May 9, 2025 • 17 mins
What if Ethereum wasn’t built to liberate us—but to study us?
In this episode we dive into leaked memos, suppressed articles, and a theory that claims Ethereum is less a blockchain and more a behavioral mirror.
Welcome to Project NOØS.
🧡 Like what you hear? Support us with coffee! buymeacoffee.com/cryptspiracy
In this episode we dive into leaked memos, suppressed articles, and a theory that claims Ethereum is less a blockchain and more a behavioral mirror.
Welcome to Project NOØS.
🧡 Like what you hear? Support us with coffee! buymeacoffee.com/cryptspiracy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to Cryptspiracy, I'm Sia Sho.
(00:02):
And I'm Matt Kosano.
This is the show where we delve into, well...
The stranger side of crypto.
For our second deep dive, we're heading into some really, eh, pretty out there territory.
Yeah, forget the usual price talk for a minute.
Today we're unpacking this collection of leaked articles, research papers,
stuff that suggests Ethereum might be something much bigger than we think.
(00:22):
Much bigger, like, could it actually be a tool designed to map, maybe even influence, global consciousness?
We're gonna look at the evidence pointing to this thing called Project NOØS.
The implications are, frankly, unsettling.
For crypto, for society,
So, yeah, buckle up. This one gets weird.
Okay, so let's kick things off with a coindesk article.
It was called "The Merge in the Mind (00:45):
Behavioral Sank in PS Protocols".
Now, this popped up late 2022 and then poof, it was gone.
Right, published and then retracted really quickly, but the core idea stuck around.
Exactly. The central claim was... pretty bold.
That the Merge, Ethereum's big shift to proof of stake, wasn't just a tech upgrade.
It might have been a massive global psychological sync event.
(01:09):
A sync event!
What triggered that idea? It sounds pretty out there.
Well, it hinged on some really strange validator activity.
It happened right after the World Health Organization upgraded an alert level for some regional
virus outbreak. September 13th, I think it was.
Okay. Validator activity.
You mean the people staking ETH to secure the network?
(01:31):
Precisely.
So, the article detailed how one validator suddenly moved a huge amount,
like 32,000 ETH from LIDO, which is a big staking pool, to a private address.
32,000 ETH, that's a lot.
It is. And usually you'd expect to move like that to be driven by, you know,
profit, network changes, something concrete.
But there wasn't anything obvious.
(01:51):
Nope. And get this:
Within the hour, five other big validators
made similar really high-stake moves.
But the market didn't budge.
No protocol event lined up.
It was just weirdly synchronized.
So, the article suggested this wasn't about normal market stuff.
Right. It pointed towards what it called an "invisible layer of validator psychology".
(02:12):
Maybe driven by, like, shared institutional feeling,
or this idea of memetic resonance, you know, an idea spreading like wildfire,
or maybe just plain fear tied to the WHO (World Health Organization) news.
It's like they were all reacting to the same external thing, but through the blockchain.
Kind of. The article had this quote really stood out.
Proof of stake isn't just about security or energy.
(02:34):
It's a distributed belief system.
And the merge might have been its collective baptism.
Wow.
A distributed belief system.
That changes how you think about consensus, doesn't it?
It absolutely does.
And the article even mentioned predictive modeling labs,
in Boston and Geneva, I think.
They were allegedly training algorithms on validator delegation patterns.
Why? What were they looking for?
(02:55):
The idea was that how these big players move their staked
ETH could be a proxy, like an early signal for wider economic anticipation,
reading the tea leaves of the blockchain, basically.
But then the article just vanished.
Yep. Bold.
The official reason was editorial inconsistencies.
Coindesk didn't say much more,
The author went quiet...
(03:15):
You know how that goes.
Always makes things look more suspicious, even if there's a simple reason.
Exactly.
And inevitably, a cached version started doing the rounds on signal forums,
places like that.
And this cached version had something extra?
Apparently, yeah.
It included an internal chart,
something labeled Validator Resonance Map-
NOØS Cohort Alpha.
(03:35):
NOØS Alpha,
There's that name again.
So even in that first weird article, the name pops up.
Uh-huh.
So the Coindesk piece, short lived as it was,
really laid the groundwork.
It floated this really unsettling idea.
Maybe the merge was a step towards,
well, decentralized behavioral manipulation.
Which leads us straight into Project NOØS itself.
This is where the leaked research papers come in, right?
(03:56):
Noosresearch.pdf and research2.pdf.
That's the core of it.
And the central idea here is, well, it's a big one.
Go on.
The leaks suggest that Ethereum wasn't really built just for finance.
The alleged primary design was as a behavioral simulation layer.
A simulation layer to model what?
Global consciousness.
Social consensus dynamics.
(04:17):
Basically, how humans coordinate,
how emotions spread,
how ideologies clash or converge,
but at a massive planetary scale.
Okay, hang on.
How could a blockchain possibly do that?
How would it map something like a motion?
The theory says it does it by analyzing everything.
The economic incentives,
how people react to sudden high gas fees
(04:38):
or market crashes,
those protocol-level stress events,
and crucially - correlating all that on chain activity
with real-world news.
So tracking how news about, say, a pandemic or an election
may be ripples through the network's behavior?
Exactly.
Looking for patterns between the digital world of Ethereum
and the physical world.
And who leaked this stuff?
Is there a source?
The main source seems to be their alias,
(04:59):
Valis-9.
Their old handle was at Newsmodule, now archived.
Claimed to be a former infrastructure engineer at Gnosis,
which is a known player in the space.
And the leaks themselves.
They were apparently traced to IPFS nodes in places like Zurich,
Ramat Gan in Israel, and Vancouver.
Because of that sort of global cloak and dagger feel.
There was also that internal memo you mentioned,
(05:20):
part of the leak.
NOØS Behavioral Mapping Targets for Phase Three.
What did that show?
Yeah, that memo had some specifics that are,
well, they raised eyebrows.
It claimed, for instance,
a confirmed 87.4% sentiment cohesion
among a group called "Validator Class A",
right during the merge.
87% cohesion.
That sounds incredibly high for a supposedly
(05:42):
decentralized network.
It kind of backs up that coindesk observation, doesn't it?
It really does.
The memo also had this opsec recommendation.
It suggested deliberately throttling,
like slowing down gas price spikes,
whenever major global news broke anything tier two
or higher on the BBC's index.
Why would they do that?
To smooth out the data?
Seems like it, as if they wanted to isolate
(06:04):
the network's internal reactions
from the noise of big external events.
Or maybe study reactions more cleanly
control the variables almost.
Like a lab experiment.
Did it mention anything else specific?
It mentioned observing preference divergence
among users on Arbitram,
which is a layer-2 network built on Ethereum.
And it linked this divergence
to something called memetic injection triggers.
Memetic injection triggers.
(06:25):
You mean like intentionally introducing ideas
or memes to see how people react?
That's what it sounds like.
Yeah, testing how ideas spread
on these faster, cheaper networks.
And what were the goals listed in that memo?
The Q4 deliverables?
Two main things stood out:
First, consolidating these ZK map profiles
think anonymized behavioral data
(06:45):
into something called the Clairvoyant Ledger.
The Clairvoyant Ledger?
Seriously, that name alone is something.
Tells you something, right?
Mm.
The second was analyzing the delay,
the latency,
in how emotions or sentiment
flowed from layer two networks
back down to the main Ethereum layer one,
like tracking emotional echoes.
Wow.
And who signed this memo?
It was signed CNBRR,
(07:07):
representing an entity called
Emergent Consensus Systems Layer Zero Protocol Group
suggests a formal structure behind this.
Okay, so we've got the weird coindesk article
these NOØS research leaks.
Any other pieces that fit this puzzle?
Yeah, there's more.
A big one is a suppressed draft
from Wired Magazine from 2023.
Is Ethereum building a mirror of the mind
(07:27):
by Miranda Rohe.
Never actually published.
Suppressed again!
What was this one claiming?
The core argument was that
validator activity staking,
unstaking, delegating,
ETH wasn't just network maintenance.
It could be feeding machine learning algorithms.
Algorithms designed to do what?
To mirror public sentiment,
predict market reactions.
(07:48):
Basically learn from the collective behavior
on the blockchain.
Did it connect any dots between organizations?
It did.
It pointed to potential links between
ETH, Zurich's neurologic systems lab,
which were signed AI and brain science
and infrastructure firms
connected to Consensys,
a huge name in Ethereum development.
Suggesting a possible pipeline
(08:09):
from academic research on minds and AI
straight into Ethereum's plumbing.
That was the implication.
And he quoted anonymous sources
who described Ethereum in really striking terms.
Like what?
One called it "a synchronized global behavioral feedback system".
Not just a ledger,
but something interactive,
reflecting us back to ourselves.
But Wired pulled it after a legal review.
(08:29):
That's the story.
