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The Wolf Of All Streets
The Biggest Financial Shift Since Bitcoin Is Happening & NO ONE Is Paying Attention! Dante Disparte
01:00:26
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- [00:00]
Scott
What if the biggest financial shift of our lifetime isn't bitcoin, but the dollar itself? Moving onto the Internet today, stablecoins are no longer a crypto experiment. They're being used by banks, governments, payment giants, and millions of people worldwide just to survive inflation, move money instantly, and.
- [00:19]
Operate outside broken systems.
- [00:22]
In this episode, we're breaking down why stablecoins became the killer app of crypto.
- [00:27]
Dante Desparte
Did the world just finally catch up to what was always a killer app and killer innovation in crypto, which is stablecoins.
- [00:33]
Scott
How US Regulation just changed the global financial game?
- [00:37]
Dante Desparte
The more regulated stablecoins are treated as a modernization of electronic money. This is a payment framework and a banking framework the whole world understands. And the genius act now captures that understanding in the United States and encourages this Cambrian explosion of activity.
- [00:53]
Scott
And why every major institution is now racing to build or plug into this new Internet of money.
- [00:59]
Dante Desparte
Every household name banking institution, payment institution are trying to effectively determine what is their stablecoin strategy. Build, buyer, partner, plug into existing networks. And so that type of rapid prototyping is to be expected once you get legal clarity. And so we encourage it.
- [01:15]
Scott
Joining me is my friend Dante Desparte, one of the most influential voices behind stablecoin policy, regulation, and global adoption. If you want to understand where money is actually going next and why this moment is bigger than most people realize.
- [01:28]
You don't want to miss this conversation.
- [01:31]
Dante Desparte
That's dope. That's dope.
- [01:46]
Scott
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- [03:10]
Dante, do you watch Stranger Things at all?
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Dante Desparte
I do.
- [03:13]
Scott
So I feel like 2025 for the crypto industry and specifically for stablecoin issuers has been the Upside Down. Or maybe, maybe, maybe we were living in the Upside down before finally back to reality. I mean, maybe start to walk us through just generally where we're at right now versus where we were a year ago, or dare I say two years ago. When we've had previous conversations, it seems like a completely and entirely different environment.
- [03:41]
Dante Desparte
Well, look, first of all, it is great to see you, Scott, and great to be back on. I know this one took a while. I feel like I need it in all of us. Us needed to have an entire calendar year devoted for stablecoins for me to earn my seat back on. Back on your program?
- [03:55]
Scott
No, we're just really bad at scheduling, but.
- [03:57]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or, you know, the scheduling roulette didn't work out in our favor. Yeah, I mean, are we in the Upside down and a good, good Stranger Things reference, or did the world just finally catch up to what was always a killer app and killer innovation in crypto, which is stablecoins. And so in so many ways, 2025 was an incredibly vindicating year. I mean, fascinating in that the opening act, you saw just an extraordinary amount of momentum coming from the White House and from the appointment of David Sacks, the country's first AI and crypto czar, to executive orders to advance legislation and policy, to that call to action being met on a very deeply bipartisan basis in Congress. And then fundamentally, on July 18, the passage of the Genius Act. It's a milestone in some ways. It also completes my LIBRA to circle journey in that we now have a set of legal criteria and legal standards for stablecoins to be treated as an electronic money form on the Internet, which is exceptional. So it's been an extraordinary year. But at the same time, Scott, you've rightly pointed out the upside down part, which is that all of a sudden every household name banking institution, payment institution, credit union and beyond are trying to effectively determine what is their stablecoin strategy. Build buyer, partner, plug into existing networks. And so that type of rapid prototyping is to be expected once you get legal clarity. And so we encourage it.
- [05:29]
Scott
Build buyer partner. I like that. Well, it's funny because it aligns with something I've been sort of kicking around, I guess on my own shows, which is that you see this just Cambrian explosion, as you said of stablecoin news. And every single bank now has to formulate a stablecoin plan. And it does seem like there's a bifurcation. It's either partner with somebody and this isn't even just in stablecoins banks partnering with Coinbase for various reasons to offer crypto services, but it's either get to market very quickly by using something that already exists and perhaps I guess punting some of the upside, or deciding to build it completely and entirely yourself. So is there a model that you favor? Yeah.
- [06:14]
Dante Desparte
Listen to me, listen to me very carefully. This is where the part of the podcast where I get to deliver a psa. I'm ready, sort of you ready for the psa. And I'm one of the godfathers of the mother of all vanity stablecoin projects. You may recall the first time I was on, I was with Libra. And in some ways, in hindsight, Libra in many respects was a catalyst of a lot of the wave of innovations and regulation and policymaking that we've seen around the world. But in some ways why it was so universally disliked and feared is because it was a so called vanity coin project. It was very, very hard for the world to see it as distinct from Facebook back then. And that scared people. And so I would just my cautionary comment to the world now that people have looked at stablecoins as the most interesting technology in 2025, rivaled only by AI, is number one with technology. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. For example, if you were interested in prototyping AI, you wouldn't go build a proprietary data center. You'd be very well served in using the tools that are out there and let the market then have its standards warp. And so when I see a wave of companies being interested in launching white labeled stablecoins or bootstrapping stablecoins from scratch, it sort of ignores the full purpose of this innovation, which is to build network effects and to treat the underlying infrastructure of the stablecoin as veritable shareware. And so our view is it's better to partner with existing stablecoins because you build in their liquidity, their circulation, the millions of wallets that Support that stablecoin versus launching a de novo one. And history so far has proven that out. Many white labeled stablecoins look like monetary airline miles. They're on closed networks, as opposed to something you and I would use as a digital dollar or digital currency at world scale. I think there's some cautionary words to say about that. And so I'm glad you teed that up.
- [08:12]
Scott
Yeah.
