 It is a pleasure and privilege to be with all of you this morning. My name is Tamika Tilleman and I am the Executive Director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America, and this is transformation, our recurring series in which we bring together top leaders from around the world to talk through how frontier technologies are going to reshape the institutions that provide the foundation for our lives on the other side of the pandemic that we are experiencing right now. We are this morning going to have a particularly amazing conversation, and I say this with a little bit of context. Six months and several light years ago, I had the privilege of hearing our panelists lead a series of discussions in Davos on the future of money and on digital payments. It was one of the most enlightening, inspiring, and mind-opening conversations that I've ever been privy to, and we thought that it made a lot of sense given what has transpired in the world over the last half year to bring the band back together again and have a conversation about what's the same and what has changed. There have, of course, been three really big changes. You know what they are, but I'll go through them quickly. First, an unprecedented global pandemic that has created, among other things, a key demand for contactless payments. We know it's obvious now that this is going to be one of the critical technologies that serves as a driver of the recovery, and beyond that, a tool that could make societies much more resilient and capable of dealing with challenges like pandemics going forward. The second crucial development is that we've seen an unprecedented movement around Black Lives Matter that has highlighted key issues of systemic inequality that permeate many societies around the world, certainly the United States. And while the issue of payments may seem disconnected from that challenge, what we found as we dove into the data on our team is that there are some incredibly powerful connections between the lack of access to financial services and the deficit of opportunity enjoyed in or unfortunately experienced by many communities of color in the United States. So there is a closed link between these challenges. And then the final piece, which again is news to nobody but important to call out, is a global economic collapse, the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression. And all of these factors are highlighting the need for better systems, better solutions, better digital infrastructure that can create more opportunity, more equity, more efficiency, and help bring us back to a better place on the other side of these crises. We could not ask for a better team with which to have that conversation today. If there were an Olympics for discussions of these matters, this would be the equivalent of the dream team starting lineup that you're looking at right now. And we are very fortunate to have them all with us. Chris Jean-Carlo is of course the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He's also senior counsel at Wilkie Far and Gallagher. Dante Desparte is the head of policy and comms and vice chair of the Libre Association. He will also, I note with great pride and friendship, he is a former senior fellow at New America and in our program. So it's good to have him back for a bit of a homecoming. And Sandra Rowe is the CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, a defining leader in the ecosystem. And another dear friend, wonderful to have you with us. Sandra, I'm going to ask all of these panelists a series of really hard questions, and they are up to the task. I know. But before we get to that, I want to encourage all of you who are participating virtually to provide feedback, to provide your insights and your questions in the chat. Make sure that the chat is pointing to the right folks. Depending on how you adjust the settings, it will go either to me and the panelists or it will go to all of the participants. So make sure that you have it dialed in correctly. But we will be incorporating your feedback and comments into our conversation today. I want to, Chris, begin with you and go back to the question that I began with at the outset. A lot has transpired in the world over the last six months. On your end, as we approach the issue of digital payments, what has stayed the same and what has changed? How have your assumptions adjusted as we have entered this brave new world? Yeah, thanks to make it. And it's great to be with you and it's great to be with the band and getting the band back together again as we did in Davos in January. When I left the CFTC almost a year ago, after five years in that role, I left with a couple of broad observations as I re-entered the private sector. The first was in traveling around the world, especially in traveling around the West, it's hard not to take notice of the fact that so much of our core physical infrastructure, our bridges, our tunnels, our airports, our mass transportation systems, that were once state-of-the-art in the 20th century have been allowed to age and decay, in some cases become obsolete in the 21st century. Well, the same is true about a lot of our financial market infrastructure, that same core infrastructure on which our economy and the global economy is built is also aged in some cases becoming obsolete. My second observation is that we are truly entering a new age of the internet, a new wave of the internet. The first wave, the one we're very familiar with was a wave of information, the decentralization of information, the digitization of information. This next wave is going to be about the decentralization and digitization, in some cases tokenization of things of value. And the CFTC is a unique vantage point to see that and we very much saw it, it oversees the key markets where most of the world's key commodities are priced. The world's cotton, soybeans, wheat, the world's energy products, oil, natural gas, the world's industrial metals, precious metals, the world's key contracts for foreign exchange are all priced in US derivative markets. And as those assets, those commodities move to a decentralized digitized form and it's happening, we saw it in soybeans. Of course, we saw it in some of the most important contracts that is currency itself with the rise of Bitcoin and Bitcoin futures. But we saw it in so many ways and that brings me to my third observation and that is that as all of those things of value become decentralized, become digitized, it's gonna put enormous pressure on those aged financial systems that I talked about in my first observation. And so everything that I'm doing since leaving the commission is focused on how do we modernize these systems for this new digital age and perhaps nowhere is that more critical than the dollar itself. Because all those pricing