Money Reimagined

In this week’s “Money Reimagined” podcast episode, we take the discussion around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) down from the high-level geopolitical themes we’ve addressed previously and into what the technology can do for people at the grassroots level. To do so, Sheila Warren and I talked to Serey Chea, director general at National Bank of Cambodia, and Makoto Takemiya, co-CEO of Tokyo-based blockchain technology provider Soramitsu, about Cambodia’s new “Bakong” central bank digital currency and payments system. They provide a thought-provoking look at how small economies can use CBDCs to leapfrog their otherwise underdeveloped financial systems into something far more advanced.With the financial world obsessing about China’s launch of its new digital yuan and the competitive threat that poses to the U.S, which is now accelerating its work on a digital dollar, this is a reminder that there is real potential to do good with this technology in the realm of financial inclusion. However, there are real challenges – the impact on the banking system, privacy and security, to name a few. We address all of those and explore where this is going in this far-reaching conversation. Image credit: Paul Szewczyk via 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.

This week on Money Reimagined, we bring you part two in our series on non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, the crypto-based digital scarcity solution that’s taking the art and entertainment worlds by storm. After last week tackling the stage-setting theme of how access to information determines value in the art world and who gets to set it, this week we go to the thin of the wedge and look at real-world use cases where NFTs are poised to blow up that centuries-old power dynamic. To do that we talk to two trailblazers in the exploding field of Black digital art: South African artist Lethabo Huma and NFT collector Cuy Sheffield, who also happens to be the head of crypto at Visa. Can this technology break open the 'Old Boys Club' of the art world? Can contemporary artists use the new contractual terms behind NFTs and the power of social media to more directly reach buyers and build a reputation? And how might it enable creative collaboration, not only between artists but also between artists and a new breed of algorithmic bots behind a brand new genre known as “generative art?”We discuss this and more in this week’s episode. At a time when everyone from the NBA to Mark Cuban to Gary Vaynerchuck is diving into NFT mania, you can’t afford to miss this one. Image Credit: Mariya Tarakhnenko/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 much of the world focused on bitcoin and ether as prices breach new all-time high after all-time high, the “Money Reimagined” crew embarks on a more nuanced journey, one that eschews world-changing networks for an art-changing renaissance that's been long in the making. We're talking, of course, about the nonfungible token (NFT) movement that has engulfed the world of crypto collectibles. With big brands like Christie’s auction house and the National Basketball Association getting involved and some tokens already selling for six-figure sums, the question isn't if NFTs will force a very old industry to adopt some very new practices, it's when.On today's episode of CoinDesk's “Money Reimagined,” Michael Casey and Sheila Warren are joined by Nanne Dekking, CEO of Artory and formerly the top salesman at Sotheby's.Founded in 2016, Artory is creating the first standardized data collection solution by the art world, for the art world. In his former position at Sotheby’s New York, Dekking was vice chairman and the worldwide head of Private Sales. His close relationships with collectors and museums were integral to the continued growth of private sales at Sotheby’s. Prior to joining Sotheby’s, Nanne was vice president of Wildenstein & Co. He advised individuals, museums and foundations on the formation and development of their collections. From 1996-2001 Nanne was the founder and principal of Nanne Dekking Fine Arts, an art consultancy firm and gallery in New York."Which scholar do I trust? Who in the art market do I trust?" Dekking said. "They don’t want to trust anyone."In this wide-ranging introduction to NFTs, collectibles and the traditional art market, the discussion ranges from Sheila Warren's Cryptokitty genealogy to the challenges of selling paintings by the old masters in litigious modern markets, plus a whole lot more.“There are so many charitable things you can do with all this technology but ultimately you want the market to understand the commercial benefits of it. Then it goes fast. The moment you’re in the realm of charity, it’s like ‘this is such a nice idea’ but in a way you’re dead in the water already if the market just thinks this is only nice for a charitable reason," said Nanne Dekking, CEO of Artory and formerly the top salesman at Sotheby's. "As long as the market believes opaqueness will help [its] business model, which it doesn’t any more, it’s a very old-fashioned idea… The moment Art-Net came up, the moment Google existed … it’s all about this crazy idea that you as a human being are so important in the sales process to an artwork. I mean, you’re not." Image Credit: Anna Hunko/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.

This week’s Money Reimagined dives into the increasingly urgently needed Ethereum 2.0 upgrade. What is it and why does it matter?We talk with Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. He has become a key player in the complicated “herding the cats” task of “herding the cats” of getting thousands of different stakeholders in this vibrant decentralized community aligned enough to undertake the massive 2.0 transition with sufficient cohesion.With Danny’s help we break the whole thing down in a way that’s accessible to people beyond the developer community: Proof-of-stake consensus, sharding, Layer 2, and how decision-making and development happens in this free-wheeling open-source environment. We put it all in the context of a giant boom for the Ethereum ecosystem, as money pours into red-hot decentralized finance (DeFi), as a mania for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) plays out, and as ether hits new all-time highs as large institutions gain exposure via new CME futures. All this is bringing into stark relief the urgent need to advance the system’s scalability as congestion on the network is driving up transactions costs, or “gas fees” to unsustainable levels. It’s a timely episode, in other words. Have a listen. Image Credit: Sander Weeteling/UnsplashSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There’s a reason the Gamestop/WallStreetBets drama of the past two weeks got so much attention. It’s because it speaks forcefully to the inequities and systemic problems in both our financial markets and the internet economy and how they’ve shaped our politics and social tensions. So, in true Money Reimagined form, we wanted to have a super high-level discussion about what all this means for the future of money and society. And for that we called on someone who is a master at drawing big-picture narratives around such issues: Demetri Kofinas, the host of the popular Hidden Forces podcast.Demetri Kofinas is an insatiably curious media entrepreneur and financial expert. His mission is to make the connections that help you see the bigger picture, empowering you to make smarter investing decisions.He also hosts the Hidden Forces podcast, where he gives his listeners an edge by using his critical thinking approach to challenge the consensus narratives structuring our world .You can follow him on Twitter at @kofinas, check out his podcast at hiddenforces.io, and sign-up for more in depth content and analysis at Patreon.com/hiddenforces.Find Michael Casey on Twitter or Clubhouse (@mikejcasey)Find Sheila Warren on Twitter or Clubhouse (@sheilaw)Image Credit:Luke Stackpoole/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.

For this episode, we travel, metaphorically, to a town in the Swiss Alps that’s for the first time in 50 years experiencing some peace and quiet in January. This week was the World Economic Forum’s “Davos Agenda,” a conference filled with the usual roster of high-powered speakers but conducted entirely virtually, over Zoom, instead of in Davos. So, as Sheila took time out from helping run that agenda, we invited her colleague Adrian Monck, a long-time WEF managing director, to reflect on the forum’s past and future and how something as anti-establishment as cryptocurrency and blockchain is being integrated into its work. It might come as a shock to the rebellious strain that’s prominent in the crypto community, but its world and that of the WEF have some important similarities. Both must grapple with the core problem of governance in a decentralized environment, with the difficulty of solving problems that serve the interests of the whole when there’s no single party in charge. Both of them grapple with the problem of consensus.As Adrian explains, the WEF tries to resolve this by using its unparalleled convening power. It brings together disparate decision-makers from governments, businesses and civil society so they can find common ground on how to address the world’s many urgent needs. At times, that convening exercise has involved inviting radical newcomers, such as the internet tech community, into the tent. In this wide-ranging discussion, which partly delves into Sheila’s groundbreaking work introducing blockchain ideas to the WEF, we dive into the current challenge for this evolving process: how to bring the crypto disruptors inside.Image credit: Jack Ward/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.

As the Biden Administration gets underway, what can we expect for cryptocurrency technologies alongside an ascendent bitcoin?One day into the new President’s tenure we’ve brought in Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association and Amy Davine Kim, Chief Policy Officer at the Chamber of Digital Commerce. In this episode we'll take a look into the regulatory future as we explore the relationships, lobbying and policymaking efforts within Washington. Album Photo by Tabrez Syed 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.