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On top of that, I would imagine that even if you can grow one to a significant size, it might not at all be interoperable with the rest of the market. Right. So what's the point of building your own private stablecoin if it can't port from chain to chain or from institution to institution, or government to government.
- [08:31]
Dante Desparte
Right. And, well, and therein lies, I think, the other interesting piece of the puzzle. I loved your Stranger Things reference. So if we are in fact in the Upside down, obviously we're facing blockchain wars. There's wallet wars, there's exchange wars, there's stablecoin wars, there's banking versus non banking and debanking and all kinds of challenges. And what I think we need to land at is that for this Internet of value, or what Jeremy likes to call this Internet financial system, truly emerge, is that it is fundamentally a set of convergence technologies that we need to bring to bear here. And instead of having people fighting standards wars and digital money like Blu Ray and DVD in terms of content, we need to figure out how to build true interoperability layers so that there's connectivity from the wallet to the chain, to the exchange, to the bank and to the broader banking system. And that all throughout, there's a couple of, in my mind, core principles that are unmovable. The presumption of privacy, the notion of fungibility and utility in the real economy and the real systems. And then fundamentally, last but not least, that the whole infrastructure has to be constantly upgradable. I mean, I think those are the fights to fight. And a lot has been proven in that domain as well in 2025.
- [09:46]
Scott
So obviously you talked about the Genius act passing in July. I think that was clearly the largest catalyst that we've had for arguably the crypto industry as a whole, beyond even just stablecoins. Now that we're five months removed from that, what would you say have been the biggest lessons that you've learned? Or what do you think we've accomplished? What's still to be done? I guess I'm just trying to understand where we might be in the timeline now that we have basically full clarity on Most things we'll get into some of the things that might still be hotly debated.
- [10:23]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, I mean, well, First Genius was an extraordinary milestone. And I've tried to make sure that not just domestically, but globally, that the world understands the Genius act as a durable piece of bipartisan legislation. 108 Democrats locked arms with their Republican counterparts. And the will of the people effectively was that stablecoins have a floor, that stablecoins become the American answer to competing and eventually winning this so called digital currency space race. And that critically, although the Genius act is an unequivocal America first law, it's not an America alone law. And I think that part is really, really important to share that the law endows our Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant, with the ability to seek out regulatory reciprocity and other jurisdictions around the world, which is really important because I never thought that in all my career in uploading dollars onto the Internet, Scott, that part of what I would have to explain to international counterparties, you and I last saw each other in Paris, is that you should not fear the growth and the advent of the Genius act because it's actually a very heavy handed, very restrictive regulatory regime that actually. So much so that if a bank wanted to launch a stablecoin under the Genius act, it would have to look more like a Circle and less like a bank, which means you have to segregate funds. You can't take risk. It's designed to really ensure that every stablecoin that references the dollar has the same exact standards that underpin that, including on financial crime compliance. And so in that way, it's a really novel law. And it's the first time the United States has a federal charter for effectively payment systems activity, which is why you've seen this total explosion in companies including PayPal, filing to become a bank. And so isn't it ironic that the future of money in banking might be banking? Because there's this. We went from an extinction level event set of risks in banking in America to now banks in America are back in business and filing for these novel charters with the controller of the currency, the occ.
- [12:26]
Scott
Well, Circle just received conditional approval from the OCC for a national trust charter. So you're also in that race. What does that mean exactly? And what does that look like?
- [12:36]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, I mean, for us, we as a company, in fact, very long before the Genius act, when I had joined the company, and frankly, all the way back to our founding, Jeremy Allaire, had this vision of becoming the country's first national digital currency bank. If you will. And that was always in the archives of our company's thinking. And when the laws around the world allowed us to race to the top in terms of the activity underpinning USDC and stablecoins more generally. But, but also our broader infrastructure, we're always happy to be first in line. We did it in Europe with the Markets and crypto Assets framework. We were the first major company to be licensed out of France. And we have passported not just usdc, but we run the largest euro stablecoin in the world. Just recently President Macron gave a wrote an op ed in which he suggested that the growth of euro stablecoins and a future potential digital euro from the central bank could coexist. And that is the most important political signal we've heard from Europeans yet on this innovation economy. And now in the United States with the Genius act. The OCC charter is exactly that. It's an upgrade of a framework that gives us a national seal of approval. It would stand to reason that we would want to be first in line to get that charter with the occ. And the good news is when the OCC announced this wave of conditional charters, circle was not alone. Which should suggest to the listener that we're now creating a competitive environment for dollars on the Internet and a competitive environment for this ecosystem. And all of it should, should ensure greater degrees of trust and safety not just for stablecoins but for digital assets more generally.
- [14:14]
Scott
Well, what does it mean to be a national trust versus a bank? I know there's various things that each can and cannot do. I think it's probably very confusing to the layperson. So what does this actually open up and unlock for you? What can you do that you couldn't do before?
- [14:30]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, I mean for one, a trust charter and the national trust banking system is a cornerstone of the American banking system. You know, there might be, you know, don't quote me on the math, but 50 or 60 or so nationally chartered trust banks that collectively custody and provide safekeeping for more than $5 trillion of assets in the American economy. But their function is very distinct from the function of a full fledged bank. The role of a bank is to create lending, credit, payment activity and very broad set of banking and payment activity of course live under banks and banks are cornerstones of the real economy. Our business model has been built in partnership with banks as opposed to in contest with banks. But the idea of putting stablecoin activity in a trust versus a full fledged bank is critical because the law as passed by Congress says a stablecoin issuer cannot rehypothecate reserves, cannot take risks with reserves, cannot lend against the reserves. And we have seen, Scott, you and I have spoken about it before. Stable and name only coins Terra Luna famously and spectacularly blowing up.
- [15:38]
Scott
But it was algorithmic.
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Dante Desparte
Yeah, I know. And you know, if it's a science experiment to hold its power to its parity to the A dollar, then it probably isn't a dollar. And so it stands to reason that the Genius act is setting up a framework that would hold those restrictions constant. The other really important thing is America is this novel country in that the states are the laboratories of democracy and banking and payments innovation. The Genius act protects that too and sets a floor for state based oversight of stablecoin issuance in the future subject to that same standard. And at 10 billion and up you graduate to a federal charter. That's why Circle again would be a Genius compliant on the basis of getting this conditional approval from the occ. And so the law is a very, very durable law. There's a lot of morning after regret and protestations that you hear about in the media about stablecoins will lead to a flight of deposits and all of these other issues. But I would just argue that the risks are different and that the restrictions on a stablecoin issuer are more restrictive than the issuer than, than the balance sheet of a bank. And we should respect that as a part of what this innovation represents for the country and for its users.
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Scott
Yeah, I think they're just crying because there's something better and there's nothing they can do about it. But I don't know if you're allowed to comment on that.
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It seems like a bank wouldn't want.
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Somebody to offer stablecoin yield because why would you go to their bank where they get no yield and they're keeping all of the yield as their business model? I don't know.
- [17:07]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, the funny thing is I've literally done a world tour of debating with big banks. One of them in the Singapore fintech Festival had several thousand people in the physical audience and many more have seen it online. And so I'm all in on taking a big debate whether it's stablecoins versus CBDCs or stablecoins versus deposit tokens. I think where we are today is a yes, end world one in which you could argue for the coexistence of these different types of products, but you must fundamentally acknowledge their design differences. A stablecoin by USDC and Circle's operating standards that are now the legal Requirement under the GENIUS act, there is no more transparent or safe dollar based payment instrument on the entire planet. It's cash and US Treasuries. And if you don't want to take Maya and Jeremy Allaire and other leaders words for it on crypto Twitter, which would be a teachable moment in failing the Jerry Maguire test based on Terra Luna as just one example, you can go to USDC or USDXX.com and see the serial numbers of every treasury comprising USDC. You cannot do that even for heavily regulated payments companies, let alone banks. And that's the point. The activity is different and so the regulatory framework should fit the activity and not try to corner the activity into a regulatory framework that is unfit. We have bank guarantee insurance like the FDIC and a public backstop for banking in the event that the banks fail. Very distinct regulatory proposition because they have very distinct risks.
- [18:42]
Scott
And FDIC is now announcing or has announced or is working on a framework that tells banks how they can then issue their own stablecoin. So obviously the regulators are scrambling to figure this all out themselves.
- [18:57]
Dante Desparte
Well, it's a good thing though, right? Congress has given federal banking regulators a period of time in which they have to go through the rulemaking process. And so the Treasury Department, the occ, the FDIC and the entirety of the Alphabet soup that comprise America's banking regulators are busy at work adapting the rule books to suit this novel activity. We're encouraging that. Remember, one of the things that led to the systemic debanking of the sector was that the banking guidance in the early days was cryptic, no pun intended. Right? It wasn't clear that you could bank digital assets. Even the cash leg of digital assets was problematic. It wasn't clear that you could bank the NFT economy and the cash lay corresponding to that. And so I think what our banking regulators have done, and they should all be commended for it, is try to create a level playing field. They're even removing things like the requirement of reputational risk and things like this that are a little amorphous, but have historically given banks the occasion and the opportunity of choosing who they bank and who they who they not bank. And I think that type of insidious background work is now gone. And now we have an opportunity to uplevel the entirety of the American banking system, including trust charters.
- [20:12]
Scott
I mean, with that in mind, we obviously all know about operation choke point 2.0. Would you say that that is officially over or do you feel like there are some leftover vestiges of that that are still worth being concerned about, because the thing like reputational risk that you've mentioned, those were the, like you said, that's kind of give an inch, take a mile. They would just use these little things as an excuse to not interact with the industry at all.
- [20:34]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, I think, I think first of all, that era is over and the, the work we did, you know, a lot of people want to celebrate and lionize themselves on crypto Twitter, but a lot of the ways I think the policy environment has changed is actually quiet work. You know the old expression money talks, wealth whispers. Well, I add power is silent. And what we tried to do in that phase, because you'll recall, Scott, you know, several years ago, we had to protect a fully reserved stablecoin from failures in the banking system. When SVB Signature and Silvergate collapsed successively, our company had to navigate not just a flight from safety or flight to safety domestically, we also had to navigate rebanking the sector by rebanking ourselves. And that was done again in partnership with the banks, but also ensuring that we provided very deep education to the banking regulators in the US and around the world, including the Fed and all of the primary regulators, about the merits of blockchain based financial services, the safety and soundness issues with stablecoins and how to design an appropriate model. I think the capstone to that is the Genius act, and the capstone to that at the policy level is the type of guidance we're seeing from our new leadership of the banking system in the United States.
- [21:51]
Scott
There's so much irony to the fact that one could argue one of the biggest risks to stablecoins is that they have to keep some of the money in a bank. Right. And that's been pointed out especially in Europe under MICA regulation. Right. Which is different than the Genius act, but there's different requirements all over the world. But the very fact that you could worry about the money that you're keeping in a fractionally reserved bank as the problem is pretty ironic.
- [22:15]
Dante Desparte
It is ironic. And you know, look, I've conveyed that very irony to European counterparts. We're a global company, as you know, Scott, not only have we been licensed in the US from sea to shining sea, as we wax a little patriotic and, you know, address this fintech federalism that we have in the United States, we're also very heavily regulated globally. And in many cases the first we have this concept of regulatory product market fit. And so when the Europeans passed mica, a part of what they put into the law was a series of protections, presuming that the Type of category company that would compete in digital money would be a big tech company like Libra. And so Libra was an accelerant of Mica. But as a result, Mica still left in it some vestiges of how to protect the European banking system and payment system system from a foreign takeover of a big tech project. Well, it turns out the market today is middle tech and the market today in Europe is heavily competitive. I've even signaled that Mario Draghi, who has called for European competitiveness, that Mika would pass his test. Today there's 17 companies that are all regulated stablecoin issuers across Europe. Banks, non banks, domestic and international companies like Circle are all competing against the level playing field. But you're spot on. There's a potential set of critical flaws in Mica, and one of them is the prescription that you have to hold reserves in the banking system at either 30 or 60% depending on your scale. And that wouldn't necessarily age well in a crisis in banking like we saw here in the United States.
- [23:53]
Scott
Not all banks have been huge fans of the genius act, right? The banking lobby has seemingly gone to bat on the idea of yield, which also was kind of the last obstacle to getting it passed. If I, if I recall correctly, why are the banks so concerned with the yield aspect of stablecoins? I mean, maybe even for those who don't understand, you can explain where the yield from stablecoins comes from and how that could be passed on to the end user.
- [24:25]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, no, it's a very, very important point. So there have been, you know, I even wrote a long paper about it at the beginning of the year reflecting on what a year 2025 was. And in it I observed this concept of the hidden cost of gradualism. We wouldn't have put a person on the moon and we wouldn't have had all types of breakthrough innovations as a country. If our political message was fear. Imagine telling the very first people to take flight, don't do it, because the landing could kill you. We wouldn't have the aviation advantages we have today. And unfortunately for the seven years that I've been at this stuff, just stablecoins, the byline has been one of fear. And part of the fear was, well, gosh, if stablecoins get big, you would see a flight of deposits from the banking system. Gee, if stablecoins get big, you're going to destabilize fragile countries and dollarize their economies. Gee, if stablecoins get big, you're going to introduce systemic risk to banking. And the irony again, and again and again and again is that now we can see that the category is a category that goes and provides opportunity rather than risk once harnessed correctly and regulated correctly. And so part of what has informed the banking opposition to aspects of the Genius act, and frankly stablecoin yield is the concept that if somebody can get yield in the secondary market with a stablecoin that it must automatically be backed for the deposit base. Now our view is pretty clear. In Europe and in the United States, issuers cannot pay yield directly to coin holders. We've always taken that view because that not taking that view years ago would have turned a stablecoin into a commodity or a security as opposed to having the product be a payment innovation. However, the use of yield and the role of yield in secondary markets we think is critical. And one of the ways regulated stablecoins support yield is by remaining composable and programmable so that stablecoins remain usable widely in defi. Stablecoins become again the outbound chair of the cftc, Caroline Pham, who's off to Moonpay, has said, look, we want to use fully reserved payments stablecoins as collateral and capital markets. She's encouraging that at the CFTC because it's a risk management improvement, because it's instant, it's settled and it's fully reserved. And so this fear based approach in my view won't age well. And it's in some respects anti American to be afraid of everything, including introducing rules based competition and banking and payments.
- [26:58]
Scott
Like as you talk, I remember how many huge announcements and crazy pieces of news we've had over the past few months lost in the news cycle because we're so used to this kind of news. I mean that CFTC news which was just in the last few weeks, that you can use Bitcoin, Ethereum and specifically USDC I believe as collateral in the system.
- [27:19]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, it's a huge, it's a huge improvement. And bear in mind what that does, Scott, is it starts to then hint at what, what is the next wave of developments we could anticipate. The more regulated stablecoins are treated as a modernization of electronic money. This is a payment framework and a banking framework the whole world understands. And the Genius act now captures that understanding in the United States and encourages this Cambrian explosion of activity. Then the more we'll also start to see stablecoins break out of merely being poker chips in a crypto casino. I've defended that casino in the Senate, in the House and over a very long career. But now they become a form of always on collateral and capital markets. And so you could look at the wave of announcements from the CFTC and, and Chairwoman Caroline Pham as just one example. You've seen announcements in Europe even with an announcement circle made with Euroclear on the use of euro denominated stablecoins in a similar capacity for Deutsche Bors, not Euroclear. Sorry for the correction there and then same with other projects around the world. And so I think that's an incredibly encouraging development which would show that digital assets, blockchain and stablecoins are converging, not competing with the traditional financial system, but converging with it and in so doing going places where money could not go if it was just analog and if it was just protected by the four walls of classical banks. The banks are benefiting through this innovation as much as frankly the non banks. And we have to figure out how to land the plane there and just promote rules based competition.
- [28:57]
Scott
There's been so many of these fear based stories about stablecoins, the imf, which I guess is an irony of its own, but the IMF recently put out a report that basically said that stablecoins could destabilize central banks around the world. And I kind of read it and I said good, but I'm a bitcoiner, right? But just another example of sort of this massive fear. Also, the kind of flip side of their paper as I read through it from the IMF was that it seemed like it could actually have a secondary effect which is that the Fed would effectively become the central bank to the entire world because we were exporting the dollar everywhere.
- [29:41]
Dante Desparte
Well look, the funny thing is. So yes, I read that report with interest, I know many of the report's authors. But it also comes on the heels of an extraordinary fall IMF World bank meeting series. Extraordinary. So much so that they had Jeremy Lair was a guest on the main stage with Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF Managing Director, with Ajay Banga, the World Bank Managing Director, the head of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Umar Farooq, who's a dear friend but represents JP Morgan and its Payments division. And so I think it was the first time ever we had a forum of that nature with literal standing room only at one juncture. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central bank was looking down at this conversation from the mezzanine. It was the first time ever tokenization stablecoins. And the actual opportunity was discussed in a forum like that one. And as a capstone to that I actually recorded An IMF interview for their podcast on this very point. And what I loved about the discussion, despite the report potentially taking a little bit of a negative bent, is that it's the first time the international community is acknowledging the opportunity this innovation represents as opposed to the risks. And I think if we get that far, and it only took seven years and it took all of the journey that we have carried out, I think it's still an extraordinary policy accomplishment to see the change of tone from these critical international bodies.
- [31:07]
Scott
It's so true because it was positioned as a risk that they were pointing out, but it was basically capitulating and saying that stablecoins will have eaten the world at that point, because that can't happen unless stablecoins are so popular and have proliferated so far that it would be a concern.
- [31:23]
Dante Desparte
Well, look, and I've spent an extraordinary amount of time with central bank governors. It's actually my idea of fun. SCOTT so there's a couple of just generally important points. I mean, the first is by a stablecoin standard, very few currencies in the world would be great candidates to be stable coins, either because they lack liquidity or because in the most extreme cases they might be not worth the paper they're printed on.
- [31:50]
Scott
Right?
- [31:51]
Dante Desparte
Hyperinflationary currencies are proof points. But isn't it also ironic that despite crypto's original promise of becoming a form of totally self sovereign money that would be independent, it would democratize access to financial services, that the most successful products in crypto all anchor to the US dollar, all are built on the backs of the American payments and banking system and the broader U.S. economy. And so I have always thought of this as an extension of banking and payments and as a model of financial innovation that could be responsive to public policy objectives and not necessarily compete with them? And the companies that have ignored that, many have failed, many have faced sanction, censure, fines and worse, but all of them now have a chance to accrue their activities to a US standard. And yes, if America wins the digital currency space race, it should not come at other countries expense. And so what we're trying to argue for and what we see of a lot of jurisdictions around the world is them building rules for digital assets and stablecoins and crypto, but also them trying to encourage national champions to compete in this market. And so it isn't clear to me that the rise of stablecoins equates to the dollarization of fragile economies. If anything, I think of this as a pathway of Ensuring that there's more interoperability, faster effects and faster conversion, the more you start to see compatible companies and currencies represented in this new Internet financial system.
- [33:18]
Scott
And regardless of the effects on the central bank or the institutions, it's good for the people 100%.
- [33:25]
Dante Desparte
You know, and like one of my very, very dear friends who runs the Geoeconomic center at the Atlantic Council, he and I have had a multi year debate about central bank digital currencies versus stablecoins. And in the end, optionality should be the point. If you want a nationally competitive payment system in a globally competitive currency, you want optionality around that, including whether a central bank wants to upgrade wholesale intra bank settlement. It should be within their rights to have those upgrades. That's why President Macron's recent statements are important, because it's the first time a western country world leader uses the word. And in describing CBDCs and stablecoins, he says, and euro denominated stablecoins can coexist. That should be the model. We should have broad payment systems, optionality, broad interoperability in these systems, and broad rules based competition. Can you imagine what aviation would look like if the FAA flew planes and built jet engines versus encouraging rules based competition? I shudder to think.
- [34:29]
Scott
I don't think there's any question that we've landed on a superior system to what you just described. And when I talk about being better for the people, listen. I have an American friend who moved to Argentina years ago, before stablecoins were wildly popular, and used to tell me stories about how he would get paid and the money would be wired into his account, and he would take the money out of his bank account in Argentina, go into the streets, convert it to cash in dollars, right? Pay this huge premium exchange rate on the black market, and then go back to the very same bank that he had taken the withdrawal from and put the money back in the bank, but in a safe deposit box, not in his account, like in cash. Right? That's how people in Argentina used to protect their money. Go buy US Dollars and go to the bank, but not because you trusted the bank, but because they had a safety deposit box that someone wouldn't be able to break into. Now he uses stablecoins.
- [35:19]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, well, and look, therein lies one of many sides of the human side of the equation. And one of the things that I found most frustrating of, you know, the seven year journey to get to the Genius act was that oftentimes the members of Congress and the senators who were interrogating me and interrogating Jeremy, and interrogating the business model and the human value of the business model, they often ignored that exact last mile example that you described, Scott, which is that one person's dollar based stablecoin that they use for crypto trading is genuinely another person's access to a dollar based system that is a solution to hyperinflationary domestic currencies or a potentially extractive or adversarial banking system that might seize the assets from them. I think one of the better examples of the superpowers of a stablecoin was projects we led in Venezuela at the height of the pandemic where we dispersed USDC to a network of more than 60,000 doctors across the country. And of course the project in Ukraine at the exact peak of the Ukrainian, of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the war, we were able to use USDC as the digital dollar that could reach these types of very vulnerable stakeholders. And it's only in those really extreme examples that you either realize where the existing financial system is falling short or you realize what a potentially exponential opportunity rules based stablecoins and the corresponding value chain that they carry can introduce. And so extraordinarily powerful use cases. But at the same time, you know, Javier Milei's government and the government here in the United States have great proximity and there would be an opportunity in my mind to create nothing short of a US Argentina trade and investment corridor powered by stablecoins, powered by domestically fungible digital wallet infrastructure that could actually lift up opportunities in Argentina as opposed to subject people in the country to every decade having a currency crisis, a debt crisis and capital controls being imposed as a yoke to effectively strain people in a stranded economic model. Getting it right could lift all ships.
- [37:33]
Scott
Yeah, I mean, I say it with no hyperbole. It's literally saving people's lives. Like access to stablecoins is saving people's lives who otherwise would not be able to afford basic living expenses, food in their hyperinflating currency. Now they have an option.
- [37:46]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [37:50]
Scott
I mean, it's wild. How do you frame all of this? So listen, as a bitcoin guy, you know, I'm a stablecoin guy too, so you know, why not both?
- [37:58]
Like the little meme, Bitcoiners always believed.
- [38:02]
I think, that there was going to.
- [38:04]
Be a world which maybe there still.
- [38:05]
Will be though, that people who use Stablecoins in the way that I just described would have been using Bitcoin as their hedge against the local inflation or as a currency peer to peer. How do you Kind of frame the advances in Stablecoins obviously, as the killer use case for the very same technology created by Bitcoin. The push and pull between Bitcoin, I guess, and Stablecoins.
- [38:29]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, I mean it's sort of, you know, as you could probably gauge, Scott, I've become a little bit more pragmatic in my old age. Something about getting a law across the finish line and the sense of either accomplishment or emptiness when you no longer are chasing something that felt so improbable has made me more pragmatic. And that if we couldn't have had blockchains without the Internet and we couldn't have had any of the work that has happened in digital assets and crypto without the breakthrough that is Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain, we have to acknowledge that each of these successive waves of innovation is built on the backs of the other as opposed to in contest with the other. And isn't it ironic that if crypto was going to democratize access to finance and banking and that banks would become irrelevant and Wall street would become irrelevant? Isn't it ironic that the things that we have been recognizing and celebrating the most is institutional adoption.
- [39:25]
Scott
It is.
- [39:26]
Dante Desparte
And so if we were genuinely as a royal we an anti establishment sector, we wouldn't celebrate nor lionize Bitcoin ETFs. We wouldn't celebrate or lionize JP Morgan, Coin or any of these types of developments. But what we should all acknowledge is that every single one of those developments, none more so than the genius act now have enshrined in law and in permanence open source blockchain. The open source fight to me was the boss fight. Anybody could upload a dollar on the Internet, but for the dollar on the Internet to really reach the billions of potential end users and support the trillions in potential unlocked use cases that wouldn't be be possible by today's banking standards. The boss fight was always open versus closed systems. And I think there we unequivocally won, not just with the genius act, but in mica. Because both sets of laws on both sides of the Atlantic do not stigmatize the use of open source blockchain infrastructure and financial services. Game, set, match, everything that happens from here on. The limitation is our imagination and the limitation is the degrees to which the sector and the proclivities in the crypto sector to crypto is going to crypto to not blow it up again, it's on us. And so we now have a permanent pathway for world scale use. Institutional use of this open infrastructure. And to that we pay homage to the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and the bitcoin ecosystem. And we have to pay deep homage to the role that stablecoins have played in solving one of the original sins of crypto, which was hypervolatility and one of the perennial problems in crypto, which is excessive risk taking and financial alchemy.
- [41:08]
Scott
So we talked about interoperability before, how obviously there's a challenge to having a stablecoin live on multiple chains and then having multiple stablecoins all be interoperable with one another. Circle has announced, obviously that you are launching your own L1 layer one blockchain ark. What's the thinking behind that decision? Obviously USDC is deployed across multiple chains that exist now. Now launching your own.
- [41:37]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, very good question and as I had hopefully said in my somewhat philosophical responses about open systems is it is a genuine hill to die on. And I think very few companies have paid as much on the battlefield as we have in terms of keeping that fight real and winning it at the same time. You know, we could also acknowledge as a company that the institutions that are still on the edge, be it the banks, the asset managers, the central banks, the public authorities and other institutions, are still looking to Circle to help navigate not just their stablecoin choices and their tokenized money choices, but they're also looking to us to be an abstraction layer, if you will, over the many choices that they would then have to make in the blockchain layer, in the digital wallet layer, and in the broader layers. And part of that is not based on technological trust, it's based on human trust. And so in it we are deeply and fully and permanently committed to the multi chain, what I like to call the omnichain environment, where to the extent the blockchains suit certain criteria of developer activity, security, resilience, etcetera, etcetera. Then we will instantiate USDC natively on those blockchains. And EURC and our tokenized money market fund, usyc, which is the second largest in the world, will all be a part of Circle's tokenized money offering. We also have an offering with Ark being an economic operating system for activity on the Internet, bigger than payments and bigger than stablecoins alone, we think as critical infrastructure that could also meet that institutional moment. But we also have the Circle payments network, which is another piece of critical infrastructure we're making available, true to the open standards I described earlier, but designed to effectively serve as an orchestration and coordination layer for global Cross border tokenized money movement, be it with USDC or other stablecoins. And so in that sense, Circle's bigger than an issuer of stablecoins. Scott we are very much at the core of this Internet financial system for which tokenized money is a pillar, the Circle payments network is a pillar and ARC is a pillar. And we think of ARK as this foundational layer that caters to a broad set of economic operating systems for the Internet and supporting broad forms of value, not just stablecoins and not just payments can be can be addressed with ark.
- [43:59]
Scott
I think when you zoom out and think about the actual user experience of a stablecoin, it's my feeling that the end game, or at least when you know you've really won and have reached widespread adoption is when somebody using a stablecoin grandma we always love to reference grandma just thinks she's sending a dollar from one person to another through a very familiar interface and has no idea if it's usdc, another stablecoin, what chain it's on. It just works.
- [44:28]
Dante Desparte
It just works.
- [44:28]
Scott
I mean, is that really where we're headed and how far are we from that? I deeply believe that nobody at the end of the day wants to decide what coin to send and on which chain. Listen, I get confused when I'm trying to move stable coins and I have to choose a network.
- [44:45]
Dante Desparte
You're spot on. While it is true that not all stablecoins are created equal and you would have regretted a potential choice had you swapped out your USDC for a Stable and name only coin like Terra Luna once upon a time, it is also true that in the future the blockchain and the crypto and the stablecoin part of the Internet of value has to fade to the background. When was the last time you had a conversation about the hardware and the software that make the Internet work? It's been a while and so I still think we're in that tech adoption curve and that transition to the infrastructure layer serving as background infrastructure and the technology just really working. I think that's the point in time that is upon us next. Scott and a lot of the reason why Circle is also trying to build out and optimize the infrastructure and the technology side of our platform is to ensure that USDC is a builder first innovation so that fintechs can be built on USDC and with usdc, which is why we're guarding against people launching vanity stablecoins and white labeled stablecoins because we think you've got to port over to your network the liquidity, the banking and the access that USDC represents. But we also want to support the rest of the tech fading to the background. Part of this with wallet infrastructure, chain abstraction infrastructure and Ark, eventually also catering to that exact moment where your grandma can buy a instant cup of coffee for instant settlement and not have to worry about which crypto asset or which stablecoin was used for the settlement, but that the settlement was made.
