Perspectives 2019 2020 Public Sector

Citi Perspectives 9 Citi Q&A Interview: The Future of Money: Cryptopia or Fiatland? Dustin Ling Tony McLaughlin Money serves as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of account. Money’s most important function is as a medium of exchange to facilitate transactions. Money is an officially issued legal tender that typically consists of notes and coins. Recently, many are talking about digital currencies both public and private — which leads us to ask what is the future of money? Are we destined for Cryptopia or will we evolve to Fiat 2.0? Dustin Ling, Director for Public Sector Banking, sat down with Tony McLaughlin, Managing Director for Citi Treasury & Trade Solutions to provide us some insights from both sides of the coin. What is the Future of Money? TONY MCLAUGHLIN: The future of money is the debate between two camps. On one hand we have a group of people, call them the ‘Cryptopians’ who believe that the future of money is based upon distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrency. This is a radical departure from the types of monetary systems that we have today. On the other there is a group of people, call them the ‘Fiatlanders’ who are engaged in making the existing systems work better. There is a lot at stake for all economic actors, for regulators, for users of monetary systems in terms of which one of these camps wins the day. What is the Cryptoview of the world? TM: The crypto view of the world is driven by criticisms of the existing fiat currency system. Some of these criticisms go back before the dissolution of the Gold Standard and exacerbated by recent events like Quantitate Easing and negative interest rates. The crypto community says that the new technology enables a completely new monetary system that will perform better than the existing system. Be less prone to rent-seeking behavior by intermediaries. Be faster, be cheaper, be more democratic and enable money to be moved internationally with privacy and as easy as sending an email.