On this episode of Money Reimagined the discussion comes home for an insiders look at how new, disruptive technology and government interact. For this discussion, hosts Michael Casey and Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum are joined by Marvin Ammori, best known for his work on network neutrality and Internet freedom issues. Rounding out the panel is Christopher Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman and founding principal of the Digital Dollar Foundation.---"My background is really 20 years of working on the internet. And I remember in the early days of the internet." said Marvin Ammori, "you know, one kind of piece of deja vu is what jumped out to everyone. The internet began with all the bad stuff. Congress couldn't believe there was porn on the internet. We had to protect the children from the number one thing that people noticed on the internet.And in fact, the first major case about the internet, had the Supreme Court upheld Congress's action, pretty much every website would have needed to get your credit card number and verify you're 18 to go on. The internet would have been for adults only." Marvin continued, "The entire trajectory of the internet would have been different, but luckily the Supreme Court pushed back on congressional action under the First Amendment. But the first impulse of congress 20 years ago with the internet was 'let's cripple this thing.' [...] We've seen all the tremendous benefits. [T]hings we could have never imagined back then. Now when it comes to cryptocurrency we see something similar."---"The first wave of the Internet was an internet of information. And interestingly, it emerged into a federal regulatory structure that was really a pretty light zone because of our First Amendment protections of freedom of speech," said former CFTC chair Christopher Giancarlo. "So the internet, actually, in the first case, it didn't face a lot of opposition, I think, Marvin is absolutely right. There was certainly calls in Congress for banning because of pornography, but at the end of the day, the Democrat White House of President Clinton, the Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich came up with the 'first do no harm approach.'And the internet flourished and a lot of lessons learned were 'don't ask permission, seek forgiveness', 'keep going until you break something.' And the first internet wave, the wave of information flourished pretty successfully.We're now in a new construct, where in fact what we're talking about, as an internet of 'things of value', whoa... Well, it's a very different construct. We have at least three federal bank regulators regulating holdings of people's things of value, market regulators in Washington. And then in every state level.And so this new wave of the internet is not running into a regulatory light zone. It's actually running into a regulatory heavy 'no go zone.' And we've seen the clash. I mean, just look at the ICO challenge a few years ago. That was a statement by one regulator that they were not conceding ground in this new internet of value. [... It's] a product of our past and our approaches and our constitutional liberties, but also these new technologies, new waves, the internet bring new challenges to old constructs that we haven't often been successful in working through."---On Dec. 18, the U.S. Treasury published a proposal to expand the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s requirements for identity monitoring and reporting by crypto exchanges. Under these proposed new rules, that powerful agency, known as FinCEN, would require exchanges to collect names and home addresses from the owners of private, self-custodied digital wallets that receive more than $3,000 in cryptocurrencies daily and to file special currency transaction reports about any wallet that receives more than $10,000 a day.The announcement prompted an outpouring of criticism from the crypto community and among digital rights activists. Many saw it as an attack on privacy. As of this recording, more than 7,500 comments have been posted to FinCEN’s site. That constitutes more than two thirds of all public comments received by the agency for various rules and proposals dating back to 2008. Then, on Monday last week, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which sets and coordinates federal banking rules, offered a rule change that was much more favorably received among the crypto community.  The OCC said banks could now use stablecoins to conduct payments and other activities, including stablecoin tokens issued on public blockchains such as Ethereum. It prompted some breathless commentary on how integrating the old world of banking with the new world of decentralized finance paves the way to a new global financial system of programmable money. To many this seemed like a weird good cop/bad cop routine out of Washington. Is the Administration pro- or anti-crypto? But to Michael Casey, there’s much more coordination here than meets the eye. There’s a common theme with respect to how both rules fit into geopolitical tensions that digital currency technology is stirring up. We’ll go into that in this week’s episode, which is why one of our guests today is Christopher Giancarlo, the former Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission who is now senior counsel at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and, among other roles, founding principal of the Digital Dollar Foundation. As someone who knows the ropes in Washington and is thinking hard about how the U.S. should prepare for a world of digital currencies, his insights will be invaluable.  The other question this throws up is: how do we forge a more constructive relationship between the crypto community and policymakers, not just in the U.S. but in the global setting in which this technology exists? For that we’ve brought in Marvin Ammori, the chief legal officer for the decentralized exchange protocol, Uniswap. Not only does that role give Marvin a solid foot in the crypto community’s regulatory concerns, but we think his past influential work for the internet tech industry developing a common framework for net neutrality laws comes with real lessons on how to do these things right. And as an influential activist for digital civil rights, the questions here of privacy and digital autonomy are right in his wheelhouse.Image credit: Nathan Anderson/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.

