Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Hey everyone, welcome back from summer. I know a lot of people in the world, including a lot of our AIR colleagues and friends, are still copying with shockingly hot weather. My sympathies! Nevertheless, we have entered September, and the fall whirlwind in our financial innovation world has begun.

And what better way to start it than with my guest today. Dante Disparte and I have been trying for months to find a good time for this conversation, and it was worth the wait.

Dante is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy and Operations at Circle. He has had a front-row seat to the evolution of stablecoins, digital money, and the regulatory frameworks taking shape around them, including through his time with Diem. I’ve known him for years, and have known Circle even longer, watching it navigate the originally-unmapped terrain that cryptocurrency has traveled, from the far frontiers of the financial system into, now, mainstream finance.

Our conversation takes us back to basics about the problems that stablecoins are trying to solve. We then talk about how digital money may reshape payments, financial access, and the broader financial ecosystem, and about why blockchain payments technology is increasingly fading into invisibility in the background. We also discuss why stablecoin and blockchain-based systems need to be fully fungible with fiat money and other financial infrastructure, and why regulators should avoid relying on regulation by enforcement as these markets mature.

A theme I find especially powerful is Dante’s warning about WHAT HE CALLS the “hidden cost of gradualism,” including for regulators. In high risk, high stakes environments like those faced by financial regulators, it often feels like the prudent course is the slow one. Slow and careful. That makes sense much of the time, but amidst headspinning technological change – like the world we all live in today – waiting can create more risks than it avoids. Another way to phrase Dante’s warning is that, sometimes, the riskiest choice may be to stand still, to wait and see.

Thinking about the speed of change, Dante describes the future financial system as needing to be continuously “upgradable.” I love that, and I think that fact is creating a profound new challenge for regulatory design: we need to shift to what we at AIR are calling “adaptive regulation.” Hard as it will be, we have to find ways to speed up regulatory change, to keep pace with accelerating change in markets. The alternative is to watch as a gap widens between the pace of tech change and the pace of regulatory change – with risk accumulating and inevitably breaking out into problems and crises. Solving for this is difficult (I’m a former regulator), but it’s doable. Watch for AIR to be taking steps to create those solutions.

The other theme I want to underline is Dante’s focus on trust. As stablecoins converge with AI, agentic commerce, digital identity, and new forms of financial infrastructure, the systems that succeed will be the ones people can, and do, really trust to be resilient, accountable, interoperable, and safe. This point is central for stablecoins, but also about something much bigger: how we build financial and regulatory systems that are ready for what comes next.

AND, Before we turn to Dante, but still on stablecoins, I have an invitation for all of you who are in Washington DC this week and coming to Stablecon. On Thursday, AIR is hosting a unique session there – a simulation exercise imagining that, a few years into the future, there is a stablecoin crisis of the kind that tends to happen, from time to time, in financial systems. We have a brilliant group of people role-playing a scenario – market players, regulators, Treasury officials, members of Congress – working under intense pressure to contain a fast-moving crisis. We have fantastic people involved, including some who lived through similar situations IRL. It’s going to be eye-opening, it’s going to be FUN, and it’s going to be scary. It’s just 90 minutes, but we have designed it to set up a multi-day exercise for next time. You can find the information at Stablecon.com/USA. Please COME!

And now, Dante Disparte!

More for Our Listeners

Thanks for listening to today’s show!

Here’s the information on joining AIR’s stablecoin crisis simulation at Stablecon USA– again, it’s this Thursday from 2 – 3:30 PM. please join us! I’ll also be moderating a panel there on Wednesday and speaking on Tuesday at the partner event hosted by Merkel Science.

Second, speaking of stablecoins, we have more ahead for you on Barefoot Innovation. I’ll be welcoming back my friend Kosta Peric of the Gates Foundation, this time together with another friend, Simon Taylor of Fintech Brainfood, Tempo, and Sardine, for a lively discussion. We also have a show coming up with another Gates Foundation leader, Ariadne Plaitakis. Watch for more.

AIR has a busy fall ahead. We’re hosting a webinar on modernizing digital identity; a gender-disaggregated data design sprint in Lagos, and a TechSprint on Reframing Financial Regulation Policy in Washington, D.C.  My colleague Sulita Levaux is speaking at CFI’s virtual Financial Inclusion Week, in a session called “From Sprint to Scale,” on using disaggregated gender data.  Lastly, you’ll see Nat Weber and me at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas.

One more piece of news I’m especially excited about: my longtime friend Jerry Buckley has joined AIR to lead new work on agentic AI agents for financial consumers. He also brings with him his excellent RegFi podcast. If you enjoy my show, I hope you’ll check out Jerry’s show too.

More on Dante Disparte

Dante leads Circle’s work on global growth and regulatory strategy, public policy, market expansion, international operations and communications. He is a key strategic leader building the business, forging government relations and taking the company into new markets. He has decades of experience working in complex global financial and risk issues. His most recent past role was as a founder of the Diem Association.