markets that I mentioned, they're all priced in dollars. And if all of the world's commodities become digitized, how can the dollar continue to serve the function it serves if it remains an analog instrument in a digital world? So that's a broad, series of broad observations that really informs everything I do. And here's to answer your question at long last, what we've seen in the last few months with COVID, what we've seen with the economic slowdown has only confirmed my belief that this core financial infrastructure, it's really time for a modernization, no different than our airports, no different than our mass transportation, but perhaps in some ways even more critically important. Chris, that's a fantastic set of insights. Sandra, I wanna turn to you. I am broadcasting this morning from the highly sophisticated nerve center located in the basement of the Tilliman household. And all of us around the world are experiencing something of an unanticipated lesson in decentralization, both the pros and the cons of decentralization. You've been at the forefront of decentralization, both at GBBC and in your past lives, what has stayed the same and what has changed in the context of these new challenges? So when I think about, and I'm gonna focus on at the moment the US, when we look at what's going on right now, I think the responsibilities, especially in the financial systems have not changed, meaning you still want to protect the consumer, you still want to have the ability to access certain services. The question now is, how do we actually create systems that are fit for purpose for the current, present and the future? And let's also not ignore the fact that we've got a generational shift of young people who think very differently about what is value and how do you move value in a digital world where pretty much you live on your phone, right? So how do we build systems that still accomplish those responsibilities, meaning having the guidelines, making sure that the bad actors in the space, because let's face it, there will always be bad actors who will try to game the system. How do we make sure that we have systems and processes in place for the digital world? And I think that's a lot of what Chris was talking about, which is we need to build next generation digital infrastructure, particularly in financial markets to address that. And in the US, we definitely need an upgrade. So, Dante, you're involved in a little project called Libra that I may have read something about at some point. I don't know if anybody has seen anything on this. Answer the question, but if you wouldn't mind, also provide a little context on what Libra is for those who may not be familiar with the initiative. Sure. So, well, thank you, Tamika, and it's good to be back together again with the band. When we last saw each other in Davos, the subject and the conversation felt and seemed very abstract, part of an 11-year conversation about the role that this magical foundational technology blockchain could play in not only democratizing access to value, but enshrining a whole range of first principles into technology. And so here we find ourselves six months later, not light years ahead where we ought to be as a planet and as a country, but we find ourselves, I think, regressing, facing depression-level economic challenges, facing the unmasking of hidden systemic forms of racism that have plagued the black community, particularly, but many others, are ingrained in the way we run our economy and our system. And all of these things are being unmasked at exactly the same time. And I think Mr. Giancarlo referred to it in his last virtual congressional hearing as an opportunity to evoke and trigger a space race as a society. And so on the other end of this crisis, there is reason for optimism and there is reason to believe that the types of issues we're describing in no small measure, in part because technology has a seat at the table, but also in part because we're now reframing how to build value and how to build shared value. And I think the Libra project is in part motivated by those very types of standards and opportunities. And I'll describe that in a few quick ways. The first is that the technology itself is open core, is open source, right? So if you want to enable the very space race that Mr. Giancarlo and others have been referring to, then you have to facilitate it in a manner that you lower the barriers to entry to responsible actors and responsible financial services innovation. I think that's item one. Item two is you have to ensure that the types of consumer protections that have informed the existing economic system, however it may labor on analog backward-looking models, it is nonetheless born from past crises. And so we have to pay great homage to standards on consumer protection and risk management and compliance and a range of other issues that have generally speaking kept the financial system safe. So these emerging technologies cannot be seen as disruptive to that, but rather as augmenting. And I do think blockchain, which underpins the Libra project is an augmenting technology more so than a disruptive one. And then last, you have to ensure that the economics that underpin the token or the digital asset or the payment instrument in Libra's case are not vaporware for far too long, far too many people have been burned. And if you wanna have a case for financial inclusion and in franchising and sort of economically empowering vulnerable people, then you simply cannot afford to play games with people and they're hard earned money. And so in that vein, I do think there's a lot of gain to be had in having a high degree of transparency and high degree of participation, which is why I think I'm excited about the fact that 70% of the world's central banks are thinking long and hard about digitizing their own assets. And so if projects like Libra and if stablecoins are a bridge to a future in which public sector oversight of the monetary system and monetary policy allows for direct innovation and digitization of fiat currencies, and we should be encouraged because then you could really start to lower the cost and increase the perimeter of the formal economy to include billions who are left out. Fantastic. Chris, despite the fact that I think all of us who are participating in this conversation, both as panelists and as participants in the audience are probably much more tuned in to this issue than most, payments is not a subject that has captured the imagination of the general public for most of American history. That changed to some extent in the aftermath of the CARES Act. And the CARES Act was of course the first initial piece of stimulus that came out of Congress after the coronavirus shut down large swaths of the economy. And what we found once the CARES Act