As the Cypherpunk movement hits its full revolutionary pitch tonight with the VIP event in the Capitol of the United States, Washington DC - (the Cypherpunk Policy Dinner at which @joshs is speaking) - brought to you by the Zcash lobbying apparatus (Pretty Good Policy for Zcash PGPZ/PGP*, spun off from ECC/ZODL and funded by Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) ) - I took the chance to examine more deeply who is speaking for and representing the community at large to lawmakers and other powerful and influential people.
I won’t rehash my critique of the ‘VIP dinner approach’ to securing privacy rights (asking permissions) from governments, instead, I want to spotlight some information about the board selected by PGPZ, as it has been accepted as the advocate for Zcash, and has been funded by ZCG to the tune of $3/4 million USD, beyond this one event.
The five members of the PGPZ Board of Directors collectively represent ZODL and ZCG (Chairman Paul Brigner @paulbrigner), mega tech VCs a16z (Michele Korver), the general crypto industry lobby (Daniel Spuller), the most active investor in the digital asset industry (Julie Stitzel), and the Zcash Foundation (J.W. Verret).
Though PGPZ is billed as an “independent policy organization”, this framing is difficult to sustain when the chairman is the Chief Policy & Regulatory Officer of the VC-funded protocol development company that sired the organization, and many of the VC investors also have direct and indirect presence on the board and one is directly present on their resume.
I’ve picked on Brigner nearly enough, but in brief, they hold roles simultaneously as CPO at ZODL, PGPZ’s founder and chairman, and a member of the ZCG - though he is said to have not participated in the discussion or vote to fund PGPZ. Additionally, they are a former attorney and US Army veteran, with a professional record including senior roles with software and policy at Verizon (2001-2011), Senior VP Motion Picture Association of America (2011-2012), positions at the Internet Society, Chamber of Digital Commerce, Coinbase Institute (a division within Coinbase) (2024-?), Electric Coin Co., Chairman of the Board of Directors at Bootstrap. They’re also currently adjunct faculty of FinTech, Georgetown University. They’re a slick, professional communicator working at intersections of money, law, and tech.
Julie Stitzel: Chief Policy Officer at Digital Currency Group, founded by Barry Silbert with founding investors including MasterCard, Bain Capital Ventures, New York Life, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Transamerica Ventures. Subsidiaries include Grayscale Investments, which has recently launched a very large Zcash fund managed by Coinbase. Their professional record includes Block (Cash App), VP, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, Etsy, and Director of the respected Pew Charitable Trusts (2011 – 2015). DCG is one of the largest and most politically active crypto entities in the U.S with very large valuation (estimated at $4.4 billion USD) and scope.
Daniel Spuller: Current Executive VP of Industry Affairs, Blockchain Association (where they have worked since 2020). An advocate for decentralized digital assets since 2012, he’s been in the game a while. Previously drove passage of the NC Money Transmitters Act (2016), worked with Chamber of Digital Commerce (2016–2020). The Blockchain Association broadly supports the crypto industry, and funders/investors include Digital Currency Group, Kraken Ventures, and the Filecoin Foundation.
J.W. Verret: Various roles at the Blockchain Association, appearing now to be part of the Privacy Technology working group. Defense expert in “forensic accounting and financial forensics” for the Bitcoin Fog (United States v. Roman Sterlingov) case, testified Chainalysis Reactor methodology was flawed. Served as Chief Economist and Senior Counsel to the House Financial Services Committee (2013–2015), and notably was involved in the early stages of an investigation of a leak which led to Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker. Tenured Associate Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School (George Mason, since 2008). Also, served on SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee and won a spot on Zcash Foundation Board with a vote of 59-58, as Matthew Green and Ian Miers (two of the seven scientists who authored the original 2014 Zerocash paper) left.
In the above, I see some things I interpret as good, and some I interpret as quite troubling among the government, legal and corporate activities.
But it is Michele Korver, currently Head of Regulatory at a16z crypto and now part of the PGPZ board that stands out with a rich and adversarial past intersecting with crypto.
A brief overview of Korver’s career:
- U.S. Secret Service, Special Agent, Miami Field Office (about 1991-1998) Role: Financial investigations
- Department of Justice (DOJ) Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA), Southern District of Florida (Miami, 2003-2007) (per ContactOut). Role: Federal prosecutor, Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Specific case assignments during this period are not documented in the sources I’ve found.
- DOJ AUSA, District of Colorado (Denver) (about 2007-2017) Section: Cybercrime and National Security prosecutor.
- DOJ Criminal Division, Digital Currency Counsel (2017–2021) Created and managed the Criminal Division’s Digital Currency Initiative, assigned to the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section. Advised AUSA offices nationwide on crypto charging decisions.
- US Treasury Department, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Chief Digital Currency Advisor, first person in the role. (brief. 2021).
Advised the Director on AML/CTF policy for digital assets. - a16z crypto Head of Regulatory, (2022–present). Helps a16z portfolio companies navigate regulation; liaises with government agencies and policymakers.
- PGPZ board, 2026.
Korver has had many commendations and made relevant publications. Other than one I will focus on shortly, I will attempt to provide an adequate summary below.*
As you can see, before moving onto the DOJ Digital Currency Counsel and then briefly FinCEN, they worked as a federal prosecutor. The FinCEN press release states:
Ms. Korver spent more than 10 years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Office in Denver, Colorado, where she served as a Cybercrime and National Security prosecutor investigating and prosecuting money laundering and darknet drug trafficking cases involving international criminal organizations.
A Cointelegraph profile adds:
Korver began working collaboratively with global law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and private technology companies in multi-jurisdictional investigations to dismantle transnational criminal organizations … to counter cross-border threats posed by cryptocurrencies. I recommend reading this article in its entirety.
There was the ‘Bitcoin Maven’ case in the Central District of California, where Korver appears to have provided legal advice and assistance. The AUSA on that case stated,
Cryptocurrencies with anonymity features impede investigations of flow of money which in turn allows illicit transactions to occur outside of the regulatory perimeter.
and they received
legal advice and assistance from Korver on this new and complex area of criminal law
As United States v. Tetley, the defendant Theresa Lynn Tetley, 50, of Marina del Rey, California, a former stockbroker and real estate investor, operated from 2014–2017 and exchanged $6–$9.5M in bitcoin for cash via LocalBitcoins, including for an undercover agent representing bitcoin as narcotics proceeds. Tetley pleaded guilty to one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and one count of money laundering. Sentenced in 2018 to 12 months and 1 day in federal prison, 3 years supervised release, $20,000 fine. She also forfeited 40 BTC, about $300k cash, and 25 gold bars. The defendant was completely non-violent, non-coercive, non-drug related - the crime was not registering as a ‘Money Services Business’ with FinCEN, and not implementing AML mechanisms. She had no prior criminal history.
Operation Dark Gold was another case, though Korver’s exact role unclear: it may have been merely advisory. A year-long, coordinated national sting operation announced June 26, 2018, described by the DOJ as “the first nationwide undercover operation targeting darknet vendors.” Chainalysis tools were used in the case. The operation was led by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security), Korver’s role appears to have been in the prosecutorial/legal strategy layer, not the investigative execution.
Per the Secret Service release: vendor accounts operated on Silk Road 2.0 (defunct), AlphaBay (defunct), Hansa, Trade Route, Wall Street Market, and Dream Marketplace. While no Dark Gold defendant was charged with selling weapons, robbery or committing any kind of violence, there may have been some truely harmful activities in this case by some of the actors (including manufacturing fake xanax, distribing fentanyl). Seizures (per DOJ press release) included: ~2,000 Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, $3.6M+ in U.S. currency and gold bars, firearms, drugs, computers and other equipment.
Closer to one of the cradles of Zcash, in Boulder Colorado… A bitcoin trader, Burt Wagner and at least three others faced the charge of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. This was an asset forfeiture case in which Korver was the AUSA. Wagner used LocalBitcoins, but also was involved with Bitcoin Savings & Trust (BSTE) an early crypto DeFi, I mean, Ponzi scheme at the center of the charge. Apparently, this involved about 7% of circulating supply at peak!
An eccentric personal site is devoted to documenting some stages of the difficulties faced by the accused, but it is hardly unbiased. There’s also some crypto journal coverage which estimates total damages at $250k USD. I’m not sure how much of the seized assets were ever returned when the charges were dismissed without prejudice.
And finally, the case I really wanted to highlight: breaking up Italian Mafia Brussels (IMB).
IMB was a transnational darknet vendor selling MDMA (ecstasy) to U.S. and Canadian customers, accepting payment only in bitcoin. They operated on Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0, which were both defunct by the time of the takedown. They used encrypted email for customer communications.
The case began in June 2013 when U.S. Customs intercepted a package of 60+ grams of MDMA sent from Belgium to Boulder, Colorado. The recipient (still unidentified, though I may have found a lead) became a cooperating witness. The investigation was led by HSI Denver through the Denver Illicit Digital Economy Working Group, in partnership with the Romanian Central Anti-Narcotics Unit, the Belgian Federal Judicial Police (East Flanders Drug Unit), French police, Europol, and Eurojust. Belgian police bugged a garage in Bruges; U.S. authorities provided Silk Road (1.0) server data from seized machines (including IMB customer communications) to Belgian partners in exchange for cooperation. French police intercepted 31 drug parcels through French mail offices.
In 2016, while @zooko, @ebfull and other brave and forward looking people were working in and near Boulder Colorado to create Zcash itself, Korver was working on this case. In May 2026, 10 defendants were arrested in simultaneous early-morning raids in Bruges and Bucharest, Romania. At the Bruges locations, police seized 4,000 pink and 102 purple ecstasy pills.
22 year old Leonardo Cristea and 23 year old Filip Lucian Simion of Bucharest, Romania were extradicted to the United States to stand trial. Simion was moved to the USA on October 17, 2016, very near the dates the Zcash founders were doing practice runs for the original Zcash parameter generation Ceremony, as a prelude to the blockchain’s launch.
The remaining eight defendants were prosecuted in Belgium, but I could find no public record of the Belgian proceedings online.
The October 2016 DOJ press release states “The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney and Digital Currency Crimes Coordinator Michele R. Korver, District of Colorado.” The October 2018 sentencing release updates her title:
The case was prosecuted by Michele R. Korver, Digital Currency Counsel at the DOJ Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Unit, on detail from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Colorado.
She was the lead prosecutor.
Simion pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import controlled substances and conspiracy to launder money. They were sentenced September 26, 2018 by Judge R. Brooke Jackson to 132 months (11 years) with $850k USD in fines. Cristea pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import controlled substances; sentenced April 2018 to 36 months.
And what happened to the Romanians who went to jail as Zcash was minted? Because Simion was not projected to be released until 2028 or 2029, I decided to look into it. Could he still be imprisoned!?
photo source
My search surfaced a mugshot from Lubbock County, TX, dated October 24, 2018, just four weeks after his Denver sentencing. The charge is “HOLD FOR BOARD OF PRISONS”. This is almost certainly a ‘transit hold’: he was being transported to a US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facility and was briefly held in a local jail en route.
Digging more:
https://www.bop.gov/inmateloc/
FILIP LUCIAN SIMION
Register Number: 43842-013
Not in BOP Custody as of: 10/27/2021
Simion was in the US prison system until October 27, 2021. The date is only ~37 months into that sentence, roughly 28% of his sentence served. This is not a normal release date.
What appears to be the most likely explanation from my limited research? Transfer to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE.
This is unusually early for an ICE transfer, though BOP can transfer a federal prisoner to ICE at any point. This raises the question of whether there was an additional factor, or this is not the correct read at all. I used the ICE Detention Locator tool to see if I could find a record of him, but they had none. Very likely he was either already deported (transferred back to Romanian authorities, where he could still be serving time or now released), or he was never transferred to ICE in the first place.
Another grim but reasonable possibility is that he died while he was imprisoned.
A next step to discover Simion’s fate would be to file a US BOP Freedom of Information Act document request. If someone in the USA wants to follow up on this, contact me via DM here on the forum, and I can provide you with some leads. At this time, I don’t know what happened to him, I lost the track in the bureaucracy of cages.
Later, Korver was a contributing author to the DOJ’s 2020 Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework (released alongside Operation DisrupTor), the operational playbook that AUSA offices use to prosecute crypto cases. This 83-page document essentially codified how DOJ would approach crypto cases going forward: threat landscape, charging guidelines, forfeiture procedures, enforcement strategies, international cooperation, and specifically flags anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies as “particular concerns”. She helped write the playbook that every US Attorney’s Office would use for crypto cases from that point on.
To put it plainly, Korver didn’t just work in crypto enforcement: she helped build the framework for it.
Then, she pivoted from being the person building the federal government’s legal architecture for prosecuting crypto-enabled drug trafficking and identifying privacy coins as a law enforcement concern, to sitting at a VC firm (a16z) that invests in the ecosystem she was scrutinizing, and is now on the PGPZ board lobbying for Zcash’s regulatory status.
a16z itself has a huge portfolio (somewhere around USD $90-$100 billion), and among many other threads led funding rounds totaling $425M for law enforcement-partnered mass surveillance company Flock Safety.
But rather than bullying these policy influencers for their corporate-government complicity any longer, I want to leave you, the Zcash community, with a few questions.
What ever happened to Simion? Are they allowed to go outside, or touch grass after spending much of their young life incarcerated in a foreign prison, summoned to serve hard time by an aggressive government for a non-violent, free and consensual economic exchange? Might they still be locked in a cage somewhere?
Has Korver’s opinions on cryptocurrency (or markets) changed? If so, why hasn’t she ever made a public statement as she went through the revolving door?** As they transitioned from the work of imprisoning the bodies and seizing the assets of nonviolent drug offenders for the state, to advocating for regulation and now for financial privacy policy for the private sector, could they have made some comment?
How much is the “modest compensation” mentioned in the PGPZ grant application - how much ZEC taken from mining, via the dev fund is now going to support the people on this board?
Will anyone else question the decision to fund PGPZ (so heavily!) even with these facts on display? The only reply I got from a ZCG member when I pointed out the corporate alignments was something like “a board will have people of various backgrounds, even people you don’t like.” Am I the only one who “does not like” this arrangement and direction? Are we supposed to believe there is a large variance of backgrounds on the board?
Finally, is this the group of people the Zcash community wants to represent them? Are their ties to various business, government, and legal interests going to compete with the overarching goals of Zcash? Are these tensions compatible with the values Zcash seeks to effectively establish? For whom, and for what will this group advocate?
The hour is growing late, we may have to meet at the cocktail bar after the dinner for further discussion.
*Korver won a Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force National Award (2009), US Attorney’s Distinguished Service Award (2012), Colorado US Attorney’s Award of Excellence (2013), Assistant Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award (DOJ Criminal Division) (2022) - see this link.
They published “Attribution in Cryptocurrency Cases” DOJ Journal of Federal Law and Practice, 2019.
“Surfing the First Wave of Cryptocurrency Money Laundering” (Co-authored with Alexandra D. Comolli. Discusses tumblers/mixers, privacy coins, and the “first wave” of crypto laundering patterns. 2021.
These are the primary sources for understanding her prosecutorial framework on crypto-enabled drug trafficking.
“Privacy-Protecting Regulatory Solutions Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs” with Joseph Burleson, and leading ZK researcher Dan Boneh. This was published while Korver was at a16z, in 2022. The paper uses Tornado Cash as its working example. I did not study this in detail, but I believe it proposes three ZKP-based compliance mechanisms (deposit screening, withdrawal screening, selective de-anonymization).
**Brigner did this, when they left MPAA. Korver’s only statement I could find was a LinkedIn post (March 2022):
After 27 years in government and law enforcement, I’m joining @a16z crypto as their Head of Regulatory. It has been my privilege to serve alongside so many dedicated public servants. I want to thank all of my government colleagues for your support and friendship over the years. I have learned so much from all of you, and I am particularly grateful for the leaders who had faith in me and gave me the space to blaze a different trail.
