) from the stage, referring to Ohio’s former Democratic senator, who used to have his job. The main crypto PAC, Fairshake, spent more than $40 million last year to stop Brown’s re-election; it now has more than $141 million stored up for next year’s midterms.

Scott’s panel, the second of the day, was a conversation with Austin Reid, global head of revenue and business at crypto prime broker FalconX, who would later pump a glop of mayo onto a burger at a cookout and agree that doing so was either trashy or European. But that was ten hours away. It was still shortly after 9 a.m.

“We are working hand in glove,” Scott told the audience. He launched into a story about growing up in poverty with a single mom. “This industry offers a woman like that more access at a lower cost point.” It will also help him “accomplish the goal I had when I was 19 years old, to impact a billion people.” That’s about three times the population of the United States.

Scott praised his fellow banking committee member, digital asset subcommittee chair Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), for co-sponsoring the industry-friendly Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins, or GENIUS, Act, which creates a federal regulatory system for the cryptocurrency supposedly pegged to the dollar. It passed with help from 16 Democratic senators this spring, and Donald Trump signed it in July. The law offers a “vision” for what the world looks like in 2028, Scott said. Reid asked him to elaborate.

“I have a dream!” said Scott, who is Black. The mostly white audience shifted in their seats. Scott chided them: Let a man have some fun. He rose to meander through the crowd. We must innovate before we regulate, “because competition needs time to grow up.” America must “empower people to want to take the risk,” and set rules of the road to make that happen, to “give people the chance to jump in, completely be miserable while they’re failing, and get better.” He returned to his seat and concluded the koan-like monologue about the new law. “That will allow that single mother like me to get more of her money faster.” The audience felt comfortable enough to clap.

Reid asked: What advice does Scott have for people in the room?

“Number one,” Scott said, “fire the legislators that are in your way.”

The lone Democratic lawmaker at the symposium, Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN), offered not so much resistance as a shrug. She’s running against populist Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan for a U.S. Senate seat and told the audience that inviting digital assets into the financial system should be apolitical. Her presence on the cusp of an expensive campaign suggested otherwise.

With lawmakers in both parties falling all over themselves to win their favor and their campaign donations, you can understand the crypto elite’s delusions of grandeur, even amid enthusiastic ignorance. Who even knows what a “CUSIP number” is, sneered Kyle Samani, co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, on a panel with Scaramucci. The two laughed together. (For the record, it’s the Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures number, the unique identifier for most financial securities in North America.)

“I learned yesterday what a registration statement is,” Samani said, “and I described it to my team as, quote, carrier pigeon for TradFi.”

Eric Trump, whose mining company American Bitcoin just went public in the beginning of September, was on hand as well. He took the stage with the intensity of a black hole, drawing all the attention toward his unblinking face. He towered over the other panelists and hugged them; he said he spends most of his business life involved in crypto, and that Bitcoin would one day soon cross $1 million in price. Crypto “might actually be the best asset class of all,” the president’s son gushed.

Bill Tai, co-founder of NTF company Metagood, offered one of the only sour notes. He said the U.S. has less than two years to build dozens of power plants to accommodate a panoply of data centers set for construction. The entire grid must be “redone,” he said, or “we’re gonna be having some very big issues.” This is an urgent topic in Wyoming, where a recently announced data center near Cheyenne intends to use 10,000 megawatts, the generation capacity of the entire state, as independent news outlet WyoFile reported last month.

You saw all the rolling blackouts in Portugal, Tai said. “In about 18 months, if all of these data centers come up, we’re going to start having that issue in the U.S.”

Another way to resolve the issue would be to not build the data centers, but Tai did not mention that. In fact, he’s counting on a fortune from there being no alternative but to power more crypto. Tai is chairman of the board of Hut 8 Corp., which has remade itself as an energy infrastructure company. Shortly after the conference, the firm announced that it “expects its platform to exceed 2.5 gigawatts of capacity under management” with the addition of four new production sites in Illinois, Louisiana, and Texas. The news pushed its stock up by 10 percent.

LET’S TAKE A TOUR AROUND THE CONFERENCE. Here is a man in a teal suit jacket and matching cowboy hat, more Huggy Bear than cowboy. Here is Morgan Murphy, a senior adviser to Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and a food writer, with his dog, Chester. He’s running for senator in Alabama and is “thinking about making crypto a plank” of his campaign.

Here is Brittany Kaiser, who worked at Cambridge Analytica, the company that secretly used personal data from Facebook to get Trump elected. She fled to Thailand with a film crew in tow when the news broke. But now she’s the co-founder of AlphaTon, wearing patent leather red boots and speaking so rapidly and in such a byzantine way that it’s difficult to follow what she is saying.

