The Penta Podcast Channel
Digital currencies and geopolitics with Ananya Kumar
This week on What's At Stake, our host Bryan DeAngelis, partner at Penta and head of the Washington, D.C. office, is joined by Oliver Edelmann, director at Penta, and Ananya Kumar, the associate director for digital currencies at the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center, to discuss Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Just a few years ago, less than 30 countries were exploring a CBDC—as of this week, over 130 countries are doing so. Ananya, Bryan, and Oliver break down this trend and discuss the increasing digitization of payments and services and highlight the CBDC projects we should be paying attention to.
More broadly, Ananya, Bryan, and Oliver discuss U.S. power projection through the dollar in geopolitical conflicts, the role that the Fed should play in CBDCs, and the future of the global financial system. Tune in!
This week on What's At Stake, our host Bryan DeAngelis, partner at Penta and head of the Washington, D.C. office, is joined by Oliver Edelmann, director at Penta, and Ananya Kumar, the associate director for digital currencies at the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center, to discuss Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Just a few years ago, less than 30 countries were exploring a CBDC—as of this week, over 130 countries are doing so. Ananya, Bryan, and Oliver break down this trend and discuss the increasing digitization of payments and services and highlight the CBDC projects we should be paying attention to.
More broadly, Ananya, Bryan, and Oliver discuss U.S. power projection through the dollar in geopolitical conflicts, the role that the Fed should play in CBDCs, and the future of the global financial system. Tune in!
Welcome to another episode of what's at Stake a Penta podcast. I'm Brian DeAngelis, partner here at Penta and your host, and I'm joined today by my colleague, oliver Edelman to help me co-host a pretty fascinating conversation. We have a great special guest with us today to talk about the latest on central bank digital currencies, the implications of CBDCs on geopolitics and the implications this means for US leadership. Ananya Kumar is the associate director for digital currencies at the Atlantic Council's Geoeconomics Center. She leads the center's work on the future of money and does great research on payment systems, central bank digital currency, stable coins, cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. Her analysis is frequently cited by both media organizations and policymaking institutions, including the IMF and World Bank, and I can say with confidence it's well read around the Penta offices here, especially those of us working in crypto. So, ananya, great to have you. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Thanks Brian and thanks Oliver for having me. It's always great to hear, as a researcher, that people actually read the things that you put out. But thanks for having me and I'm really happy to have this conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we read it and we can't wait to talk to you about all of it. So why don't we start though just a little bit of an introduction? Give us some more on your background and the work you're doing at the Atlantic Council.
Speaker 2:Sure. So, like you said, I'm the Associate Director at the Geoeconomic Center at the Atlantic Council. Before I came into this role, I was working in TradFi for a few years before I got into the policy side of things, so I had a little bit of experience working in capital markets and thinking a lot about how spreads and liquidity worked before.
Speaker 3:I got into this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the fun stuff. And then I sort of wanted to take a turn into more policymaking roles and came to work at the Atlantic Council, which is, you know, sort of a global think tank, has about 16 centers and programs. They do work on everything from Ukraine and Eurasia to, you know, nato and its expansion to China and other places. So there's both functional centers and regional centers. I work for one of our functional centers with the Geoeconomic Center, and the core focus of the Geoeconomic Center is to merge conversations of foreign policy and economics. So I work with a lot of economists, I work with a lot of lawyers who try and talk about foreign policy and international finance at the same breadth, because both affect each other and the decisions you make in one have impact on the other.
Speaker 2:The Geoeconomic Center works across three main pillars. One of them is called the future of capitalism, which looks at the role of global governance institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, as well as China's trajectory in the future and how capitalism has affected its own economy. The other two pillars are the Economic Statecraft Initiative, which looks at the tools of statecraft like export controls, sanctions and others, but also newer tools of positive economic statecraft, so aid and development. And then it's the work that I lead, which is future of money, and the way that I often describe my work is in two parts. So I think about what the form and function of money is going to look like in the future and what is the infrastructure that's going to enable it. So that's how I describe my research.
Speaker 4:So I remember when I was an undergraduate in college, I would cite Atlantic Council research on things like energy and you know the conflict at that point in Russia as it related to Crimea. And I suppose if I were an undergraduate today and I was on the Atlantic Council website and I saw some of your research around payment standards and CBDCs, I think a question would be why is the Atlantic Council so involved in this? And then the flip side, which I've learned since talking to you and attending the conference that you all put on in November, which is that there's so much interest in the Atlantic Council's work. So I guess my question is number one why is the Atlantic Council so involved in discussions around standards and CBDCs? And number two, what do you think explains the great interest that people have in the research that you're doing?
Speaker 2:Sure, and I wish I had a better answer than we just really got interested in it and wanted to read and write more about it. But that's at the crux of it. I'll say why a foreign policy think tank should be thinking about payment systems and how we justify, you know, our place in a foreign policy think tank, and it's not traditional at all. I think that the way that we think about US power projection through economic lens is a little bit different than other people do, right? So we look at indicators like what is the US dollar status going to look like in the future, how it's going to project power through treasuries and dollars and other dollar-denominated assets, and not just that, because a part of our work touches on sanctions how is the financial plumbing of the world going to be impacted by geopolitics? So that's how I sort of justify my existence within the Atlantic Council.
Speaker 2:The other part of it, the flip side of why I think foreign policy think tanks should be interested in this, is about the rights of peoples and the way that technology has affected their lives. So as soon as you interact with any piece of technology and as money becomes more digital, the way that it impacts your life is entirely different. You have a digital footprint. You have to care about privacy, you have to care about cybersecurity. You have to care about inclusion issues too. So, both in a macro, geopolitical sense and a more economic lens of inclusion, access, privacy, cybersecurity it really behooves, I think, foreign policy think tanks to have a little bit of a focus on payment systems and how they impact people's lives.
Speaker 4:That's great. So I guess one of the roles of a think tank is to inform policymakers, to inform academics and to inform others. And so I guess if I were an incoming policymaker say the NSC or the State Department of the Treasury maybe I have some understanding of finance broadly. But I came to you, I see your research and I ask you what should I know about all of the issues that you're tracking? What should be on my radar? What are the issues that come to mind for you?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I'll maybe talk about two related issues one on digital currencies themselves and the other on sanctions On digital currencies. As you'll know, through our research we look at CBDC developments around the world. We're looking at over 130 countries that are looking to develop central bank digital currencies. Concurrently, though, there's a development happening of modernization of financial market infrastructures so fast payment systems, rtgs systems and others and concurrently to that there is a broader movement of decentralization happening both in emerging markets and advanced economies.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of movement happening where technology is increasingly colliding with the way that people buy and purchase things and store value, and there's not a lot of rules around that system at all. So, in the most broadest of sense, a policymaker should think about how those interactions are happening, how are they impacting people's lives, and how do I create a regulatory perimeter where that interaction remains positive and does not have negative externalities? Now, that means, in sort of the real world sense, it means stable coin regulation. It means regulation of broader digital assets. It means AML, cft regulation. It means being interested as a central bank or finance ministry, having a vision of what payment systems are going to look like in your country and being interested in new technologies and having sort of an innovation based framework for that.
Speaker 1:I feel like that point of technology outpacing regulations is literally the basis of every single conversation we have in this office and on the podcast. But to keep it on CBDCs, this is a good example where I don't think it's talked about as much or maybe enough in the United States, and I think it would surprise most people who aren't familiar with the CBDCs to look at your work and your tractor. Just a few years ago, I think only a handful of countries were experimenting with this and now we're upwards of, I think, 130 countries. So, beyond maybe just the technology advancements, what's been the surge in kind of interest? And I don't know if it's right to say adoption, because I think some of them are still experimenting, but certainly the interest in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I always think of maybe two main catalysts of interest in CBDCs. So we started documenting CBDCs about three, three and a half years ago, where we had about 30 countries looking at CBDCs. We now have 130.
Speaker 2:So, like you say, it's a huge jump in the number of countries and I think two things happened in the last four years. One is the pandemic and the way that government services were provided. During the pandemic, I think most countries realized that their way of providing subsidies, of providing GDP payments, essentially, were outdated. Right, we would get a check. That check would take weeks to come. We would take weeks to cash it. It would take three to five days to come in. That's a really outdated system for having an emergency that happens tomorrow. And I think most countries realized that during the pandemic. It's not just the digitization of payments, it was a broader digitization of services that needed to happen during the pandemic and I think payments is a part of it. The other is the creation of Libra, which Facebook at the time was leading.
