Dante Disparte started out in risk. In 2014 he founded Risk Cooperative, a risk advisory and insurance brokerage in Washington, D.C. In 2019 he became a founding executive of Libra, Facebook’s stablecoin project. In 2021 he joined Circle, the issuer of USDC, where he is now Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy.
By his own account, he has united Washington twice: once against Libra, and once behind the GENIUS Act, which passed the Senate 68–30 in 2025. His central claim is that the dollar’s dominance comes from network effects, which public-sector currency projects will struggle to recreate. For Europe, that may be the most worrying point of all. In this episode, we discuss:
why Libra failed, and what Circle got right in its place;
why a CBDC without new rails is an engine without tracks;
how the GENIUS Act brought US stablecoin issuers under banking law;
why MiCA passes the Draghi competitiveness test even as Brussels treats it as unfinished;
why AI agents may become the heaviest users of digital dollars.
We recorded on October 27, a few days before the US midterms. Dante argues the GENIUS Act is safe whatever the result (in this case, Democrats retaking control of Congress), and expects the next Congress to take up the stalled CLARITY Act.
Dante’s work is at dantedisparte.com and Circle.
Marieke: Welcome to the Currency of Power podcast, where we explore how money, technology and geopolitics are reshaping the global order. We speak with the people building, regulating and challenging the new financial infrastructure, from currencies and stablecoins to AI, trade, energy and the competition for technological power. Our goal is to understand how the financial system is changing, and who gains influence as it does.
Today, it’s just me, Marieke Flament. My co-host Nicolas Colin is at a retreat with Vsquared. We only have one hour with our guest anyway, so one of us should be more than enough. Today we’ll talk about stablecoins, agentic AI, and what’s at stake between China, Europe, the US and the rest of the world when it comes to the future of money. And we have the perfect guest to talk about this.
My guest today is Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy at Circle. Dante’s work spans global strategy, market expansion and the regulatory questions shaping the future of digital money. Before Circle, Dante was a founding executive of the Libra Association, later known as Diem, the Facebook stablecoin project. That gives him firsthand experience of two major efforts to rethink how money moves around the world. I don’t think many people can claim that.
But Dante’s background goes well beyond digital assets. He brings more than two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, business leader and global risk expert. He founded Risk Cooperative, has overseen operations spanning 117 countries, and serves on the board of the Atlantic Council. That combination of building businesses, understanding risk and working at the intersection of technology and public policy is what makes him such a compelling guest for a conversation about the future of money.
Dante, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.
Dante: Thank you, and what an incredibly generous opening statement. Now everything I say and do will be with “not disappointing the audience” in mind.
Marieke: I’m sure you won’t. I’ve been preparing for this and re-listening to some of your talks. I am absolutely certain there will be no disappointment here. So thank you so much for being here.
“Money fundamentally is a trust-based business.”
Marieke: Let’s start from the start: Libra. You were a founding executive at Libra, later called Diem, a project that I think pushed central banks worldwide to take private digital money very seriously. Looking back at that project, what held it back? Was it the design? Was it who was building it? What happened?
Dante: First of all, it feels like it was a decade ago when you consider how far the policy conversation, the central banking conversation, and the regulatory advancements have come. In many ways, parts of the Libra story have been vindicated, but parts of the fears about Libra have also been vindicated. I suppose one of the reasons I have endured despite the catastrophic failure of Libra is a very personal sentiment of unfinished business. And candidly, Circle as a company got right a lot of the things that Libra got wrong, beginning with the fact that if the world couldn’t trust you with cat videos, it was not likely to trust you with money. That was the joke.
There’s a lot to be said about digital money fundamentally doing with code and technology what printed money, at least here in the United States, does with the emblem “In God We Trust.” Money is fundamentally a trust-based business and industry, and just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
So there are a few reasons Libra probably didn’t succeed at launch, aside from its link to big tech in the United States, which was a particularly aggravating reality in Europe. The fear of GAFA, or big tech, was very, very real in Europe during the attempt to launch the Libra project. One reason was obviously that the technology hadn’t yet come of age. Blockchain, stablecoins, and digital assets were on the fringe of the financial system, not at its core. Another was that the regulatory environment had not come of age. The proof is simple: in the years since Libra, we have seen not just the central banking conversation advance, but also the regulatory and policy conversation advance in the halls of power, from Brussels to Washington to every other major financial center in the world. You needed new rules to legitimize and regulate new activities on the open internet, and I think the new rules have absolutely been catalytic.
And lastly, I think you needed the central banks to go through their own flavor of market reaction and policy reaction to the future of money. You’re absolutely right that after the Libra project was announced, something like 114 central banks, representing more than 90% of global GDP, started asking the Shakespearean question: to CBDC or not to CBDC? While some of them have abandoned those projects, others remain absolutely committed to public money also being represented in this digital money architecture. In many ways, Libra was the catalyst for a lot of those market reactions.
Marieke: I have two follow-up questions on that. First, my understanding is that Libra was a basket of currencies, not pegged to just one. You didn’t mention that as one of the failure points. Was it not?
Dante: Oh no, 100%. When Libra was first announced, you’re absolutely right that it was originally meant to be a neutral global currency. Libra was originally a composite stablecoin: a basket of five currencies, the dollar, the pound sterling, the euro, the yuan, and the yen, at some degree of weighting that would look and feel, for your technocratic listeners, like the SDR, the Special Drawing Rights at the IMF, which were meant to represent neutrality in an international context.
The irony is that Libra abandoned that construct, and we rewrote the Libra white paper to represent a single-currency stablecoin architecture. But by that point, from an economic point of view, it might have been too little, too late as a monetary concession to get the central banks to agree. If you fast-forward to today, international concerns about dollar-based stablecoins raise the question of digital dollarization. So do you need a global, synthetic, neutral currency so that there is no monetary policy fear at the edge of stablecoins? Or do you need multiple currencies represented as stablecoins so that you get to neutrality in terms of economic activity and weighting?
Marieke: That’s a big question, because today, as you mentioned, 99% of stablecoin activity is still dollar-denominated. Do you have a point of view on that? What do you think is better?
Dante: Ironically, it’s not only for this amazing podcast that I have to have a point of view.
Marieke: I can imagine.
Dante: I joke that I wake up in the morning being accused of destabilizing fragile economies with digital dollarization, and by the time I go to bed in the evening, we’re being accused of triggering a flight of deposits from the banking system. Of course I’m joking when I make those two comments. But the point is that, as a policy reality, the rise of stablecoins to where they are today has had to travel through some really intense, very serious policy discussions. The only reason I think Circle has been successful is that we’ve been able to answer these questions. Even if the answer is unsatisfactory, you have to have a point of view.
So, first, the more currencies are represented on these open networks, the more you will see representation and therefore acceptance that the architecture matters. And ironically, even some of the jurisdictions that have been the most opposed to the rise of stablecoins have moved. Europe is one of them, as you know extremely well. President Macron, for example, was the first Western leader to say “yes, and.” You could have a digital euro from the European Central Bank, and you could promote the development and growth of euro-denominated stablecoins.
I have moderated my own position over the years to believe in this idea of “yes, and”: that this is a multi-currency future, and also that you might have different forms of digital currency and tokenized money interacting on open networks.
“To CBDC or not to CBDC”
Marieke: So: multi-currency, multi-form. And I love the catchphrase, “to CBDC or not to CBDC.” You’re known for catchphrases, but this one definitely caught my attention. Different countries around the world are taking different approaches, and you already started discussing Europe. What’s your point of view? My understanding is that the US is no longer pursuing a CBDC as much as other jurisdictions are. Should countries do it or not?
Dante: It’s a very good question. I wrote one of the very first counter-narratives on this in Project Syndicate, because at the time the prevailing argument was that the only way countries and currencies could compete was for the central bank to issue a digital currency. This was in the late-2020 era. My piece asked whether the United States was losing the digital currency space race. Back then, the Boston Fed was running Project Hamilton, an experiment exploring a US central bank digital currency. My argument was: is the US actually losing this digital currency space race when the lion’s share of what were then loosely regulated stablecoins, but stablecoins nonetheless, referenced the US dollar?
You had already started to see this global network-effects business take off, in no small measure because it met the market and met consumers where they are. People wanted a form of stable money. They might have been using it for digital asset purchases, as a store of value or a hedge against currency volatility, or as a form of global payment innovation. All of it, back in 2020, was very prototypical.
Fast-forward to today, and I think that counter-narrative, that the US was not losing the digital currency space race because the dollar was already the early currency of reference for crypto assets, has proven correct. With the passage of the GENIUS Act here in the US, that operating model has been enshrined as the basis for dollar competitiveness in the 21st century. It will be GENIUS-compliant stablecoins that do the job.
The GENIUS Act was as much a referendum on open innovation on the US dollar as it was a referendum on the question of “to CBDC or not to CBDC.” And the US Congress answered affirmatively that no one in the United States wants a central bank digital currency, so much so that legislators went further and tried to ban the Fed from ever contemplating one. The irony of all this is that buried in the original Project Hamilton was the provision that if the Fed were ever to prototype or launch a CBDC, it would need congressional approval anyway.
So it was a bit circuitous and very political, but the policy debate in the United States was very clear: Americans do not want the invisible hand of a central bank in their wallets and in how they spend money. Other countries and jurisdictions have had different tastes and different flavors of this. But I do think the notion that public authorities should be democratically endowed with the right to issue a digital currency should be widely understood and widely protected.
Marieke: Which I think, in Europe, we’re still far away from. You mentioned GENIUS, and I’d like to double-click on it, because it’s a major piece of legislation, and I’m sure you played a big role in shaping it. Under GENIUS, dollar stablecoin issuers basically become holders of US Treasuries.
Dante: It is indeed a major piece of legislation.
Marieke: And when you read the public debate, it has been very clear that it is an instrument of monetary statecraft, a way to keep spreading the dollar. How does Circle see its own role in extending the dollar’s reach? And tell us more about GENIUS: how it came to be and what you make of it.
Dante: The good news is that getting to the GENIUS Act has been a very personal journey. If you want to be invited, as an entrepreneur or as a person, to the front-row seat of the future of money, then put out a white paper with Facebook and 27 other companies with the label “Reinventing Money” underneath it. That’s the fastest way to get a front-row seat to how the world and policymakers would react, including in the House, in the Senate, in Brussels, and in capitals around the world, to money and to trust in money in the 21st century.
In many ways, GENIUS is a byproduct of years and years of public policy debate. I joke that twice in my career we have united Washington: once in its hatred of the Libra project, and the second time in bipartisan support for the GENIUS Act, which had 108 Democrats voting in favor. It moved very quickly into the rulemaking phase, so US agencies, the Treasury, the OCC, and the alphabet soup of American regulators, are putting rules on the books that are much bigger than stablecoins.
To understand the GENIUS Act, you have to understand what I call US fintech federalism. Banking and payments, and insurance as well, are regulated at the state level in the US. To be a regulated entity in the United States, you have to be regulated in all 50 states, and the sum of the parts represents the dynamism of American fintech. But until the GENIUS Act, America did not have a non-bank license for payment systems innovation. And a product like a stablecoin, like USDC, is by its very nature global.
During my tenure at Circle, I was able to get Circle licensed in Singapore as a major payments institution, in Europe as the first major company under MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, out of France, and in many other countries around the world. But I could not say that the company that successfully uploaded the dollar to the internet represented an American innovation with American regulatory authority. The GENIUS Act solves that. It simultaneously addresses the crisis in banking we had in this country: until the GENIUS Act, we faced a decline in bank registrations in the United States, which has now taken off again since the Act was passed.
Marieke: How does that work? What’s the link between a decline in bank registrations and the GENIUS Act?
Dante: One of the requirements of the GENIUS Act is that all stablecoin issuers in the United States have to operate on a level playing field under banking law. You can be a state-based issuer or a federally based issuer, but in all cases you have to point to a banking regulator. Our primary regulator in the United States, as of January 18, 2027, is the national banking regulator, the OCC. It’s very similar to Europe, which has said that payment stablecoins, known there as e-money tokens, are fundamentally a banking and payments innovation, with very similar parameters at the edges.
That was the gap. One of the reasons Libra set itself up in Switzerland was that the US didn’t have a regulatory regime back then, and the Swiss did. Now we do in the United States, and so you see this proliferation: more than 40 companies have sought banking licenses with the OCC in this new phase. We’ll come back to that number, because it also mirrors the experience in Europe under MiCA.
Marieke: Correct, and there is an explosion. What you mention is also interesting: MiCA came first, and the Swiss had a framework before that, but it feels like the world needed to see GENIUS come through to really wake up to the fact that stablecoins were here to stay and were extremely powerful.
