YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Bench

lines on the record: 70
first: 2025-06-11
most recent: 2025-06-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at RK Bench. Our website's radiuschech.xyz. We're pretty open, pretty transparent. DMs are open. If someone wants to reach out. But importantly, I appreciate the time. Having these types of conversations, I don't think we're possible 20 years ago. You had to go on Lewis Rukaiser, have this type of conversation. And I'm definitely not qualified to be on that show. So thank you for the time. This is awesome.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think what you're going to see is certain internet networks no longer be global, right? So China has its own internet. Certainly regulations in Europe are coming out to give it its own internet. So maybe they can persist in establishing a currency standard within those zones. But if there is a what I'll call default Internet that is American run, I don't know how you get away from not having standardization and currency. And I think that's the big what if that economists who are way smarter than me need to start modeling because I think that's a really interesting conversation.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, us in Canada can't get along right now. What hope does China and Brazil have? Over that course of time with that depth, maybe a little great, but I think making five very different countries get along on a currency standard would be really hard to do. Really, really hard to do. But what happens to Latin America? What happens to Africa? What happens to Southeast Asia? I don't know. But if history is any indication, history tends to standardize. Technology tends to standardize things. If currencies are deep and liquid enough and can be standardizable in code, I just don't know how that doesn't happen. And way smarter economists than me can talk about the trade-offs there and the results to local economies and communities. And I have never lived anywhere but the United States. So I've always had relatively stable currents. But I think that's the one thing that people aren't talking about enough is as currencies get natively digital and move over open internet networks, what happens to local currencies?”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you noticed the last year, but us in Canada really aren't doing that well right now, right? I've never seen a Stanley Cup like this one between Florida and Edmonton, right? And you're Canadian, right? So you know this.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're really making a big bet that those very different countries get along with each other. Right, right. We have the five eyes in the United States, and there all happen to be English-speaking Commonwealth countries.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You probably have the yen, you have the yuan, you have the wan, you have the pound, you have the euro, you have the franc, the rupee. And let's see what else is in the dollar and let's see what”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money, if it becomes natively digital, we'll start standardizing towards certain economies, but probably only those economies of liquidity to handle it. So, what does that, and ideally those that are stable for unstable economies or economies with unstable currencies, if their persons have a legal ability to get access to a more stable, deeper, more liquid currency, they may go to that so what does the Western Hemisphere look like in 2050? How many countries are dollarized by 2050? I think that's a great question. My bet is most. Maybe Brazil hangs in there, but most probably get dollarized. What does the eastern part of the world look like? Does China start exporting? Because they have the deep liquidity markets. And my bet is by 2050, you probably have six or seven currencies left in the world. Like, that's my big bet.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think this will disrupt AdWords. Like, that is one of the goals of our company, is to disrupt AdWords full stop. So I think that's coming. I think the third thing is something we raised inside the Federal Reserve System, and it was always a very uncomfortable conversation is the question of how many currencies exist in the world in 2050. And I think this is something that you look at every technology system. If you look at the internet or you look at the code of the internet, the overwhelming majority of the internet is in English. Almost every coding language is in English. That is not an accident, right? Primarily speaking, English speaking countries built this technology. And what emerged was English being the lingua franca of this technology. Is the standardization.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This administration kind of keeps on path of either promoting or just getting out of the way of the emergence of emerging technology being financial technology. I think there's some really interesting things down the path. One is what I just talked about. I think there is a world by which the bank card stack really gets disrupted. And I think banks that do lending will be fine. Banks that offer great customer services will be fine, but banks that focus on cards, I think there could be disruption there. Definitely the cards themselves could be disrupted, but they're so technology companies at their heart, they may jump into this game, but although you really cannibalize their entire business to do so, I don't know.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way I think about technological progress is it tends to lead towards standardization, but for artificial impediments. And when I say artificial impediments, I usually mean law, right? And so at least in the United States, for the last 25 years, we have been running parallel tracks in financial technology and everything else. And because of that, the US has actually limited its role in the global financial system. We've actually kind of held back the ability of the US to export its financial system because we've been very much limiting that financial architecture to the Federal Reserve system and members of the Federal Reserve System”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cut in this team. The dollar is a good thing. America's a good thing. We do believe that. And so someone's going to fill that vacuum with AdWords. Either it's going to be some open AI model of AdWords, in my mind, is going to suck us right back into the screens, or it's going to be USD stablecoins, or you see why. Alternatively, it's Bitcoin. I'm okay with the Bitcoin model, but I'd love it to be the USD model because I think there's a really, really interesting future of that. So that's where heads are. That's where our focus is. If we can literally scale the networks that support stablecoins and make them effectively free so that you have a bell, the net amount of API calls per day be the same as a genetic interactions, you can start getting natural markets for data compute and inference. And that's super exciting. So that's what we're doing. That's our sole focus. We're going to ride over the cliff going for that. That's our vision. And so we're going for it.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stablecoins. But if USD stablecoins are not this mechanism, there's a non zero chance that another actor comes into play. And the only actor with liquidity to do so is China is China, right? And one thing we've seen for the last 15 years is China does not play what I'll call standard geoeconomic games. Like they play asymmetrically on geoeconomics. The ECNY is currently in the back end code of multiple central banks around the world via the Embridge project, right? If you go to the BIS, they talk about Embridge being the future solution of central bank money. And Embridge is just ECNY, PBOC code. And like that, they're doing the smart thing. Like they're not asking permission at multinational meetings to do something. They're just building really good code. They're hiring really smart people and they're solving the problem. And so the other thing we're very shameless like pro-Americans in this.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Excited, right? So We're already hearing about open AI working on ad models, which for me is a failure, which for me is repeating the failure. And we're working like hell and sprinting like hell when we raised our last round from light speed to stop open AI from using an ad model, because then we're just attention economy all over again. And we can't have that. Like we have to have agents doing this stuff with authorization, with permissioning, with identity, so we can get away from our phones and get away from our screens. Like that 20-year experience or 25 year experience of being attached to a screen is really suboptimal. And we think stablecoins can do this. Now, we do think there's a bet that Bitcoin might be able to do it. Because, you know, our whole team is Big Bitcoiners. It's really hard for Bitcoin to scale. One of the veteran of Bitcoin Lightning was part of Project Hamilton. So we know him well when we really love the idea of Bitcoin being a censorship proof way to do this. But our bet is on the U.S.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there a way to incentivize the internet that doesn't evolve eyeballs and clicks and swipes? That's really, really exciting. And we think stablecoins are a mechanism for that. Now, the buzzword you're going to heal about this is agents, right? Is if agentic systems or actors on top of AI models can use compute, use data, use inference to do things for you or do things amongst themselves. And generally speaking, that would be buying data, buying compute, buying inference, or selling those three. Can they do so in a way that has a native currency? And this is where kind of the Carney, Mark Carney thing comes in, which is whatever currency figures out to be the mechanism by which this economy buys and sells things from each other and replaces Adwards, that will probably be the default language or the default model of this new version of the internet. And that's where you get really.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are in the multiple millions of transactions per second in our testnet, and we're running about 10 million transactions per dollar. So we're nearing free. And as we add more compute, it tends to scale better. We're really excited about that. The most exciting thing is a use case, which is if we can literally scale value transfer, we can fundamentally change the incentive model of the internet. I don't know about how your team works, but I spend most of my time on the internet now on Cloud or OpenAI or cursor. So what does the attention economy look like if we're not clicking and eyeballing? How does the Internet incentivize itself? And can we actually use stablecoins as a mechanism to free ourselves from that hamster wheel? And so as we think about how we describe ourselves, one of the things we start talking about is letting humans do human things again, which is, can you actually get as a father of three, can I get my kids away from the attention economy that Zuckerberg so wants them to have and be attached to?”