authorized payments to Americans is that the Treasury really didn't have a good way to make that happen. And so you had families that in many cases were in urgent need of help waiting weeks or even months by the mailbox for a paper check to arrive in 2020 so that they could get some assistance. I'd love it if you could go into a little bit of detail on why things aren't working here. You mentioned this in your opening comments, but why are things as broken as they are? And the flip side of that is tell us a little bit about central bank digital currencies and why they came up as a potential solution both during the legislative drafting process and in the last few months something that might be able to move us in the right direction on this challenge. Thanks, there's a lot in that. So bear with me a little bit. Maybe I'll start if I can at the beginning. And the beginning in history is ever since man could collect seashells on the seashore they use those as tokens of value. I mean, before that there was barter, right? You've got a chicken. I've got a duck. I'll trade you my chicken for your duck. But at some point, somebody didn't need a duck. They needed a blanket. And so they needed something that could represent value to do all those different transactions. Ergo tokens. Eventually precious metals were used and rulers images were stamped on them. And we have many coins going back to ancient Egypt and the Roman Republic. Well, coins and tokens serve for a long, long time until the medieval era when merchants in Northern Italy and Venice in particular discovered that it was actually dangerous to travel around with large stacks of money. It was heavy, it was hard to convey. And so banks emerged where you could put your money on account and then go about your business and come back later and perhaps get some interest on it. The account space system in the course of human history is not that old. It's maybe a thousand years in the course of human history for a longer period of time we had tokens. But we moved away to an account space system for some degree of convenience in an analog world. But guess what? Many of our fellow citizens were not in that system. And you only need to go to an American military base anywhere in the world and see all the check cashing centers that surround it to know that there are still segments of our population that are not fully included in the banking system. The estimates are about 6% unbanked and another maybe 19% of underbanked population. That's been there for a long time but it became so apparent in the COVID crisis when guess what? We tried to use this account space system to distribute money, to discover what a lot of people have known for a long time that it doesn't reach all segments of society. And so we've used the methods we have in this account space system paper checks which take time, which then rely on the individual to find a way to cash that check to turn it then into tokenized money cash for them to go shopping. And that's where the notion of a digital currency suddenly makes so much sense. You know, some of us have been talking about digital currency for some time. We talked about it when Bitcoin came about. We talked about it with the Lieber project and all of the mind expansion that it's that caused us all to do to rethink about money. But COVID has really extended that conversation to different levels, different constituencies, constituencies that have been long concerned about this underbanked population that are now realizing that a central bank digital currency or other forms, Liebercoin others would provide a way of distributing capital directly to people to their mobile device. You know, when you dig into that underbanked number of 20, 24, 25, 26%, it's a very diverse group of people. A lot of it is young people who are very facile when it comes to smartphone devices but are not fully banked because they don't have car loans or mortgages that they certainly know how to use a mobile device. In fact, they've been familiar with a mobile device since an earlier age, an age when some of us of another generation begin our banking activities, they won't begin their back activities for another decade or more but their activity on a cell phone is extensive. So the ability to use a mobile device to use as an on-ramp into financial inclusion I think is the promise of digital currency. We can, you know, go where people are and a lot of people are on smartphones. Let's go where they are and bring them financial services directly with the central bank digital currency. Sandra, I want to build on that for a moment because as our team dug into this, you know what we found which will not surprise many of you is that the phenomenon Chris is referring to check cashing and the fact that those in predominantly but not exclusively lower income settings have to go through much more cumbersome and expensive processes to access their funds imposes the equivalent of a $35 billion a year tax on those Americans. So this is monumentally expensive. If you think about the implications from a financial opportunity and an equity standpoint, other countries have mostly figured this out. You know, if we look at the last 20 years or so beginning in 2000, you saw a series of different jurisdictions start to experiment with instantaneous virtually universal payment systems. And that has progressed pretty rapidly over the last 20 years to the point where now even in very complex nations like India you see the beam system coming online. Again, none of these are perfect. None of these are fully realized but they do give us a pretty clear vision of what could work. Two questions for you because you have a global mandate and a global purview. What are the systems that you're seeing that you are really excited about that you think should be a benchmark for the United States as we start to think about these challenges and also talk a little bit about how this issue is different in the global North and the global South. So maybe I'll just start with the first question that you've got with the experience that I had about five or six years ago in Nairobi. I support a film school there and I used to go there once a year and I thought, you know what? I wanna open a bank account, just keep some money there in Kenyon Schilling. So I went to the local bank said, hey, I'd like to keep, you know, no more than like 500 bucks, $1,000 equivalent. And they were like, sure, you can open a bank account but we're gonna charge you 20 equivalent of $25 a month to maintain it. I said, well, wait a minute. I just want you to hold my money and they're like, yes, but that's our charge. And I was like, oh, really? And I then take that example of charging 25. And the reason why they tell me that they charge that much is because of the infrastructure costs to