Viewed soberly, it was no coincidence that the trail of one of the largest digital heists in history did not lead to ordinary hackers but to one of the most hermetically sealed states on Earth. When, in 2022, more than six hundred million dollars vanished from the blockchain of an American gaming company, few initially suspected that behind the anonymous wallet addresses lurked what appeared to be the extended arm of North Korea’s intelligence apparatus. The so-called Lazarus Group – also known as Guardians of Peace, GOP, or APT38 – had struck again: a hacker collective allegedly operating on Pyongyang’s behalf, employing methods more sophisticated than much of what Western intelligence services can currently muster in the digital realm.
North Korea, that peculiar relic of the Cold War, has isolated itself from the world more completely than almost any other nation of our time. It possesses natural resources but lacks any meaningful industry, functioning export economy, or access to global financial markets. Yet within the logic of such a system, necessity becomes the most fertile ground for ingenuity. Even in the late twentieth century, Pyongyang was suspected of keeping itself afloat through unconventional means. Intelligence agencies reported throughout the 1990s that North Korea earned a significant portion of its hard currency through counterfeiting and trademark piracy. The so-called “Superdollar” became legendary. A near-perfect replica of the U.S. one-hundred-dollar bill that, according to experts, was produced with such precision that even experienced cashiers could hardly tell it from the original. These counterfeit notes repeatedly surfaced across Asia, Europe, and Africa. Washington accused Pyongyang of operating entire printing facilities dedicated to their production – an allegation North Korea, of course, indignantly denied. Yet the phenomenon fit too neatly into the image of a state that for decades has operated in the grey zone between ideology, survival, and organized shadow economics.
What the counterfeit dollar once was, stolen cryptocurrencies have now become. Moved across anonymous digital marketplaces. The terrain has shifted: secret printing presses have turned into server farms; counterfeiters have become highly skilled programmers. For years, they have provided the regime with what sanctions are meant to deny it – a steady inflow of hard currency. But crime as a strategy of survival, as a tool to overcome obstacles and turn isolation into leverage, is hardly a North Korean invention. It has long been a weapon of statecraft, an instrument of foreign and geopolitical policy. Pyongyang is by no means alone.
Iran, too, has long understood that sanctions can be circumvented not only by patience but through technology. While Western banks closed their doors, massive crypto-mining farms emerged, powered by cheap electricity from state-run power plants. Yet it is not only the regime that benefits. Dissidents and ordinary citizens also use cryptocurrencies to escape Western sanctions and their economic fallout. Mining has grown to such proportions that entire regions now suffer from power shortages and recurring blackouts. Ironically, digital independence has become a new form of dependence. Dependence on one’s own energy consumption. This is one reason Tehran is pursuing long-term access to nuclear energy with such determination: a future reactor would not only power the cities but also empower the state. Granting a form of independence no oil field can provide.
Russia, for its part, has long discovered the digital financial sphere as a refuge for sustaining its economy despite Western boycotts. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, money has flowed through increasingly complex channels. Oligarchs transfer fortunes via stablecoins to the Middle East. State-owned companies experiment with the digital ruble. And intermediaries in Hong Kong and Dubai facilitate the trade of Russian oil for cryptocurrencies. Moscow, having studied the mechanisms of Western sanctions like no other state, has grasped that blockchain technology offers a safe haven for those seeking to operate beyond the Western-dominated financial order.
And then there is Venezuela. That Latin American laboratory of economic collapse. There, the government went so far as to create its own state-controlled cryptocurrency, the Petro, nominally backed by oil reserves. The project failed technically, but politically it marked a turning point: the realization that a resource-rich state might try to escape isolation through a digital parallel currency.
Traditional instruments of diplomacy like notes, sanctions, threats are losing traction in this digitized world. Where once oil, gas, and rare earths served as strategic tools, today data, computing power, and encrypted assets have taken their place. Cryptocurrencies are no longer the anarchic playgrounds of early adopters. They have become geopolitical lubricants – forming alliances, funding conflicts, and undermining sanctions.
And while Western analysts continue to search for patterns in the blockchain, the deeper truth is more uncomfortable. The digital shadow economy now emerging is no accident. It is the logical consequence of a globalized world that integrates faster than it matures morally. When financial systems interconnect without shared ethics or oversight, crime becomes the most rational form of politics. It has, in truth, always been that way – long before international diplomacy began rallying behind the comforting term “rules-based order.”
One need not be a prophet to see that this model will inspire imitators. States like North Korea have demonstrated that with a handful of servers and a few thousand programmers, one can achieve the kind of strategic returns that once required armies, fleets, and entire diplomatic corps. It is the perfected form of asymmetric warfare.Cheap, invisible, and alarmingly efficient. In an era when information itself has become a weapon and data traffic the new Silk Road, power shifts to those who control the digital domain. What we are witnessing is not a rupture with history but its digital continuation. Cryptocurrencies are quietly transforming the mechanisms of foreign policy. They remove financial flows from traditional oversight and create new spheres of political autonomy – particularly for states excluded from, or deliberately rejecting, the Western order.
Those who speak of power today must no longer think only of weapons and raw materials but also of data, algorithms, and digital liquidity. And perhaps one day it will be said that the world’s first truly global currency was neither the dollar nor the euro – but Bitcoin: a coin without a fatherland, made for a world without trust. And that those who first grasped its geopolitical significance were not bankers in New York, but hackers in Pyongyang.
The Western world will not endure in this new digital order through moral appeals or regulatory zeal, but only if it rediscovers how to unite technological competence, political rationality, and strategic foresight. In an age when power increasingly derives from data, networks, and control over information flows, it is no longer territory that determines geopolitical agency – but technological sovereignty.