Algorand ALGO Speaking At The Council On Foreign Relations About The Changing World....

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.

[00:00:02]Robert here and today we're going to be looking at a talk that was hosted by the Council of Foreign Relations that was all about the fate of the dollar. This was the title, the fate of the dollar, digital currencies and geopolitical challenges.

[00:00:20]And there was none other than the Algrand Foundation's CEO, Stacy Warden, that featured on this panel. Today I want to look at what was said broadly in regards to the debate and certainly what Stacy had to say. Of course Alrand fits into this bigger puzzle. So I guess this is kind of an Algrand first video or related to Algrand given that Stacy was on stage in this very important uh talk but it really relates to the cryptocurrency space broadly. there's this change taking place globally as this technology has introduced um both an innovation and a challenge and challenges I should really say there's more than one and actually it's going to be essential for certain distributed ledger technologies such as Algrand that's very much putting themselves forwards in Europe in the US uh in the world more broadly um to be adopted by nations at a national level to effectively aid um in a kind of digital relevancy. So this is a very interesting video. I think a great way to kick this off is with Barry Iiken Green of UC Berkeley. Berkeley have done a lot on crypto over the years. Um he talks about how reserve currencies lose their dominance and this is going to set the stage for the adoption of cryptocurrencies um to ultimately propagate that. And it's not just the dollar that's going to partake in this. you are going to see adoption of cryptocurrencies hockey stick whether that's uh through the kind of tokenization of currencies or the digitization of currencies to more of a degree a lot of currencies are already digital but in an onchain world or whether that's financial instruments whatever it may be so Stacy's got a great take on all of this let's start with Clint Numera uno >> very gradual erosion of the dollar's dominant role in in in the global economy as a reserve currency held by uh central banks uh around the world as uh a a unit that is the bedrock of of corporate uh um portfolios, treasuries and and and so forth. Um as a currency to which uh other countries peg, but that erosion has uh been only along select dimensions and very gradual at best uh over time. Um the book traces the uh economic and financial prerequisites for uh uh uh a global role for a currency well known to economists and economic historians uh uh uh a healthy economy, commercial prowess, uh deep liquid and stable financial markets. But it goes on to talk about the political and and you know to come to your question Eddie uh when countries experience economic trade related uh financial market related problems there the dominant status of their currencies can be threatened. But the book goes on then and talks about the political prerequisites for international currency status domestically rule of law separation of powers um control of corruption. You can imagine where I'm going with those observations. and internationally um alliance politics that um central banks and and and governments prefer to hold and use the currencies of their alliance partners as a show of good faith because they believe that alliance partner is a reliable steward of their reserve holdings. Uh and and again I think you can see where where I'm going there when I think about the future of the dollar.

[00:03:41]So I've been concerned about economic and financial conditions in the United States, explosively growing public debts for a while, but now there is the overlay of domestic and international political considerations that I think will be dollar negative in the longer run. So I think that somewhat sets the stage, you know, talking about the changing world um and certainly the changing world as it relates to the dollar. And we'll come on to a Hoover uh Institute paper in just a second that was actually published by or co-authored by Kevin Walsh, the now Fed chair. It was all around adopting cryptos.

[00:04:15]Let's get into some of what Stacy Warden has to say.

[00:04:18]>> The history, this is a simplification, but the history of financial services in the last 20 years have been bank bal banks and bank balance sheets reconciling with each other faster, more efficiently, and more cheaply. And blockchain technology is not that. it is writing to one ledger. So it is not this kind of messaging system back and forth and on that ledger you can have both cash in the form of a stable coin or other assets or tokenized securities.

[00:04:47]All of these things can be on that ledger as opposed to different ledgers and uh they can be um moved around by smart contract automated kind of if then statements. So when you think about that and you think about moving a bitcoin from here to Latin America, you are really just updating the Bitcoin ledger, you're not actually sending anything anywhere. And when you when you step back and you think about the fact that somebody in Nigeria can send somebody in Malaysia a movie over WhatsApp in two minutes, a movie, but can't send $10 without traveling through the correspondent banking system, clearing at the Fed, traveling back down. It gets there or not 10 days later, and somebody's taken between four to 7% off the top for the privilege of doing that.

[00:05:32]When you look at it on its face, it's a pretty interesting technology.

[00:05:37]It has its problems. It has its grifters. It has, you know, everything associated with it. But the thing, there's two things to understand about it and they're kind of the same thing.

[00:05:45]One is that clearing is settlement, right? Because it it automatically moves. It's there's not this swift state swift system and then this batch clearing at the Fed separately.

[00:05:56]It is it is a bearer instrument. Crypto.

[00:05:59]You have to think about it in the same way that you think about cash. You know, when I give you a Bitcoin, it's now it's now your Bitcoin. So when I first got interested in this, this was what I thought was just absolutely compelling about it. And I would say that it hasn't quite lived up to its promise. Uh the one of the major innovations in crypto was that, you know, Bitcoin, it's not very liquid and people think of it now as digital gold and so it was not a very was a peer-to-peer payment system. It's actually turned out not to be that. And the best in, you know, one of the most important innovations has been this stable coin technology where you're kind of you have a you have a pile of collateral that's tokenized and you can sort of move those tokens around and keep the collateral where where you know sitting in one place in your bank account if if you want it there. Um, so I think if you think about it theoretically it's a pretty darn interesting payment system. Has it become a global payment system? No, not yet. Will it become a global payment system? I'm not sure. Are stable coins exactly a bearer instrument the way a native crypto is? Not exactly because it's a tokenized pile of collateral. But I think there's a lot of I think there's a lot of promise for it. And it is an improvement on cash in that it does have this traceability element to it as well.

[00:07:17]Not completely, but much more than obviously like cash in a briefcase.

[00:07:21]>> Very interesting. There are clearly revolutionary properties that distributed ledgers bring to the table.

[00:07:27]hasn't quite reached the promise yet. I think it will. Um, this is all along the lines of what we looked at just the other day and that is a paper that was all about digital currencies. The US, China and world at a crossroads. It spoke about the kind of issues that were going on. You can see this was published or co-authored um by none other than Kevin Walsh who's now the Fed chair, the guy in charge of the US currency. They are going to propagate dollars via crypto to enable that reach to democratize access. We have now is an admission from uh the individual from UC Berkeley.

[00:08:08]I think it's a professor at UC Berkeley, Barry, um, Iiken Green actually talking about DTS and how it is creating a new set of payment rails and countries that build first can lead and I think Alrand certainly they were there but they very much fit into this. We'll listen to what Stacy has to follow up on this in just a second. Let's get into this.

[00:08:28]>> They have a leg up in this international currency competition. Uh if I can add on the um the digital technology point, I I I do agree that distributed ledger technology is a thing and that there is going to be a new set of payments rails out there and the uh countries and currencies that are able to capitalize on those new payments rails will have a leg up in international currency competition as well. There there are some big uncertainties there as we we we've heard. What will run on those new digital payments rails? Will it be plain vanilla cryptos? Obviously not because they're too volatile to um carry out the basic functions uh provide the basic functions of money. Stable coin, privately issued stable coins, I don't think so. I think the arrow of history points toward public provision of the public good of stable money. Um, so I I think rather than uh the United States and and the Genius Act betting on the right horse in this race, I think the Europeans and the Chinese who are putting their um digital gold on um central bank digital currencies and tokenized commercial bank deposits are are are likely to be betting on the winning coins. If you think about where we are um in regards to this race really the US is it owns stable coins has monopolized that whole market there's going to be this real fight that is going to take place let's get into Stacy talking a little bit more about this >> I will say though in terms of the store value point now the macroeconomists in us will uh be a little bit horrified by this and the microeconomists among us will be uh maybe celebrate this but the idea that if you can I swear on this panel or no okay the idea that you may live in a shitty ass country right with a nefarious monetary policy and no kind of rules-based uh inflation dynamics right that you might as a as a middle class household hanging on to the middle class might be able to have sav savings in US dollars because you know how to VPN into somewhere and you can now hold dollar stable coins without having to have a bank account. That may be, and I say this provocatively, the most important developmental policy that this country has ever had, right? The idea that you can rescue households from their own governments is um you know is I think also worth keeping keeping in mind in all of this.

[00:11:06]>> There we go. Very much the plan. Um obviously we know Alran's already proving this. You know if we look at how uh Hezard pay becomes the first and only interoperable digital payment platform in Afghanistan. you know, they've used kind of dollar aid um to Afghanistan uh to help uh sort of individuals there.

[00:11:29]You're going to see this on a kind of global and wider scale. I think uh personally AI big big topic. Um let's look at what Stacy has to say in relation to AI and we'll get into what Alran's doing there and then I'll conclude. But this was a very interesting talk at the Council of Foreign Relations on what is a very important topic. Let's get into what Stacy has to say on AI. I think it depends on what kind of agent you're talking about. So, a level one agent, which is you control the agent and you say, "Look, I love Italian shoes. Please scrape the world. Every time you see uh shoes from Italy at 15% below their average price, I want you to go out and buy that my that shoe for me." That's the agent is going to be linked to your credit card. I think it's just easier.

[00:12:08]But when you get to level three agents that act on them act by themselves and they have a you can set them up with a set of objectives and a set of rules by which they need to engage and identity is not clear and providence is not clear. Those agents are going to run on stable coin rails. They're not going to be able to go to a bank and get a bank account. They're going to use um uh US dollar stable coins if they're in the US. And by by using an atomic swap, they're going to sweep cash balances automatically into things like tokenized money market funds and manage their and manage their uh treasury holdings. Uh like that is my prediction.

[00:12:42]>> Interesting. A little bit different from uh some of the other predictions on AI.

[00:12:47]Of course, you know, Alrand is very much ready to take on the agentic world. Very interesting debate um and conversation.

[00:12:54]I think Stacey did a good job. You know Alrand's very much ready for a gentic commerce on Alrand agent can request a service accept the price and pay for it in seamless flow. Algrand enables fast lowc cost settlements and infrastructure you know and they very much stand out in this. So just an interesting video thought I wanted to share it certainly has it has the algran foundation co on it you know this is a very important uh institute well respected across the world lots of individuals would have been present to that um very interesting let me know your thoughts in the comments section. On that note, guys, I'm going to love and leave you. Thanks for watching.