Welcome to Axis Pro Radha, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak, and today we're going to devote the full show to just a single topic, the crypto craze.

So one week ago, the price of Bitcoin was around $9,500 per coin. Then by Tuesday afternoon,

it briefly soared above 14,000 per coin spurred by Facebook's Libra announcement. In fact,

things got so heated that a couple of crypto exchanges, including market leader Coinbase,

crashed yesterday, sending the price way down. And as of this taping, it's at around 11,600 per

coin, so kind of in the middle of the week's volatility. The rise and fall may have been driven

by retail investors, some trying to front run, others trying to pocket their winnings. But the

real story is how so many institutions, from big banks to credit card processors, to big name investment

firms, are finally coming around on the idea of cryptocurrencies as an inevitable and legitimate

part of the future global financial system, not just blockchain as a buzzword, but cryptocurrencies

as, well, currencies. The trouble, of course, is that no currency can be viable

with such pricing tumult, which is part of the idea behind Libra, which is a so-called stable

coin, initially pegged to a group of low volatility assets and kind of sort of backed by Facebook's

massive balance sheet. There's more centrality than crypto purists are comfortable with,

although Mark Zuckerberg

stressed yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival that Facebook is to be just one of 100 Libra consortium members

and that the ultimate Libra goal is to eventually become decentralized. In short, become so trusted

that it doesn't need a reserve, kind of like fiat currency. But Libra isn't the only

centralized crypto project announced over the past week. Another is called DeCentral, which basically

wants to become the crypto world's federal reserve. And not coincidentally, one of the people

involved with it is Stephen Moore, who recently was to be nominated by President Trump to join

...