Why Gold Still Matters as Money Goes Digital | Chris Giancarlo

Is the push for a digital dollar a necessary upgrade to protect America's financial dominance, or is it laying the groundwork for financial surveillance? Former CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo joins Kitco News Anchor Jeremy Szafron to cut through the noise on the future of your money.

In this exclusive interview, Giancarlo explains why traditional U.S. banks are using their lobbying power to slow down stablecoin innovation, the reality of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) acting as potential tools for government repression, and why he believes the U.S. must encode privacy rights into digital money to maintain global dominance. We also explore the paradox of why major stablecoin issuers are aggressively hoarding physical gold, the enduring value of precious metals as fiat systems go digital, and how Wall Street's core plumbing, the DTCC, is actively moving toward tokenized securities.

Recorded May 4th, 2026.

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Chapters:
00:00 Digital Dollar Stakes
00:31 Meet Crypto Dad
01:41 Why Washington Shifted
04:22 Future Proofing the Dollar
06:49 Surveillance vs Freedom Money
10:22 Privacy Standards for Stablecoins
13:32 Banks vs Crypto Legislation
16:43 Stablecoin Yield Battle
17:32 Remittances and Micro Payments
20:54 Why Stablecoin Giants Buy Gold
24:37 Tokenization Goes Mainstream
34:11 Book Trust and Wrap Up

#DigitalDollar #CBDC #Gold #KitcoNews #Stablecoins #Crypto #Finance #Investing #MacroEconomics #Tokenization
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Disclaimer:  
The videos are not intended to provide trading advice, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. Kitco News, its anchors, producers, and reporters are not responsible in any way for the performance or actions of any sponsor, advertiser or affiliate of Kitco News. In no event will Kitco and its employees be held liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of the content in this video.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Is the push for a digital dollar a necessary upgrade to protect America's financial dominance, or is it lying the groundwork for financial surveillance? And if digital money is the future, why are some of the biggest digital dollar players aggressively hoarding physical gold? And today we asked the man who oversaw the launch of the first regulated Bitcoin derivative market and is now advising Wall Street on the future of your money. Welcome back up, Jeremy Saffron. Money is fundamentally changing, and for the hard asset investors, the rise of stable coins and central bank digital currencies is not just about technology, it's about privacy, government overreach, and of course, the future of the U.S. dollar. Joining me to cut through the noise is Jay Christopher John Carlo, as the 13th chairman of the CFTC. He championed a pro-innovation regulatory approach. And today, he's executive chairman of the Digital Dollar Project, senior strategic advisor at Potomac Global Partners and author of a fascinating upcoming book, The New Adventures of Crypto Dead. Great to see you, Chris. Thanks for coming on the program. Jeremy, really good to be with you. I've been looking forward to this. Me too, me too. And you know, I put I put out some feelers with the audience before, any questions, that kind of thing. A lot of people focused on this, obviously. Before we get into, you know, all the all the good stuff, uh surveillance, CBDCs, uh, you've been busy. Uh you recently stepped back from your legal practice at Wilkie Farr to focus entirely on strategic advisory. Um, you know, you you've recently called this current environment the golden age of crypto, noting that massive policy reversal where digital assets are now seen as an opportunity rather than a threat. Um, Chris, I mean, what's what's specifically kind of shifts in Washington to make you realize now is the exact right moment to go all in on policy and advisory?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Yeah, you know, I I had the honor of serving in the first Trump administration, but then in the second one, we are seeing an unleashing of innovation. Like, quite frankly, I've I've never seen before. I my public career goes back to the early Reagan years, but I've never seen such a tailwind for innovation. And not just uh digital network innovation, but innovation in every area from artificial intelligence to biotechnology, nanotechnology, drone technology, uh space exploration technology, energy technology. I mean, it it's really extraordinary to be alive right now and to be active right now. And so uh part of my move, stepping down from full-time law practice to move really exclusively into the policy advisory side is to help innovation companies focused on innovations to navigate this terrific landscape, but one that's still nevertheless complicated and early stage companies need the benefit of a steady uh advisor, some of steady advisors. I not only served in government, but I also built a technology company myself and took it public in the in the early 2000s. So I know both sides of this, both from the regulatory and from the company building side.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you kind of answered it there. I mean, when you say that the strongest tailwind for innovation that we've seen. I mean, what what what's been so dramatic? I mean, the regulators, is it the courts, Congress, the White House, or or is it the market's demand from institutions here?

