On the morning of May 21, 2024, as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sat down in Jerusalem to discuss Iran and the future of the Abraham Accords, Bitcoin’s price barely flinched. The market, it seemed, had priced in the theater of geopolitics. But beneath the calm surface, a quiet revolution was brewing—one that would test the very foundation of decentralized trust. This wasn’t just a political summit; it was a stress test for the crypto thesis that code, not treaties, builds lasting trust.
Context: The Meeting and the Middle East’s Trust Architecture
The meeting itself was a signal. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, were rekindling a relationship strained under the Biden administration. Their agenda was straightforward: double down on the Abraham Accords—the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab nations brokered in 2020—and craft a unified front against Iran’s nuclear program and regional proxies. The subtext was clear: a Trump 2.0 administration would return to ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran, rebuilding a coalition of states willing to isolate Tehran economically and militarily.
For the crypto world, this geopolitical chess match is not an abstraction. Iran has been a significant participant in crypto markets, using Bitcoin mining as a way to monetize its cheap, subsidized energy and bypass international sanctions. According to data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Iran accounted for roughly 4-5% of global Bitcoin hashrate in 2022 before crackdowns reduced that share. The country’s citizens and entities have turned to peer-to-peer exchanges and decentralized platforms to preserve wealth and transact abroad. Meanwhile, the Abraham Accords have already spurred blockchain collaborations: Israel and the UAE have launched joint ventures in digital identity and supply chain tracking, leveraging the trustlessness of DLT to bridge political divides.
This meeting, therefore, was not just about missiles and oil—it was about who controls the infrastructure of trust. The core question: can centralized alliances solve trust problems that decentralized systems already address?
Core: The Code of Alliances vs. The Code of Trust
When I first dove into blockchain during the 2017 ICO craze in Hangzhou, I believed that code could replace intermediaries. Years later, teaching DeFi to anxious students during the 2022 bear market, I saw the power of transparent, auditable protocols. But today, watching the Trump-Netanyahu summit, I see a deeper tension. The Abraham Accords are a brilliant political maneuver—they create trust between former enemies by aligning incentives, shared threats, and bilateral trade. Yet they remain fragile: they depend on the whims of leaders, the stability of governments, and the reliability of intelligence.
Blockchain offers a different model. A smart contract, once deployed, executes impartially. A DAO’s treasury is managed by code, not a prime minister’s decree. We don’t call it the ‘Abraham Chain’ because trust isn’t a treaty—it’s compiled, verified, and shared. The meeting in Jerusalem highlighted exactly this fault line.
Let’s look at the data. The Abraham Accords have produced some blockchain initiatives. For instance, the Israel-UAE ‘Bridge to Opportunity’ program launched a pilot for cross-border payments using a permissioned DLT. But permissioned means centralized control—the validator nodes are government entities. This is not the permissionless, censorship-resistant vision that Bitcoin and Ethereum champion. It’s a walled garden with a blockchain label. Code is only as strong as the trust it protects—and when that trust is delegated to a handful of states, the code becomes a contract, not a constitution.
Contrast that with Iran’s crypto adoption. Since 2020, Iran’s central bank has issued licenses to crypto mining firms, and the country has experimented with a digital rial for domestic use. But the real story is on the ground. Peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading volumes on LocalBitcoins (now Paxful alternatives) for the Iranian rial have surged during periods of sanctions intensification. In 2023, when the US froze $6 billion in Iranian assets in South Korea, the response was not a military escalation—it was a surge in crypto P2P trading. Trust isn’t a treaty you sign; it’s a network you join. The Iranian people, squeezed by both their regime and international sanctions, are turning to Bitcoin not because they love volatility, but because they trust code more than any government.
From my experience auditing tokenomics for open-source projects, I’ve learned that the most resilient systems are not the ones with the most sophisticated cryptography, but the ones with the most distributed authority. The Abraham Accords, for all their diplomatic genius, concentrate trust in a few hands. If a new US president decides to walk away, or if a coup in Saudi Arabia shifts the balance, the entire edifice trembles. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, on the other hand, doesn’t care about leadership changes in Riyadh or Jerusalem.
Now, consider the role of stablecoins. Circle’s USDC is the darling of institutional crypto—transparent, regulated, and compliant. Yet its compliance is its Achilles’ heel. Circle can freeze any address within 24 hours at the request of law enforcement. During a sanctions standoff with Iran, that’s a feature, not a bug—for the US government. For an Iranian citizen trying to buy food or medicine, it’s a weapon. The meeting in Jerusalem likely included discussions on strengthening sanctions compliance for digital assets. That’s good for US geopolitical goals, but it’s a betrayal of the decentralized ethos. We don’t call it ‘trustless’ when a single entity can freeze your funds. The Abraham Accords represent a similar centralization: they promise trust through alignment, not through code.
Contrarian: The Case for Pragmatic Trust
But let’s not romanticize the chaos. The contrarian angle is uncomfortable for true believers like me. Perhaps the Abraham Accords, despite being centralized, are the pragmatic path to peace. They have delivered real economic benefits—tourism, trade, and technology sharing—that blockchain alone cannot replicate. In 2023, Israeli-Arab trade under the Accords exceeded $3 billion. That’s real value created by trust between humans, not algorithms.
Similarly, Iran’s crypto adoption is not a utopia. The regime uses crypto to evade sanctions, which funds its nuclear program and proxy militias. That’s the dark side of permissionless trust. Bridges aren’t built on trust alone—they’re built on steel, concrete, and the commitment of engineers. The same applies to geopolitics. The meeting in Jerusalem was a reminder that trust sometimes requires messy, human negotiation. Blockchain enthusiasts often forget that consensus mechanisms require social consensus too—witness the Ethereum Merge, which was a political compromise among developers, miners, and users.
There’s also a blind spot in our narrative: the Middle East is not a blank slate for crypto. The UAE is embracing blockchain, but with a heavy hand—they banned privacy coins and require KYC for all exchanges. Iran encourages mining but prohibits using crypto for domestic payments. Both use the technology to reinforce their authority, not to dismantle it. The Abraham Accords, while positive for peace, could lead to a surveillance state version of blockchain—identity systems that track every transaction, with governments as the ultimate validators.
During my work bridging the NFT community gap in Hangzhou, I saw how token-gated communities could create belonging without borders. But that belonging was fragile—it required constant governance, moderation, and shared values. The Trump-Netanyahu summit showed that even the strongest alliances need constant maintenance. Trust isn’t compiled once and forgotten; it’s a continuous process of verification.
Takeaway: The Future of Trust is Hybrid
So where does this leave us? The meeting in Jerusalem was not a defeat for crypto’s ideals; it was a mirror. It reflected that trust is never fully centralized or decentralized—it’s a spectrum. The Abraham Accords are a smart contract of sorts, with clauses, escrows, and dispute resolution mechanisms. But they lack the transparency and immutability of on-chain governance.
As we move into a bull market where euphoria masks technical flaws, we must keep our eyes open. The next wave of innovation will not come from copying traditional alliances onto a blockchain. It will come from building systems that combine the best of both: the efficiency of code and the legitimacy of human consensus. The question isn’t whether Trump and Netanyahu can build a regional alliance. It’s whether we can build trust systems that no single leader can tear down. Code is only as strong as the trust it protects—and that trust must be distributed, but also nurtured. We don’t have to choose between the Abraham Accords and Bitcoin. We can demand that our digital infrastructure is as resilient as our diplomacy, and as transparent as a smart contract.
