The Download: a “God-driven” cryptocurrency and a solar engineering roadmap

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. According to Eli and his wife, Kaitlyn, He told them to get married, buy a house, and start having kids.

Then in 2021, divine guidance steered them in an unexpected new direction: crypto. That October, the Regalados later testified in court, they received holdings in a little-known digital coin. Over time, they came to believe that He wanted them to launch their own coin.

The Regalados created INDXcoin, which they promoted through family, friends, and contacts in evangelical Christian circles. In all, more than 500 people handed over more than $3 million. But within a year, the project collapsed.

Investors lost it all, leaving many to wonder where the funds went and whether they had fallen victim to an elaborate fraud. Read the full story on the collapse of a pastor’s “God-driven” cryptocurrency. This article is part of the Big Story series, the home of MIT Technology Review’s most important and ambitious reporting.

You can read the rest of the series here. The story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Scientists have spent half a century exploring whether we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.

But even after hundreds of studies, we still don’t know how well it would work or what else it might do—and there’s no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty. Reflective, a research organization, has now attempted to fill that gap. The San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal.