Money Reimagined

The story of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is a tragic reminder of the lasting impact of colonial injustice and how it extends into modern finance. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange.It’s why this episode, on the potential for blockchain technology and digital currencies to empower people in such places, begins with a powerful monologue by Sheila about the shameful, century-long legacy of a slavery-era debt. That debt, imposed by France in punishment of Haiti’s citizens for freeing themselves from their slave masters in a rebellion that founded their independence in 1805, later became a U.S.-owned asset serviced by a bank that would become Citibank. In that sense, this long-standing problem is directly related to the issue of Wall Street’s power and dominance in the age of dollar hegemony, a power that is challenged, in theory, by cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. We learn from guest Jerry Tardieu, a Haitian author, entrepreneur, and politician who represents Petion-ville in the Chamber of Deputies, of how that debt legacy and the dependence on aid that came with it, has challenged Haiti’s capacity to strike its own economic path. He calls for technologies and policies that boost access to investment capital rather than aid. We also hear from Daniele Jean-Pierre, the co-founder and COO of Zimbali networks, which delivers smart ledger solutions for the decentralized economy, on the kinds of solutions that entrepreneurs like her are developing to meet that call to action. -InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. -The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.-Image credit: Heather Suggitt/Unsplash modified by CoinDeskSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With CoinDesk’s Consensus just a week away, we decided that this week’s Money Reimagined episode should focus on the big macro and geopolitical themes that will be its hallmark. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange.Highlights of that landmark event include Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard’s perspective on the future of money, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio’s thesis on the end of the dollar’s dominance and a discussion/debate on the inflation outlook featuring former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and CoinDesk’s Noelle Acheson. Attendees will be asked to contemplate where the global economy is headed in an age of monetary transformation and what that means for the power structures of the world as we know it. As a prelude, we invited Bruno Macaes, a Portuguese politician, author and influential thinker on geopolitical trends, and Tomicah Tillemann, the Director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at the New America think tank, to give us their take on these matters. Some of the scenarios we discussed are challenging. They paint a picture of mass disruption of the global economic order. But both our guests had a somewhat contrarian take to a common view, held by many observers of geopolitical trends, that forces of technological change and economic stress will conspire to bring to an end to the era of U.S. financial, economic and political hegemony.In different ways, Macaes and Tillemann both argued that the U.S., if it plays its cards right, could turn this current moment of economic uncertainty to its advantage and sustain leadership of the global economy. To do so, they said, it must embrace the principles of open systems and open society that lie at the heart of the crypto ethos – and which, in theory at least, are ingrained in what are widely considered “American values.” -InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. -The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.Image credit: Eric Prouzet/Unsplash modified by CoinDeskSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you were to describe what crypto represents in its entirety, either to the insiders who are obsessed with it or to the “normies” looking on with wonder from the outside, you might focus on technical issues related to immutability, censorship resistance, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges and so forth. Or you might use the language of finance and “asset classes” to talk about bitcoin as “digital gold” or ether as a commodity token that runs a decentralized network.This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange.But to capture the full picture, you’d also need to deal with all the strange, sometimes obscure, sometimes crude, occasionally funny memes that constantly course through Twitter and work their way into the crypto lexicon. That’s important, not only because memes are integral to the crypto experience on their own, but because they are also driving some of the shifting ideas around money and finance generally. This, after all, is the era of SPACs, “stonks” and meme shares that rise because Reddit groups like WallStreetBets manage to bring the power and collective will of the mob to markets.In many respects, that traditional world of finance is only catching up with crypto. Dogecoin, the ultimate meme token, might be hitting headlines now with its latest spectacular price rally as it is following on the heels of the WallStreetBets GameStop phenomenon. But dogecoin really precedes it, having been around since December 2013. You could argue that dogecoin is the original stonk. This episode makes the case that if you’re going to try to understand how money is being reimagined in the new era, you need to go beyond the technology and the market dynamics and address the confusing cacophony of memes that drive the narratives around crypto. To do that we were joined by two people who’ve inserted themselves into this grand, collective storytelling exercise with more influence than almost anyone. We talk to Nathaniel Whittemore, host of CoinDesk’s “Breakdown” podcast, and Coin Center’s Neeraj Agrawal, to discuss the importance of all this to both the outside world and the strange but fascinating subculture that has formed around the crypto community.-InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io.-The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.Image credit:peterschreibermedia/iStock/Getty Images Plus, modified by CoinDeskSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In what has become a de facto world tour of crypto hot spots, this week “Money Reimagined” is headed to Nigeria.This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange.We talked to two Nigerian entrepreneurs – Yele Bademosi, the CEO of payments app Bundle Africa, and Adia Sowho, a venture builder and operator – about the burgeoning crypto innovation ecosystem in their country. Among this entertaining pair’s many insights was the idea the Nigerian Central Bank’s February order that banks shut down crypto companies’ access ended up being a positive for the industry. It spurred even more innovation in the space, inspiring local developers to dream up interesting new decentralized solutions for getting around the banking sector’s gatekeepers.The idea dovetails with some we’ve heard from other guests – from Democracy Earth’s Santiago Siri, for example, who spoke of how the startup scene in his native Argentina is shaped and driven by the failure of the existing financial system and the efforts by authorities there to constrain people’s financial freedom. It shows how the crypto world has fostered a new breed of developer-entrepreneur, one who no longer wants to work to change the existing system but is inspired to build entire new alternatives to it. We also learned from Bademosi and Sowho that the narratives the crypto community in the industrialized world tend to embrace about the technology’s value in the developing world are often misplaced. It’s convenient for people in the U.S. to talk up the idea that Nigerian activists were using bitcoin during the anti-government protests last year or that it is being used widely as a remittance and payments vehicle. But our guests point out those use cases aren’t as widespread as believed and that, much like in the U.S, most Nigerians are for now buying bitcoin as a store of value. On the other hand, they tell us Nigeria specifically – and Africa generally – is a hotbed of innovation in DeFi. And why not? The opportunities for experimentation and creativity for decentralized finance are arguably much greater in places where the existing financial system is underdeveloped. -InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io.-The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.Image credit: Fela Sanu/iStock/Getty Images PlusSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With all the gyrations in crypto markets, it is easy to lose sight of why this technology has drawn so many passionate believers. In this week’s episode we go straight to that point by diving into the theme of human rights and the role that bitcoin can play as a medium for saving and spending that is free from the confiscatory powers of government – including those of authoritarian regimes. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange.Throughout its life, communities of activists all around the world have taken to bitcoin as a tool of empowerment. Sometimes it’s because they live in places where the local currency is constantly being debased by profligate governments. Sometimes it’s because they are at risk of having property seized by the regime. Sometimes it’s because they need a way to fund dissidents’ activities.To explore all this, we speak to the Human Rights Foundation’s outspoken chief strategy officer, Alex Gladstein, on how he, a career human rights campaigner, found his way into the weird world of bitcoin. We also have the pleasure of talking to an activist in Sudan, a person who goes by Mo and the podcaster pseudonym of @SudanHODL.-InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io.-The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.-Image credit: Phototreat/iStock/Getty Images Plus modified by CoinDeskSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week’s Money Reimagined episode was recorded at the ideal moment to take stock of the biggest development in the crypto space this year: Coinbase’s public listing on the Nasdaq exchange. The show was recorded on Wednesday, the day of the listing, just after 4 pm, the time at which U.S. stock markets closed. So, with the help of Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vigna (who was Michael’s co-author for both The Age of Currency and The Truth Machine) and of CoinDesk Director of Research Noelle Acheson, we broke down the day’s action, the history of what brought us to this point from when Coinbase was first launched in 2012, and what this means for the future: for Coinbase, for the crypto community, for Wall Street, and for Main Street,In tying itself to the corporate “suits,” is this disruptive firm from the crypto universe going to  shake up the Wall Street establishment from within, or will those older institutions constrain it?What does the sudden scramble up the crypto learning curve look like for all those institutional investors who now feel they need to own – and therefore understand -- this stock and the weird new decentralized financial industry it services?Who’s the next Coinbase? And what does the inevitable influx of investment in search of that “new new thing” do to the funding of new projects and new ideas among startups that may end up supplanting Coinbase and eventually rendering it obsolete?We address these and many more in this episode. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Without letters of credit, bills of lading, shipping documents and trillions of dollars in global goods trade would grind to a halt. (And you thought our dependency on the Suez Canal was a problem!)This episode is sponsored by Interpop.ioBut the world’s system of trade finance, a highly complex setup involving banks, insurers, shipping companies, data providers and all manner of intermediaries, is far from ideal. There is massive fraud – check the New York Times’ account of the recent Greensill Capital collapse for – and severe inequity in terms of who gets favorable borrowing terms and who doesn’t. Without access to the trusted data needed to prove their creditworthiness, millions of small-and-medium enterprises are unable to obtain credit to cover the risks associated with exporting their goods. So they either run the risk of non-payment or simply cannot participate in the global economy. As a measure of that inequity, Sheila noted in her monologue to this week’s Money Reimagined episode – in which we talk to two blockchain pioneers trying to fix the trade finance industries many problems – that there’s currently a $1.5 trillion global trade financing gap. But then in his first comments, Tallyx CEO Aditya Menon offered an alternative analysis of how much of the goods trade goes unfinanced and came up with a $5 trillion number. That’s about half of the global trade in goods. Can blockchains and tokenization address these inequities? As you’ll hear from Menon, as well as from Skuchain co-founder Rebecca Liao, the answers lie in figuring out how to incentivize all participants – the exporters, importers, shippers and financiers – to share data in a way that unlocks funding faster. Skuchain is focused on making the information richer and more reliable along the supply chain. Tallyx is figuring out how to turn the contractual information such as invoices into tokens of value that can be traded in ways that allow smaller suppliers to monetize their legitimate receivables.The problems they are trying to solve aren’t easy. But that’s what makes their work so compelling. Blockchain projects like Skuchain and Tallyx offer a healthy reminder that beyond the razzamatazz of crypto markets and celebrity non-fungible tokens, meaningful impact is also possible if you work hard at the core problems faced by real-world entities.  --InterPop is building the architecture of an entirely new landscape of fandom using technology built on the Tezos blockchain to drive their vision. Visit hellointerpop.io to learn more.--Image Credit: Mahmoud Khaled/Getty Images NewsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Few countries have as deep and long-lasting a history of financial crises as Argentina. Given how otherwise blessed it is with natural and human resources, Argentina is Exhibit A in the argument that repeated monetary mismanagement will do lasting harm to long-term prosperity. A century of such crises, which has bred profound mistrust of the institutions of government among Argentines, took their country from being the seventh-richest nation on earth to the 75th. Now, with the advent of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, some finally a way out of this trap of mistrust. It’s no coincidence that Argentina has a relatively high level of bitcoin adoption nor that it has contributed a disproportionately high number of successful developers to the global crypto community. But is crypto the answer, or should Argentines continue to work within the system to get the accountable government they deserve? We explore that question, along with a deep dive into just what it is that explains Argentina’s uniquely dysfunctional economic experience, in his week’s edition of “Money Reimagined.” We’re joined by Lucas Llach, a professor of economics at Torcuato di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, a radical, blockchain-based solution for democracy inspired his struggles to reform government in his native Argentina. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

An insider's look at how Bitcoin is making renewable energy sustainable featuring industry veterans Meltem Demirors and Harry Sudock.As big banks, publicly traded corporations and some of the biggest names in finance become increasingly bullish on Bitcoin’s prospects, only a few objections really remain. These days on Wall Street it’s all about responsible investing as seen through the lens of “Environmental, Social and Governance,” (better known as ESG). On this episode of CoinDesk’s “Money Reimagined,” we speak with two of the top minds building out bitcoin mining in the U.S. for an insiders look at the real story on energy, money and sustainability.  In this episode we’ll speak with Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of CoinShares, and Harry Sudock, vice president of Strategy at GRIID.To set the stage, earlier this week on CoinDesk TV, fund manager and “Shark Tank” co-host Kevin O’Leary said Wall Street has to satisfy sustainability reporting requirements before it can buy wholesale into bitcoin. He estimated that only 10% of institutions that wanted to buy had bought in, partly because of climate concerns.He continued, “All of these new providence concerns, which were not on anybody’s mind when crypto was simply the purvey of the hedge fund or the retail investor. Now it has to have a new standard.  Where did it come from? How was it mined? Was it mined sustainably? How do I know I’m not supporting mining in a country where human rights are abused like China? All of these issues are at the fore for institutional clients.”These are valid questions, but they’re certainly not new, much less unanswered. Demirors described the problem as “two facts and two fallacies,” saying:“Fact #1 - Bitcoin mining is highly energy intensive. That is a fact. Bitcoin is the only network that I know of that documents its energy use and is extremely transparent about it, which I think makes Bitcoin a very easy target. It’s impossible for you to calculate how much energy the banking industry uses, how much energy the U.S. military uses. Most industries and sectors are very opaque about their energy usage.  Bitcoin is not.Fact #2 - A majority of bitcoin miners are located in China. That is still a fact, we are working on changing that but it is a fact.From those two facts, some logical fallacies follow:Fallacy #1 - The logic then goes: Bitcoin miners in China are using dirty, coal-based power. That’s actually false and we have proven that to be false through our bitcoin mining research report. We were the first firm in the industry to do this research. We spoke to all of the miners first-hand and did a bottoms-up calculation where we found that 77% of all bitcoin mining done in China was done with renewable energy that would otherwise not be utilized. So that’s fallacy number one.Fallacy #2 is that bitcoin mining has an extreme carbon footprint. And that is something that’s also provably false, and I think an area that people who care about the bitcoin network are working to provide more data to make that extremely transparent. And then, the last logical, sort of “transitive property sum” that comes out of those four statements… Two facts, two idealogical fallacies is that “Bitcoin is bad,” which is a moral judgment.”  Sudock, meanwhile, discussed his experience as a profit-oriented bitcoin miner who was sucked into environmentally responsible mining out of sheer necessity.“We didn’t enter this industry with an eye towards becoming a renewable operator. We didn’t think that that was sort of our ‘edge,’ but what we quickly found through conversations with everybody from very very large, federal energy producers in the U.S. to very small hydro dams that are run by Mom and Pops who can’t afford upgrades to their turbines, is that everybody is looking for revenue enhancement strategies that will support the growth and resilience of the energy that they’re producing. And the need for those enhancement strategies are particularly acute when you start to look at renewable generation.  Those conversations at this point for us are inbound. I spend less time reaching out to energy producers than energy producers spend reaching out to me. And that’s a huge change.”All of this and more in this week’s episode of CoinDesk’s “Money Reimagined.”Image credit: Master Wen/UnsplashSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At the end of a high-energy week in the burgeoning digital art world, “Money Reimagined” brings you the third and (for now) final edition of our NFT series. In between recording this episode and publishing it two days later, a non-fungible token attached to a piece of digital art sold for a whopping $69.3 million. The sale, orchestrated by Christie’s, turned the digital creator known as Beeple into the third-highest paid living artist. It also represented a high point in the media attention now swirling around this new, crypto-based technology. So, it’s appropriate we end on a note that grounds things in the reality of the technology and its potential to transform the creator economy generally, rather than being caught up in the celebrity story and media sensations. To do so, we talk with Roham Gharegozlou, the CEO and founder of Dapper Labs, the startup that in many respects is responsible for kicking off the entire NFT phenomenon. We talk about the early days when Dapper created the ERC-721 standard on Ethereum and launched the popular CryptoKitties program. We talk about why the team made the decision to build its own blockchain, known as Flow, and to migrate the business there away from Ethereum. And we talk about where this rapidly evolving industry, with its competing platforms and wild debates over rights and opportunities, is going.Join us for the conversation. Image credit:  Benjamin Suter on Unsplash, modified by CoinDeskSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.