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we need to get our minds wrapped around what does currency conflict look like, what tends to happen during currency conflicts, and how can central banks get themselves ready for currency conflict. Background on that. Apparently he no one knew he was giving the speech. It was the last speech he ever gave as head of the Bank of England. He didn't run it past anyone. Everyone was kind of silent and shocked in the audience when he gave the speech of, the dollar is nearing its end. And usually when currencies change, we have a world war. So can please the central banks who are in the room here and the governments that support them, can they get together and figure out what are we doing? So we don't have a lot of people die. And so those two speeches came out about four days from each other in late August 2019. And they've been a real foundation of how we think about what we build. And so when we think about what we're building here at radius, one is we've been laser focused on building a literally scalable smart contract execution network that's effectively free.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Andreessen went to this, but for us having effectively linear scalable data systems or value systems that move as scalably as TCP IP, we have to use this weird barter system with ads. The other really interesting thing is Carney, who at the time was the head of the Bank of England, gave a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Wyoming event, Jackson Hole event, which said that we are nearing a point of currency conflict.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he talked about this 20 years later at this podcast in 2019 and late August saying, but for us having technology, because we didn't have the technology to move money on this layer on the internet, smart people at Google and layer that woman went to Meta built something called AdWords. And so now we have this original sin of the internet, which is effectively the attention economy or AdWords. It's also a massive business. It's Google's primary business. Everything else at Google lives for that. Everything on Meta lives for selling ads. And also a parent of three kids. I think about how much time they're pulled into the phone. I think how much time I'm pulled into the phone because the attention economy is really what drives several of our largest corporations is a sale of ads for incentivizing the internet.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More recently with a Coinbase developer platform's X402 protocol, were they really talked about this at depth? And that team is like, we really look up to the Coinbase developer protocol team. It's a guy named Eric Greppo and them are really, really good. And the whole point there is what Andreasen goes at length with is when he was developing Netscape in 1998, he banged on every single door in the financial services sector from banks to Federal Reserve to Card Network saying, we've built this really useful digital network called the Internet. We're making it really user-friendly. We'd love there to be native money on it. And everyone just told in the Pound Sand.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And can you get into the millions of transactions per second? Like, you know, like we did with Project Hamilton, can you get a cost level in the hundredth of thousands of tens of thousands of a penny? Because what gets really interesting there isn't just driving standard card swipes to zero cost or, you know, infinite speed for settlement. What gets interesting is you can start changing digital incentive models. So talking about where the puck is going, one thing we think about is what are the most high margin activities out there but for the apps that exist but for the absence of a technology and we are really inspired on Hamilton was two concurrent speeches that happened within a week of each other in 2019. So in 2019 two speeches came out for about 40 days from each other. One was Mark Andreessen's original sin of the internet podcast. It got made a really, really popular.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And most Americans don't have that much money. Our economic situation is pretty broadly gapped. And if you can save 3.5% on most loaves of bread, that's a really good thing for a lot of people. And I think people like Stripe get that. So I think that's what I'm calling the stable card era. And that's right now. That's happening right now. In the next 18 months, that is happening. We're thinking next, right? So the main focus, you know, radius launch in 2024. We're building it all off that parse, that code base. We built with MIT as part of the Federal Reserve Project, which is can you linearly scale stablecoin execution? When I say literally scale stable coin execution is as you add more compute, can the stablecoins move faster? Can they get cheaper? So right now, the cool thing is most stable coins are running on the EVM. So I think 98% of stablecoins all run on EVM-based networks, right? So we've built our entire company based on the EVM because the tooling is there.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that's where the puck is right now. I think really smart people inside Stripe and companies like Stripe are asking, why do we need to pay $350 basis points on a transaction when stablecoins and stablecoin networks can solve 325 basis points or that? And I think that is a critical good. And people ask why stablecoins, why financial technology, that is a critical good. And one thing that drove me crazy inside of the Federal Reserve, not that I'm a monetary economist, not that I'm smart enough to be angry inside the Federal Reserve, but one of the things I would pull my hair out is us having genuine conversations of what to do about 8% inflation. And we're staring in the face of 3.5% of that for most retail goods based on car networks and banks.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For payment, we have a payment instrument called stablecoins. Maybe that will work. And 280 visas charging 25 basis points for messaging. And then we are the POS. We own the POS and the UI. Okay, so can we get, how low can we get this number, right? And you can get pretty low. Like Walmart and Costco get down to about 90 basis points because they just squeeze everyone because they have the size. But your corner bodega can't do that, right? If you're in Brooklyn, you're in Cambridge where I am and I'm getting a Coca-Cola for my kids and I use a card, that's a three and a half percent tax. So I think Stripe is thinking about that and understanding, can you bring, and this is not inside baseball, but if someone does need the credit side of the credit card transaction, can you add a Klarna to the stack, right? Klarna and Stripe are already working together. Can they add 40 bips on the credit side? And now you're looking at 65 bip with credit involved, supposed to 350 bips. I think that's a really good conversation.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to say that's a payment mechanism, not a credit mechanism. And so, do you need us give bank X 300 basis points? I think smart people ask them that question. And then, if bank X is moving that 300 basis points, do you need visa to be the messaging system between Bank X and Bank Y if you can replace that bank with a stablecoin and you replace Visa with some type of distributed network, whether it's a blockchain or some type of stablecoin network? I think smart people asking that question, because if you look at operating margin, no one's better than the cards. The cards operating margin has for the last 20 years has been by far the highest operating margin on the S&P 500, and it's not close, which means the really darn good business, but darn good businesses get competed against, right? And so I think Stripe is taking a look at Visa and those types of companies are saying, okay, we know that Bank X is just charging 300 basis points the end user.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Circles team in 2018 really solved the DeFi problem. And then in the next administration, a lot of that team, particularly the policy team, pushed for the remittance solution. I think now there's a really interesting solution happening, which is what I'll effectively call the stable card era. And this is how we think about where stables are going right now. And you're starting to see traditional fintechs, namely, you know, the one I'm most excited about is Stripe, because I think the Collison Brothers are the best in the game at FinTech, which is taking a look at that 3.5% that has effectively attacks in all commercial activity, at least in the United States, if not in most of the world, that bank X gets 300 basis points, Stripe gets 25 basis points, and Visa gets another 25 basis points, and questioning, well, why does the bank differ 300 basis points? Is it for lending? Is it for the availability of money? And I think for most card transactions,”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, kind of going back to our theory about where the era is of stablecoins, right? So, you know, I was on the circle trade desk when we were one of the bigger users of Tether back in 2017 because it worked and because bank wires had a big latency problem. And so the Tether team did solve for that problem.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I don't know anyone who has a check account that gets much yield, right? Banks can offer some yield, but I know what my corporation's reserve gets from its bank and it's zero. And there's a lot of money in there. We still get zero. So I don't get that argument either. I think there might be product store for yield. I'm really hard to see how they're not securities, though, if they're offering yield. I don't know anyway from the security question, aside from very specific guidance on it. But my hunch is if you're offering yield, you look a lot more like a stable coin if you're not.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crises. I don't know, you know, kind of with a point where it was the bank's management, the reserve assets behind the stable coins that caused the problem. And I was at the Fed when those broke, so I had no inside baseball on it because I wasn't pulling directorate. But I think that's a great conversation for historians of like chicken and egg there. But offering yield, you know, you also get criticism from persons in the banking industry saying stablecoins don't offer yield.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is going to move between the same parties, and obviously legislation is changing and guidance is coming up from Chairman Atkins' office that might change these things, but they don't move the way they do if they're securities, right? You're not offering DeFi products in 2018 if they're securities. And that a lot of that led to why stablecoins were heavily in the banks. Stablecoins were into banks because that was the safest place to put the money that didn't immediately call them securities. Bank concentrations is a wholly different conversation. When we were looking at designing USTC, we really wanted 37 banks because that's how money markets split there bank accounts. But there wasn't 37 banks in America with risk appetites or legal provisions or compliance divisions or lawyers that would give them clarity on could they hold these things. And I think people talk about stablecoins causing bank.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just the way the laws work is if you have a derivative of security, you're a security, right? And so if you wanted to have some type of stablecoin that was backed by government bonds and you're effectively putting a synthetic government bond out there, you can't put a security on a new type of technology and call it not a security. It's still a security. And we worked really hard inside the halls of the SEC during the first Trump administration to get any kind of clarity on this. And we spent a lot of money on a great law firm who worked really hard for us. And we got nowhere. It was really, really hard to get that version of the SEC to see where we would try to go. And I'm sure other firms have these same challenges. But then the question is, if it is a money market fund and you are offering a yield, can it move in the same room?”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this was one of the first battles we had when trying to design USDC was Tether had been out there, but Tether wasn't even attempting to go into any kind of regulatory remit. I think Paulo and his team were just solving the problem of the trading desks exchanges. But when we tried to take this very seriously, we hired my esteemed best firm in Washington for this. We spent a lot of time inside the halls of the SEC and the Federal Reserve.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad he brought up the comparison to money market funds because that's exactly how I've been thinking about them myself as well. And it feels like a lot of other people are. And it just feels like a new version of that. But the one distinct difference between the two is where the yield goes. So these stablecoins are not yield bearing. And it appears that if the genie stack gets passed as it is existing today, they will not be allowed to pass on any yield. I want to bring that and throw that at you and just get your take on why that is. If we want these to be the new version of money market funds, but then we don't allow people to actually get a yield on them, how could they actually be a money market fund if all the yield is just going to the...”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin still is not immutable. I think people have a false belief it is, but Bitcoin breaks all the time through just really smart people fixing it. So they're not perfect. And so there's risk there. And if you have real money on top of it, you need a capital cushion for it. And again, people in the system know how to solve for that problem, and I'm sure they're working on it.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On public blockchains. And the learning curve to understand what I'll call the operational risk of public blockchains. The Federal Reserve has a long and storied history of analyzing and modeling operational risk, which generally means risks associated with non-financial matters, right? So legal or technology. And what type of capital buffer do you have to put on, say, Tron versus ERC20? That is a question that hasn't been solved. I think smart people are asking these questions, but there's going to need to be some type of capital buffer. Again, Jeremy's going to kill me for saying this, but I think there needs to be some type of capital buffer on public blockchains running stablecoins because there's real risk there. Blockchains are not, people say blockchains are mutable. They're not. They're code. Those people maintaining that code and there's validators in that code. You've seen how many public blockchains that were decentralized have been totally rewritten in the time of crisis.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was with the first one to say he was kind of the wizard on money market funds inside the Federal Reserve system. He led a lot of the 2008 crisis issues with the money market funds breaking the buck and took a look at stablecoins and said these look, act and smell a lot like money markets. Tell me why they're not. And if they are, we have a pretty good idea on how to handle these things. And so I think you have a lot of people like Eric Rosengren and still inside the system who say, okay, not to use the Gary Gensler term, but these look like a duck, quack like a duck, act like a duck. The banks are getting a lot of adjuda because they're pulling money out of the banks. But at the same time, these appear to be fully collateralized. These are solvable problems. And my hunch is those types of veterans within the system are saying these are solvable problems. Let's just identify the risks. I think the one risk that is new is the propensity for stablecoins to exist.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we were talking about CBDC, like that's just a new ACH, that's just a new CLS. Nothing's new under the sun, which is really cool. But these types of changes do. What's really cool though is you can find people that have been through a similar type of experience and they'll calm you down and say, This is fine, here are the risk controls, we can solve for this. What was really helpful with this was Eric Rosengrin. So Eric Rosengren was the president of Federal Zerbank of Boston when we launched our project and proposed it.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fundamental technology change that is leading to new pathways for dollars to move around the world is probably causing a little bit more discomfort or Ajita and the payments directory because they need to rethink how they do what they do. But again, one really cool thing about the Fed is how collegial it is. And people tend to spend 30, 35, 40 years there. And so more often than not, what you're doing that you think is really exciting and cool, that person has done three or four times, right? So when we were building Hamilton, we went and met with the head of all payments at the New York Fed. And he was back there since 1972 digitalizing everything, post-paperwork crisis, bringing FedWire that's been around since 2018, bringing that up to the computer era in 1972, right? You know, that guy actually built CLS Bank post Halston. The Halstep failure.