maintain the entire system, right? To safeguard my measly, whatever, 500 bucks in the account. But here's the issue when you've got something like M-Pesa and let's say M-Pesa, Safari comes in Pesa. It's not perfect either, but I can move. And give folks contracts on M-Pesa, Sandra, if you don't mind, what is M-Pesa? Absolutely. So M-Pesa came out of Safari.com. A lot of the telcos in Sub-Saharan Africa have different basically ways for you to move mobile money. And it started off with actually credit. So if you had two minutes of airtime credit, you could actually give it to your mate and transfer it seamlessly with no cost. And that eventually evolved to actually moving money around in the form of small amounts, probably $10 equivalent in the U.S. And that became hugely popular. Why? Because you didn't have to carry it around. You have your phone with you and you're able to basically almost frictionlessly move that around. And in Kenya, that became a source of money movement for a lot of people. It's been around for actually now probably over a decade, 15 years plus. What about the next generation of that? My view is that Sub-Saharan Africa in particular is ready for that leapfrog moment. Because why? As many of you guys mentioned, almost everyone has a phone in their pocket. They may not have running water or electricity, believe it or not, but I spend a great deal of time in Sub-Saharan Africa and you'd be surprised. My farmer in the middle of nowhere Cameroon has got a smartphone or a tablet. And that access is finally, and by the way, it's cheaper now to deliver those services, is now the prime opportunity for why banks should get involved as well as new fintech companies. Because the cost of delivering these services dumb right is cheaper than ever. And that should be a compelling case for anyone who wants to do that. So when I think about developed world versus developing world, the U.S. has a challenge. We have a lot of systems that are entrenched, embedded, and let's face it, we're talking about the plumbing here, whether it's wholesale or retail, you're talking about deep, complex plumbing that we are not going to rip out overnight. So who's got the actual greenfield opportunity? It's countries where the infrastructure is actually very poor and their ability to adopt and the will to do that across the board, whether it's government or entrepreneurs, all the above, those are the prime places to actually leapfrog. In the same way that Africa leapfrogged over its lack of ground infrastructure for telecommunications and went to mobile devices, it will leapfrog over lack of account space or minimal account space infrastructure and go directly to a digital payment infrastructure. We'll see that elsewhere in the world as well. And Sange is exactly right. We're actually hindered by our extensive grounding in this medieval architecture, actually 20th century banking architecture, as we have a hard time contemplating. I mean, the answer I get all the time, why do we need a central bank digital currency is my credit card works anywhere. Well, yeah, I mean, that 20th century infrastructure does work. Question is, do we want to have the infrastructure for the next century or do we want to let others develop that? And Chris, you raise another, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead, please. No, I was gonna say Chris raises another excellent point. The Western world is weaned on credit cards and cards. Go anywhere else. People do not use cards. It's a behavioral problem too. That's not to take away from the importance of cards. I think they'll still play a role in a digital world. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, but we can do better. That architecture, Sange is actually right. It's about architecture. Do we want to build the architecture of the future or continue to rely on the architecture of the past? So Dante, I want to build on both of those points. One of the areas where there is almost universal consensus that the architecture is broken is remittances. Remittances are massive. They're about $600 billion a year. And most estimates are that it costs about 7% of every dollar you send back to your family to actually send that money home, which is just an extraordinary fee given the amounts of money that are moving through the system. We talked about the $35 billion cost of inadequate financial infrastructure in the US. Globally, you're looking at a roughly equivalent about a $30 billion cost of the creaky remittance architecture that we're utilizing. First, talk to me a little bit about this problem and how you think about it. Because I know this is something that is personal for you growing up in Puerto Rico and something that you've experienced at an individual level. But why haven't we fixed this yet? Because I've been going to meetings for a long time and I'm increasingly old where everybody has said, yeah, this is a problem. We got to get our act together and solve this and we're going to be much better at addressing development challenges if we do, but it hasn't happened yet. Give us some guidance on this. Yeah, so I think it builds very much on the points that Sandra and Chris just made, which is that part of the argument the traditional financial sector makes is that the cost of compliance and the cost of brick and mortar makes it cost prohibitive to provide people on the perimeter who don't have access, who can't undergo things like know your customer screening to enter the formal financial system. Therefore, it is costly to serve them and it is costly to then deal with all of the other mechanics of an international cross-border transaction. And I always have to remind people that this case for lowering the cost of payments isn't an emerging and developing country challenge or opportunity. And to your point about Puerto Rico to Micah, sending a very, very basic bank-to-bank transaction to the island cost $30 if you want the payment to arrive anything close to overnight and the experience on the receiving end leaves a lot to be expected, right? The money doesn't arrive overnight. It's less than instantaneous. We could do better than that, right? And so broadly speaking, part of it has to do with infrastructure. A lot of it has to do with compliance and the very real cost of compliance that today is putting the heaviest penalty on the poor across the system. And then when you think of and when you amplify this whole point upwards to the global remittance cash flows and the 7%, I think there's a range of issues. Part of it is that in most of the world's remittance corridors, there's actually a lack of competition. If anything, you have one large player or you have a duopoly at the perimeter that controls those remittance corridors. So the global diaspora population is being squeezed on both ends. On the one