- [46:16]
Scott
Yes, just double click the side of her iPhone and pushes it up to the thing and she has the coffee. I really do think that that's the necessary finish line for the technology. And I wonder, we kind of joked before that, you know, the crypto industry is going to crypto. We have more creative ways to shoot ourselves in the foot than any industry in the history of the world. Right. You keep referencing Luna. We obviously have ftx, lcs, Voyager. You can go down the long list. Do you think that now post genius act with so many people trying to launch stablecoins that we could see some unintended consequences, that some of these won't fade quietly into the distance, but could blow up in the spectacular fort that we're used to in this industry? Yeah, yeah.
- [47:03]
Dante Desparte
Well, it's funny, it's funny. I almost feel like I want to write either a book or a long paper on crypto risk. Because when risks rear their ugly head in crypto, they tend to happen in 36 hours and it tends to happen over a weekend. FTX spectacularly collapsed. Over a weekend, Terra Luna spectacularly collapsed. And it did so quickly. And frankly, on the one hand, you might say it's endemic to crypto and that it's the people in the sector that are always all about FOMO and fear of rug pulls and what have you. Or is it a feature of the technology that when a risk is about to occur, it's discoverable and you cannot discover risks in the traditional banking system. And I'll just give you one real world comparison. The Danish branch, sorry, the Latvian branch of the Danish bank Danske bank was implicated in a 200 plus billion dollar Russian money laundering scandal during the sanctions. And by the time the world found out, because of the opacity in the banking system and the lack of reporting and the lack of transparency, and we don't live in an always on nature in the traditional banking system. It took a long time for that risk to be discovered and by the time we discovered it, it was too late. And with crypto, by contrast, as we saw with tornado cash, the second something bad happens or the second A regulator makes an injunction where their fair or not, the whole world is armed with the same information at the same time. I think that can make for a really great improvement in risk management in the financial system as opposed to a source of permanent risk. Will things blow up? For sure. Will there be crime? Absolutely. Why do criminals rob banks? It's because where the money is. But what the Genius act does do and this law doesn't exist in payments. If the CEO and CFO of a stablecoin issuer misreport reserves, they get fined and they go to jail. Jail.
- [49:02]
Scott
It's a big deal.
- [49:03]
Dante Desparte
Go, go straight to jail. That's a standard for which there's the era of cryptographic counterfeit US dollars on the Internet is over with the Genius act. And we should all be encouraged by that because the products that really did blow up and hurt, not just Brand America and the US Dollar were in the stablecoin category. And I think that that change is a huge improvement in the market.
- [49:25]
Scott
Yeah, the industry as a whole obviously is still awaiting some more legislation that they view as key to securing the industry in the United States into the future. Obviously the Clarity act is the biggest one. On the stablecoin side though, do you feel like the Genius act was game, set, match? Is there anything left that we're looking for from the government on the stablecoin front?
- [49:47]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, I mean there might be some noise about reopening the Genius act and Genius act loopholes and all of the rest. My admonishment to anybody making that case is you're number one, ignoring the will of the people. Number two, you're ignoring the seven year development of the Genius act and all of its predecessor laws. We came really close many times, Scott, in getting stablecoin rules passed in America. And the Genius act is a byproduct of all of that collective energy and collective engagement from members of Congress and senators. 108 Democrats in an otherwise hyper partisan political environment locked arms on this bill. I joke twice in my career I've united Washington. Once in their unified hatred of Libra and second, me and others, not alone ensured that the Genius act was a bipartisan product. And so I don't think there's any political will to reopen it. And frankly, I don't think there's any regulatory necessity to do so because our agency, agencies and their leadership are doing really, really great work and taking into account the equities of the banks, the non banks, the states and the federal stakeholders. We do need clarity, however, and the secondary bill on market Structure is massively important because if you compare the United States to Europe, the European regulatory framework takes in stablecoins and broader crypto market activity, and America still has a regulatory gap. And so I hope we will get this done in the first quarter of the year, and I hope we'll get it done on an equally bipartisan basis as genius, so we can go confidently into the future as a country and as a sector and not squander more innovation and more opportunity to grow the U.S. economy.
- [51:28]
Scott
Yeah, I mean, the catchphrase of the day is tokenization or catchword. Right. I mean, that's been now all the rage. You heard Atkins, the chairman of the sec, talking about literally everything in the financial system being on blockchain rails within two years, which just blew my mind. And I thought that sounded crazy until I saw the DTC make the announcement that they had gotten a no action letter from the SEC and intended to be tokenizing almost everything by the end of 2026. So I would argue that stablecoins are the first iteration and best use case of real world assets on chain. Right. It really is just a tokenized real world asset. Where will they play a role in. In the tokenization of everything that now even the biggest institutions and government agencies are talking about?
- [52:15]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, it's a great question. Look, on the physical dollar bill, it says the words in God We Trust. And in the digital rendition of the dollar bill, you would say in code, we trust. And now we have a law that sets a standard so that people can no longer create crypto counterfeits of the US Dollar. At the same time, it is genuinely extreme, extraordinary to think. For example, Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein from BlackRock turned to the pages of the Economist and wrote an op ed heralding tokenization as an extraordinary technological breakthrough.
- [52:46]
Scott
He was talking about tokenization before he was talking about ETFs in their annual letter.
- [52:50]
Yeah, he's.
- [52:51]
Dante Desparte
An extraordinary, extraordinary moment. Now, as. As anybody who's been in this sector long enough, on the one hand, we will acknowledge the extraordinary institutional moment, because all along, the journey that crypto and stablecoins have to travel is a billions to trillions journey. I don't think our work is done until we're serving billions of people who have been underserved or unserved by the traditional financial system. And I don't think our work is done until trillions of dollars of economic activity can be supported in a safe and sound manner by these new technologies. That's why I've always felt this was a convergence technology as opposed to a disruptive technology like the Internet. And so the moment is real. I don't think there is a firm, an institution, a payments company, a bank, a domestic or foreign stakeholder who isn't concerned by stablecoins and tokenizations as a technology innovation. And the only thing that surpasses it is their interest in AI. But like the interest in AI, it would be a huge mistake to live in the extremes where it's either the Terminator movie or it's kind of clippy for Microsoft. I think the middle is where we will land in this sudden interest in tokenization. And people would be well served in looking at the stablecoin market dynamics to understand the end state if we talk about securities, commodities, capital markets and all of the rest.
- [54:11]
Scott
I've been actually shocked in a number of my conversations that I've had of late on how many people are quietly using stablecoins and what they're using them for. So I heard a. A podcast with the Collison brothers, I think, from Stripe, and I really had no idea that they were using USDC for most of their payments and settlements in the background, certainly on weekends and at night when the banking systems closed. I spoke recently with Johan from Robinhood. I had no idea that Robinhood was using stablecoins all the time for payments, cross borders, and to do all the things on the weekend that they couldn't do otherwise. I mean, is it like people are just saying the quiet part out loud now because it's okay because everybody is using these things and we're talking about huge businesses and institutions.
- [54:55]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, well, first, first say my name. They're not using all stablecoins, they're using usdc. They are in most cases.
- [55:05]
Scott
Both of those cases, certainly both are.
- [55:07]
Dante Desparte
Because in some cases what they're trying to build, when they're, quote, you know, using the anodyne or clinical term stablecoin is they're really building on USDC because of its inherited inherent liquidity, trust, ubiquity, circulation, the compliance layer, the trust layer that is superimposed by circle on top of all of it. These are hard things to recreate. It goes back to my AI analogy. You don't go buy a data center because you want to take advantage of AI as a company. With stablecoins, you'd be better served to build on an existing successful one like USDC that has regulatory clarity around the world and liquidity and trust around the world, rather than trying to bootstrap one from scratch. And so a lot of those projects that have been in the news and are gaining traction where they say we have a stablecoin strategy. It's built on usdc. Visa has said the quiet part out loud in its most recent communique this week in which it said Visa is using USDC to trial stablecoin payments for banks and intra bank payments. You have banks like Lead bank and Cross River Bank. And I think this is super important because what it shows with a Visa and banking institutions and Circle being in that same press cycle is it shows exactly what the point is of these innovations and these infrastructures and these networks. It's interoperability. All ships can rise. If you get the business models right versus this continuous debate of deposit tokens versus stablecoins versus CBDCs or open versus closed blockchains, you could have them both. But at least finally we're starting to actually name the product that is powering many of these products projects. And it's usdc.
- [56:42]
Scott
Yeah, they are both usdc, to be fair. So I should have been more specific.
- [56:46]
Dante Desparte
No, no, and by the way, by.
- [56:48]
Scott
The way, Johan also did say that.
- [56:50]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no indictment of you. It's just this broader message that if something happens in crypto, all of crypto has to atone for the something that happened. And in many cases the bad activities in the sector are named projects, named networks and named named people products. And it's like asking all banks to atone for the sins of a bad bank. We don't do that in banking. We should, we should name products by name in crypto. No indictment of you and no loss of love. But stablecoins is not a generic product. People are choosing USDC time and time again because it's the product that enjoys the greatest degrees of liquidity and regulatory trust.
- [57:25]
Scott
So I know we're running up against time. I have one kind of final thought that I wanted to briefly explore. Obviously a bulk of the revenue for Circle or comparable stablecoin comes from Treasuries. Right. So you benefit from high interest rates. If we know that interest rates are likely to come down, how do you handicap for that in your business moving forward? Like when we talk about the odds of rate cuts, we should just call the stablecoin guys and be like, what do you think? Because actually directly more than anybody else.
- [57:58]
Dante Desparte
Yeah, look, it's a good question. And so, you know, obviously I'm not in a great position to prognosticate what the central banks will do around the world, but, but the fact that there is such a linear relationship between monetary policy and the impact on regulated stable coins also proves that one of the other arguments and fears of stablecoins is unfounded, which is that if stable coins get big, they will undermine the role of central banks and central bank bank governance. Quite to the contrary, we're a deep, deep and almost near instant conveyor of U.S. policy. And if you get the stablecoin regulatory regime right, it will reflect the safety and soundness in the banking system and the central banking system more generally. That's why again, in the flight to safety, flight to quality debate, the dollar has been the winning currency on this battle on the Internet. All stablecoins that are successful reference the dollar to to varying degrees, but the dollar is the winning currency. Now, we as a country cannot continue doing ourselves a disservice in terms of trust in the American economy and trust in the US dollar. The United States has had more than 80 debt ceiling debates where we have effectively chosen to play a game of chicken with our economy in Congress. That's not a great operating model to build and protect the greatest currency in the world and the greatest economy in the world. The United States has also been slow to regulate this activity. Seven years to regulate stablecoins. Stablecoins are the easy part of crypto. And so I hope we learn some lessons and go into 26 and get market structure passed quickly, because gradualism is not a strategy when our country and our companies are competing with fierce opposition globally. And so I think of these innovations as very fast ways of conveying monetary policy, including interest rate changes, but very, very critical innovations that are going places where banking and payments cannot go if they remain analog.
- [59:48]
Scott
Dante, I think we nailed it. I'm sure there's a million other topics we could go into, but I want to be conscious of your time and the fact that it took us many, many months to finally get the schedule. I'm glad it did because it was even more interesting and compelling than I expected. It always is, man.
- [60:03]
Dante Desparte
Thank you, my friend. This was the year of stablecoins and I could have, I could think of no better conversation and better person to close out the year with than you. So thanks for having me on. Scott.
- [60:12]
Scott
Thank you so much, man. We'll have to do this again much sooner than the last gap.
- [60:17]
Dante Desparte
We're here. Thanks. Thank you.