Join Michael Casey and Sheila Warren as they speak with Matthew Davie the Chief Strategy Officer of Kiva and Alpen Sheth Senior Technologist of Blockchain at Mercy Corps. It's Finally 2021, the year we all were promised. Even though the calendar has turned, the world is still on a wild ride. So today we go back to the fundamentals.They call it the charitable-industrial complex: a system where money for development, for humanitarian needs, and for improving the lives of billions is controlled through a top-down process, run by U.S. charities and shaped by U.S. tax rules and regulations.The first Money Reimagined podcast episode of 2021 dives into the problems this creates. Can we get away from this top-down, centralized system to build a bottom-up model that empowers the people charities are trying to help? And will the decentralizing power of crypto and blockchain technology play a meaningful role?In this episode we dig into the "why" of this empowering new technology. What's the point? And more importantly, who is it for?“Reimagining money isn’t about money at all but more about the complexity of the systems surrounding it. [...]The exciting part about Crypto is that it has the potential to be a partial fix for the problems of exclusion plaguing our financial system” said Sheila Warren.According to Matthew Davie, “There is a gap between the informal sector and the formal sector, and you can’t build a bridge without figuring out how to solve that problem. So, we came at this from the system side saying we need verifiable identity and how do we do that?” “What we find is that the unbanked are just too broad of a category to comprehend so it has to be broken down. There [are] substantial gender inequalit[ies]. Whether its device ownership, around participation in the economy, around disasters... People are just stuck underneath layers and layers of intermediaries to just do basic activities” said Alpen ShethAbout our guests:Matthew Davie @KIVA focuses on long term strategic initiatives to help drive systemic financial inclusion for the world’s most venerable populations. He oversees corporate strategy, emerging technology development, and policy and regulatory engagements.Alpen Sheth, PhD, is Senior Technologist, Blockchain, at Mercy Corps. a blockchain advisor for companies in the insurance, identity, and energy sectors. Previously, he co-founded the Economic Space Agency, a blockchain R&D startup, and later became the Head of Product at etherisc.com, an insurtech company, creating smart-contract based applications in several different countries See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Join Michael Casey and Sheila Warren as they speak with tech ethnographer Tricia Wang and metaMe CEO Dele Atanda, as they dig into social media privacy and the value of personal data. For the first time since the “Internet 2.0” era began at the turn of the millennium, the dominant social media, search and e-commerce platforms are facing existential challenges. The disruption could come from legal efforts as anti-monopoly lawsuits evolve in both the U.S. and Europe. Or it could come via some nascent alternatives to the platforms’ centralized model, including from blockchain-inspired startups. Wang, who joined us on this week’s episode of the “Money Reimagined” podcast, says these responses won’t lead to a meaningful alternative until we gain a better appreciation of the role data plays in our internet interactions. Data, she says, “is not just information. Data is relationships.”The algorithms of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others place the greatest value not in static, simple information points like your name, address and income, but data that reveals your relationships with other people. That matters, Wang says, because the story of those connections is equally important to humans because it is our connections to others that describe who we are. The imbalance is not just that ad dollars flow to Facebook and Google rather than to the users who generate the content and build the audiences the platforms and their advertisers monetize. It’s that, as detailed in Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, we are trapped in an ever-tightening feedback loop in which these companies use our data to modify our behavior. There’s a scary Matrix-like aspect to all this. It’s why the other guest on this week’s podcast, metaMe CEO Dele Atanda, views his company’s work building a more decentralized, blockchain-powered data marketplace as an exercise in protecting people’s human rights. Creating that marketplace and figuring out a meaningful expression of the value of people’s data is how we will ultimately restore agency over our digital lives, he says. “We need to create a unit of account that we can measure – not just on the basis of size [as bytes] but on the basis of sensitivity, identifiability. These issues are central to how this information can be used to help or harm us,” he said. Also important, Atanda says, is the governance structure of the database storing the information, which speaks to the role to be played by blockchain. The more “permissionless” and decentralized the architecture behind the data marketplace, the more confident individuals can be that the rights to their data are protected. All of this seems pertinent in a week in which society was once again found vulnerable to data failures at centralized systems. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.