Imagine one of the world’s largest oil reserves decides to skip the traditional financial system and adopt cryptocurrencies as the official way to export its crude. On paper, this sounded like the ultimate use case for decentralization advocates: a State using digital wallets and the blockchain to evade SWIFT system control and tough international financial sanctions.
But what began as a bold crypto adoption experiment at the government level ended up mutating into the most devastating black box in the region’s economic history.