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Well, so we've just been through a four-year period where unfortunately regulators hampered innovation. They they they in my mind, and I write about this in my upcoming book, The New Adventures of CryptoDad, I think in their mind they conflated financial stability with me a rigid maintenance of the status quo of the financial system. And and that really hampered innovation because they felt that for some reason the only way to maintain financial stability is to keep everything the way it was. What's changed is we now have an atmosphere in Washington that says, just because you're creating something new, we're not gonna stop you. If anything, we want to make sure that our capital markets are working, that that IPOs are are able to be done and that you can cut through the noise and get out into the public markets, that you can raise capital, that you can build your business. And and regulators are not gonna be the impediment, they're actually going to be an accelerant to you building your company.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Yeah, yeah. Uh, you know, as chairman of the digital dollar project, you're you're focused on on modernizing fiat, uh, you know, something that everybody is curious about. I mean, right now, obviously, a number of BRICS-aligned countries are trying to reduce reliance on dollar-based payment rails. Um, is is digital dollar modernization now a defensive necessity to protect the U.S. reserve status?

SPEAKER_01 4:44

I'm so glad you brought that up. I want to make one thing clear to your audience. The Digital Dollar Project is not an advocacy organization for a U.S. central bank digital currency. We're entirely neutral. What we did back in 2000 is look uh 2020 is look ahead into the future and we said, look, the future is going to be dominated by digital networks of value, whether they're Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, other networks, and whether they are central bank digital currencies offered by China and its digital ECNY or the digital euro. With that coming, we asked the question: how do we a future-proof the dollar for this world? How do we preserve its reserve currency status? And perhaps most important, I think, for your audience, thirdly, how do we make sure the dollar continues to represent freedom, freedom of financial expression, freedom of economic activity, freedom of uh of financial wherewithal, and getting the right balance of privacy and law enforcement? Those are the questions we continue to ask at the Digital Dollar Project. And we don't take a position on CBDC or not CBDC. We actually applaud the U.S.'s approach of unleashing the private sector to develop stable coins, which are a form of digital dollar. They're not a sovereign instrument, they're a commercial liability, but they are a form of modernizing the dollar. And we applaud that innovation. We're disappointed, however, that the Genius Act, which has authorized the private sector to innovate a new form of digital dollars, does not provide for privacy rights. It's actually quite disappointing in that what it does is it uh puts the existing Bank Secrecy Act surveillance regime atop stablecoin innovation. So we haven't advanced in the area of privacy, but we are going to advance in the in the area of of digital money um uh innovation.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Right. I mean, this is good because uh when hard asset investors hear CBDC, I mean, their immediate concern is is programmable money and and and obviously state overreach, things you've heard about, but uh again, you've uh you've advocated for a digital dollar that protects democratic values. But Chris, I mean, you know, we don't have to look to uh uh authoritarian regimes to see the risk. Just four years ago, the Canadian government invoked that emergency act to freeze the bank accounts of protesters. You know where I'm going here, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

They didn't need a digital uh uh uh what's that's Canadian currency is called the loony. They didn't need a digital loony to be able to block people from spending their money in a way that those people want to spend their money to protest government policy. Uh and so you know we we fear central bank digital currency that it could be a tool of government repression, but the existing system is a tool of government repression. I'm one of those who actually, maybe I'm Pollyannish, but I believe that if we were to get uh digital money right, it could be a freedom instrument. In fact, I I say that if the United States were to encode privacy rights into digital money, we're gonna win the future because the world will aspire to holding digital dollars that protect their privacy as opposed to holding Canadian money where the government can can restrict their rights, or a digital uh Yuan, the Chinese ECNY, which is designed to be a control instrument. It's designed that if you protest the government, the government can turn your money off so you can't leave your village or you can't pay the rent on your apartment. That's by design. I say what the United States should do is take the opposite approach. What what we the missed opportunity in the Genius Act is we should have written privacy into it. In fact, if I can make another point, Jeremy, yeah, I think what we should do in our country is declare a trademark right over um the word dollar. And anybody that wants to develop any form of digital dollar, whether it's a corporate entity or or a country like um uh Bermuda that pegs their money by by uh by their um constitution to the dollar has to ascribe to U.S. values. And just like if you want to license the Nike trademark, it comes with a hundred-page book of all of the obligations. Anybody that wants to license the dollar should be subject to all sorts of obligations. And obligation number one should be not to invade your privacy. If we made privacy the overwhelming standard of any form of digital dollar, then the dollar would be the currency that all the people in the world uh aspire to hold because of that right to privacy. Now, throughout history, privacy has always been balanced with law enforcement. Even though you have a right to privacy in your home, if law enforcement has probable cause to believe criminal activity is taking place, they can get a subpoena and they can bash around your door. So that's not to say the rights to privacy are absolute. We need to regain the balance that goes back to Magna Carta 800 years of what's the right balance between privacy and law enforcement. But if we can regain that balance in a new digital world, I think that's a winner for the United States. And compared to a digital euro, which is going to be a surveillance instrument, and a digital yuan, uh, China's ECNY, which is going to be a control instrument, the U.S. could come out of this the big winner in the 21st century uh financial uh influence sweepstakes.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's a fascinating idea. Privacy not as a feature, but as a requirement for using the word dollar. Uh, what would it look like in law? I mean, if a stable coin calls itself a digital dollar, should it have to meet a privacy standard the same way it has to meet a reserve standard? Well, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

First of all, I I've got news for your audience. There's no privacy rights in a stable coin.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Unfortunately, the Genius Act did not impose upon these um stablecoin operators uh rights of privacy. And that may be because government has found it easy to actually use third parties, whether they be banks or for other financial services companies, in order to surveil all of us. And they can do that because none of these companies are subject to the Fourth Amendment. You know, I can make the argument that a central bank digital currency in the United States at least would be better for privacy than a commercial stable coin because at least the government is subject to the Fourth Amendment rights against um uh uh inappropriate searches and seizures. Now that's not the case, but the fact of the matter is the stable coins do not protect privacy, and they will the data will be mined for all kinds of purposes. That's the missed opportunity in the Genius Act. As I said, it would have been ideal if that um law had provided for the protection of personal privacy.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

It's interesting. Uh key point. I mean, if private stable coins are are not inherently built to protect freedom, what would what would force them to? Is it is it regulation, is it competition, is it open source kind of standards, maybe privacy laws?

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Uh I I think it should be, it should have been congressional action. Um as they say, it's a missed opportunity. Now, uh I I'm still positive on the Genius Act because I think only the American private sector will be able to develop digital forms of the dollar that have all the bells and whistles that uh uh consumers of iPhones and and um uh and other digital equipment like to see. Uh I I can't I would never expect our government is gonna create that sufficiently cool apps on digital money that are gonna attract American consumers and global consumers. I think our stablecoin companies are gonna develop very user-friendly forms of digital money that very quickly we're going to get used to. And beyond that, once we develop artificial intelligence and agents, what they call the gentic AI, I think we're gonna find that stablecoins are the way money moves. And because of that success, the dollar is gonna become the basically reference medium for all transactions in digital forms of money. Nobody's gonna reference digital yuan and use a system that is a control system. And the digital euro is gonna be fine for European domestic use, but I don't see it having a lot of global attractiveness. Um, so I truly expect that the uh the the genius, you might say, of Congress's genius act is it's setting up the dollar for utilization uh in in the new agentic uh digital economy. Uh uh too bad we just didn't get the privacy piece right.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Right, yeah, it wasn't written into that into that law. Uh you you recently say, uh said in in a quote, uh, you know, the banks need this more than crypto, referring to the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Help our audience understand that dynamic. I mean, how are US banks currently kind of being boxed out by Washington's slow pace?

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Yeah, it's so interesting, uh Jeremy. If you go back over the last 50 years, you can see at almost every stage of financial innovation, whether it was branch banks, whether it was ATMs, whether it was um uh uh banking applic apps on mobile devices, American banks use their clout in Washington to slow down the innovation rather than get on board and further it along. And they're doing it once again. They're afraid of this innovation uh of stable coins. And so rather than, in a sense, innovate, what they're using is their lobbying power in Washington to try to thwart the efforts toward a new crypto market structure bill. Now, I'm optimistic that this time around that cloud is not going to work and we're going to get some good legislation out of Congress. But that's what's happened in the past. And the problem with that is every time they thwarted the innovation, they didn't wind up avoiding it. It came to it developed offshore and then it eventually came onshore and they had to innovate anyway. So just I don't know if you remember there was a time where if you traveled to Europe, you would they wouldn't take our swipe credit cards. Uh, they wanted the ones with the chips in them, but chips were not available in the United States because once again our banks had tried to avoid that innovation only to find that their customers demanded it because they were able to use it in London and Paris, and they wanted that innovation here in the United States. And so it's time for the banks to realize you can't stop innovation. And using lobbying power to try to slow it down, it ultimately you've got to adopt it in the end. This innovation is coming. The internet is doing to finance and banking and money itself, what it's done to social networking information gathering. It's making everything much more accessible, much more direct access on people's mobile devices. And our banks need to get with the program. Now, our big banks are already with the program. It's the regional and small banks that are that are putting up the resistance. And I understand, I'm sympathetic. I understand that a lot of actions in Washington, certainly actions of the Federal Reserve, have really consolidated power with the big banks and made life much more difficult for America's community and regional banks. We we've had the lowest pace of small bank formation in the United States uh in the 21st century compared to the previous century. And a lot of that is because of actions of the Federal Reserve, uh, what I used to call the Washington whale uh sucking up all the oxygen in the room and making life good for big banks and hard for smaller banks. So I understand their resistance or concern, but I think this time around they really need to step up to the future in the form of uh digital networks of value.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Yeah, I mean it kind of brings us directly to that stablecoin kind of yield fight, too. Is Washington protecting consumers or is it protecting the bank deposit model?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Well, exactly right. Um you have to ask yourself, why are they so afraid of the ability of stablecoin issuers and stable coin um uh uh trading platforms to pay yield, but for the fact that they might have to pay a little bit more yield themselves. Again, I'm I'm not indifferent to the the concerns of bank balance sheets. Uh, but it's the big bank's balance sheets that are pretty well protected in this. Um and consumers uh unfortunately have come out on the wrong side of this.

SPEAKER_02 17:22

Yeah, you know, I was on uh I was prepping for this this morning. I was on X and I was looking at a couple of tweets and and we'll show one here. I mean, you say traditional banks need clarity so that they aren't left behind. But uh but look at this data from this morning. It's a tweet from Tether CEO Paolo Ardoño who just announced that USDT processed 6.3 billion transfers last year with an average cost of just nine cents. 3.6 billion of those transfers were under $100. I guess the question is: I mean, if an offshore stable coin is already kind of dominating cheap global microtransactions, is it too late for US banks to even catch up in the retail space?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah, is that that what you just showed, quite Jeremy, is really remarkable. And actually it makes me really optimistic. You know, we have uh uh so many of our of our citizens here in America that have and that have followed the course of many immigrants before them of sending money home to their loved ones. But you know, the average cost of sending money through a wire transfer is anywhere between 7 and 17 percent. And so on that stat you just showed, they're saying that for a $100 transfer, the cost is less than nine cents, less than 1%. I mean, that that is remarkable. What a savings that will be for the global economy at a time when we're seeing really a slowdown in some sectors of the global world, certainly European economy, a slowdown. If we can get back the cost of moving money, it's been estimated that the cost of moving money just around the globe every year is one to two percent of the world's GDP just to move money. If we can reduce the cost of moving money, we can gain one or two percentage points of GDP back into the global economy.

SPEAKER_02 19:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

What a tremendous difference that would make in people's lives.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, a stablecoin can materially lower remittance costs. I mean, are banks just protecting consumers by slowing them down, or are they protecting the legacy fee model, I guess, is you know, going back to it.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Yeah, I I I think we have to ask ourselves, why is it that that we look to banks to move money around the globe? I I think banks play a very important role in in money creation, in the multiplier effect of taking funds, aggregating them, and making loans. Important uh process uh in in the global economy, certainly an important process in a lot of the U.S. economy. But we have to ask ourselves, why is it that banks also have a monopoly on money movement? Um why can't we do the cost, why can't we reduce the cost of moving money around the globe to a fraction of what it is by really looking to technology companies and digital networks like uh based upon uh Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and some of the other digital uh digital tokens systems to move money at a much lower cost? And we're seeing that already. And I think that's a that should be a welcome uh technological breakthrough for the global economy.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean, that that goes right into yields. If if banks earn income on customer deposits and stablecoin issuers earn income on reserves, who should get the benefit, the institution or or maybe the person holding the money?

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Well, I, you know, as something of a populist, why why not make it the consumer? Um, and I think we've had too little emphasis on the consumer and perhaps too much emphasis uh uh on the banking system and their their balance sheet and their profitability. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity for us to reconsider what is the right balance between the consumer and the financial institution.

SPEAKER_02 20:53

Yeah, fascinating. I mean, we talk about stable coins obviously modernizing the fiat dollar, but let's look at where the issuers are actually what they're kind of doing with their capital. Two tether just reported that they added another six tons of gold to their reserves in Q1, uh, bringing in their hoard over 130 tons, and they're now one of the largest known private holders of physical gold outside the banks and the nation states. Um for our Kiko audience, I mean, you know, if the if the biggest pioneers of digital dollars are aggressively hedging with physical bullion in Swiss bonkers, I mean, why should the everyday investor trust a purely digital financial architecture?

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Well, actually, what I would say is what I find so interesting is amidst this enormous technological uh breakthrough innovation of uh blockchain technology, Bitcoin, the growth in different types of tokens, what I find so fascinating is the world still looking to gold and precious metals uh for as a stable source of value. Well, we've seen one of the biggest run up in precious metals prices. In the last few years that we've seen in decades, and it's coming at a time uh when um we're having these breakthroughs in in um the architecture of finance and money itself. And I think it proves the endearing value proposition of gold and other precious metals uh in this environment.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Yeah, yeah. I mean that's the contradiction our audience understands immediately after all the breakthroughs in blockchain, AI, digital settlement. Turning to the oldest monetary asset for stability, what does gold still provide that digital systems can't, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Well, I think it provides something that people have understood really, you know, through centuries as a stable source of value. It has industrial and personal uses, but it's something that people truly understand. The notion of you know, the physically possess, or else at least through custodians and others, possess a asset, a commodity of value. You know, it's interesting that throughout all of human history, almost every every money, every fiat form of money has been anchored to a commodity. You know, you go back to ancient Mesopotamia was wheat. Throughout most of history, it was precious metals. The Romans used both silver and gold. The United States, we had a silver system and a gold system. Um, and the reason for that is because of its it's it's both inherent value, but also because of its limited its scarcity value. And so you can anchor money to it and therefore control the debasement of the money. It's when currencies go off a commodity-based system and become few pure fiat, right, that that uh money often loses value through debasement. And often at the end of that debasement period, you see people reaching once again for that scarcity value commodity uh as a as a re-anchor of of the things of value.

SPEAKER_02 23:55

Yeah. How do you, you know, I mean, we can bring up tokenized gold, right? I mean, how how do you think about tokenized gold without losing the trust that makes physical gold valuable in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 24:06

Well, I think tokenized gold is bringing those two innovations together, bringing the the innovation of digital networks together with the most uh longstanding uh symbol and and and instrument of value. Uh and so I think there's a lot of uh there's a lot of logical sense in that. And I think people have found um uh tokenized forms of uh uh uh of precious metals. You know, there's PAX gold and there's other stable coins out there that have people have found to be very attractive in this environment.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah. And I mean this tokenization story is is moving fast. Just today, DTCC, the core Wall Street clearing and settlement utility that processes more than $100 trillion in security transactions annually, is reportedly targeting a July pilot and an October launch for a tokenized security platform. I mean, this is not a crypto startup. This is a core market plumbing here that we're talking about. But does that mean tokenization has officially moved from theory to infrastructure?

SPEAKER_01 25:06

It does, Jeremy. Your audience may not be familiar with DTCC, that stands for the Depository Trust Cleary Corporation, but it's effectively the they run the plumbing of Wall Street. You buy and sell securities and not just equity securities, but debt securities, government treasuries. All of the underlying movement of that, the storage, the the the value, the collateralization of that is operated by this company, DTCC, which people never hear about, but it's a consortium of basically all the world's banks. They assigned to this company 40 years ago the responsibility to do this. And as the market has grown, it's the most important piece of infrastructure uh in the world. It's the con Edison, you might say, uh of New York's financial system and of the global financial system. And what they announced, that they are moving from an analog system of recording who owns what, to who to who's transferring what to whom, to a digital network-based system. I mean, it it's it's it is it's truly one of those remarkable um uh statements that that not enough people are paying uh attention to, but it really marks that we're leaving the analog state of finance and moving into the new digital network state of finance. It really is a truly watershed moment. We'll look back 10 years from now when the entire financial system is in the form of tokenized tokens sitting on digital networks and realize that what the DTCC is doing is really the beginning of that. And by the way, they wouldn't be doing this without the wholesale support of the global financial system, who are their shareholders and directors. So this is not just a one-off, this is the system itself moving to the next phase of financial architecture.

SPEAKER_02 26:54

Yeah, yeah, Chris, that's a major point. I mean, if tokenization is moving from theory to the plumbing and the DTCC is now preparing tokenized security infrastructures. What are investors missing by treating this as a niche crypto story?

SPEAKER_01 27:08

Everything. I tell this to people all the time. Crypto is much more than just some funky new alternative asset class. It truly is a whole new digital architecture of the financial system. It's changing the way we record who owns what and who's transferring what to whom from an entry on some financial company's balance sheet to uh a digital network system. In the same way that the internet changed everything we know about photography. Before the internet, photography was a one-off thing you did with film. You took it to be developed, you got a photograph back, you put it in an album, there it sat for all eternity. Today, photography is an internet activity. You you take the photograph, you send the photograph, you share the photograph, you manipulate the photograph, you but you know, by changing the color scheme, whatever you want to do, and you and you post it online, you send it to grandma, you do all kinds of things with it. Photography is a living everyday, every minute activity. That's the same thing that's happening to finance. Digital networks are gonna change finance, they're gonna make that immediate. They're gonna make it on in an app, on your phone, you're gonna calculate and do things with it, and eventually you're gonna use artificial intelligence to make you even better at it. This, we're, we're at a, you know, we think we've come so far. We're we're we're just beginning a complete change in how we interact with our money and other things of value that are gonna be put into tokenized digital network form.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

Yeah, I just had this moment thinking my son's gonna be asking why I was talking about this 10 years ago, you know. Uh let's let's stay on about the future here, because you recently argued that the on-chain tokenized assets could eventually trade at a premium or to their maybe their off-chain counterparts. Uh, you know, obviously for a traditional investor, the appeal of physical metal is that it sits completely outside of the banking system with zero counterparty risk. When we tokenize gold, I mean you just said it, we introduced custodians, code auditors. How do you justify a premium on an asset when you're reintroducing counterparty risk?

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Yeah, so I'll I'll actually come to gold in a second. I want to start off with when I made that comment, I was really referring to securities. Um uh having uh been uh an executive in a publicly traded company, uh GFI group back uh 20 years ago, I knew that at best we could recognize 70% of our shareholders. The other 30% or more held their shares in street names through uh custodians and other intermediaries. As an issuer, we had a a very limited interaction with our shareholders because of the analog process by which shares are issued and held. But tomorrow, when shares are issued in a dig in a digital tokenized format on digital networks, issuers of securities are gonna have a direct parity, uh privy of interaction with each and every one of their shareholders. So, from an issuer point of view, digital issuance of securities is gonna be a tremendous step forward. From an investor point of view, I'm gonna have direct access to the issuer. I'm gonna own my shares in a digitally native format. I'm gonna be able to trade them and move them in ways like I could never do before when they're held through custodians. So from a securities point of view, it's sort of like you know, the the photography example, I'm gonna have direct interaction with the shares and the companies I own and the debt and the and the bonds I own. And that's gonna be transformative. Now, when we think about precious metals, just like with crypto, there are some people out there that want to own their own crypto, want to have it on their own digital wallet, might put it on a ledger stick, and might put it in a safe somewhere. But then there are also those who are perfectly happy to own their crypto and and have it housed on a wallet on a on a um uh on a kraken or uh or other uh crypto trading platform. I think you may see the same thing with precious metals and other commodities, where you'll have a choice between holding it in a digital format, but also holding it in in physical format. And I think there might be arguments for both. If I'm in a war-torn country uh where people might where there might be a high criminality and people stealing uh digital wallets, I might want a physical um uh holding. It it'll depend. I think there's gonna be demand for both.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

Yeah, uh, you know, that's that's actually a good point. It's a it's a huge shift. I mean, if if issuers can have direct parity with shareholders and investors can kind of own shares in a digital native way. I mean, here's a question because I I got a lot of broker friends uh, you know, that'll be going, ah, because again, it comes down to business. I mean, if it what happens to the old layers in the middle, the transfer agents, the custodian, the brokers, the clearing system kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Well, I look, I used to run a global intermediary, GFI group. Uh we were a broker between large financial institutions. Um, you know, brokers have a way of surviving. I I I uh they'll find some new society gets rid of intermediaries and then creates intermediaries. It used to be that Sears Roebuck um was an intermediary for many American shoppers, uh, and the internet came along, and now it's Amazon. Um I was in a dentist's office one time. I picked up an issue of archaeology today, and there was a story about brokers broking the building blocks of the pyramids to the ancient pharaohs, and the brokers would put their marks on on those blocks that came from their that they that they in fact uh negotiated the sale of. Um I I I have comp I have confidence in intermediation. There's some scientific evidence that whenever you have seven or more counterparties, intermediaries come about. But the intermediaries change technology changes who the intermediaries are. And so we may find that yesterday's intermediaries that don't adapt uh will be knocked out, and then uh new ones will come about. I'm not a fearful for wealth managers. Um even if people have more direct access to their things of value, being able to give them good, solid uh advice on how to invest their money is still something that's very important. Uh you may have made your fortune in dentistry. That doesn't mean you actually know how to uh best invest your money. So I I think that the the value proposition will remain. Just as I think people are worried about artificial intelligence um uh getting rid of some jobs, they maybe it may create others. Yeah. Uh when the um internal combustion engine came around, a lot of blacksmith shops were wiped out, but they became village mechanics. Um and I think that we'll find, I'm not, I never worry about the future. I think that uh technological innovation always creates opportunities. If you if you master the innovation, you'll find those opportunities.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Yeah, fascinating. Well, this is a Chris, our time is going too fast, but uh, I want to you about your upcoming book. I mean, it's titled The New Adventures of Crypto Dad: The Quest for Financial Freedom in the 21st Century. Specifically, again, I mean, we got almost a million subscribers here. A lot of them are retail investors watching this who holds, you know, some equities, some physical metal, trying to navigate this transition. How should they be thinking about financial freedom today compared to when you first took the helm over at the CFTC?

SPEAKER_01 34:40

I think your audience will enjoy this book. I, as I explained in the beginning, if you're looking for a textbook on digital network innovation, crypto innovation, this is probably not the book because I'm not a textbook writer. But if you're looking for some good stories, I'm a great storyteller, and I've got some stories to tell about this innovation, about some of the characters from Sam Bankman-Fried and Shane Copeland and others, uh, the founder of Polymarket in this area. And in and I use the stories to tell a bigger picture about really where this innovation is going and how, why I believe if we get it right, this could be a huge regaining of American citizens' freedom of action and control over our own financial activity. But if we get it wrong, I think this new innovation could be further rob us of our rights to fight financial autonomy in the same way the Canadian government robbed those truckers of their rights. And so I look at the balance between these uh these two very important issues and lay out where I think the future is going. Yeah, fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

Uh I know you've seen some things, you know. I mean, after FTX, a lot of traditional investors heard crypto and they immediately thought fraud leverage, political access. Uh what do you say to the viewer who says that the industry has not earned its trust back yet?

SPEAKER_01 35:58

Well, uh what I would say is if you look back at history, and I do this in the book, every time there's been a major uh innovation, a technological breakthrough, it's been accompanied by fraud and manipulation. It's almost as if the fraudsters recognize the enthusiasm of ordinary people for this new innovation and find a way to defraud them. You know what? When the transcontinental railroad came to the United States, it was an incredibly transformative technology. We were not a national economy, we were a series of regional economies, and the railroad turned the United States into not only a national economy, but the greatest economy the world has ever seen. And yet, railroad shares were sold and railroads to nowhere. There were fraudulent uh issuance of securities. There was all kinds of fraud that accompanied that technological breakthrough. And there were spectacular booms and crashes. And yet, every time there was a crash, nobody said, okay, that's it. We're done with railroads, let's rip up those tracks, we'll we'll move on to something else. No, they kept building, and we kept building the railroad, and it was critical to us during World War I and World War II to become the arsenal of democracy. And so technological innovation is often accompanied by people that take advantage of our enthusiasm, and yet that doesn't undermine the technology itself.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

Fascinating. Always a privilege to get your perspective on these complex market structures. Um I was gonna ask you for a little insight into those fraud cases, but I guess we'll leave that for another time. Maybe I gotta get your book first, Chris.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

I'll get your copy of the book, and I'd love to talk about it when it comes out in September to your audience.

SPEAKER_02 37:38

Yeah, I appreciate that. I was just gonna say that uh his new book hits shelves this September, of course. Uh gonna be fascinating to watch Jay Christopher John Carlo, senior strategic advisor at Potomac Global Partners. Uh, thanks for making the time on Kitco News today. We appreciate this.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Great being with you. Thanks, Jeremy.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

All right, and thank you all for watching. Big thanks to our sponsor, Swan Bitcoin, your partner for generational wealth. You can get started at Swan.com slash Kitco. I'm Jeremy Saffron. Be sure to subscribe to the channel for more deep dives into the markets, the economy, the future of money. We've got some great guests coming up this week.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

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