Welcome back to the breakdown, Money Reimagined.

A special podcast micro series in the run-up to Consensus Distributed,

a free-to-attend virtual event from May 11 through the 15th, hosted by CoinDisc.

Money Reimagined is about the battle for the future of money in the post-COVID-19 world,

and it's a hell of a story.

This episode is sponsored by Aris X, the Stellar Development Foundation, and grayscale digital

large-cap fund.

Here's your host, NLW.

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

So on the first episode of this special money reimagined series,

we looked at the strange, almost schizophrenic narratives around the US dollar. On the one hand,

Money printer go burr. Massive stimulus and increasingly exotic forms of QE would suggest for future

inflation, right? On the other, however, in practice, the dollar has

gotten nothing but stronger and become even more in demand during the crisis. The goal of that

episode was to maybe piece through and figure out how these two things, how these two narratives

might not be mutually exclusive. On this episode, however, we are turning our attention,

and instead we'll be looking at the contenders in this battle for the future of money. These are

the insurgents that would replace the dollar in the global order, and in particular in this episode,

the insurgents who would replace it in an inside-the-system formal way.

So before we fully dive in, let's get some historical context from Neil Ferguson. He's a

historian and senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author of works like

The Ascent of Money. It wasn't always a foregone conclusion that the world would be organized around a single

...