Again, the lack of public explanation
just fuels the speculation.
It's a pattern.
And then there's the Palantir connection
from that FT Alphaville leak.
Palantir is famous or maybe infamous
for data analysis,
especially for governments.
Right.
This leak involves screenshots of a pitch deck for 2020.
A Swiss consultancy,
(08:49):
Dorado Ledger LTD,
was pitching Ethereum's developer stack
to Palantir.
Pitching the dev tools,
not the currency.
Exactly.
They were positioning Ethereum's tools
as a way to model distributed belief systems.
The pitch title was literally
"Distributed Belief Engines".
Belief engines?
That sounds less like finance
and more like social engineering.
(09:10):
It certainly leans that way.
The pitch deck apparently talked about labelling
validator nodes with metrics like ideological flex,
fear resistance,
even authority empathy delta.
So trying to profile the network participants
psychologically,
not just economically.
That's the implication.
Understanding their underlying tendencies.
What kinds of uses were they proposing
(09:30):
for this kind of analysis?
Things like stress testing governance models
after a crisis,
modeling how ideas spread like viruses,
ideological contagion during market panic,
and even testing counter narratives.
How would they test counter narratives?
By deploying what they called
Memetic Contract Payloads
onto the blockchain.
Basically injecting ideas to see if they stick
(09:51):
or how they change behavior.
And the Dorado Ledger company,
they had connections.
The leak mentioned ties to the World Economic Forum.
That's a detail that
definitely plays into the broader conspiracy narratives
around global control.
There was also an image in that leak,
the NOØS Flowchain.
Yeah, supposedly a diagram mapping protocol,
forks and changes against behavioral clusters
(10:14):
they identified in the transaction data,
like showing how technical shifts might correlate
with changes in group psychology.
Did the Ethereum devs comment on this
Palantir leak?
According to the leak source,
key devs went noticeably quiet
on Twitter right after it surfaced briefly,
which again, some interpreted as significant.
So the takeaway from the Pakantir pitch is pretty stark.
(10:35):
It is.
It suggests Ethereum's main application
might not be financial at all, but psychological.
Makes you ask,
what does trustless consensus actually train people
to do or expect?
What deep patterns is it revealing?
Okay, this is a lot.
Let's try to synthesize this.
Based on all these leaks,
how would project NOØS supposedly work day-to-day?
What's the operational framework?
(10:56):
The leak suggests a kind of feedback loop
starts with the basic rules of Ethereum,
the protocol logic.
That shapes the validator incentives.
Those incentives,
plus network usage,
affect gas press volatility.
Right, the cost to use the network.
Exactly.
And all those things influence behavior clusters,
how different groups act.
But it's not a closed loop.
Their behavior is also affected by things
(11:17):
like bridge usage timing,
when they move assets between chains
and crucially, by global news pulses.
So real world events feed into this blockchain
behavioral model?
That's the theory.
And there was that table,
mapping key rear-world events
that interpreted Ethereum's history
through this NOØS lens.
What were the examples?
They framed the DAO hack back in 2016
(11:38):
as a deliberate test,
a protocol fracture test,
to see how people's loyalty shifted
based on ideology versus their token holdings.
Okay, what about more recent events?
The Merge in 2022 was tagged
as a behavioral calibration event
aimed at reducing randomness,
maybe making behavior more predictable
under proof of stake.
Uh-huh.
The Tornado Cash sanctions.
(11:59):
Seen as a way to model
how the network reacts
to state-level censorship attempts.
And the whole boom in Layer-2s
is from 2021 onwards.
Framed as a complex,
multi-layer emotional mirror-ring experiment.
Emotional mirroring.
And then there was that mimetic injection engine.
That sounds creepy.
It really does.
The idea is that NOØS actively use things
(12:19):
happening on chain NFT drops,
new meme coins,
even deliberate forks or community dramas,
rage events,
as psychological probes.
Probes for what?
To test group think,
virality,
how quickly certain ideas catch on,
like poking the network hive-mind to see how it buzzes.
Right, there are specific examples given.
Yeah, the leak,
memetic probe deployment chart,
Q-1-20-23 from Dorado Ledger.
Yeah.
(12:40):
Had some, like an NFT drop,
#mnt012,
right after the SVB bank crash.
The data supposedly showed spikes
in anxiety and resentment.
Another one,
#mnt017,
a forked token launched after a Bitcoin dip,
apparently measured skepticism versus opportunism.
And a scam coin,
#mnt012,
seeded during a memecoin frenzy,
(13:00):
was used to gauge mania and amusement.
Wow.
It's disturbing to think these things
could be manufactured experiments.
Did the leaks give a timeline for NOØS?
Yes, a draft timeline.
Phase one, 2015-17,
incentive calibration,
studying early mining and DEA loyalty.
Phase two, 2018-20.
Forks simulation and ideological encoding,
tracking reactions to forks.
(13:21):
Phase three, 2021-23,
Validator Cohesion and Sentiment Sync,
focusing on The Merge and Bridge Anxieties,
and phase four, starting 2024.
Consciousness Graphing,
aiming for predictive modeling and behavioral mirroring.
Consciousness graphing,
and the codename, NOØS,
and that tagline.
The blockchain was never about money.
It was about mapping the mind.
Pretty direct, isn't it?
(13:41):
Shillingly direct.
It also mentioned an own media arm.
supposedly focused on exposing manipulation and web three,
which is deeply ironic if true.
And there was one more technical bit,
the validator behavioral compressions summary.
Yeah, notes suggesting they were compressing
delegator behavior data.
It mentioned finding behavioral clusters linked
to un-publicized events,
(14:02):
specifically mentioning the Ukraine border situation
in March 2022,
and using ZK proofs to preserve fine-grained,
preference data.
All of which circles back to that suppressed wired article.
And that quote.
That quote from the anonymous ETH Zurich researcher.
Ethereum is not the platform,
it's the mirror.
What you're seeing is us.
(14:22):
It really hammers home the core idea.
Ethereum as a mirror reflecting our collective psyche.
A ledger of behavior, not just transactions.
Exactly.
Millions of interactions,
all public forming this dynamic map
of our collective mental state.
It's a radical thought.
And that phrase,
Pavlov meets POS.
Yeah, the idea that the very rules of the game,
the staking rewards of the slashing penalties
(14:44):
might be conditioning our behavior,
our trust in real time.
Like training us,
the neurologic systems lab at ETH Zurich
was supposedly looking into validator clusters
acting like human groups,
showing conformity or defection.
That's what the research suggested.
Exploring if these groups of validators showed patterns
like conforming to the majority or breaking away.
Even looking for signs of anticipatory anxiety
(15:06):
within those clusters.
So treating the network like a giant psychology experiment.
Seems like it.
The alleged experiments with gas fees
by its time with geopolitical news
were supposedly designed to test
how external stress influenced trust and decision-making
within the network.
And Dr. Andrea Keller at Maastricht University
had that striking description.
(15:26):
She called Ethereum
"the largest behaviorally incentivized
permissionless simulation in human history."
Highlighting that it's opt-in,
which is a key point,
we choose to participate.
But maybe we don't know the full extent
of what we're participating in.
Even the DAO hack,
maybe not just a crisis,
but a controlled fracture.
That's the radical reinterpretation, yes.
(15:46):
A way to measure loyalty thresholds,
see how beliefs form when a system breaks.
As that anonymous dev supposedly said,
tracking who followed which fork
told them more about belief formation
than any psychology study could.
And the most extreme claim tying it all together.
Intelligence agencies,
behavioral AI labs,
using Ethereum to study us.
(16:08):
Using those memetic probes,
NFTs, scam coins by fee periods
to see how ideas spread,
how groups form,
how easily were influenced,
it paints Ethereum as a potential petri dish
for understanding and maybe manipulating social dynamics.
Of course, we have to stress,
this is all based on leaks,
suppressed articles, anonymous sources,
the Ethereum foundation, consensus,
(16:29):
ETH Zurich,
they haven't confirmed any of those.
Absolutely, it's deep conspiracy territory,
but built around these specific
documented claims and alleged leaks.
So, after diving into all this,
Project NOØS,
Ethereum as a mind mapping tool,
It's a lot to process.
It really is.
It forces you to reconsider
what consensus actually means in a system like this.
Is it just agreement on transactions
(16:51):
or is it something deeper?
A synchronization of belief or even behavior?
Are we just moving digital assets around
or are we unconsciously feeding data
into some vast model of the human psyche
every time we interact with the network?
It definitely leaves you looking at your wallet balance
a little differently, doesn't it?
Yeah.
This is one of those deep dives
that throws away more questions than answers.
(17:12):
For sure.
We really encourage you to dig into these ideas yourselves,
read what you can find of these leaks,
and just... think about it.
Yeah, definitely.
And if you found this exploration
into the Cryptspiracy world,
interesting, maybe a little unsettling,
please do support the show.
