Why ‘Crypto Dad’ Is Building the Digital Dollar Foundation

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As Libra continues to spur discussions among regulators around the world, and China’s digital yuan comes ever closer to fruition, the U.S. Federal Reserve seems disinclined to look seriously at a digital dollar. Ex-CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo - aka “Crypto Dad” - isn’t waiting around. He has teamed with Accenture to launch the nonprofit Digital Dollar Foundation. As crypto continues to evolve, it does so in sometimes divergent directions. Gemini announced a new insurance company designed to make big institutions more comfortable with the space. Zcash, meanwhile, released an updated SDK to make it easier to shield transactions via mobile. Can the privacy-preserving side of crypto co-exist, ultimately, with the sanguine institutional side? Finally, we revisit our discussion of personal tokens and ISAs, as well as look at the latest research from Coinmetrics on whether bitcoin is behaving like a safe haven asset.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.
0:15.0	The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. Welcome back to the Breakdown. It is Thursday, January 16th, and today we're going to be
0:25.1	trying something just a little bit different. I'm going to try organizing things into
0:30.3	segments that have a little bit clearer of a prompt just to see how you guys respond.
0:35.2	And so we're going to start off with what I think is the most important story of the day.
0:41.2	That's where we'll start.
0:43.1	Crypto Dad is back.
0:45.2	The former head of the Commodity Future Trading Commission, the CFTC, Christopher Giancarlo,
0:51.3	affectionately known in the crypto world as Crypto Dad,
0:54.1	has just announced a new project,
0:56.6	a new laboratory, a nonprofit lab, to build a digital dollar. Basically, Christopher Giancarlo
1:04.5	thinks that the dollar risks losing its role as the world's global reserve currency
1:09.0	in light of emergent digital currencies
1:11.8	such as the forthcoming digital yuan.
1:14.5	That's a major concern for him.
1:16.1	And rather than waiting around for the Federal Reserve to actually do something about this,
1:21.1	especially when they have indicated that they don't particularly see the need for a digital
1:25.6	dollar, they have teamed up with Accenture to
1:28.7	basically design and advocate for a U.S. Central Bank digital currency. So the project is going to be
1:35.5	called the Digital Dollar Foundation. As I said, Accenture will be providing a lot of the
1:40.2	architecture and technology development. But certainly the real story is that a major,
1:46.4	a significant former government official, right? Giancarlo's only been out for a little more
	...

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