The fix is in, and it’s pegged to the dollar.
According to the Financial Times, Donald Trump’s newly minted "Board of Peace" is reportedly kicking the tires on a stablecoin-based aid system for Gaza. It’s the ultimate 2025 headline: a collision of high-stakes diplomacy, humanitarian catastrophe, and the kind of "crypto-first" governance that feels like it was written in a Mar-a-Lago steam room.
The proposal is exactly what you’d expect from an administration that views the world through a Bloomberg terminal and a DeFi wallet. The idea? Bypass the sclerotic, "woke" international banking systems and pump digital dollars directly into the pockets of Gazans. No middleman. No pesky UN oversight. Just the ledger.
It sounds clean. Efficient. Modern. It’s also spectacularly detached from the reality of a place where the fiber optic cables are shredded and the power grid is a memory.
The Board of Peace—a name that sounds less like a diplomatic body and more like a rejected Hideo Kojima faction—is apparently looking at how a USD-pegged token could facilitate reconstruction. The logic is simple, if you’re a venture capitalist: traditional aid gets stuck in the plumbing of NGOs and corrupt local authorities. A stablecoin, theoretically, moves at the speed of light. You send a token; they buy a bag of flour.
Except you can’t eat a private key.
To make this work, you need a functioning cellular network. You need a merchant class with the hardware to accept digital payments. Most importantly, you need a population that trusts a digital asset backed by a foreign power more than they trust the physical cash currently buried in the rubble of their living rooms.
The friction here isn’t just technical. It’s visceral. Gaza’s infrastructure damage is estimated north of $18 billion. Bridges are gone. Water desalination plants are scrap metal. In this context, talking about "on-chain transparency" feels like bringing a spreadsheet to a house fire. It’s tech-solutionism at its most arrogant.
But there’s a darker, more pragmatic angle here. This isn’t just about "peace." It’s about the plumbing. By moving Gaza onto a US-backed or US-adjacent stablecoin, the administration effectively brings the entire reconstruction economy under the thumb of American software. It’s financial soft power with a "Move Fast and Break Things" sticker on the side. If you control the ledger, you control who gets paid, who gets blacklisted, and which construction firms get the lucrative contracts to rebuild the Mediterranean skyline.
We’ve seen this movie before, just with different actors. The "Board of Peace" isn't reinventing the wheel; they’re just trying to put it on a blockchain. The FT report suggests the board is looking at private-sector partnerships—think Circle or Tether, or perhaps the Trump family’s own World Liberty Financial—to provide the rails.
Imagine the optics. A Palestinian family standing in the dust of Khan Younis, trying to find enough bars of 4G signal to download a wallet app so they can buy bread. The gas fees alone on a busy trading day could cost more than their daily caloric intake. It’s a grotesque parody of the "unbanked" narrative the crypto industry has been shilling for a decade.
There’s also the question of the "peg." Stablecoins are only stable until they aren't. We’re talking about building a literal society on top of a digital asset. If the liquidity dries up, or if the board decides to "pause" the smart contract because of a political shift in the region, an entire population finds their savings deleted. It’s a level of centralized control that would make the most hardened central banker blush, all wrapped in the language of decentralized freedom.
The Board of Peace hasn't commented officially, of course. They’re too busy "mulling." It’s a great word, mulling. It implies deep, thoughtful consideration. In reality, it usually means waiting to see if the trial balloon gets shot down or if the market reacts favorably to the rumor.
Meanwhile, the actual work of peace—land rights, security guarantees, the grueling, unglamorous business of human diplomacy—remains untouched. That stuff is hard. It doesn't scale. You can't put it on a dashboard and watch the numbers go up.
So, we get GazaCoin instead. A digital solution for a physical tragedy. It’s the ultimate Silicon Valley export: a way to feel like you’re solving a problem without ever having to touch the dirt.
Who actually holds the admin keys to the reconstruction?