end, it's hard, of course, to make a living. And you put that in the context of a pandemic where a physical payment is nearly impossible. And let alone a physical payment that costs a lot of money and is slow to arrive puts an enormous penalty on poverty. And we're seeing that play out across the world. But then there's just a lot of entrenched interest in keeping that status quo the way it is. And so globally, you have 1.7 billion people without a bank account. But of that number, a billion have access to a low-cost mobile device. If that low-cost mobile device and the premise may be very simple can become a regulated payment endpoint. And so that peer-to-peer payments can reach each other instantaneously. Things like the UN Sustainable Development Goal of having a 3% global remittance cost become possible. But in order for this to actually occur, you can't just talk about it and this case for lowering costs can't just be an object of curiosity for panels like these. Eventually, we have to start seeing real market-level innovation to solve these issues, connect these dots. And then you also have to start having deep conversations with compliance, national security interests, financial interests, and many others around what is the alternative? A world with that many people on the margin produces enormous amounts of risk. And a world where those people can be pulled into the formal economy, you could now start to remove a lot of the excuses that prevent people from moving up the ladder of economic mobility. So a lot to be gained here if we can get it right. Chris, let's build on some of what Dante said and also some of the amazing questions that are coming in. And we are getting an avalanche of incredible questions from our audience members. We won't be able to get to all of them but we'll get to as many as we can. Two of the themes that are emerging in the discussions online and in what Dante said is that we need real solutions but not all of these solutions are necessarily gonna be the same. So one of the themes that's coming out online is talk to us about how these different solutions will work for small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs versus big commercial financial institutions. Is it gonna be the same thing? Will it be different? They're also now a proliferation of new solutions starting to appear which is exciting at one level. You have platforms like Mojibu that Scott Carpenter mentioned in the questions. How are all of these different platforms going to find a niche or will they all find a niche? Will some of them go away and then we'll be left with one ring to rule them all. What's your take? And we need you off mute, Chris. I'm sorry. Thank you. The important thing is that we create an environment for a thousand flowers to blossom and then it will become for the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of commerce, the marketplace of consumers to determine what best serves their needs. What we don't have right now is yet at least at my experience as a regulator is sort of a way forward for that type of blossoming to take place. And I think we regulators, policy makers can do a better job creating the environment that we were successful in creating at the time of the launch of the internet. When the policy, which was a bipartisan policy of a Clinton administration and Republican Congress to create a do no harm approach to development of the internet. And it led to such a flowering of innovation, creativity, of service provision. We need that same environment right now. In our own digital dollar project, we're very careful to say, we're not calling for a US CBDC to exist in exclusion to private sector initiatives. We say the more innovation, the better. We can all learn from each other. And ultimately it will be actors in the economy, actors in society and the different use cases, whether they be written instances, which Dante talked about, whether it be financial under inclusion, whether it be in small and medium size enterprises using it as a means for soliciting trade finance or enterprise finance, or whether it be in large wholesale transactions and in international transactions, which again, as Dante noted, is incredibly costly. I think there are solutions for all of the issues that are presented by this 20th century accounts based system and the shortcomings, they're in it. There are solutions to be explored. But what we need is a full environment that says, let's do it, let's explore this. Obviously, let's do it in a responsible fashion. We do need to remain concerned with the things that we've always been concerned with when it comes to money and commerce. We can't allow it to be exploited by wrongdoers for money laundering or sex trafficking or illicit narcotics. But those are given in any era. Those were given in the internet area. Those can't be the reason not to allow innovation to flourish. We need to allow innovation to flourish with those concerns taken seriously. To Micah, if I could just very briefly build on what Chris just said, that I think it from a policymaker and a regulator point of view, this notion of a thousand flowers blooming, I think should also be backed by this case for optionality. That for far too long, and maybe the early crypto utopians and the early crypto anarchists are partly to blame, but for far too long, the narrative around digital payments has been that this is a disruptive wave of technology, when in my view, a lot of what this enables is optionality and broad vigorous competition. The other point I would like to make is that, the more large economies and the OECD countries and other countries create regulatory certainty, not just around the opportunities and payments and fintech, but for the blockchain movement more generally, I think there's billions of dollars of economic activity at stake and there's a lot of capital waiting on the sidelines for countries like the United States and other parts of the world to start to declare a pathway in which the thousand flowers that Chris just spoke of can not only begin to blossom, but can also be harvested. And so not since the earliest days of the internet, is there a wave of technology innovation and investor capital looking for regulatory certainty? And we still don't yet have it around the world, particularly in this issue of payments and banking. So two questions and Andante, I wanna come back to you on that point in particular and Sandra, I want your take on this as well. There are two models out there that really scare people and I think it's important to put this on the table. One, which Chris alluded to a moment ago, is the idea that an authoritarian government will have full visibility into everybody's payments activity. And based on that, they'll be able to engage in a lot of coercive behavior and get