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Research effort that's going on. And there's no place in the world with more and better economists than the Federal Reserve System, right? It is kind of Shanger Law for economists. On the payments directorate, that's a totally different conversation, right? What does it mean if dollars move outside of their purview? I think that's incredibly critical. And it's a credible change to the dollar system. If dollars become bearer assets or synthetic bearer assets that are not monitored and controlled as opposed to messaging between what I'll call repositories of dollars vift or ACH. They're either happening in the reserve accounts of the banks or in large international banks, that becomes a fundamental change of oversight. And my hunch is the economist can probably wrap their minds around the change in the market for say T bills. Reverse repos.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are two separate questions with regards to stable coins? I think the economists, and there's work being done at MIT on this, and that's why I know a little bit about it is. Of related to Basel, you know, the Basel standards, right? When the Basel committee said X, Y, and Z assets have a lower capital treatment. That distorted the market for those assets, right? And so, you know, for example, when the Basel company said certain types of mortgage-backed securities were a zero risk rate or X risk rate, people jumped into those assets because they had a higher yield than the other ones, right? So if the genius actor, things like the genius act decide that this fast growing asset class can be only collateralized by say Treasury bills or reverse repos, well, that's going to distort the market. And so I would be shocked if the economists of the Federal Reserve aren't doing the same thing the economists at MIT are doing, which is modeling stablecoin growth and the markets for reverse repos and those bills, right? I think that is a very reason.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I am not an economist. And once you work at the Fed, you learn very quickly to say I'm not an economist and I have no statement on monetary policy. But what I can talk about on the anthropology of the organization is you have two distinct groups. One is the payments directorate of the Federal Reserve, and they're incredibly important. So all the drama you heard about master accounts over the last several years, that comes from that directorate of who is permitted to have access to the Federal Reserve payment systems. That's incredibly important. And that goes from everything from cash, wire, ACH, master accounts. That's all ran out of one group. And then you have monetary fares, and those are the economists.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, 100%. So, okay, well, considering a career trajectory there, but I do want to pause and just ask if you could just speculate a little bit on what you think is the current perspective on stablecoins, distributed ledger technology, blockchains, et cetera, from the Fed perspective. And just in general, as you've mentioned, you've been up on the hill talking and consulting as the Genius Act starts to work its way through Congress. The way I think about it is obviously there's the private stablecoin design, i.e. USC that you worked on. There's the CBDC side of things, which is just a digital dollar. There's this whole other world, which is probably quite familiar to our audience here in terms of just implementation of monetary policy through protecting of the corner, the Fed funds, right, through a variety of different rates on reserve balances and repo, et cetera, et cetera. And so as I look across the cross currents of all of those, I'm curious, what is your current perspective, you think on all of”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, and I started my career as a community bank examiner at the Office of the Comptroller of Currency. So I've been deep inside these organizations. I don't know the policy reason why we calcify our financial system for those organizations. But those organizations do have the influence that in 2022 I'm being grilled by, I'd say, persons affiliated with the right about why you're destroying community banks. And then in 2025, while advocating for the Genius Act, I'm also being accused by the left of destroying community banks. So it's remarkable, but what a country, what a country.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell me how stablecoins don't destroy the community banks of America. So the most fascinating thing is we found the one thing Republicans and Democrats universally agree on is nothing can possibly threaten independent community banks. They are the group that cannot be touched, which is really, really fascinating. And I'd be really curious to hear other guests if you've had in the past with these types of conversations of to what extent do we calcify our financial networks in order to preserve a single industry or a single compartment of a single industry? Because I know they're not threatening JPMorgan Chase. I know they're not threatening city.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my favorite example of this was when I was going through this process of the Fed, just talking about code, a question I would get multiple times both from industry but also governors of the Federal Service themselves was tell me how this doesn't destroy every small bank. And it's a great question. Now the question why we have a legislative reason to protect small banks is a great question. And I think anyone who deals in Washington understands the power of the independent community banks, right? They are absolutely a force in Washington. The funniest thing, and these questions generally came from persons on the right side of the aisle. What's most impressive is I was in Washington three weeks ago talking to the hill about stablecoins. And the exact same questions about from the left.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disintermediates some banks that maybe should maybe are taking advantage of that crew, that type of American. And that's a very simple code you can put in. And you can inflation adjust that so that those Americans can have a free wallet on their phone that buys their goods. I don't think that's a crazy thing to ask for. On top of that, you have what I would call a three to 40% tax on all goods based on card sheets, right? So your local bodega in New York, if that's where you live, you want to buy a case of Modello, you're spending an extra three and a half percent because the bank's getting 3%. The POS is getting 25% and the cards getting 25%. And so for most Americans, it probably better than not that they're not spending that extra three and a half percent were there a method of payment that is readily used around the world. But we live in a democracy that has lobbying and lobbyists are really, really strong.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's super interesting, and I'm sure there's way better political theorists than I that can think of these things. The first fight came heavily from the commercial banking sector that we are going to disintermediate the banks. And that's a possibility, but there's a lot of ways you can work with code to make that the case. The Federal Reserve has done multiple studies about the effect of illiquidity of most Americans. Most Americans don't have a lot of cash. And if you had a CBDC that effectively gave them a risk-free version of value transfer and you capped the wallet at, say, two thousand dollars, three thousand dollars, you would handle most Americans cash needs. Almost anyone can tell you, finance is most expensive for those who have the least finances. And so you give people a $2,000 cap wallet. I don't see what bank that distance remediates.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you characterize all that, I hear a process of some very passionate and knowledgeable people that wanted to purely explore technical feasibility of a very innovative technology that is distributed ledgers and blockchain. And you got pulled into this world where you came from the privacy stablecoin side of things and now you're exploring, you know, let's just call it public stablecoins or CBDCs. As you started to hint at there, and I want to tiptoe around this, but obviously just the, I'm sure people are listening to this. And when you even hear the word CBDC, there's probably some knee-jerk reactions. But to my understanding, you know, it was extremely public. Like you're saying, you're publishing all the code bases, but it feels like when I just hear the heuristics of, oh, well, if we implement the CBDC, we're going to erode and destroy the commercial banking private system and those sort of knee-jerk reactions. So I would just love to just hear your reflection on all of that and how it became this.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wide crisis, but those crises never emerged. But the cool thing was one, we were ready with the code. Two, we were able to bring in absolute rock star engineers into the federal government and have them build really cool open source code. And three is I got to work with my team that I'm still with today here at Radius, which I'm very thankful for.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's if you think about CBDC even remotely having a retail application, you start dealing with people. And when you're dealing with people, you're dealing with, you end up dealing with politics. And the one thing the Federal Reserve is extremely careful about is retaining its independence. And if you're dealing with people on a day-to-day basis, it's really hard to avoid getting into political type decisions, or I'll just call executive branch type decisions. And I think that when the rubber hit the road in CBC, it was Could this, is there a risk that this is going to pull us into politics or lose independence? And what's the trade-off for that? And I just don't think there's a compelling need for a CBDC at the risk of pulling the Federal Reserve into politics. And more often than not, major changes in financial architecture, whether it's fed or not fed, happen as a result of a crisis. And there may have been a chance of a Libra, we'll call it a crisis, although I'm quite positive with the Libra work that it was done.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To our workbench and started working on can we literally scale smart contracts? And that was what's called Parsec. And we got the EVM up to about 118,000 transactions a second, which we started designing that in 2021. Since then, paralyzed smart contract execution has become a pretty common thing. You have shops like Monad and Mega ETH working on the type of code. But the EVM 118,000 TPS was pretty cool back in 2022. And then we got that out there. And then effectively, the Federal Reserve has really three main jobs. One is stable prices, which is extremely hard to do. The second is full employment, which is maybe even harder to do because they don't really control a lot of that side of the fiscal side, right? And then third is retaining an independent Federal Reserve. If someone asked me like one reason why all the C.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT