DeFi panel erupts over CBDCs as Circle’s Disparte calls them ‘proposterous’ and a law professor curses the Fed

And no, it wasn’t a Bitcoin bro saying it; it was Rohan Grey, a law professor at Willamette University and strident critic of the crypto industry who shares its enmity for the legacy banking system but has very different ideas about how to replace it in the digital age.

Those differences were on full display in the panel discussion at Consensus 2022 on whether the U.S. Federal Reserve should issue a digital dollar or leave such innovation to the private sector. Dante Disparte, head of policy for stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial, called central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) a “preposterous idea” while Grey warned private-sector efforts would put the taxpayer on the hook in the event of failure.

Disparte argued that the Fed running its own digital currency is “the equivalent idea of the [Federal Aviation Administration] in the United States building jet engines and flying planes,” during a panel Wednesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2022 in Austin, Texas, touting his company’s stablecoin, USDC. “Circle’s not doing this as an academic abstraction—we’re doing it for real.”

But Gray countered that Circle is a private company shielded from liability, arguing that “if you go under, the public is on the hook for your losses.”

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard recently said that her agency is waiting for support from Congress and the White House before the Fed will decide whether to launch a digital dollar. And if the central bank ends up issuing that digital currency, it could take at least five years to put it in place. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) holdings and transactions would still be managed through private sector accounts, Brainard said, and not at direct customer accounts at the Fed.

Disparate contended that the U.S. is under pressure to “out-China China,” which has embraced the idea of a CBDC. And it would come from “a government that can’t build healthcare websites that work.”

“This is not free market capitalism,” Grey said of private token  efforts. “It’s a new generation of crony capitalism.”

Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of crypto bank Custodia, made the point that the Fed has the last say in issuing dollars and she’s watching the decentralized financial space growing apart from the traditional U.S. financial system, and there’s no way yet for money to move back and forth between them.

Long, whose Wyoming-based bank sued the Fed this week for dragging its feet on the company’s application for a central bank “master account,” argued that the U.S. “should be embracing this new, better payment rail.”