From the Federal Reserve to Circle: What Most People Are Getting Wrong About Onchain Finance | Gordon Liao
episode
Talking Tokens: Crypto, Onchain Finance, Investing
44 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Who is Gordon Liao and how did his career path lead him to Circle?
force clarity would would be uh great in bringing uh no pun intended clarity into uh how firms should operate uh on on blockchains, it would clear up institutional adoption related to uh tokenization. Uh but it's not a must-have uh because Circle's main business activity is still related to USDC, the stablecoin, and the Genius Act, the passage of which uh is i that was a material change in the landscape of a stablecoin each year.
Today's Talking Tokens guest is Gordon Liao, the chief economist and head of research at Circle. He's one of the masterminds behind ARC, Circle's new institutional blockchain. And before Circle, he worked on research and strategy at Uniswap and was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve. Gordon, welcome on.
Glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to chat with you too. Before we kind of get into the topics of the day and everything that you're working on with ARK and Circle, I want to learn more about your background and how you went from the Federal Reserve. Which is pretty wild. I don't know if we had anyone from there on the show to Crypto.
I spent my career studying how money moves and basically throughout every stage of my career, whether it's at the Federal Reserve or previously in fixed income trading, I arrived at the same conclusion. uh that the plumbing is the bottleneck. At the Federal Reserve, I um led some efforts on the ripple market uh and at the time responding to pretty serious crisis in the financial system, uh, in which the ripple rates spiked to uh 10% in intraday, which was a big deal. And over and over again I looked at, you know, why that is from a core economic and infrastructure angle, and I realized the plumbing is very broken. And that actually eventually led me down the path of pursuing a career in digital assets in blockchain space.
Uh I as you mentioned, I worked at Uniswap as well. Um on solving some of those issues from a infrastructure perspective. Since then I have an I circle, uh, where I think it's really where uh regulated digital dollar meets the uh programmability and meets the regulatory uh standards that's required for institutional and enterprise adoption.
Mm-hmm. When we say programmability, what do you mean by that?
Uh so I said we know that uh blockchain space allows us to do much more than simply transforming money from point A to point B. In fact you could program in if then statements and much more complex uh set of logics, which are becoming more and more important uh in today's world with agentic type of uh payments and agentic use case, which I'm sure we'll discuss as well.
Yeah. I mean, with the historical context in mind and you're talking about how you always thought about how money moves, how do you kind of think about the future of on chain finance? And what do you think people may be overlooking today, given all the context that you have on the back end um and how things have evolved over time?
Yeah, I'll probably categorize it into three different areas that maybe people are underestimating. One is this shift to machine to machine-based payments, which is this agent e-commerce that is arriving really quickly. Historically, as you know, uh most of the transfers are initiated and received by humans on the other side. And more and more so with the rise of AI agents, the world is uh I I think is underprepared for a scenario in which the vast majority of economic activities will happen um super fast rails that is agent friendly, that's AI friendly. that could perform things like small microtransactions, nano payments. Це дас прави. Part one of what people are underestimating. Part two is a reorganization around uh how money moves from a
Very balance sheet heavy type of activity that's dependent on a chain of intermediaries, which is how traditional finance intermediary-based money movement transfer happen. And that is a very slow process, especially for cross-border payments, but also a process that's intensive on the balance sheets. Uh why is balance sheet so important?
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from Talking Tokens: Crypto, Onchain Finance, Investing
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