I’m excited to share today’s conversation, because it goes right to the heart of one of the hardest questions in financial innovation: how do we build a digital financial system that is fast, open, programmable, and efficient, without making everyone’s financial life visible to the world?
My guest is Yaya Fanusie, Global Head of Policy at the Aleo Network Foundation. Yaya has one of the most unusual and valuable perspectives in the crypto and financial policy world. He began his career at the CIA, working as a counterterrorism analyst in the years when Al-Qaeda was at the center of US national security concern. After leaving government, he moved into illicit finance research and became one of the early security experts asking hard, evidence-based questions about how terrorist groups and nation-state actors might use Bitcoin and other digital assets.
That work led him into a deep fascination with blockchain technology, not only as a source of risk, but also more deeply, as a new kind of financial infrastructure. In our conversation, Yaya explains how the transparency of many public blockchains can be highly useful for investigators, while simultaneously creating a huge problem as crypto moves toward mainstream payments. If stablecoins become widely used by banks, businesses, and consumers, how will we prevent people’s everyday transactions from becoming publicly visible on-chain?
Yaya wants to solve that, which leads to his current work focusing on privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure. Aleo is building a programmable privacy network using zero-knowledge proofs, enabling people to demonstrate that something is valid, without revealing all the underlying data. Yaya walks us through what that means in plain English, including how stablecoins could be used in a private environment while still enabling transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, freeze-list checks, and other tools needed to address the risks of illicit finance.
Our conversation also widens the lens to the geopolitical stakes. Yaya has studied China’s digital currency work, including the e-CNY and cross-border payment experiments like mBridge. He argues that the US needs a much clearer vision for the digital financial infrastructure it wants the world to have – one that preserves privacy, supports innovation, protects against financial crime, and keeps democratic values embedded in the next generation of payment rails.
We also talk about stablecoin legislation, market structure, decentralization, DePIN, quantum risk, sanctions, the future of the dollar, and the danger of a fragmented global financial system in which authoritarian models gain influence over the rails of money.
This is a fascinating conversation about crypto, privacy, national security, and the future of finance. It is also about why the next financial system has to be deliberately designed, not just allowed to happen.
We have wonderful conversations coming up on Barefoot Innovation. Watch for my episode with Greg Ruppert of FINRA, who gives us a glimpse into what the regulator of the future will look like.
I also want to highlight AIR’s Global Design Sprint: Harnessing Gender Data for Inclusive Regulation, running virtually from July 20 to September 4. We are bringing together global experts to move beyond collecting gender-disaggregated data and turn it into practical tools, insights, and action for more inclusive financial regulation.
On July 28, AIR’s Shelley Anderson will be speaking in the Perspectives on Financial Inclusion webinar series, delivered by the Women Regulators Network and powered by the Regulator Knowledge Exchange. In September, I hope you’ll join AIR at Stablecon USA and the Global SME Finance Forum in Washington, D.C. And later this year, Nat Weber and I will be speaking at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas in October.
Yaya J. Fanusie is a pioneer in assessing the national security implications of digital assets. He is currently the Global Head of Policy at Aleo, where he leads global policy engagement and regulatory strategy to advance privacy-preserving blockchain systems and stablecoin adoption across consumer, enterprise, and institutional markets. Yaya previously served as Director of Policy for Anti-Money Laundering and Cyber Risk at the Crypto Council for Innovation, where he remains a Senior Advisor. Prior to that, he spent seven years at the CIA as an economic and counterterrorism analyst.
