00:00 Speaker A
Stable coins did not destroy the dollar, they smuggled the dollar onto blockchains where it became faster, more global and more programmable.
00:06 Speaker A
That is a massive victory for the United States, but it is not an unconditional one.
00:11 Speaker A
Stable coins may increase demand for short-term Treasury debt, but they may also pull deposits from banks.
00:16 Speaker A
They may expand financial access, but they may also accelerate capital flight.
00:20 Speaker A
They may protect people from local inflation, but they may weaken the monetary sovereignty of their countries.
00:25 Speaker A
They may give users direct control of a wallet, but they do not remove the power of an issuer to freeze the token.
00:30 Speaker A
The technology does not eliminate the old tradeoffs, it globalizes them.
00:34 Speaker A
And that may be the most important lesson.
00:37 Speaker A
The crypto revolution did not begin by replacing the institutions it opposed, it began by forcing those institutions to upgrade.
00:43 Speaker A
The dollar now has a 24-hour distribution network.
00:46 Speaker A
Treasury bills have a new class of global buyers, American financial rules can travel through privately issued tokens.
00:52 Speaker A
Anyone with a phone can potentially hold a digital claim on the world’s reserve currency.
00:56 Speaker A
Washington spent years asking whether crypto threatened the dollar.
01:00 Speaker A
It should have been asking a different question.
01:03 Speaker A
What happens when crypto makes the dollar easier to use than every competing currency on earth?
01:07 Speaker A
We are beginning to find out.
01:10 Speaker A
The answer may be that the dollar’s new next great expansion will not come from banks’ military power or trade agreements, it will come from wallets, blockchains and private companies issuing tokens.
01:17 Speaker A
Crypto was supposed to build a financial system beyond the reach of the dollar.
01:21 Speaker A
Instead, it may have built the most powerful distribution system the dollar has ever had.
01:26 Speaker A
And somewhere, Satoshi is either laughing or screaming.
