This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 21st, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How might regulators make use of blockchain technology at the Cato Institute's conference

on cryptocurrency.

I spoke with Chris Jean Carlo, a commissioner on the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

We discussed how near instantaneous knowledge of a company's various positions would assist markets, but also might give regulators

more room to metal in private affairs.

What do you think is the biggest potential benefit of one of the innovations that Bitcoin has sort of introduced, which is distributed

blockchains.

Yeah.

I think it has tremendous benefits for the industry and the regulators who oversee the financial service industry.

And I'll start with the regulatory element.

In 2008, I was a senior executive of one of the world's largest trading platforms for credit default

swaps, an instrument that some people have said was at the epicenter of the financial crisis. I recall in the middle of September 2008 when there

was tremendous panic in the air and there was concern that some of the world's

largest banks were on the verge of collapse,

receiving a call from a Prudential Regulator asking about trading in the counterparty credit exposure of a number of key banking names

including Lehman Brothers and what was clear to me from that is that Prudential Regulators then had little options other than to call

around to broken floors to find out what was happening in the spreads and which is basically a predictive element as to financial health of a financial

institution.

Here we are now seven and a half years later in the spring of 2016 and I'm no longer an executive

in a broken firm, I'm now a U.S. Commissioner of the U.S. Commodity Futures Training Commission,

...