The storm had rolled in quickly, the rain streaking down the floor-to-ceiling windows of Steenberg’s office in Basel. He had turned off the overhead lights, leaving the room dim except for the soft glow of his desk lamp. The file lay open before him—frustratingly thin, more inference than fact.

He exhaled, rolling the cap of his Montblanc pen between his fingers. Alias.

He had been the one to coin the name in internal memos, a placeholder for the unknown architect of Pegged. A name that suggested nothing, meant nothing, yet paradoxically encapsulated everything about its bearer. A man whose defining feature was his absence.

He smirked. Perhaps that was my contribution, he thought. "Alias" was what he had started calling the unknown architect of Pegged in internal memos. It was fitting. No one could name him, so Steenberg had.

"Who are you?, What is driving you?"

He tapped a finger against the file, flipping through the sparse intelligence they had compiled. There were no leaks, no trails, no vanity. Alias had learned from Satoshi.

That much was clear.

Satoshi Nakamoto had designed Bitcoin as an elegant experiment—a system immune to external control, a financial escape hatch. But what Satoshi had not accounted for was power’s ability to bend without breaking, to co-opt rather than crush.

Bitcoin had not overthrown anything—it had been absorbed, domesticated, and financialized. Captured without resistance, devoured by its own thirst for legitimacy. Steenberg smirked to himself. Bitcoiners thought they were burning down the house. Instead, they renovated it.

He leaned back, staring at the blank ceiling, reaching for something deeper—an understanding. If Alias was designing Pegged to be untouchable, it meant he had learned from history. More precisely, from Bitcoin’s history.

That’s what this is, Steenberg thought, a direct response to the capture of Bitcoin.

Alias had watched. He had studied the process. And Pegged? It was designed not just as an alternative system but as an evasive one. The entire blueprint screamed of a man who had identified Bitcoin’s failures and deliberately avoided them.

Steenberg spoke aloud to the empty room.

"No central issuance."
"No reliance on exchanges."
"No banking rails."
"A built-in liquidity mechanism that doesn’t require trust in counterparties."
"A self-sustaining system that needs no centralised operations once launched."

Each point landed like a precision-engineered bullet.

Pegged was not just another experiment—it was a direct response to Bitcoin’s fate. It had been designed to be fundamentally incompatible with systemic capture.

Alias was not some idealist playing at revolution. He was something more dangerous. A strategist.

Steenberg tapped the file, deep in thought. How would a man like this operate? Satoshi had gone silent—vanished before Bitcoin could become personal. Had Alias learned that lesson too?

A ghost in plain view. No social media, no leaks, no breadcrumbs. Yet he must have tested his theories, must have run models, perhaps even shared them in obscure corners of cryptographic communities.

If Alias had designed Pegged to resist capture, his next question was obvious:

His gaze drifted back to the sparse intelligence reports. The same questions gnawed at him.

"What’s his escape plan?" "Had Alias worked alone?"

Satoshi had. Or at least, Satoshi had disappeared alone. But Pegged was far more complex than Bitcoin—it leveraged a decade’s worth of cryptographic advancements, DAO frameworks, synthetic stablecoin models, lottery-driven liquidity pools.

That didn’t sound like the work of a single man.

"If there was a team, I’ll find them," Steenberg thought.

Because teams were weaknesses. Bitcoin had succeeded in its escape because Satoshi had disappeared before the system gained traction. But Pegged? Pegged was only just beginning.

If Alias had worked with others, if even one of them had left a trace, then he would be found.

Steenberg leaned back, exhaling slowly. He didn’t believe Alias considered himself smarter than Satoshi. But he knew Alias had learned from Satoshi’s mistakes.

The only question was: Had he learned enough?

Steenberg smirked, tapping his pen against the desk.

"Let’s find out."