Like it, share it with someone
who might also find this stuff fascinating.
(17:33):
And then, a link in the description
if you feel like buying us a coffee
to fuel the next deep dive.
We appreciate the support.
Thanks for going down this rabbit hole with us.
(mouse clicking)
Welcome back to Cryptspiracy, I'm Sia Sho.
(00:02):
And I'm Matt Kosano.
This is the show where we delve into, well...
The stranger side of crypto.
For our second deep dive, we're heading into some really, eh, pretty out there territory.
Yeah, forget the usual price talk for a minute.
Today we're unpacking this collection of leaked articles, research papers,
stuff that suggests Ethereum might be something much bigger than we think.
(00:22):
Much bigger, like, could it actually be a tool designed to map, maybe even influence, global consciousness?
We're gonna look at the evidence pointing to this thing called Project NOØS.
The implications are, frankly, unsettling.
For crypto, for society,
So, yeah, buckle up. This one gets weird.
Okay, so let's kick things off with a coindesk article.
It was called "The Merge in the Mind (00:45):
Behavioral Sank in PS Protocols".
Now, this popped up late 2022 and then poof, it was gone.
Right, published and then retracted really quickly, but the core idea stuck around.
Exactly. The central claim was... pretty bold.
That the Merge, Ethereum's big shift to proof of stake, wasn't just a tech upgrade.
It might have been a massive global psychological sync event.
(01:09):
A sync event!
What triggered that idea? It sounds pretty out there.
Well, it hinged on some really strange validator activity.
It happened right after the World Health Organization upgraded an alert level for some regional
virus outbreak. September 13th, I think it was.
Okay. Validator activity.
You mean the people staking ETH to secure the network?
(01:31):
Precisely.
So, the article detailed how one validator suddenly moved a huge amount,
like 32,000 ETH from LIDO, which is a big staking pool, to a private address.
32,000 ETH, that's a lot.
It is. And usually you'd expect to move like that to be driven by, you know,
profit, network changes, something concrete.
But there wasn't anything obvious.
(01:51):
Nope. And get this:
Within the hour, five other big validators
made similar really high-stake moves.
But the market didn't budge.
No protocol event lined up.
It was just weirdly synchronized.
So, the article suggested this wasn't about normal market stuff.
Right. It pointed towards what it called an "invisible layer of validator psychology".
(02:12):
Maybe driven by, like, shared institutional feeling,
or this idea of memetic resonance, you know, an idea spreading like wildfire,
or maybe just plain fear tied to the WHO (World Health Organization) news.
It's like they were all reacting to the same external thing, but through the blockchain.
Kind of. The article had this quote really stood out.
Proof of stake isn't just about security or energy.
(02:34):
It's a distributed belief system.
And the merge might have been its collective baptism.
Wow.
A distributed belief system.
That changes how you think about consensus, doesn't it?
It absolutely does.
And the article even mentioned predictive modeling labs,
in Boston and Geneva, I think.
They were allegedly training algorithms on validator delegation patterns.
Why? What were they looking for?
(02:55):
The idea was that how these big players move their staked
ETH could be a proxy, like an early signal for wider economic anticipation,
reading the tea leaves of the blockchain, basically.
But then the article just vanished.
Yep. Bold.
The official reason was editorial inconsistencies.
Coindesk didn't say much more,
The author went quiet...
(03:15):
You know how that goes.
Always makes things look more suspicious, even if there's a simple reason.
Exactly.
And inevitably, a cached version started doing the rounds on signal forums,
places like that.
And this cached version had something extra?
Apparently, yeah.
It included an internal chart,
something labeled Validator Resonance Map-
NOØS Cohort Alpha.
(03:35):
NOØS Alpha,
There's that name again.
So even in that first weird article, the name pops up.
Uh-huh.
So the Coindesk piece, short lived as it was,
really laid the groundwork.
It floated this really unsettling idea.
Maybe the merge was a step towards,
well, decentralized behavioral manipulation.
Which leads us straight into Project NOØS itself.
This is where the leaked research papers come in, right?
(03:56):
Noosresearch.pdf and research2.pdf.
That's the core of it.
And the central idea here is, well, it's a big one.
Go on.
The leaks suggest that Ethereum wasn't really built just for finance.
The alleged primary design was as a behavioral simulation layer.
A simulation layer to model what?
Global consciousness.
Social consensus dynamics.
(04:17):
Basically, how humans coordinate,
how emotions spread,
how ideologies clash or converge,
but at a massive planetary scale.
Okay, hang on.
How could a blockchain possibly do that?
How would it map something like a motion?
The theory says it does it by analyzing everything.
The economic incentives,
how people react to sudden high gas fees
(04:38):
or market crashes,
those protocol-level stress events,
and crucially - correlating all that on chain activity
with real-world news.
So tracking how news about, say, a pandemic or an election
may be ripples through the network's behavior?
Exactly.
Looking for patterns between the digital world of Ethereum
and the physical world.
And who leaked this stuff?
Is there a source?
The main source seems to be their alias,
(04:59):
Valis-9.
Their old handle was at Newsmodule, now archived.
Claimed to be a former infrastructure engineer at Gnosis,
which is a known player in the space.
And the leaks themselves.
They were apparently traced to IPFS nodes in places like Zurich,
Ramat Gan in Israel, and Vancouver.
Because of that sort of global cloak and dagger feel.
There was also that internal memo you mentioned,
(05:20):
part of the leak.
NOØS Behavioral Mapping Targets for Phase Three.
What did that show?
Yeah, that memo had some specifics that are,
well, they raised eyebrows.
It claimed, for instance,
a confirmed 87.4% sentiment cohesion
among a group called "Validator Class A",
right during the merge.
87% cohesion.
That sounds incredibly high for a supposedly
(05:42):
decentralized network.
It kind of backs up that coindesk observation, doesn't it?
It really does.
The memo also had this opsec recommendation.
It suggested deliberately throttling,
like slowing down gas price spikes,
whenever major global news broke anything tier two
or higher on the BBC's index.
Why would they do that?
To smooth out the data?
Seems like it, as if they wanted to isolate
(06:04):
the network's internal reactions
from the noise of big external events.
Or maybe study reactions more cleanly
control the variables almost.
Like a lab experiment.
Did it mention anything else specific?
It mentioned observing preference divergence
among users on Arbitram,
which is a layer-2 network built on Ethereum.
And it linked this divergence
to something called memetic injection triggers.
Memetic injection triggers.
(06:25):
You mean like intentionally introducing ideas
or memes to see how people react?
That's what it sounds like.
Yeah, testing how ideas spread
on these faster, cheaper networks.
And what were the goals listed in that memo?
The Q4 deliverables?
Two main things stood out:
First, consolidating these ZK map profiles
think anonymized behavioral data
(06:45):
into something called the Clairvoyant Ledger.
The Clairvoyant Ledger?
Seriously, that name alone is something.
Tells you something, right?
Mm.
The second was analyzing the delay,
the latency,
in how emotions or sentiment
flowed from layer two networks
back down to the main Ethereum layer one,
like tracking emotional echoes.
Wow.
And who signed this memo?
It was signed CNBRR,
(07:07):
representing an entity called
Emergent Consensus Systems Layer Zero Protocol Group
suggests a formal structure behind this.
Okay, so we've got the weird coindesk article
these NOØS research leaks.
Any other pieces that fit this puzzle?
Yeah, there's more.
A big one is a suppressed draft
from Wired Magazine from 2023.
Is Ethereum building a mirror of the mind
(07:27):
by Miranda Rohe.
Never actually published.
Suppressed again!
What was this one claiming?
The core argument was that
validator activity staking,
unstaking, delegating,
ETH wasn't just network maintenance.
It could be feeding machine learning algorithms.
Algorithms designed to do what?
To mirror public sentiment,
predict market reactions.
(07:48):
Basically learn from the collective behavior
on the blockchain.
Did it connect any dots between organizations?
It did.
It pointed to potential links between
ETH, Zurich's neurologic systems lab,
which were signed AI and brain science
and infrastructure firms
connected to Consensys,
a huge name in Ethereum development.
Suggesting a possible pipeline
(08:09):
from academic research on minds and AI
straight into Ethereum's plumbing.
That was the implication.
And he quoted anonymous sources
who described Ethereum in really striking terms.
Like what?
One called it "a synchronized global behavioral feedback system".
Not just a ledger,
but something interactive,
reflecting us back to ourselves.
But Wired pulled it after a legal review.
(08:29):
That's the story.
Again, the lack of public explanation
just fuels the speculation.
It's a pattern.
And then there's the Palantir connection
from that FT Alphaville leak.
Palantir is famous or maybe infamous
for data analysis,
especially for governments.
Right.
This leak involves screenshots of a pitch deck for 2020.