She is far from the only one speaking in riddles. Her fellow panelist, Jeff Park, chief investment officer of ProCap BTC, utters the following: “The reality is Bitcoin tends to sometimes get a little bit of the short end of the stick when it comes to its utility because part of why people find it so useful is potentially its uselessness.”

If you can explain what that means, the Prospect will pay you ten billion Zimbabwean dollars, cash. That is the denomination of the banknote taped under the audience’s chairs, which human rights activist and pastor Evan Mawarire uses to make a point during a speech about how digital assets can help activists. Conference handouts refer to him as a “Zimbabwean hyperinflation survivor,” but a more accurate description is “torture survivor,” since that’s what the Robert Mugabe dictatorship did to him after he demanded government accountability in 2016 via an online video that went viral. There are three other panels on human rights and crypto, accompanied by soaring music and video montages. Then the panel discussions snap back to moneymaking.

Here are women in frilly dresses, some of whom brought their dogs, and serious ones in smart ensembles, and others who got into the spirit of the state and the request by conference schedulers to wear “Cowboy Casual.” Some of them have gone downtown to buy bespoke cowboy hats, which range from $245 to $1,795.

One expert estimated that the number of digital asset companies domiciled in Wyoming runs into the “thousands.”

Here is Zunera Mazhar, vice president of policy at lobbyist The Digital Chamber, who posted a photo of herself in the conference Telegram channel in cowboy boots and a short leather skirt with a slit up the thigh, standing shoulder to shoulder with the chair of the SEC, Paul Atkins, and two other stylish women.

Here is a man in a cowboy hat and a black shirt with gold diamonds strewn across the fabric, and dark wraparound sunglasses though the room is dim. His cowboy boots are bedazzled with numerous sparkling studs. Here are the casual hoodie tech bros, sleeveless fleece zip finance bros, blazer-with-sneakers bros, and at least one Brazilian jiu-jitsu bro.

Here is a man cramming his mouth with popcorn from a red-and-white striped bag in steady five-second intervals. The uninterrupted rustle of paper prompts another man to glare at him from across the aisle. But popcorn guy is rapt by his snack and the speaker, Premier of Bermuda E. David Burt.

David Hirsch, former head of the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, has also availed himself of the popcorn. Now he works in private practice representing crypto firms.

Let us go next to the Cowboy Cookout, an evening activity that followed the first day of speakers, held at a ranch near the foot of the Tetons and sponsored by blockchain platform Avalanche. The same day, Fortune reported that Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital would bring $300 million in assets to tokenize on Avalance’s blockchain, about 10 percent of total assets under management.

Elk graze in the distance. Servers pass what they say is crudités: two celery sticks and two mini carrots rolling around in a paper dish, with an optional puddle of ranch dressing. A drone zips above the party and a man drives his rental car into a ditch.

I talk to a “digital nomad” from the Bay Area who says he was once a park ranger in Yellowstone. He’d like to move back to Jackson Hole, but everything is expensive, so he’s come up with a plan. “I’ll start with a studio,” he says, “and rent it out to companies who need a Wyoming address.” So they can get the Wyoming tax benefits? Yes, but what they really need is a human who has the address. “Luckily, I’m a human.”

There are a lot of swindlers in this industry, and you might not know that right away, a man who’s at the party with his wife tells me. Both are executive coaches. The man is also an ex-Marine, or, as he puts it, “a protector.” Scaramucci is also making the rounds, urging people to call him Tony. “He’s one of the good guys,” the protector says.

The sun sets behind the mountain range and the temperature drops. Ground fog rises through the field. The rental car is still in the ditch. “That’s a problem for tomorrow,” says the man who put it there. A woman laughs as they catch the Four Seasons shuttle back to their rooms. “I like that attitude.” she says.

“REGULATORY CAPTURE” USED TO MEAN CORRUPTION. And, well, it still does. But crypto executives in Wyoming discussed it as an imperative. Take Henson Orser, founder and CEO of Soter Insure, which provides theft and loss insurance for digital assets. If there is to be a global crypto economy, he said, “you nevertheless need to have local regulatory capture.” That was the overwhelming sentiment of the symposium, and it was on display immediately.

Fortunately for the industry, the regulators are so happy to be captured these days, they’d probably build the prison cells themselves. The ones who took the stage were bent on jamming cryptocurrency into the American financial system.

The crypto industry has for years seethed at the SEC, led in the Biden years by Gary Gensler, who once called the digital asset industry the “Wild West” because it lacked adequate investor protections. But “it’s a new day,” said Gensler’s successor, Paul Atkins.