people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. And we see this in a very real way. This is not a theoretical concern as we look at the rise of Alipay and Leachat, which are two dominant Chinese payment platforms that include frankly a host of services that we can't even compete with in the United States and the West in general. They are very, very impressive in terms of the technical capabilities and the service offerings that they bring to the table. But they also have these massive implications around privacy in the sense that the Chinese government has access to all of the activity that is occurring on those platforms and we know that they use it. The second model that scares people is a big tech model and that is a model where individuals' data maybe isn't owned by the government, but it's utilized in a pretty mercantilist, almost futile fashion where we all put information in, we put data in and payments information into a system. And then the benefits and the insights from that information are harvested by a handful of people sitting in Silicon Valley or Seattle. That certainly has been one of the big concerns around Libra as well, one that I know you're working hard to dispel. But tell me, are these valid concerns and what are the solutions? And Sandra, I'm gonna ask for your insight on this as well in a moment. But Dante, please. So sure, look, I think that there are great examples around the world. And PESA that Sandra just mentioned is a great example of mobile payment networks that have been around for decades and have demonstrated that you can at once enable low-cost peer-to-peer payments while at the same time having a strong standard on compliance, a strong standard on privacy, consumer protection. A lot of that hinges on ensuring that you get the regulatory regime right and that you sort of get social license in order to really facilitate the need for these types of systems. And in the case of Libra, we're doing exactly that to Micah, as you know very well. We have had three public hearings here in the United States and an ongoing global conversation that has on one front invigorated the role of CBDCs, central bank digital currencies as a part of the spectrum of lower-cost payments for consumers. But make no mistake, we're walking through the very, very difficult standard of global compliance across the spectrum including on privacy. But let me then ask and sort of raise the counter question which is that to be banked and poor in the United States also comes with the burden of indebtedness. And so, banking here all too often because people are living check to check also equals indebtedness. And then it equals a series of insidious payments if you were one of the few countries in the OECD that if you have a low balance threshold then you're hit with a $35 non-sufficient funds fee. This death by a thousand cuts economic model that we're in burdening people by itself produces enormous risks. And so I do think this management and this careful balancing act of avoiding censorship capital and avoiding an all-seeing financial system that knows every person's transaction we have to stay on the right side of that but we also have to acknowledge that we're on the wrong side of a system where banking equals indebtedness and a foregone future for a lot of people hundreds of millions of people are affected by that model. There has to be a better way and it goes to this sort of core question of is it really your money if you have to pay someone to hold it and you have to ask someone where you have to pay to spend it. So these fundamental issues of control of your value and your money is part of what the mobile money movement is all about. So I wanna have you build on that but also fold in one I think very insightful question from the chat which is what is reasonable for governments to see under these circumstances? You talked to a lot of different governments that are wrestling with these issues. What is a decent standard of privacy? And the related question I would have is that GBBC recently signed on to a set of principles that have been developed in partnership with the World Economic Forum called the Presidio Principles which start to lay out some mild markers that may constitute kind of some metrics for good behavior that could be utilized going forward. What are the right frameworks that we should look to as we think about what frankly good looks like as we build this new architecture? Yeah, look, I think there have been a lot of great points made here. I think I'm gonna try to summarize and say we still look at the problem set as you can have privacy or you can have cheap or transactions or you can have it fast or it's not or it should be and and when I mean and I mean a system where if you're moving $10 around it should cost you pennies and it shouldn't put you in an indebtedness you know situation as Dante mentioned. So we need to build for solving critical and solutions not or that's one. Number two, I absolutely agree that surveillance the way we view individuals data as a value needs to be addressed at the highest levels of government. The US does not have laws nor does it have real critical thinking around how should consumers or citizens be protected with regards to their data, which is now value. I don't think, I think the big tech concerns would actually go away significantly if there were constructive ways to protect people's individual data rights. Turn the model upside down is what I say. We'll see how that goes. And yeah, individual citizens should be more and more vocal about how their data is being used. And I think that pushback will ultimately lead to potentially legislative changes that need to happen over time. And with respect to something, you know when I think about governments they're doing some cool things out there who have actually pivoted to a digital society and economy. We just had President Ilvez on board and he actually said something that I just didn't think was as critical but he actually thinks it's the lynchpin of any government and country moving to a digital economy which is he says you've got to get identity right. And that means solving for the KYCAMLs we've talked about but more importantly who owns that data who owns that identity and what does that mean? You have multiple identities potentially. It's not just your driver's license or your passport. It's much more than that. And I think we need to spend a lot of time thinking about how we help the government get to a place where we have a good set of digital identity solutions that work for everyone. So Sandra, you and I didn't pre-game this but of course the digital impact and governance initiative Digi at New America works with governments around the world right now in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and others developing blueprints for what 21st century digital government should look like and I'm gonna ask Jordan to put up a slide that we developed after looking very closely at Estonia and what President Bilves and others in that country have created there because we recognize that there are some foundational layers involved in building out these solutions and at the bottom of that foundation the key really is digital identity. You need to have a good solution in place there in order for everything else to work. You also need layers for data exchanges and payments but Jordan I'm hoping you've got that slide if not we will move on but payments are really fundamental to this and if you can match digital identity and payments then that provides an opportunity to start plugging in a number of other applications that allow societies to run far more efficiently than they are able to otherwise. The estimate in the case of Estonia is that they save the equivalent of 2% of GDP annually by virtue of having world-class digital input structure in their system so you can imagine what that would translate into for the United States I think it's also really important to note in a moment of looming fiscal austerity when everyone knows that governments are gonna be having to do a lot more with a lot less going forward. This is a really crucial set of tools. Chris I want to come back to something that you had raised thank you so that folks can see this is the blueprint that we utilize when we think about how these systems should fit together again identity data exchanges and payments as the foundational layers and then you have tools like tax and public finance public benefits asset tracking land titling civic participation procurement down the line that plug into that underlying infrastructure and allow institutions to operate far more effectively and coming back to Sandra's point on surveillance Chris one of the concerns that we have come to terms with as we have thought about these issues is that going forward a country's choice of digital infrastructure will be as consequential for their geopolitical orientation today as membership in the Warsaw Pact or NATO would have been during the Cold War because these systems hardwired certain values and behavior into the foundational aspects of how societies operate. And once they are in place it's really difficult to go another direction if your systems are designed for openness and accountability you will have a more open accountable society if they are designed for surveillance and repression you will have a society that engages in more surveillance and more repression. Talk with us a little bit because I know you've thought about this issue deeply on the geopolitical implications of these technologies and what's happening is authoritarian governments race to develop their own applications in these areas. You know the issue of privacy actually has a long tradition in the United States. It was of concern as part of the United States is a rebellion from Great Britain and it's enshrined in our Fourth Amendment of our constitution. I believe that one of the reasons one of the many reasons why the dollar is serves a predominant role as a global reserve currency is a general global comfort with the way the US government approaches the use of its currency abroad and not overly abusing its ability to surveil transactions for purposes outside of say law enforcement and national security. Now I don't want to get into a debate about sanctions policy it's along and there's reasonable positions on all sides of that issue and nor am I an expert in it. But I think that you can just take the dollars dominance abroad as a at least historic going back to World War II general comfort level with the US's approach to government surveillance. Now in a strange way in the United States socially we're more comfortable with commercial utilization of our data than say Europe is. And Europe the GDPR law is often cited as a model for privacy protection but remember it protects against commercial exploitation it doesn't restrict government exploitation of data. And then of course you've got a Chinese tradition where at least for users of its currency which are mostly domestic there's an expectation of state surveillance. So if we take three large geopolitical blocks say North America, United States, Europe and Asia you might roughly characterize the approach as in the United States commercial use of our data okay, government use of our data no good. Europe commercial use of our data bad government surveillance okay and in Asia government surveillance expected. Now that's a rough, rough harsh probably inaccurate in many details characterization but it's a broad one. I believe if the United States were to develop a central bank digital currency and I believe the United States will like it's just a matter of when if the United States can bring to that the right jurisprudence around state surveillance. So it's limited to those things that say a reasonable group of people would agree are appropriate. Law enforcement, appropriate national security but not exploitation for surveillance purposes. And if we could develop what I think is the most forward-looking approach to commercial exploitation and that is you have the choice of whether to have that data used and you have an ability to receive some sort of fair compensation for it. I think that could be the winning model on a global basis. In a world of competing currencies and let's remember at least until the post-World War II era currencies competed all along the world. There was nothing like the dominance the dollar has today. And I think we may someday look back and say that's been a relative anomaly that the dollars had such dominance. I think we probably will go back to a world of both competing sovereign currencies and non-sovereign currencies as we have had in other periods of American history. In that world, the values that you build into your currency are what's going to be part of the reason people will choose it when they have choice. That's why it's vitally important that we get the privacy issue right. Both the state level privacy, the commercial level privacy but if we get them right it could be the killer combination. It could be the killer app in a world of global currencies. And certainly that's one thing at the digital dollar project that we're advocating. Let's get that balance of privacy issues right so that the dollar can enjoy, I hope another period of global utilization. I'm one of those who believe I may be old fashioned but the dollar's role in global commerce I think has been a net good over these last few decades. We've seen more people rise out of poverty than ever before in human history. And I don't think that's been a coincidence. I think it's been something of a consequence of the use of a single currency that has enjoyed the world's support. And so the our approach to digitizing it, modernizing it is an offensive approach. Let's improve it. Let's enhance it in the same way we do with a bridge or a tunnel or an airport for a new generation of utilization in a world of competing choices. So to Micah, if I could just a very brief interjection in there to add to Chris's points. There are many who are observing some similarities between the 5G kind of Cold War that's being waged in the world today and this likely sort of set of battle lines that are being drawn around the innovations of digital currencies and their delivery instruments and also making geopolitical observations that this sort of level of innovation is also an export product through things like the Belt and Road Initiative and others. But then to add to Chris's point, you have some very interesting observations recently from Hank Paulson that would say that a digital currency, especially one that is being issued by a government is the sum of the parts. And so if the sum of the parts are an untrusting central bank, non-privacy preserving technologies and things like that, then a digital rendition of that asset or that currency would be no better than the parts on which it is built. And I do think in this vein a vigorously competitive private sector competing on the last mile use cases, the rails and then up to the standard of consumer choice and Adam Smith's invisible hand as a market maker is a very powerful addition to what will eventually become the innovations of the public sector entering this space and upgrading core public infrastructure such that it can serve more people in more ways. But at the end of it, when all of the other things break and when the technology fails to perform, what underlies it is governance and value systems. And so I think to that end, Chris is hearkening to a very optimistic long range scenario, but it does require action. And this is where, again, my concern is that we're not seeing anything close to enough action, taking a lot of these opportunities very seriously. None of it is zero sum because of the way these things eventually build up. But we need more action. So let's take Dante's call to action as the point of departure for our concluding question. And as I ask this, let me thank all of you for sharing your time today. There's a risk as a moderator when you go into these discussions of overhyping your panelists. And in this case, if anything, I think we have given you guys a short billing. We could do this, I think, all day long and you would not run out of just mind blowing insights to share. So all of us who have been privy to this today are in your debt. But I wanna take Dante's point seriously. And this has obviously been a global conversation and we have global equities, but I'd like to focus on the United States for our wrap up. If each of you were queen for a day or king for a day, what is the thing you would change to help the United States solve this problem? What is the one thing we need to get right in the next few months, next few years, if we wanna end up on the right side of history when the grand chronicles of payments are written? Because at the moment, I think it's pretty fair to say we're not where we should be and we could be doing a lot better. So what do we need to change? What's the one thing you would fix? Chris, I'll start with you. I think we're on the verge of a consensus built in the United States of that we need to explore a central bank digital currency. So to answer your question, what we need to do is the same thing we did when we decided we were gonna go to the moon. We need to launch a series of pilot programs. In the 1960s, those were called Gemini, they were called Mercury, they were called Apollo. Each one built on the one before that eventually led to a successful moon landing. With some failures along the way and they learned more from the failures than they learned from the successes, that's what got them there. It's time to do the same thing in developing a central bank digital currency. A series of pilot programs with the private sector in the public sector working side by side as it did in the space program, as it did in the internet to explore a central bank digital currency. Sandra. US needs a grand digital infrastructure plan just like what Chris said. But I would take a look at every level, the interbank markets, wholesale markets all the way down to retail. And I would also look at how we raise capital in this country. The VC model is broken and we haven't even touched upon that. How do we allow an entrepreneur sitting in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the US to have access to capital? Let's do a version 2.0 of the ICO model but with guardrails and that actually work. This not only translates into new opportunities and jobs but it's also, let's face it, it's going to happen. The question is what will the US play as a leader or as a follower in this evolution? I would say these changes are gonna happen to us or they're gonna happen through us. And we need to decide which side of that we wanna be on. Dante, bring this home. Look, if as a taxpayer I am on the hook for $5.5 trillion of restoring faith in our economy then I would like to see the thing that we do on the other side of this is that we recognize that it is a fundamental human right to be banked and that to do so should not cost you a penny to have fundamental basic access to the financial system. So we need to reinforce those ideals here in the United States and reinforce those ideals around the world. Technology is a part of that puzzle but it is not a panacea on its own. We need the ideals to be enshrined in code and policy and in conduct. Then we could begin to make a difference. Chris, Sandra and Dante, thank you for your extraordinary contributions not only to this conversation but to this ecosystem as a whole. You are three of the champions that if we ever end up in a good space you are the three people who are gonna be instrumental in getting us there. I wanna thank our incredibly prolific audience. The questions that we have received are amazing. I'm sorry we weren't able to get to all of them. We will share them with the panelists so that they know what you were thinking about. We certainly got to as many as we could and I also wanna thank the great team that helped us put this program together. Jordan Sandman in particular has a family wedding today and it's nonetheless here helping us out which is real dedication which we appreciate. We will look forward to joining you next month on a very special edition of Transformation where we look at the opportunities around open source digital infrastructure and we thank all of you panelists, audience for being with us today. We'll see you next time.