April 30, 2020
The interview outlines the definition of a ‘true digital dollar’ and discusses how its creation will provide benefits worldwide.
Former CFTC chairman Chris Giancarlo, senior counsel at Willkie, was featured in a Forbes Q&A article on his vision for a ‘true digital dollar’ and how its creation will be a mission-critical move for the United States in today’s global economy. He is the founder and director of The Digital Dollar Project, a multi-stakeholder initiative to advance exploration of a United States Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
In the April 26 interview, Mr. Giancarlo said, “The Project sees a digital dollar as a true central bank digital currency that will be a public good and have a myriad of use cases. These include modernizing financial infrastructure for the dollar-based domestic and international economy of the future. A digital dollar is far more than a federal benefits distribution mechanism, it is core digital architecture for our financial system.”
In discussing why the US needs to play a significant role in the digitization of money, he said “The Internet of things and the digitization of assets is coming. At the CFTC, we saw the beginning of this with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) increasingly being applied to movement of large commodities. We also saw it with the first bitcoin futures and peer-to-peer decentralized finance-based currencies. I am concerned that our western financial and regulatory systems may be slow to respond and adapt to this new wave of digitization of assets. We must give our attention to our financial market infrastructure to prepare it for a wave of digitization. So much of history tells us we can lose that quickly. After WWII, the dollar came out ahead of the British pound, that had been so dominant before. If you are not prepared for the future, you will fail to adapt to it.”
Read: “Why Chris Giancarlo Considers A Digital Dollar Mission Critical For The World,” Forbes