The agency is no longer “head in the sand, hoping crypto would go away,” Atkins said. Instead, the recently announced Project Crypto and other initiatives will make sure everyone in the room has what they want, including the ability to choose what regulator oversees their outfit, so that “if one regulator becomes too obstinate,” they can take their idea and go to another.

Atkins praised the passage of the GENIUS Act, “which was great, hallelujah,” called Scott “a great guy,” and looked forward to the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which passed the House in July and would create a regulatory framework for all digital assets other than stablecoins. The centerpiece of the bill would take oversight over most crypto assets away from the SEC, and to the much friendlier Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And here was the head of the SEC, beaming about the prospect of having his agency’s power stripped away.

“The good thing is we have a president who’s thrown down the gauntlet. I mean, he’s not shrinking from this and he understands the importance of it,” Atkins said, adding that Trump wants “the world running on American technology” and for the country to be “the crypto capital of the world.” The Trump clan, of course, has gorged on crypto cash. It now represents more than half of Trump’s total net worth.

“There’s a benefit to not regulating too quickly,” said Ian De Bode, chief strategy officer of Ondo, on a later panel, and he’s “in active conversations with the SEC about how to figure this out.” Until last year, De Bode was a partner at scandal-addicted consultancy McKinsey, which helped the first Trump administration terrorize immigrants. His aside about grinding the regulators into submission was unintentionally revealing about how capture works.

Michelle Bowman, vice chair for financial supervision at the Federal Reserve, was another bearer of good news, telling the audience that it was “inspiring” to be at the symposium, extolling the virtues of tokenized assets, and remarking that stablecoins “are now positioned to become a fixture in the financial system” thanks to the GENIUS law. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City would hold its own symposium in the same town in just a few days. But before then, Bowman sympathized with the crypto industry’s unsatisfying interactions with regulators.

“When you start from a world of possibility, where you move fast and break things to make rapid improvements, you may struggle with the complex and rigid regulatory constructs familiar to bankers and regulators,” she said, and reassured the audience that “despite this past inertia, change is coming.”

Bowman explained what questions the industry should answer for regulators and mentioned her recent fireside chat about artificial intelligence with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose ChatGPT program led a teen to kill himself this year, his parents allege in a lawsuit, including by providing encouragement and detailed instructions on how to tie a noose.

But regulating based on “an imaginary ‘worst-case’ scenario” is not the way forward, Bowman said, nor is it the role of examiners or policymakers to direct which customers or industries to serve or which products to offer. That’s the job of bank management. The relationship between industry and regulators should be collaborative, she said, and Fed staff should be allowed to hold crypto. Otherwise, how will they know how it works? “I certainly wouldn’t trust someone to teach me to ski if they’d never put on skis,” Bowman said.

Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Wyoming-chartered Custodia Bank, sat smiling in the front row, sometimes pumping a fist in agreement. Her bank is for cryptocurrencies and offers various services, including custody and a token it calls an “electronic negotiable instrument.”

She’s been locked in a regulatory fight for the last two years after the Federal Reserve board denied her application to make Custodia part of the Federal Reserve System because she failed to convince members that it could operate in a safe and sound manner. “Instead, the record indicates Custodia could in fact pose significant risk to its community,” the Board of Governors ruled.

After Bowman’s speech, Long tweeted, “PINCH ME!! – the @federalreserve Vice Chairman for Supervision is making a speech *supportive* of #tokenization & @stablecoins, incl facilitation of near-real time payments, in my home state – the leading state for #crypto – of #Wyoming. ‘Change is coming’ – Bowman 👏🤠”

THE DIGITAL ASSET INDUSTRY HAS GOOD REASON to pick Wyoming as its HQ. In addition to being the least populated state in the union, it’s also one of the world’s major tax havens, drawing wealthy elites from all over who want to hide their money from investigators and tax collectors.

The state’s “cowboy cocktail” of laws, as wealth managers call it, offers a variety of maneuvers, such as the ability to create a trust with a private company at the head rather than a specific person, and another law that allows for the creation of a company within a trust to hold bank accounts, property, and other assets. The state offers 1,000-year dynasty trusts, laws that protect assets against creditors, and freedom from taxes on capital gains, estates, gifts, or income.

There are incentives for creating limited-liability companies, the formation of which Wyoming was the first to authorize in 1977, though Delaware steals all the credit as the home of legalized financial trickery. Wyoming LLCs have tripled over the last five years, outstripping Delaware as the location of choice, according to OpenCorporates. In 2023, 166,960 entities incorporated in Wyoming, and all but 8 percent were LLCs. That’s 348 LLCs per 1,000 adults in Wyoming versus 268 in Delaware. It’s easy and cheap. First hire a registered agent, which can run as low as $25 a year, according to one firm’s online advertisements. Then pay the state’s fee of $100.

The arrangement has made Wyoming attractive for crooks. In March, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that a small building in Sheridan was the incorporation address for 266,000 companies between 2019 and 2024, including one called Alo Group. That company used its Wyoming address when it received more than $500,000 in emergency COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program money from the U.S. government. Then it switched its mailing address to China. Then it disappeared.

The same laws have made Wyoming attractive for cryptocurrency companies. Steven Lupien, director of the University of Wyoming’s Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation and Long’s life partner, estimated in July that the number of digital asset companies domiciled in the state runs into the “thousands.”

Not a single worker I spoke with had heard about the state’s cryptocurrency industry or Wyoming’s new stablecoin.

During the conference, Gov. Mark Gordon unveiled the nation’s first state-sponsored stablecoin, the Frontier Stable Token, or FRNT. It will be available on Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and Solana. The state will hold collateral for the tokens at 102 percent and put income over the reserve requirement into a public school fund, lawmakers said.

Asked for her thoughts on Wyoming’s embrace of crypto while waiting for a hamburger at the Cowboy Cookout, Long told me that it’s all “about jobs, it’s about revenue to the state, and it’s about the University of Wyoming, attracting donors, students, and scholars in this space.” Others echoed Long’s optimism about the rise of the state’s digital asset industry.

But Lee Reiners, lecturing fellow at the Duke Financial Economics Center, said that, for all of Wyoming’s chatter about the benevolence of its stablecoin and crypto’s benefits, lawmakers still haven’t solved the central problem that the industry is full of liars and thieves. The stablecoin, for example, could easily be used to fund drug trafficking or launder terrorist financing.

The digital asset players brush that aside. “Nobody believes that anymore,” Lupien told me in an interview before the symposium. Unless you’re a real anti-crypto zealot like Elizabeth Warren, this is the way the world is going,” he said. “I think the day of referring to us as money launderers or drug dealers or terrorists is gone.”

That style of thinking has made Wyoming a magnet for the industry. Crypto exchange Kraken relocated its headquarters to Cheyenne in June, because the state’s pro-crypto environment “made it a uniquely well-situated backdrop” to “foster institutional understanding” of cryptocurrency as an asset class. The press release announcing the move includes a quote applauding the decision from Sen. Lummis, who took the stage with Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi.

Lummis has been crypto’s cowboss in Washington for years now. She has been pushing, along with Custodia, to give Wyoming crypto banks access to the federal payment system, as well as calling for the creation of a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.” Her nickname is the “Crypto Queen.” At the conference, Lummis forecast that the Senate’s version of a market structure bill, which she predictably co-authored, would be voted out of the Senate Banking Committee by the end of September and finished by the end of the year, hopefully before Thanksgiving, which the audience rewarded with cheers.

Kraken’s Sethi commented that he’s still stuck in California’s expensive Menlo Park after his company relocated. He wants to move to Jackson, but that’s expensive, too. “Can you subsidize my house?” he asked Lummis. “Move to Cheyenne and I won’t have to,” she responded. Cheyenne is the seat of Laramie County, where Lummis lives. The audience laughed.

Sethi asked about Lummis’s crypto holdings; she has individual stock and five Bitcoin in a blind trust, she said. “Which exchange do you use?” Sethi asked. The audience laughed again, this time punctuated with “ohhh!” Sethi offered for his firm to custody her assets “in a blindly trusted way. I’ll leave it there.” Lummis threw her head back and laughed, clapping over her head. “I’ll say this to that: Arjun, you had me at hello.”

That evening, the two held a fundraiser for Lummis at the Teton Village home of former Interior Department official Rob Wallace and his wife Celia, where the suggested contribution was at least $1,000.

THERE IS ANOTHER STORY IN JACKSON HOLE that deserves oxygen, one that unfolds every morning at dawn.

It is 7 a.m. on a crowded local bus from downtown. Riders greet each other briefly, mostly in Spanish, sometimes in English, then settle in for the hour-long ride to Teton Village, where the symposium is taking place and where snow and sun bunnies stay in luxury resort suites. One-way bus fare is $3, higher than the cost of public transportation in New York City.

A woman folds her arms on the seat in front of her and leans forward to rest her head. Others pull their hoodies over their eyes and lean back. The bus passes the same idyll as the airport shuttle. Again, no one is looking out the window. But this time it’s because they are dog-tired. The sun rises over the Teton Range and paints the valley with light.

The last stop is a parking lot near major resorts, across the street from a trail riding company, where a stablehand saddles dozens of horses before their first customers arrive.

Though conference attendees framed their industry as altruistic, not a single local worker I spoke with had heard about the state’s cryptocurrency industry or Wyoming’s new stablecoin. None believed either would improve their lives. All of them said Jackson is an exhausting place to live, mainly because rent is astronomical, homes are scarce, and salaries are too low to keep up. It’s a microcosm of the U.S. affordability crisis, made more painful by all the rich tourists with piles of money to spend on fun.

Rental platform Zillow puts the average monthly cost for a Jackson Hole two-bedroom apartment at $4,000, about 25 percent higher than in Los Angeles. But workers said the amount they pay is even more. A woman who manages three hotels said if you can find a relatively reasonable place to rent, you hang onto it as long as possible or hope that your employer provides company housing. She said she was lucky to find her $3,000 place, but has to move soon because her landlord is raising the rent. It’s not just her and her husband the prices affect; she often can’t fill open jobs unless she can also provide workers with a place to stay. They can’t afford to live in the area otherwise. Usually that means renting rooms in local hotels. But Jackson only has two short off-seasons, and the rest of the time most places are booked.

She had not heard about the Wyoming stablecoin, but she had heard that Eric Trump was in town for something or other about cryptocurrency.

Another worker who drives for Lyft and Uber said that claims that Wyoming’s crypto industry would help made no sense, because he had no idea how to buy it and didn’t want to. He has worked practically every day since moving to the U.S. from Mexico a decade ago, with no time to enjoy the natural beauty of the state, such as taking a drive to Yellowstone. The Four Seasons Resort had offered him a job, and it came with housing. But at the last minute, management told him they were charging him $1,450 to live there, and he had to share with three other roommates. How could he make his wife live in a place with three other men? So he turned down the job and moved across the border to Idaho, where it’s more affordable. But that comes with a long commute that is dangerous in winter.

A worker with multiple jobs, including at the Jackson Hole Airport, said he was sick of the high cost of living and of wealthy visitors’ sense of entitlement. The day the blockchain conference started, for example, so many private jets flew into the airport that they interrupted the schedules of two commercial flights, he said. An official on the ground radioed to the jets in the air and demanded they circle so commercial planes could land. But instead of complying, they argued back for several minutes until the airport official ultimately won. The airport did not respond to a request seeking confirmation and more information.

Elsewhere in Jackson, the food rescue organization Hole Food Rescue was preparing for its own gathering: the annual Million Pound Party to celebrate their work with a cook-off among local chefs, food, games, and music. More people have relied on the organization for help in recent months, program director Iván Jiménez told me. About 10 percent of residents in Teton County are food insecure under an assessment officials conducted four years ago. But the United Way recently found that another 30 percent of people are food insecure, too—they just earn more than the federal poverty level.

Jiménez laughed when asked about Wyoming’s digital asset industry. “Let me tell you, working-class people are not talking about that,” he said. “They’re concerned about working one to three jobs.”

I asked an official from the treasurer’s office to comment on how difficult life is for regular people and how the crypto industry would help. He wore starched jeans with a crease pressed down the middle. Billionaires are fine with people coming over the pass from Idaho to work, but they don’t want them living here, so they make sure to buy up as much land as possible and keep rents high. That way, poor people will be locked out, and there will be no slums in Jackson. He wanted that off the record, but I did not agree to that, and instead wrote down what he said and asked workers about it.

One person shook his head in disbelief when I did and said they’d like to take the official to some trailer parks in Jackson. They added that they were “not impressed, nor am I convinced” that Wyoming has any intention of sharing any crypto industry gains with regular people. “It seems like glorified gambling to me.”

Contrast this with the Telegram channel of conference attendees, who posted happy snaps of their “excursions,” as the conference organizers put it. There was paragliding, trail riding, yoga, an oxygen bar, massages, and a “regenerative health experience” in an Airstream camper. There were off-road vehicle tours and a visit to a gun range.

They were still talking about all the fun they had for days afterward in the Telegram channel. “Still absolutely buzzing off the energy from last week!” one attendee posted. Many praised the conference and looked forward to the next one. Like so many other beautiful places on this planet, workers are just another natural resource to exploit.

After a particularly sad conversation with a worker one day, during which he looked at the mountains and wished for some time off, the symposium’s atmosphere of self-congratulation was too much to bear. I ducked out for a solitary walk, past preparations for lunch, the man-made waterfall, and the many attendants welcoming guests. Half a mile away, a trail led along a creek and into the shade of aspen trees. Their leaves shivered overhead.