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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“And so it was a really wonderful thing for not just our team, but all those engineers in federal government service or Federal Reserve type service whose code hasn't been able to make public, they were really excited for us. This now may be a thing. So that was really cool. So we got that all out. And like, okay, we think we know how to literally scale UTXOs, but what if Congress wants us to have something more expressive? Say something that has programmability features that might be interesting. So then we scrapped everything and went right back to”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chair Powell was dealing with the largest inflation crisis since Paul Volcker, and he had to deal with a bunch of nerds from MIT plus me messing around on code bases on C++. Like he had to handle 8% inflation and his time was being bothered about by crypto, which I feel really bad about because if you've ever met CherPal, if you ever work for CherPal, he's the kind of leader you run through a wall for. Like 100% were very our generation is very fortunate to have him as the chair of the fad. But it was really exciting. Like, you know, we got, we effectively learned how to linearly scale UTXOs and we published all that. And the other thing is we published in open source. And open sourcing code like that as part of government is also something totally new. And the amount of phone calls our team would get from the DARPA's of the world and NSA world and those engineers who have worked a whole career effectively in silence seeing code get published publicly, they were really excited about it.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we were running a network globally on standard AWS systems that had about 2.2 million transactions per second. And we built all of that code in a matter of months. Like the actual release of the code took an extra eight months just because doing anything public at the Federal Reserve has to be done very carefully. And to this day, I have a massive amount of appreciation for the persons in Washington who have to handle to your point.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Singles Day in China, or 2019 Singles Day in China, WeChappe got to somewhere around 500,000 TPS. Said, okay, if we are assuming the PBOC is hiring the top engineer from WeChatPay to build their thing, America's not going to be worse than them. That has to be our seller. We have to get a minimum 500K TPS. And that has to be geodistributed. We're not talking like Fogo style, single rail in a Nasdaq, you know, black box. This has to be distributed around the world on multiple AZs and standard type stuff. So either AWS or GCP, can we get that 500 kTPS using all the double spend protections that Bitcoin has? And so we really went back into the Bitcoin code base in a lot of ways and just tore out everything that went to not double spend protection, but the consensus models, right? If you're assuming the Fed is running it, you don't have to have the Byzantine general's problem. You're trusting the Fed to handle the money. And so we got to a point which ultimately became a code base called OpenCREC.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As Congress could give us. And then how do we design it in a way that can handle all those expansive powers? Because you can always restrict. And so then we got to the point of thinking truly, can every human that has access to the Western internet? And you're starting to think about WhatsApp membership right there. So you're seeing somewhere around $3,000 to $4 billion. Could they all click send on a dollar app at the exact same time and would the system not have a latency issue? And so we started thinking about what were the closest examples. So we went back to at that point 2019.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can we have a form of the US dollar and a digital form, I guess in a digital form, that we can protect and double spend? Like, can we make it secure? Like the first thing we had to worry about was security, because if you get a dollar that gets devalued through digital means or through hacking, it's game over, right? And you don't, you can't roll back the dollar the same way you kind of roll back Sui a couple weeks ago. It's not going to happen. So what does that look like? And so that's when we were really fortunate to get a bunch of Bitcoin core engineers actually who had been maintaining security of Bitcoin for upward on a decade to actually start thinking about what security measures Bitcoin has, what security measures they work on a Bitcoin core, and can we put that into a dollar-like instrument? That was really cool. And then the question was, okay, if we're going to build this thing, what are again, assuming that Congress would have to prove this, what's the most expansive power?”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're going to an office at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and working with the tooling we had available or tooling we could get. And the most interesting thing from the jump, not related to the currency at all, was if you find a giant hard problem, there's no limit to the quality of engineers you can get, right? There's a lot of places world-class engineers can work for a lot of money, but there's only few opportunities where they can fundamentally change the world or have an opportunity to do so. That was A one, the most exciting thing, like unquestionably. Now, what did we learn along the way that I think was important? One of our theories was,”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you had the full force that might have what is now meta building some type of digital dollar solution or digital SDR, maybe if you want to call it that, you had stablecoins emerging and then you had the what had gotten more public was the People's Bank of China had been working on a digital wand for somewhere around five years and had nationalized somewhere between 500 and 1,000 top engineers in the country to build something that could be at least used for domestic digital wand usage, if not for an exportation along the Belt and Road Initiative. And so those things combined made it just kind of a really exciting thing. And as a founder of a team, the other exciting thing was building a team of great engineers. I had always been on the legal side of the house and trying to get world-class engineers into a government service type job in which they're turning down multiples of that salary that have gone to Google or Coinbase.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get smart on it, and two is credit my boss at the Fedigun named Jim Cunha brought me in and gave me a lot of robe to build a team, bring in engineer some MIT, bring in engineer from circle, a lot of the USDC team came over with me over the course of time to explore what would a digital dollar look like, what technology from what I'll just effectively call the distributed systems and cryptography world could we bring over can we work with the team over at MIT DCI, who I still think are the best in this space. And what can we find out? And then can that actually coexist with inside the Federal Reserve, which is a very carefully managed institution for all the right reasons? And so that started summer 2019. If you think back of summer 2019, stablecoin has come out. The LIBRE project was just about to be announced. I knew about it.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, to start with it was leaving circle, and that was hard because we had built such a great team, that circle and working for Jeremy and Sean was such a unique learning experience. I think anyone who's worked for Jeremy and Sean would agree. But we had a really interesting opportunity where at Circle, we were a global company at that point. And we had multiple offices around the world. And we were at the cutting edge of digital asset exploration. And one thing we kept hearing about was the national interest of the Chinese government in building an ACNY. And that more than anything was what led me to leave circle and in light of this recent IPO, get rid of all my shares and not let my shares expire because I didn't want to conflict, which was, can I go to the Fed and try to do something to at least let us understand what our near peers are building? Because if they're building it, there might be a use case there.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“FOMC press conferences, people would be asking Chair J. Powell about what's going on with CBDCs. What's your perspective? What are you thinking about? And there'd be these discussions about how there's some technical research going on paired with partnership of MIT Lab. And you let all of that. So I would love to just hear about what was that process like? What did you learn? Where did it end up? Obviously, the overall it ended and there was no further progress on that. So yeah, walk us through that whole journey. It's fascinating.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think circling to their credit a bunch of other firms realized that remittances were a huge problem that could be solved by stablecoins, and while they don't show up in the real volume numbers of staple coins, it solved the real problem. And you're seeing that continue to grow to this day peer-to-peer transactions aren't terribly large in the greater scale stablecoins, but they are life-changing for those who need it. And so I think Circle really got to that phase, recall phase three of the remittance problem of stablecoins. I think there's two more phases that we can get to now or later that I'm not sure how circle is going to play, but that kind of goes into where stablecoins are going to play and what I'll call the traditional card stack and traditional online payment stack, and then where they're going next, which is where Radius is focused.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think next question for Circle was where was it going? So Circle built that USDC to solve the DeFi problem. Then we had administration change in 2020. And the question was, what are stablecoins used for than just DeFi? And I think Circle also jumped into the question of can we solve what I'll call non-crypto real world problems here? And this was largely led by their new head of policy, Dante, which was, hey, remittances are a massive nasty problem. And this is something we saw at the Fed too. Everyone agreed remittances were terribly expensive and were attacks on persons who”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use of the programmability of stablecoins. And this is where Jo ⁇ o and some of the members of the product team really understood about DeFi and where DeFi was going and why Tether wasn't built to solve the DeFi problem and where Circle could get to. And the really interesting thing was there was no regulatory challenges when DeFi started with Circle. It was, can we use a programmability native to USDC and can we get real traction there? And that's, I think, the most important historical moment with USDC was that we had a team of people that saw where the world was going and built the product to solve that problem, which was DeFi. And that's where you start circle USDC. And to that point, Coinbase had joined Coinbase joined about a month before launch, where we start breaking away from Gemmy impact. So some of the other ones trying to jump into that same space. And I think that kind of being able to change your direction and understand where the world is going was really critical for Circle.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Novel at the time, which were if we thought that there were very bad people on the other end of the money, could we burn the money and put it into the right type of repositories? Those are all innovations we did at Circle that hadn't been done by Tether that we thought would be game changing. The most interesting thing was they weren't in a lot of ways. Tether retained its dominance on that kind of what I'll call stable coins as a wire replacement. And to this day, they hold that dominance, right? Tether is still 90% of transactions. Tether on Tron is still overwhelming supply of the market. What's most interesting is Jeremy and Sean committing to that vision of money working better was really what I'll call the phase two of stablecoins. That was largely led by a guy named Joel Reganado, who's now the founder and CEO of Mero, who said, all right, Tether has a dominant role in this stable coins as wire replacements. But what do stable coins, what if you actually take?”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those counterparties, which is till to this day, why you see trading guests get along so well, because there's a lot of trust there. If you had a way for the dollars to move a lot faster than the wires, particularly over weekends, that was a problem Tether solved for, which was a critical, critical need in the space of the time, not to mention the large holdings, their large exchanges had. And I think at Circle, we saw that and said, can we do it better? And Jeremy and Shaw, I think, really did believe from the jump that there's ways to do better in a regulatory compliant way. And when he built USDC was, can we do this with very clear backing from audit firms? So to be clear, Circle always had an attestation, not an audit. But can we show that we have the money there? Can the money be in the safest place that we're permitted to from a regulatory standpoint? And can we be transparent about that? And with USDC, we launched it with all those guidelines in place, including things like remote burn that were”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How circle came up with USDC, how we thought about that more regulatory and legal perspective. It's a really interesting history of how does regulatory innovation happen? And should it happen? I think a lot of people are really kind of skeptical of regulatory innovation. So with USDC, I can talk kind of about the long argrove stablecoins and where we see ourselves in the history. When we run Circle Trade, and that's where I started my circle query was with the Circle Trade desk, us in DRW are two of the largest crypto desks in the world. And what you really needed was some type of vehicle that could solve the FX and latency problem with BTC. There was a major mismatch there where the BTC may not settle in a different timeframe as the wires. And you have to really trust.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thanks, Felix. First, I'm really excited for the team. This has been over a decade in the making. And a couple of things I think about on the circle side is how directly correct Jeremy and Sean were. On can money move on new networks and what does it take to do so? And they took a pretty long path to get there between circle pay, circles BTC activities, the trade desk, Coloniax. But they were always directly correct that money can move better with less intermediaries. So that's really, really incredible story there. And happy to talk about that. Another thing is the story of the investors of Circle. There's been firms like General Catalyst and Fenway Summer who have been along that journey the whole way. So as a founder thinking about what I saw David Orfeo and Raj Date and the rest of the investors in circles do supporting Jeremy and Sean. That was a really good lesson. On the stablecoin side and”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, super excited. So skim through there, your background, but I would love to just get everybody at the speed and do a bit of deep dive on some of your different phases of your career and some of the insights and lessons and takeaways that you've derived there. Let's rewind all the way back to circle, which is obviously very much in the news these days as the IPOD just last week and it went exceptionally well, which is fantastic. Yeah, I would just love to hear a bit about what it was like working there. You let a lot of the regulatory framework of circle, which led on to be a lot of, as I understand it, a lot of the building blocks for stablecoins in general within US. And obviously we're at a moment right now where we have some stablecoin legislation that's working its way through Congress. So we'd love to just hear from a high level what were some of the lessons. What did you work on there? And what were some of the key takeaways for how you think about stable coins as an industry?”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was all about exploring the feasibility of a central bank digital currency and provided and led a lot of the research there around CBDCs, which we'll be getting into, and now is currently the founder and CEO of Radius, as well as a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab. So Robert, really great to have you on the show. It's an absolute honor.”
2025-06-11 · Forward Guidance · Former Fed Official & Stablecoin Expert On The Future Of Money | Robert Bench · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT