At the Reinventing Bretton Woods Washington Economic Festival in 2024, Circle Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy Dante Disparte outlined the generational opportunities that internet-scale money makes possible.
Is our global financial architecture fit for purpose in today’s always-on economy?
That question loomed large at the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee’s Washington Economic Festival this fall. Central bankers, finance ministers, and executives gathered to discuss fragmentation, market resilience, and macroeconomic trends.
No trend was more central to the discussion than the digital transformation of money. In one session, “Cross-Border Payment and the Future of Money in a Deglobalized World,” panelists explored how an upgrade to permissionless and frictionless financial rails could yield substantial institutional efficiencies while eroding barriers to financial inclusion.
This conversation (full audio available here), chaired by Oliver Wyman Partner Ugur Koyluoglu, featured Circles’s Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy, Dante Disparte, alongside European Central Bank Board Member Piero Cipollone and Bank for International Settlements General Manager Andrea M. Maechler.
In his opening remarks, Dante reflected on the nature and evolution of money. Listen here:
In God We Trust? In Code We Trust? Credibility, Dante explained, is currency’s sine qua non—the prerequisite for serving as a unit of measure, store of value, and medium of exchange.
“Central bank money is the safest form of money,” he said. “And obviously the steady—and often invisible—hands of central bankers are really critical to protect monetary policy. But the real underlying technological breakthrough and the real underlying opportunity…is the advent of internet-scale money, always-on money that doesn't take bank holidays, and that allows for transmissibility.”
As we consider this breakthrough—and the digital currency space race that it has spawned—Dante emphasized this fact: the rails on which money moves may matter more, or at least as much as, the money itself. These rails enable basic internet-connected devices to become payment endpoints. The challenge now, Dante said, is to bring this concept of financial portability within our regulatory perimeter so that digital money riding on open rails enjoys the full faith and credit of the central bank and banking system.