Speaker 2:It was essentially an asset-backed stablecoin that people were going to have access through the Facebook app in some way, and I think regulators effectively realized that this huge social media company that has a bigger reach than the population of most countries is going to now have a now going to impact singleness of money and the trust that people have in fiat currencies, and I think a lot of regulators became concerned about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was certainly a moment. I'm not sure they were the first, but once Facebook came out with that, a lot of people's heads popped up and started paying attention.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's entirely about the scale of Facebook.
Speaker 1:It's not the number of people and their reach. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think those two things I think really drove a lot of development. There's a few things that have happened since and I think the conversation in the US is indicative of that. I think once China got interested in started in 2017, but really got interested in 2019 2020. A lot of heads turned both in Europe and US about what it was doing, what the aims of that project was going to be, and there's a lot of, I would say, misinformation, disinformation about what China does with payment systems. But that still drew a lot of interest in, I would say. G7 aligned countries into wanting to explore CBDCs.
Speaker 1:Just quickly on that point, the 130 countries. Can you just even broadly break that down? That is some big economies around the world in that mix too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so maybe we'll break it down by G20. So every G20 country has expressed some sort of interest in doing CBDCs, but the question we always ask is how interested are they and at what point of interest are they? How much investment are they doing into this? Essentially? So what we found was that about 62 so more than half of that hundred and thirty around half of that hundred and thirty number were in the development, pilot and launch stage of CBDC development, which meant that they were in the advanced stages. They had already invested some sort of resources and doing it. They were creating a proof of concept, a technological tool that people could use.
Speaker 1:They're committed.
Speaker 2:They're committed to this. Now. This includes 19 of the G20 countries, including the United States, including Europe.
Speaker 1:Who's the odd man out?
Speaker 2:It's Argentina, but I think, they have other economic issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, sure, that's another podcast.
Speaker 2:To be thinking about. But yeah, that's the out man out. It's a good question, but yeah, almost all of them are in the advanced stages of development.
Speaker 4:I guess, to follow up on that point a little bit, what does it mean to be exploring a CBDC? Something that I and I think I speak for others around the office you know struggle with sometimes is almost on a weekly, monthly basis. There's a new announcement of a pilot that X or Y central bank is doing. There's, you know, enbridge between Hong Kong and UAE. There are, you know, the Fed is launching things, banks are launching their own kind of regulated liability network proposals, and it's hard sometimes to piece all the pieces together and to kind of understand what is actually important. What is signal versus noise? What should I be kind of tracking? What is kind of just kind of on the side a little bit. So my question for you is when you're kind of understanding and seeing all the different projects that are coming through, what to you stands out as things that eye in this office that others in the space should really be paying attention to?
Speaker 2:Right. So the way that we categorize developments and this was a very important part of this exercise right Like you have to be able to say where countries are in the process of adopting a CBDC. We categorize them across four sort of buckets it's research, development, pilot and launched, and they essentially have different subcategories. So a country might express interest in developing a CBDC and say, hey, I'm going to start a pilot. What does that really mean? Usually, pilots take about like two years to come live. It means that they're going to start researching on, like, how it's going to impact their monetary stability. They're going to do some sort of like desk research, as a researcher would call it. We then get into the development phase where they contract it out. They have, you know, usually a request, a proposal request or contractor request to get private sector companies to come and build something that they can play around with, either in a controlled environment or, once they start interacting with other central banks or people, in a pilot type environment. So pilot really is the testing ground of a CBDC, of trying to see how people are going to interact with it, what are the kinks that they need to work out, and at that time a proof of concept has already been developed and then there's a launch stage where countries will do sort of limited pilots leading up to a launch of a CBDC.
Speaker 2:Something that I think people miss is that there's two kinds of CBDCs, right. There's a retail CBDC, which is how I would buy a cup of coffee, and there's a wholesale CBDC, which is a financial market infrastructure that allows banks to interact with each other. So it's essentially it tokenizes the bank deposits between banks, and a lot of those deposits are digital already. It's about changing the kind of technology that they run on. I think when I think about CBDCs, what's impactful, sort of in a geopolitical sense, is the wholesale CBDC part, because that's changing the nature of the financial plumbing, which is entirely dollar-based. So the reason that so much emphasis is put on Enbridge or other projects is because they're recreating the financial plumbing based on different kinds of currencies, and that is, for a geopolitical sense, more important than what countries do domestically. Of course, what countries do domestically is going to impact their economic stability and their technological adoption, which leads into a lot of their foreign policy prerogatives, but really it's the cross-border wholesale CBDC part that's really impactful.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a perfect place to take a quick break, because when we come back, I want to get into the US a little deeper, both what we're doing within our own borders and what we're doing across borders. So let's take a quick break. You're listening to what's at Stake. We'll be right back.
Speaker 3:Penta is the world's first comprehensive stakeholder solutions firm. We are a one-stop shop for the intelligence and strategy leaders need to assess a company's reputation and make decisions that improve their positioning as executives in the C-suite must account for a growing set of engaged stakeholders, all with distinct, fast-changing demands. Penta provides real-time intelligence and strategy solutions. We work with clients solving complex global challenges across a variety of industries. Our clients span technology, financial services, energy, healthcare and more. To learn more about how Penta can support your company, check out our website at pentagroupco, our Twitter at PentaGRP or find us on LinkedIn at Penta Group.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to what's at Stake. I'm Brian DeAngelis, your host here, with my colleague Oliver Edelman and our guest Ananya Kumar of the Atlantic Council. Let's jump into the US a little bit. So obviously, one of the most kind of pressing geopolitical issues today, as you mentioned, is the conflict in Ukraine and it's no secret there's some debates going on about the US and our allies' support for Ukraine. We just went through a big funding debate here in DC. But I want to dig a little bit deeper, particularly into sanctions and how the US is using its power behind the dollar to, you know, really push its agenda and its sanctions and to what extent you know you buy into some of the criticism, I guess, about weaponizing of the dollar and where that plays into some of what we're talking about with CBDCs and other alternative payment systems.
Speaker 2:Sure, I think pressure sanctions are an interesting case because until 2015, any sanctions regime that the US had put on other countries had been a part of a package where the sort of tip of the spear was kinetic action like military action fear was kinetic action, like military action, and sanctions were a parallel sort of action that the US was taken to, you know, maybe cripple the economy of the country that it was attacking, affect its you know, military, in some way affect the financing of terrorists and things like that. Russia's sanctions changed that dynamic a little bit, where US imposed sanctions have become Right going to engage in. It's an interesting case that way, where sanctions are the only thing that the US can rely on, not the only thing, but they have become the most important part of that package of things, with both the US but also G7 countries, and I think sanctions were never meant to do what we expect them to do now. For that reason, right, the motivations of sanctions were to cut off terrorist financing, to cut off military financing for countries. I don't think that that can be realized through just sanctions, and so I do think that there has been a level of increased usage of sanctions over time, not just in 2015, but really starting, you know, starting the negotiations with Iran, where these have become the only tools the US comes to rely on.
Speaker 2:What that means is that countries are insecure about their reliance on the dollar based financial system and they are looking for options outside of it. Now, those countries are not always the sort of Russia, china, iran nexus. They're also middle power countries like India and Brazil that are interested in interacting with Russia, china, iran in some capacity because they you know these are commodity exporters and people want to be engaging with them in some way. So I do think that it has led to an expiration of alternative payments arrangements, but people always think of it. You know, there was a lot of talk last year about a BRICS currency. Sure yeah, and people always think of it as like. I don't think any of these payment systems are here to threaten the primacy of the dollar as the dollar-based payment systems, but I do think that they can cause leakages into the dollar-based payment system. So, whenever US overuses sanctions, which isa really hard line to sort of balance To find.
Speaker 2:To find yeah yeah, you don't know at what point you tip over. Essentially, I do think that there's an interest in alternative payment systems and that does lead to the creation of alternative payment systems and that does lead to the creation of these infrastructures, and wholesale CBDC is a part of it.
Speaker 4:We've kind of heard for years and years, if not decades, that BRICS even going back, I think, as far as 2011, was exploring alternative currencies. There were gold-backed currency suggestions. So I guess my question is does the kind of distributed ledger technology that we have now to the other kind of faster payment technologies that are available to us that are being explored in Brazil and other places? Does that mean this time is different, or is it again just all talk? How do you kind of think about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean BRICS is an interesting case because, like most BRICS countries aren't really aligned with each other on what their agenda is going to be. It's just a sort of random grouping of countries that sometimes agree with each other Sometimes. Sometimes and thinking about India and China in the same sort of grouping of countries is even sort of counterproductive, because their geopolitical motivations are sort of completely opposite of each other. On the BRICS currency, I do think technology has allowed countries to look at options, but I also think that you know, a feeling of insecurity through overuse of sanctions has created that motivation too. I think I'm trying to figure out.
Speaker 2:If you know, a lot of conversations in DC are about BRICS currency and that's not what I think the sort of emphasis should be on. It should be on the rails itself. So it should be on the financial plumbing and not the currency that they're going to use in that financial plumbing, because I don't really think a gold black currency is going to offer them any advantages or many of them are going to want to use a yuan or a ruble in any way. What they are going to use is a connected and interconnected financial plumbing system that technology has allowed them to create.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fascinating, but I do want to shift gears domestically a little bit. The US has, you know, looked into the concept of a digital dollar, but that's led to a lot of debate and some may even call it controversy in this country. There's proposed bills in Congress to ban a US CBDC. Former President Trump, florida governor and former candidate for President, ron DeSantis both came out pretty hard against the digital dollar. You and your colleague, joshua Piskey published a piece earlier this year kind of warning that the Fed was falling behind on CBDCs, and I'm curious what the Fed thinks of that. But what do you want to see the Fed do? And I guess why.
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm not sure what the Fed thinks of that, but probably not positively. But what we didn't notice over the course of the last two years is that there's a greater divergence in G7 central banks. But also the big four central banks are part of the G7 central banks. So what we're thinking about is the Bank of England, the ECB, the Fed and the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Japan. Three of those banks have a strategy for how they're going to incorporate innovation into their next, you know, the next generation payments infrastructure that they're building. Three of those banks have existing RTGS and fast payment systems that they have up and running since at least five years three or four years ago. And three of those banks have a CBDC strategy. Right, they're all in the development and pilot stages. So Bank of Japan and the ECB in the pilot stage, bank of England development phase of developing a CBDC.
Speaker 2:The US is nowhere when it comes to retail CBDC and, like you said, a part of the reason is politicization is trying to tamp down what has been a controversial and deeply politicized debate on CBDCs, and I do think that we should have that debate. I think that we should think very seriously about citizens' rights and privacy and cybersecurity and things like that. I think we should have a rich debate on those things, but simply banning a CBDC is probably not going to allow for that debate to continue. So, yeah, that's where I think the US is, and what the Fed should do is invest more on innovation. The Fed should be like any big company or big corporation in the 21st century is they have multiple innovation centers, they have the ability to invest talent and resources into innovation, and we think that's where the Fed is lagging behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the Fed tends to go slow, but they're more thorough. I'm not sure there's a role for Congress here to decide what we are going to do or not going to do. But, you know, really have the Fed kind of continue and maybe speed up to your point. But they're the right ones to kind of hold the reins here, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean they're the issuer of the currency and they have monetary goals in mind, so I do think that they are. They're also a neutral body that's not politicized.
Speaker 3:Not yet. Let's hope.
Speaker 1:We might have to edit that one out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well they are. They're an independent and neutral body On the retail CBDC. I do think Congress has a role to play, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, agreed.
Speaker 4:I think it's an interesting kind of communications problem too, because it's very technical and some of the work that we do around here a way that it's been described when I was starting out was we deal with issues that sound one way after 30 seconds but sound totally different after five minutes. And I think a US CBDC is that If you have government control of digital money, it maybe doesn't sound great after 30 seconds, but if you describe it right and you kind of dig into the details a little bit, you kind of understand why we should be exploring it, why there are kind of global implications, for why a CBDC is something that we shouldn't just say no to immediately. And I think part of that kind of debate or part of the problem is that the debate is just is very one-sided at this point. I mean you have folks like like you guys and the Digital Dollar Project and others that are engaging, but I mean the other side has just totally come out against it, I think. And it's just kind of an interesting communications issue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I you know I work with a team and not all of us agree on whether they need to be a retail CBDC or what it needs to look like. All of us agree on whether there needs to be a retail CBDC or what it needs to look like. I do sort of think about two anecdotes when I think about why we should explore a retail CBDC. One is about what happened last year as people started using chat GPT. I don't think anyone had thought about what predictive regenerative AI was before it happened. Like a normal person not anyone but having it be incorporated on your day-to-day life and being able to play around with technology led to a lot of thinking about how we should be using it, what it should look like, what are the ethics around it that you and me, like normal people, could engage with and think about it from a technologist's perspective, where I do think having some kind of technology is actually and playing around with it and exploring it is actually useful because it leads you to new kinds of thinking.
Speaker 2:There is sometimes a card option, there's a wallet option which, if my phone's not dead, I can use, but there is no cash option anymore in a lot of metro stations, and that is actually a very interesting financial inclusion question. Like we're essentially not including people who have smartphones and not including people who have debit cards, which is a certain percentage of this country which is an advanced economy. So think about that argument extended to an emerging economy where that percentage is much longer, where people do rely on public services like transportation to get from one place to another. So when I think about like increasing digitization and sort of excluding people, that's an example I bring up because it's something I think about almost every day.
Speaker 4:So I guess, to close out, I mean, why don't we end on a little bit more of a positive note, hopefully? When you think about topics like inclusion, when you think about the amazing technological developments be it in CBDC, be it in stable coins, be it in some of the other fast payment systems innovations that we're seeing, and if you envision what the global financial system looks like in five years or 10 years, what does that look like to you, based on all of the developments that you're seeing? What does it look like for, you know, a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia trying to send money back to the Philippines? What does it look like for policymakers here and trying to impose sanctions, for example? What does the ecosystem look like and what are the implications for the various actors?
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean, when I think about our cross-border payments infrastructure today, I think of it as a dirty shirt that's the least dirty Like. The way that we've made it work is not the most efficient way that it could work, but it kind of works and so we've continued to make it work that way. The other bit is that, you know, technology has changed the way that people send money and receive money and interact with money, and we need to keep that in mind as we evolve these things that we have. I think of two things when I think of the future. First, I think that we need to stop getting into the weeds of, you know, like the weeds of like what throughput is going to be, what the scale is going to be, how much is going to be transacted, all of this thing, and actually think about what our objectives are with the future payment system which is why I think that you know going to be transacted, all of this thing and actually think about what our objectives are with the future payment system, which is why I think that you know countries should have a vision of what they want, like 50 years in the future, where you and I are probably not going to exist. I think that we need to think about objectives and think about wanting it to be faster. We need to think about wanting it to be cheaper. I mean think about wanting it to be safer in many ways right, and we should think about not be, you know, kind of distracted by shiny technologies that can achieve that today, but think about how we create a holistic system that achieves that for everyone. I think that if we have that goal oriented thinking, we can actually have more agreement on what payments infrastructure can look like.
Speaker 2:The other thing is not to be overly prescriptive. I don't think that anyone actually knows how we're going to use stablecoins 50 years down the line, and I don't think we need to be overly prescriptive about people are not going to use CBDCs, people are not going to use stable coins, people are not going to use fiat money. What we should do is create as many options for the consumer as possible so they can choose the option that helps them the most in whatever scenario they are in. So if a migrant worker decides that a stable coin is the best solution for them to send remittance to their country, we should allow for that to happen with adequate protections on every side. Right. We need to make sure that money is not being sent through a Hawala system that's completely intransparent. Things like that, I think, are important.
Speaker 2:The other piece that I do want to talk about is a piece that I wrote recently, which was about this sort of reimagining a future of financial architecture, and I took a specific use case in Palestinian territories. So, as we think about, think towards reconstruction and away from the war, there's, of course, a lot of things that need to change, but one of the things that is going to be important is how aid money gets into Palestinian territories, how it's distributed and how you can keep track of whether terrorists are having access to it or not a benefit of low cost and a benefit of actually connecting a future Palestinian economy to the rest of the world, which doesn't really happen right now. I do think that we need to sort of rethink a lot of the ways that we've constructed our financial architecture. Think about the inefficiencies and the excesses there and try and rework that a little bit, and I think CBDCs can offer one of the waste of doing it. So can stable coins, and so can other digital assets.
Speaker 1:I do think there'll be some fascinating use cases in terms of reconstruction and investment in war-torn countries natural disasters but, getting money quickly into the hands of people who need it. Having more transparency to get rid of what inevitably right now in our system does lead to some fraud or leakage, and it'll be really fascinating to see where this goes in the next five to 10 years, but unfortunately I think we have to leave it there.
Speaker 1:But we could go on and on. So, ananya, thank you so much for joining us today. We could go on and on. So, ananya, thank you so much for joining us today. And, to all our listeners who are interested in this space, I strongly encourage you to check out her work and the work at the Atlantic Council's Geoeconomic Center For more episodes of what's at Stake. You know where to subscribe on the Penta Podcast channel, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter at PentaGRP or on our website, pentagroupco. I'm Brian DeAngelis, here with Oliver Edelman. Thank you so much for listening to what's at Stake.