Dollars Without Borders

An in-depth interview with L'ADN in which we map the new monetary battlefield

A few months ago, in October 2025, we were interviewed by Martin Lapouille for L’ADN, a highly regarded French media outlet and consultancy that focuses on social, cultural, and technological transformations and emerging trends.

This was our first “two-sided” interview, and we found it extremely stimulating and enriching. We wanted to translate it and share it with you. As you’ll see, our views often complement each other, and we continuously build on one another’s ideas. Our thesis emerges from these dialogues and intellectual exchanges, and we are very grateful to L’ADN for the opportunity.

Following the interview, L’ADN published an article based on it (in French only, sorry!) and invited us to be keynote speakers at their event on 21 January, La Journée des Tendances (The Day of Trends). If you are in Paris, join us!

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“The first proven large-scale use case”

L’ADN: To begin with, I wanted to ask you what led you both to launch your newsletter, Euro Stable Watch [now rebranded Currency of Power], dedicated to stablecoins, which is a somewhat niche topic.

Nicolas: Until recently I got interested in cryptocurrencies only about once every two years, just to check in and see what was going on. Apart from the whole FTX scandal, the last time I took a real interest in the topic was when Facebook launched Libra, which was a kind of precursor to the decentralised payment solutions that are now starting to take off, and which ended quite badly. It flopped. The team tried to revive the project with a new name (Diem), and then finally, everything stopped. The entire team left, especially the person in charge, David Marcus, with a lot of bitterness and a desire for revenge against the regulators. In Diem’s team opinion, regulators had prevented them from implementing it all.

After that I stopped paying attention to the space until the start of last year when I began discussing the topic with Marieke—the person I always turn to for expertise in this area. She explained a little bit about what was going on, what was bubbling under the surface. I then suggested doing a long, wide-ranging interview with her about the current state of cryptocurrencies for my newsletter, Drift Signal. In the interview, she pointed out that stablecoins, which she knows well from having worked at Circle—but I’ll let you tell us more about that later, Marieke—were the first proven large-scale use case that would really become part of the daily lives of individuals and businesses.

From then on, we started talking more frequently. Marieke explained to me that one of the big problems with stablecoins is that they are all, or almost all, denominated in dollars, and that if Europe did not ensure that there were also stablecoins denominated in euros, it would be marginalised in terms of financial infrastructure.

At some point, I think it was my idea to say: this topic, stablecoins in euros, is both very niche, but also very important. It’s perfect for launching a newsletter, because on a niche and important topic, on which there are few people, because it’s so niche, you have to initiate the process by injecting thoughts, ideas, and unique perspectives. That’s what newsletters are for. And that’s how it all started.

Marieke: To add some colour, I’ll just add a few anecdotes. Nicolas and I first met in 2018, when I was at Circle. We were invited to an event in London attended by Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron. Both of them were late, but we were on time, so we started chatting. I think at the time, Nicolas, you were writing an article about Bitcoin for Drift Signal, and that was our initial interaction, but it was largely just a casual or coincidental meeting rather than anything significant.

Since then, Nicolas and I have often worked together. He’s someone who has a different perspective—I call him “The Grand Vizier”. He’s someone who always thinks more broadly and laterally than many of the usual advice you might find.

When we did the interview for Drift Signal, it was 360 degrees—we went deep and broad on the entire crypto industry. Nicolas is quite skeptical of the industry, and during the entire interview, I was thinking: “Oh dear, I can’t convince him that something very important is happening”. And I was thinking: “If I can’t convince Nicolas that this is really very important, where is the world going?”

We did this interview and I think something clicked about stablecoins and their importance. From then Nicolas had the idea of the newsletter. I’ve never really written a newsletter and I know it takes time, so I was thinking: is this really where we should be spending our time?

Turns out that it’s actually a great idea. First of all, it’s a very niche subject. There’s very little written about the topic in depth, beyond all the tweets you can read all day long. I also think that the approach we have is quite complementary—I have spent quite a few years in the world of cryptocurrencies, with Circle and NEAR, and I’ve also spent quite a few years in the banking world with NatWest and I continue to do a lot of advisory work on projects across the spectrum. But Nicolas has a very research-oriented, in-depth, economist’s view of the world and he understands the issues in depth and puts them in a historical context. It’s great that we are different but very complementary. We launched it in June 2025, and it is going from strengths to strengths and has gained quite a lot of traction [some stats here].

L’ADN: Do you have any idea who your readers are?

Marieke: Yes, because they often message us afterwards—either because they read the newsletter, or heard about it and have been forwarded an article.

What matters to us is seeing the ideas we are trying to put forward become mainstream. For example, the key idea that ninety-nine per cent of stablecoins are in dollars, and that if we don’t do something, there’s a huge problem—is one of the first key ideas that we saw come up repeatedly after writing about it. At all levels, at the central bank level, at the Treasury level, at the bank level, at the FinTech level. So that’s something that has really stuck.

Then we also see ideas such as the new stack of money take on. That idea was novel because often things are put in opposition; it’s either CBDC, tokenised deposit, or stablecoin, and everything is put into a war between one and the other. But we don’t think that’s the case. We think it can be harmonious and it can be a stack.

These are also ideas that we see, and when we see them being taken up, it gives me a better idea of who is reading [for example, our recent Barrels to Bytes article, published shortly after this interview, has attracted considerable attention.]

Nicolas: Basically, our readers are many professionals in the sector, both from traditional banking and probably also from FinTech start-ups in general, and crypto in particular. I was also going to say people in the world of central banks, but I think these people remain discreet due to their mindset and professional obligations. I don’t even know if they would explicitly subscribe to a newsletter for fear their names would appear on some subscriber lists. But clearly, given how much buzz there has been in the market, the feedback we get and the ideas we see spreading, we know that this content has been circulating, has been read at the highest levels, and is attracting more and more interest.

“We’ve all been forced to revisit our old macroeconomics lessons”

L’ADN: Actually, you launched it in June, which I believe was around the same time that Donald Trump signed the Genius Act, although I’m not sure of the exact date. That’s exactly what I wanted to start with. How do you analyse this turning point, this regulatory shift that has recently taken place in the US? How can we analyse it?

Marieke: I’m going to go back in history a bit. What’s interesting is that crypto has had a very difficult past with the world of regulation, particularly in the US. There were all these stages of fearing the regulator and getting sued [often referred as Choke Point 2.0], and very few entrepreneurs were able to stay in the United States, so we had a whole wave of entrepreneurs and start-ups that were mainly based in Europe, because even Asia had closed its doors for quite some time [China banned crypto trading in 2021].

Trump’s election was a turning point as he did really put Bitcoin into the mainstream narrative. That, in itself, is a huge movement. The Genius Act is something that had been in the works for months, waiting for Trump to arrive. And from the moment he was elected, the doors were wide open for business. The industry was finally legitimised.

Genius is interesting, because MiCA, the European regulation, is ultimately quite similar to Genius. We could go into several details and point out the differences, but MiCA was there before Genius, yet it didn’t have the same impact at all. Once Genius arrived, it completely opened the floodgates and made a huge number of people around the world realise that this industry is not insignificant. And that stablecoins are something of strategic importance, particularly for the US.

L’ADN: Nicolas, do you agree with this analysis?

Nicolas: Yes, I would say I place this in the broader context of Trump coming to power and everything he aimed to shake up. He did so by announcing changes in advance and, in a way, keeping his promises—not necessarily by achieving many results, but by stirring things up in all directions. The way I usually explain it is that because of Trump, since January 2025, we’ve all been forced to revisit our old macroeconomics lessons. I learned macroeconomics at Sciences Po literally twenty-five years ago and I’ve never put it into practice. When you work in the corporate world, especially in the world of tech and start-ups, these are not topics that interest you at all, unlike what people in macro hedge funds or even public equity analysts and so on might do.

And then Trump, with his talk of tariffs, imbalances, trade with China, his election, his arrival in power and his first announcements, suddenly there was a huge amount of macroeconomics. With our our article How Stablecoins Are Cementing US Hegemony For Decades To Come what we were trying to explain is that the mirror image of the US trade deficit, the fact that the US imports a huge amount of manufactured goods from China, is that the US exports a huge amount of dollars, since it pays for its imports in dollars. As a result, the whole world has dollars. And if Trump reverses this, and seeks to reduce this trade deficit, it will automatically translate, in accounting terms, into fewer dollars in circulation abroad.

And when you start reading about this, you have a kind of superficial, intuitive understanding, but then you realise that no, you still need to go back and re-read some of the fundamentals of macroeconomics. And one of the pillars of macroeconomics, as you may know, is monetary policy, which has a huge influence on all of this, because it determines the quantity of money and the interest rates on different currencies. And so, it determines the balance that will be established between different countries and their currencies.

So, the whole movement to open the floodgates and inundate the world with dollar-backed stablecoins is, of course, a technological narrative that delights all the entrepreneurs who wanted to create new tools and new platforms for this. But it is also a macroeconomic narrative that could have considerable consequences, comparable in some ways to what Americans call the Nixon Shock, i.e. the decision in 1971 by the Nixon administration to abandon the convertibility of the dollar into gold. Now, my general theory is that 2025 is a new 1971. I don’t know if it will go down in history as the ‘Trump Shock’, but it must be acknowledged that it played a decisive role in this whole story [after the interview we wrote an article about this, 2025: The Year of The Trump Shock.]

“2025 is a new 1971”

L’ADN: That’s exactly the question I wanted to ask you, because I read that you mentioned Bretton Woods at one point, which could reconfigure the entire macroeconomic landscape at the global level. Could you explain a little more in detail how we might be experiencing that moment today?

Nicolas: Yes, well, Bretton Woods is an interesting reference because we’ve actually rebranded our newsletter, renaming it from Euro Stable Watch to Currency of Power. In doing so, we want to broaden the subject matter, meaning we decided to move away from the niche of euro stablecoins whilst continuing to cover it, but precisely to take a step back and think about it on a larger scale, i.e. the Bretton Woods system, how it ended and what replaced it.

But to think about branding, positioning, subtitles, the baseline and all that, I revisited the history a little, and I realised the following: In fact, the Bretton Woods system was a system that existed between 1944, when it was negotiated in Bretton Woods in the US, and 1971, when Nixon, with his unilateral decision to suspend the convertibility of the dollar into gold, put an end to the Bretton Woods system. Today, many people are asking: what will the post-Bretton Woods era look like? But in fact, we have been in the post-Bretton Woods era since 1971! What we are now trying to invent, or better understand, or put in place, is a post-post-Bretton Woods system. It’s a post-floating exchange rate system.

And that is the big question, of course, but it explains why everyone always refers to Bretton Woods, because Bretton Woods is a reassuring and positive story, because it was really delegates from all over the world who got together over several days to reflect, to debate, and to engage in power struggles that were brutal, particularly between the Americans and the British. But in the end, they arrived at a collective solution that gave rise to institutions that are still with us today, such as the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, etc.

Conversely, the shift in 1971 was purely unilateral. Without consulting anyone, the US said: we can no longer maintain this system, we’ve got ourselves into a mess. We’re cutting it off, we’re stopping it and we’re letting everything float.

The question now is: will the system that emerges from this Trump Shock of 2025 be a multilaterally negotiated system, as was done at Bretton Woods in 1944? Or will it be a system imposed by a unilateral decision of the US, taken in its own interest and not necessarily in the collective interest of all the countries of the world?