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The future of the global economy lies in the ongoing dynamics of the intersection of markets, technology, and public policy. The interplay of these vectors determines the cost and availability of the food we eat, heat for our homes, electricity for our smart phones, financing for our homes and ultimately the money we use to pay for them. Chris Giancarlo spent a thirty-year career in that intersection as a Wall Street lawyer and finance executive before emerging as leader of one of the world's most important market regulators, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, known as the CFTC. It was there that he began to glimpse what is perhaps its most profound change: the Internet of Value and the rise of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.
This change is fundamentally more transformative than the first wave of the Internet that started in the late 20th Century -- the Internet of Information. The next digital wave will do to material things what the Internet of Information did to immaterial things: make them accessible, distributable, and movable instantly across the globe. Think of the ability to send money or property as easily as sending a text message to somebody on the other side of the world or into the future to your unborn grandchildren.
This book is also about digital change and how it will affect the lives of everyone in the global economy. It is also the story of how a Margaret Thatcher-admiring, free market Republican, who witnessed the carnage of Wall Street on 9/11 and then helped build one of the world's leading trading platforms for over-the-counter derivatives found himself in the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. That experience led him to become a supporter of financial market reforms in the Dodd-Frank Act, the last major "patch" of the old analog, accounts-based financial system. It also led to a rare feat: nomination by President Barack Obama to the CFTC and a subsequent appointment as Chairman by President Donald Trump with unanimous Senate confirmation. In the face of both domestic and international criticism, he then led the agency to recognize the digitization of markets and foster the development of cryptocurrencies, for which the online cryptocurrency community dubbed him "CryptoDad." This book is his story.
This book is about how America's existing financial market infrastructure, just like its bridges and tunnels, has been allowed to age and decay, unprepared for the coming Internet of Value. The book tells the story of "CryptoDad's advocacy amongst world financial market leaders to redirect their gaze from the last financial crisis to a forward-looking regulatory response to the rapid pace of technological innovation. The book includes his call to update aging financial infrastructure, especially the infrastructure of money itself through his not-for-profit creation, the Digital Dollar Project. This book is also a call for renewed faith and confidence in free market innovation. With the proper balance of entrepreneurship, sound policy, regulatory oversight, and a little bit of courage, new digital technologies can unleash a future of untethered aspiration, a future where creativity and economic expression is a social good in its own right, a source of human growth and advancement.