Stripe’s billion-dollar stablecoin subsidiary Bridge Ventures Inc. has apparently been listed on documents as having sold 12 Mitsubishi trucks to a company in Venezuela with ties to the family of former president Hugo Chávez.

The stablecoin company, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion, appears, along with its exact street address, suite number, city, state, and zip code, on a shipment slip that sent trucks through a New Jersey port to a company in Venezuela.

At the time of the shipment, Venezuela was under broad US sanctions that covered many companies connected to the Chávez regime’s state-owned oil company PdVSA, and entities acting on its behalf.

Bridge categorically denies any involvement with the shipment. “Whatever this is about, it has nothing to do with us: Bridge had no involvement in this shipment or any associated payment activity,” a spokesperson told reporter Jason Mikula.

“The only explanation we can think of is some clerical error or confusion around a common name like Bridge.”

However, the platform’s character-by-character name isn’t particularly common, while the address on both bills of lading match US Patent and Trademark Office filings and third-party business registries like Bloomberg.

Mikula tweeted and published an article about his skepticism that a third party used Bridge’s name without its authorization.

Thundernet, a Hugo Chávez family connection

The buyer on both truck shipments from “Bridge Ventures Inc.” was Thundernet, C.A., an internet provider based in Barinas, Venezuela.

Thundernet belongs to Grupo Nemer, a conglomerate of dozens of companies across Venezuela, Panama, and the US with close ties to Chávez’s regime.

For example, Hugo Chávez’s youngest brother, Adelis, previously owned the Barinas-based Zamora Futbol Club. The club is now run by Omar Jose Nemer Irched, the eldest son of Grupo Nemer head, Syrian-born Atef Salami Nemer Hirchedd.

That soccer club’s sponsor switched from PdVSA to Thundernet.

In addition, investigative outlet Armando.info reported in 2021 that Nemer Hirchedd maintained a close relationship with another Chávez sibling, Adan Chávez Frías.

Adan served as governor of Barinas and Venezuela’s ambassador to Cuba, a relationship that allegedly helped Grupo Nemer take over operations of a bankrupt state agriculture company.

An exact name match and a denial from Bridge

According to Mikula, the shipping documents compound an already dubious compliance record.

In January 2026, he revealed Stripe’s connection via the Bridge stablecoin platform to Venezuelan crypto exchange Kontigo, rumored to have links to ousted President Nicolas Maduro’s son.

Maduro served as president of Venezuela since 2013, succeeding Chávez.

Moreover, as recently as November 2025, Bridge and Stripe executives were praising Venezuela as a stablecoin showcase.

Bridge subsequently reclassified Venezuela from “controlled” to “prohibited” in its sanctions compliance document.

The timing aligned neatly with the Kontigo fallout and Bridge’s pursuit of a national trust bank charter from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which conditionally approved its application, after Bridge’s downward revision of Venezuela, in February 2026.

Lido DAO proposed spending up to 10,000 stETH to buy its own governance token at what it calls a historically depressed valuation. That works out to roughly $20 million at current ether prices near $2,000.

The problem is where to spend it.

Onchain LDO liquidity sits at about $90,000 of depth at plus-or-minus 2%, according to the proposal posted by the Lido Ecosystem Operations team over the weekend. The market depth measure means a transaction of that value could move the token’s price by as much as 2%.

A single 1,000 stETH batch executed onchain would blow through available liquidity multiple times over, meaning Ethereum’s largest liquid staking protocol has to go offchain to buy its own token at scale.

The proposal authorizes the Lido Growth Committee to route trades through centralized exchanges including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate and Bitget, each of which currently offers more than $100,000 in depth. It also permits the committee to engage market-maker partners on behalf of the Lido Ecosystem Foundation to facilitate execution.

Valuing governance

LDO hit an all-time low of $0.27 on March 7 and currently trades near $0.30, according to CoinGecko data, with a market capitalization of roughly $258 million.

The token is down more than 95% from its 2021 peak of $7.30. At current prices, the proposed buyback could use up roughly 65 million tokens, or about 8% of the circulating supply.

The DAO’s case rests on a gap between token performance and protocol fundamentals. The LDO-to-ETH ratio sits at approximately 0.00016, a 70% discount to levels that held for most of the past two years.

Net protocol rewards, in contrast, have dropped only about 20% over the same period, while costs improved 13% year-over-year and the protocol’s effective take rate rose to 6.11% from 5%. Lido still holds the largest share of staked ether at around 23%, per DefiLlama.

“This is not a routine fluctuation,” the proposal states. “It represents one of the most significant dislocations between LDO’s market price and its underlying protocol fundamentals in the token’s history.”

Execution would proceed in 1,000 stETH batches, each requiring a separate Easy Track motion — a governance mechanism for routine or approved operations — with a three-day objection period. The Growth Committee retains discretion over timing and pace to avoid signaling exact moves to the market, a necessary precaution given that the proposal is public. Slippage is capped at 3% below the reference price.

The deeper question the proposal surfaces is one facing DeFi governance tokens broadly. LDO’s 95% drawdown from peak is extreme, but it is not an outlier in the category. A protocol that dominates its sector, generates consistent fees, and holds billions in TVL is trading at a $258 million market cap because the market has broadly repriced what a governance token is worth when it controls a fee switch but distributes nothing.

Lido’s answer is to treat the dislocation as a buying opportunity. Whether that works depends on whether the market ever decides governance tokens deserve to trade on fundamentals at all.

Opinion by: Ashna Vaghela, chief customer officer at Mercuryo, and Vi Powils, CEO at World of Women.

For decades, the financial industry has treated creativity as a high-risk hobby. If you’re a woman building a global brand from a laptop, there is a risk that your bank doesn’t see a CEO. Rather, it sees someone with a non-standard income stream, without collateral, who might have to stop or pause working, to have children. Our global economy champions the middleman while the actual source of value can be treated as an afterthought.

For many women, particularly in emerging markets, creating online is not supplemental income; it is primary income and often the most borderless economic opportunity available to them.

That barrier runs deeper in emerging markets. A creator in Lagos can build a following of millions, only to find that the banking systems turn cross-border payments into a months-long exercise in fees and delays. When you control the flow of capital, you control who gets to stay in business. Women have spent years asking for a seat at the table where the legs were already broken.

The intersection of the creator economy and crypto payment infrastructure offers the first genuine path to financial freedom that doesn’t require anyone’s permission. As we move toward a world where code does the work that banks used to gatekeep, and that shift matters more for women than almost anyone else.

The invisible tax on identity

Legacy finance has failed women and creators in tandem. Venture capital still directs a tiny fraction of its capital to female founders with only 2.3% of venture capital funding having gone to female-founded companies in 2024. Credit scoring still penalizes uneven income, which is the reality for most independent artists. These systems were designed for a 9-to-5 world that is no longer the default way of being.

Layered on top of that is the platform toll. Some take up to 50 percent of earnings before a single cent reaches a creator’s wallet. You’re renting your audience from a landlord who can evict you whenever the terms do not suit them. 

Programmable revenue and the end of Net-90

In the old world, a creator sells their work and can wait months to get paid. Smart contracts change this entirely. Revenue splits happen at the point of sale. If an artist collaborates with a developer, the payment doesn’t pool in a corporate account, it moves directly to their respective wallets the moment a transaction clears.

Related: Blockchain restores women’s power in AI

The code becomes the escrow. There’s no chasing invoices, no waiting on platforms to release what you’ve already earned. Hardcoded royalties mean creators benefit from the long-term value of their work regardless of where it’s resold. 

While an imperfect system, the structure of onchain royalties is intended to help artists capture value over time, rather than relying solely on single transactions. OpenSea made royalty enforcement optional, which most marketplaces have now followed. This is what we mean by participatory capitalism: a model where the growth of the whole, lifts the people who actually built it. For many artists, especially women building global audiences, this shift is more than technical, it enables consistent revenue without depending on a platform’s schedule or policies.

Infrastructure as the foundation of family

Infrastructure sounds dry until you realise it’s the difference between asking for permission and having power. Community is a multiplier, but infrastructure is the engine. For the millions of women entering the creator economy, crypto rails offer a global passport that doesn’t check for borders or bias.

The community talks a lot about community in Web3, but what is really being described is something closer to family. A community is a group you associate with. A family shows up when things get hard. Stablecoins have become that bridge for creators in regions with volatile currencies, letting them hold the value of their work without needing a bank’s approval. 

When you lower friction at both ends of a transaction, the creativity in the middle takes off. There is already seeing a generation of entrepreneurs who don’t need an invitation to the boardroom because they own the system it sits on. Reliable payment rails make the difference between being able to monetize globally and being restricted to local, slow, or costly banking systems, a gap that disproportionately affects women creators in emerging markets.

Moving toward ownership

Inclusion is not a gift. Ownership is holding the deed, not being handed a seat. The shift to Web3 payment infrastructure moves us toward that deed. This moment is about refusing to let legacy systems set the value of creative communities. The infrastructure is ready. The only thing left is for the creators to lead.

Let us stop waiting for the system to change. Let us continue to the payment rails that replace it. 

Opinion by: Ashna Vaghela, chief customer officer at Mercuryo, and Vi Powils, CEO of World of Women.