Mastercard Creates a Forum for Crypto Players to Discuss CBDCs

Let's go to CBD CS. My favorite topic, Mastercard is doing a CBD C Consortium with it is true. It actually be long time viewers know it's, you never know, you never know which way I'm gonna go on CBD C. It's always an adventure. This one is about mastercard working with consensus with ripple with fire blocks with others to sort of advance the conversations around CBD C interoperability, treating these things like other forms of money that will exist in the future. Not a huge story but an interesting way to riff on the CBD C conversation and the folks involved. Certainly mastercard being chief among them. I'm gonna throw this to you, Jen. What do you think? What do you think this means for the future of my favorite CBD CS? You love CBD C si, don't think CBD CS are going anywhere, right? No, it's unclear. Maybe today you love them. Maybe one day you won't. It's, it's a real toss up. I love it. It looks like the Bitcoin chart today. Anyways. Let's get back to, to CBD C. Um I think that this is like another road to boring story. I, I said that a little bit earlier. Um The fact that Mastercard is creating, creating these forums, inviting players like ripple firelock consensus to come and discuss what CBD CS could look like in the US and beyond, I think is just like, interesting to, to hear that Mastercard is doing that a few months ago, we heard that they uh launched a Web three music accelerator. And so I see this as Mastercard just really putting their money into investigating what is happening in Web three and then taking it away and looking at, OK. Where does Mastercard want to play? Is it in CBD CS? Is it maybe in stable coins? I know visa came out with an announcement. I think in April that said they were hiring some software developers first to start exploring stable coins. Is it in uh NFTS? And so I think this is just part of their research that they are looking into where they might play next and we'll see what comes from it probably in the next full cycle when the people who, who use Mastercard, when those mainstream people are more interested in crypto and want to use some of these products. Ben? Yeah, I think this is good news for central bank digital currencies and there are lots of countries out there. Uh you know, mulling these projects and obviously mastercard sees an opportunity there. Um But you know, there are some other important companies involved in this rle fire blocks consensus uh as well. Uh So that's good for that industry. But I, I do want to say, I mean, this is about as far away from, to, to kind of Bitcoin version as we can get, you know, this is mastercard, this is uh central banks and it's nothing really to do with decentralization and the kind of dream of permission less open. Um you know, finance. So I think it's worth putting that in context. Ben the two can coexist, can't they exist together? Can't we have CBD CS? So Zach can do his taxes easily but also have the decentralized world of Bitcoin. I think the jury is still out on that, you know, can we still have these two worlds, the the open world and the close world? I think we're seeing a clash of that all the time. So um I think there is an interesting merging though, I will say, I mean, there could be divergent tracks for like people's financial futures, right? But I think there is an interesting like convergence around using Blockchain rails to do existing things better. And that's why I think we're seeing a lot of conversation around real world assets, CV D CS, stable coins, stuff that makes the sending uh transacting and settling of uh accounts easier like Blockchain does that, right? And so I think there's sort of this quiet actual realization among very big firms out there that this can be a better sort of infrastructure for a lot of the stuff that we do now in the world of like Corp banking and, like, weird things with, like, Swift and, like, sending a wire and having to touch all these entities. Right. I think the thing that a lot of these companies are realizing is that, oh, the Blockchain, you know, whichever Blockchain of choice can be the thing that undergirds all the things that we do now but can do so in a much more efficient fashion, right? So that's why you see people like, OK, we're gonna digitize uh U treasuries and we're gonna stick them on a Blockchain like stellar has had a lot of success with this actually through its partnership with Franklin Templeton, right? It's just easier, quicker to do it. And I think more and more experiments are sort of uh finally reaching prime time to the point where there could become that critical mass where a lot of existing infrastructure builds, its, builds its way onto the, onto the Blockchain. I hate saying the Blockchain. It feels like 2018 like IBM commercial, sorry finds its way onto a Blockchain somewhere um as a way to just produce operational efficiencies, right? Um You know, again, there's gonna be like the Sas Soshi like Cypherpunk vision and there's gonna be like the CBD C vision. Um Those may be able to coexist. I think, I think Ben is right? Like the jury is still out as to one will try to kill off the other. Right. That's the fear. Um, but there is this sort of interesting realization that, oh, maybe, you know, it wasn't tracking lettuce after all, but, like settling stocks actually is something that a Blockchain can do efficiently, uh, in a way that works for traditional finance institutions. So that, to me, I think is maybe the interesting thing here is like RW a CBD CS stable coins, all that stuff. Um, is very much, uh, of the moment. So, yeah, I don't know, CBD, CS. Jen, CBD CS Digital to, is it said it too? What is it? Two? Yeah, that's the thing. $2 coin. Tony has a little polar bear on it. Super cute. Yeah. Come on up to Canada. We got cute money. I love that. That's a nice, they should do a commercial for Canada. Cute money.