A Swiss consultancy,
(08:49):
Dorado Ledger LTD,
was pitching Ethereum's developer stack
to Palantir.
Pitching the dev tools,
not the currency.
Exactly.
They were positioning Ethereum's tools
as a way to model distributed belief systems.
The pitch title was literally
"Distributed Belief Engines".
Belief engines?
That sounds less like finance
and more like social engineering.
(09:10):
It certainly leans that way.
The pitch deck apparently talked about labelling
validator nodes with metrics like ideological flex,
fear resistance,
even authority empathy delta.
So trying to profile the network participants
psychologically,
not just economically.
That's the implication.
Understanding their underlying tendencies.
What kinds of uses were they proposing
(09:30):
for this kind of analysis?
Things like stress testing governance models
after a crisis,
modeling how ideas spread like viruses,
ideological contagion during market panic,
and even testing counter narratives.
How would they test counter narratives?
By deploying what they called
Memetic Contract Payloads
onto the blockchain.
Basically injecting ideas to see if they stick
(09:51):
or how they change behavior.
And the Dorado Ledger company,
they had connections.
The leak mentioned ties to the World Economic Forum.
That's a detail that
definitely plays into the broader conspiracy narratives
around global control.
There was also an image in that leak,
the NOØS Flowchain.
Yeah, supposedly a diagram mapping protocol,
forks and changes against behavioral clusters
(10:14):
they identified in the transaction data,
like showing how technical shifts might correlate
with changes in group psychology.
Did the Ethereum devs comment on this
Palantir leak?
According to the leak source,
key devs went noticeably quiet
on Twitter right after it surfaced briefly,
which again, some interpreted as significant.
So the takeaway from the Pakantir pitch is pretty stark.
(10:35):
It is.
It suggests Ethereum's main application
might not be financial at all, but psychological.
Makes you ask,
what does trustless consensus actually train people
to do or expect?
What deep patterns is it revealing?
Okay, this is a lot.
Let's try to synthesize this.
Based on all these leaks,
how would project NOØS supposedly work day-to-day?
What's the operational framework?
(10:56):
The leak suggests a kind of feedback loop
starts with the basic rules of Ethereum,
the protocol logic.
That shapes the validator incentives.
Those incentives,
plus network usage,
affect gas press volatility.
Right, the cost to use the network.
Exactly.
And all those things influence behavior clusters,
how different groups act.
But it's not a closed loop.
Their behavior is also affected by things
(11:17):
like bridge usage timing,
when they move assets between chains
and crucially, by global news pulses.
So real world events feed into this blockchain
behavioral model?
That's the theory.
And there was that table,
mapping key rear-world events
that interpreted Ethereum's history
through this NOØS lens.
What were the examples?
They framed the DAO hack back in 2016
(11:38):
as a deliberate test,
a protocol fracture test,
to see how people's loyalty shifted
based on ideology versus their token holdings.
Okay, what about more recent events?
The Merge in 2022 was tagged
as a behavioral calibration event
aimed at reducing randomness,
maybe making behavior more predictable
under proof of stake.
Uh-huh.
The Tornado Cash sanctions.
(11:59):
Seen as a way to model
how the network reacts
to state-level censorship attempts.
And the whole boom in Layer-2s
is from 2021 onwards.
Framed as a complex,
multi-layer emotional mirror-ring experiment.
Emotional mirroring.
And then there was that mimetic injection engine.
That sounds creepy.
It really does.
The idea is that NOØS actively use things
(12:19):
happening on chain NFT drops,
new meme coins,
even deliberate forks or community dramas,
rage events,
as psychological probes.
Probes for what?
To test group think,
virality,
how quickly certain ideas catch on,
like poking the network hive-mind to see how it buzzes.
Right, there are specific examples given.
Yeah, the leak,
memetic probe deployment chart,
Q-1-20-23 from Dorado Ledger.
Yeah.
(12:40):
Had some, like an NFT drop,
#mnt012,
right after the SVB bank crash.
The data supposedly showed spikes
in anxiety and resentment.
Another one,
#mnt017,
a forked token launched after a Bitcoin dip,
apparently measured skepticism versus opportunism.
And a scam coin,
#mnt012,
seeded during a memecoin frenzy,
(13:00):
was used to gauge mania and amusement.
Wow.
It's disturbing to think these things
could be manufactured experiments.
Did the leaks give a timeline for NOØS?
Yes, a draft timeline.
Phase one, 2015-17,
incentive calibration,
studying early mining and DEA loyalty.
Phase two, 2018-20.
Forks simulation and ideological encoding,
tracking reactions to forks.
(13:21):
Phase three, 2021-23,
Validator Cohesion and Sentiment Sync,
focusing on The Merge and Bridge Anxieties,
and phase four, starting 2024.
Consciousness Graphing,
aiming for predictive modeling and behavioral mirroring.
Consciousness graphing,
and the codename, NOØS,
and that tagline.
The blockchain was never about money.
It was about mapping the mind.
Pretty direct, isn't it?
(13:41):
Shillingly direct.
It also mentioned an own media arm.
supposedly focused on exposing manipulation and web three,
which is deeply ironic if true.
And there was one more technical bit,
the validator behavioral compressions summary.
Yeah, notes suggesting they were compressing
delegator behavior data.
It mentioned finding behavioral clusters linked
to un-publicized events,
(14:02):
specifically mentioning the Ukraine border situation
in March 2022,
and using ZK proofs to preserve fine-grained,
preference data.
All of which circles back to that suppressed wired article.
And that quote.
That quote from the anonymous ETH Zurich researcher.
Ethereum is not the platform,
it's the mirror.
What you're seeing is us.
(14:22):
It really hammers home the core idea.
Ethereum as a mirror reflecting our collective psyche.
A ledger of behavior, not just transactions.
Exactly.
Millions of interactions,
all public forming this dynamic map
of our collective mental state.
It's a radical thought.
And that phrase,
Pavlov meets POS.
Yeah, the idea that the very rules of the game,
the staking rewards of the slashing penalties
(14:44):
might be conditioning our behavior,
our trust in real time.
Like training us,
the neurologic systems lab at ETH Zurich
was supposedly looking into validator clusters
acting like human groups,
showing conformity or defection.
That's what the research suggested.
Exploring if these groups of validators showed patterns
like conforming to the majority or breaking away.
Even looking for signs of anticipatory anxiety
(15:06):
within those clusters.
So treating the network like a giant psychology experiment.
Seems like it.
The alleged experiments with gas fees
by its time with geopolitical news
were supposedly designed to test
how external stress influenced trust and decision-making
within the network.
And Dr. Andrea Keller at Maastricht University
had that striking description.
(15:26):
She called Ethereum
"the largest behaviorally incentivized
permissionless simulation in human history."
Highlighting that it's opt-in,
which is a key point,
we choose to participate.
But maybe we don't know the full extent
of what we're participating in.
Even the DAO hack,
maybe not just a crisis,
but a controlled fracture.
That's the radical reinterpretation, yes.
(15:46):
A way to measure loyalty thresholds,
see how beliefs form when a system breaks.
As that anonymous dev supposedly said,
tracking who followed which fork
told them more about belief formation
than any psychology study could.
And the most extreme claim tying it all together.
Intelligence agencies,
behavioral AI labs,
using Ethereum to study us.
(16:08):
Using those memetic probes,
NFTs, scam coins by fee periods
to see how ideas spread,
how groups form,
how easily were influenced,
it paints Ethereum as a potential petri dish
for understanding and maybe manipulating social dynamics.
Of course, we have to stress,
this is all based on leaks,
suppressed articles, anonymous sources,
the Ethereum foundation, consensus,
(16:29):
ETH Zurich,
they haven't confirmed any of those.
Absolutely, it's deep conspiracy territory,
but built around these specific
documented claims and alleged leaks.
So, after diving into all this,
Project NOØS,
Ethereum as a mind mapping tool,
It's a lot to process.
It really is.
It forces you to reconsider
what consensus actually means in a system like this.
Is it just agreement on transactions
(16:51):
or is it something deeper?
A synchronization of belief or even behavior?
Are we just moving digital assets around
or are we unconsciously feeding data
into some vast model of the human psyche
every time we interact with the network?
It definitely leaves you looking at your wallet balance
a little differently, doesn't it?
Yeah.
This is one of those deep dives
that throws away more questions than answers.
(17:12):
For sure.
We really encourage you to dig into these ideas yourselves,
read what you can find of these leaks,
and just... think about it.
Yeah, definitely.
And if you found this exploration
into the Cryptspiracy world,
interesting, maybe a little unsettling,
please do support the show.
Like it, share it with someone
who might also find this stuff fascinating.
(17:33):
And then, a link in the description
if you feel like buying us a coffee
to fuel the next deep dive.
We appreciate the support.
Thanks for going down this rabbit hole with us.
(mouse clicking)
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