Carpe Consensus

This week on the Opinionated podcast, we welcome two Londoners: Lex Sokolin and Frances Coppola. 

Lex Sokolin is the global fintech co-head at ConsenSys, the Ethereum development studio, as well as a CoinDesk columnist. 

Lex discusses his recent piece How DeFi Can Avoid the Irrelevance of P2P Lending and Crowdfunding, where he compares DeFi to once-hot financial ideas, like equity crowdfunding.

He explores how DeFi can avoid the fate of those trends. DeFi has global scale, he says, a thoroughly open source nature that spurs innovation, and it offers built-in tokenized incentives for participation, among other advantages. 

“DeFi is displaying the evidence of traction with something between 500,000 and 1 million people using DeFi protocols,” Sokolin says. “There’s a magic in DeFi that wasn’t in P2P lending and crowdfunding.”

Frances Coppola is a veteran writer on banking, finance and economics and the author of “The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing.”

She discusses her recent opinion piece about the state of the banking system called “Banks Are Toast but Crypto Has Lost Its Soul.”

“The nature of the business is changing so fundamentally that what we think of as big banks and what they do will be very different in the future,” she tells us. 

But while some see stablecoins as a helpful way to move currencies around the world, Coppola believes that the industry has sold out its values by adopting fiat-backed coins like tether. 

“This game has been played from time immemorial. [It’s] creating fake things to represent real things. I think the fact that you put it on a blockchain makes any difference really,” she says.

Tune in to hear two bold thinkers with big ideas about the future of finance.

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Coinbase’s recent decision to take no position on political and social issues has divided the cryptocurrency industry. 

Some see it as a wise move in a no-win hyper-sensitive political environment. 

Others say CEO Brian Armstrong is tone-deaf to cultural forces sweeping the United States and the world. 

This week, the debate got material within Coinbase itself, with about 5% of employees choosing to quit and take a severance package, rather than work for a company with a crypto-only mission statement. 

This week on Opinionated – our new podcast featuring CoinDesk’s best columnists and contributors – we are joined by Jill Carlson and Emily Parker to discuss the Coinbase controversy and its meaning for the industry and Silicon Valley. 

Carlson is an investor with Slow Ventures and co-founder of the Open Money Initiative. 

She writes this week that Armstrong, far from creating an environment in which people can work free of distractions, is creating an environment where difficult issues remain unaddressed and people feel not-heard.

Carlson sees Coinbase’s stance cutting off useful debate. “The backlash against cancel culture is not manifesting as advocacy for dialogue, free speech, nuance and tolerance. Rather, the backlash is only driving discourse deeper underground, breeding an even more intense culture of fear and further entrenching intolerance,” she writes. 

Parker is CoinDesk’s Global Macro Editor. Her op-ed “Coinbase’s ‘Mission’ Violates the Spirit of Bitcoin” points to what she calls the hypocrisy of Armstrong going apolitical while espousing the values of Bitcoin (including economic freedom and censorship resistance). 

“Armstrong would like to have it both ways. He wants to be apolitical about the disruptions that make him uncomfortable, but political about Bitcoin’s mission to disrupt the world,” she writes. 

Join us for a lively discussion with two bold and original thinkers. 

Opinions featured in this week’s podcast:

Emily Parker – Coinbase’s ‘Mission’ Violates the Spirit of Bitcoin

Jill Carlson – Reading Between the Lines of Brian Armstrong’s Mission Memo

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Nic Carter discusses the $20 billion stablecoin phenomenon and its implications for the global financial system. 

Welcome to Opinionated, a new podcast featuring CoinDesk's leading columnists and contributors. I'm your host, Ben Schiller, CoinDesk's opinion editor.

On this week's show, we're joined by Nic Carter, cofounder of Coin Metrics and partner at Castle Island Ventures.

Nic discusses this year's $20 billion surge in USD-backed stablecoins (what he calls "crypto-dollars") and the potentially enormous implications of an offshore dollarization system based on blockchain.

Fiat-backed stablecoins are "not what Satoshi intended," Carter says, but their "preposterous" growth this year is the "the most important phenomenon in the industry."

"It not only tells us about he maturation of the crypto financial infrastructure. It also tells us a lot about current geopolitics, too," he says.

Nic has written two op-eds for CoinDesk about crypto-dollars:

"Policymakers Shouldn't Fear Digital Money: So Far It's Maintaining the Dollar's Status" (from February)

and

"The Crypto-Dollar Surge and the American Opportunity" (this month).

U.S. policymakers fear losing power as dollar-flows increasingly shift to stablecoins.

Central bankers may have less ability to set interest rates. And the corresponding banking infrastructure, based largely in New York, will process fewer transactions as people move into assets like tether and USDC instead.

Nonetheless, Carter says the U.S. should embrace this new form of money technology.

One, it's mostly, for now, a U.S. industry, and overwhelming pegged to dollars. More dollars in circulation, while not necessarily good for American workers, is good for the dollar's reserve currency status.

Two, blockchains are inherently neutral – "equal opportunity databases" that don't exclude people and represent financial freedom. That ought to accord with American values.

And third, if the U.S. doesn't sanction stablecoin transactions, some other country or company will, inviting in the threat of surveillance and a loss of power anyway.

"The U.S. should consider embracing a neutral alternative to the highly politicized New York corresponding banking system before it's too late and whole tranches of its allies defect to a Chinese or a Russian system," Carter says.

Nic had a lot more to say about stablecoins, the future of money and great power rivalry. Check it out here, and please subscribe to CoinDesk's new podcast feed. 

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