When Jonas Gross and Jonathan Knoll sit down with Christian Catalini, the conversation begins with a ghost that still moves through the financial system: Libra. The Facebook-backed digital currency project never reached the market, yet its architecture has become difficult to ignore. In Washington, in European regulatory debates, in the boardrooms of payment companies and banks, many of the ideas once treated as dangerous now look almost inevitable.
Catalini, one of Libra’s key architects, does not soften the verdict. Libra failed. The launch was too loud, the political threat too easy to amplify, the timing too early. A project that might have started as a narrow remittance application arrived instead with the symbolism of reinventing money. Governments, central banks and incumbent financial institutions reacted accordingly.
Still, failure is not the same as disappearance. Libra’s reserve design, legal protections and governance questions have reappeared in today’s stablecoin legislation and market structures. Catalini’s phrase captures the strange afterlife of the project: one can kill a project, but not necessarily the thesis behind it.
A Stablecoin Moment Built on Old Scars
The world that rejected Libra in 2019 has changed. Stablecoins are no longer a fringe experiment. Banks are preparing tokenized deposits. Payment giants are exploring shared rails. Crypto firms, fintech companies and regulated institutions are converging on a question that Libra forced into public view: what should money look like when it moves with the speed and programmability of the internet?
Catalini sees the coming phase less as ideological combat than execution. The technology is no longer the core obstacle. The harder questions concern governance, interoperability and incentives. Who controls the rail? Who captures the economics? Who gets to build on top of it without asking permission?
That is where Libra’s history becomes unusually useful. Behind the public controversy sat years of work on reserves, consumer claims, merchant incentives, wallet competition and the problem of keeping a network open once powerful sponsors have entered the room. Catalini describes the quiet machinery that rarely made headlines: frameworks for risk, reserve management, regulatory expectations and the difficult market design needed to make a global payment ecosystem function.
Today’s new stablecoin initiatives may discover that the technical launch is the easy part. The deeper challenge is convincing the market that neutrality is real.
Europe’s Risk of Regulating Yesterday’s Battle
The conversation turns sharply toward Europe, where the euro has struggled to find a meaningful place in the stablecoin economy. Catalini’s diagnosis is uncomfortable. Europe has talent, financial sophistication and a deep need for modern cross-border payment infrastructure. It also has a habit of regulating nascent technologies before markets have had enough room to learn.
MiCA, in his view, may have created more friction than momentum for euro stablecoins. The result is a continent that understands many of the right problems, yet often moves too slowly to shape the solutions. In a world where dollar-denominated stablecoins dominate, domestic alternatives will matter. Businesses, treasurers and consumers need reliable ways to move between currencies seamlessly, especially if programmable money becomes part of global commerce.
Catalini does not expect a single model to win everywhere. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits may both thrive, each serving different needs. Bank-led systems can move enormous value quickly, while open stablecoin networks can offer interoperability and reach. The danger for Europe is not that it lacks ideas. The danger is that it turns those ideas into paperwork while others turn them into infrastructure.
AI, Judgment and the New Scarcity
The episode then leaves money without really leaving it. Catalini’s recent work on the economics of artificial general intelligence frames AI through a simple and unsettling lens: if something can be measured, it can likely be automated. The remaining scarcity is verification.
Machines can generate text, code, analysis, legal drafts, financial recommendations and operational workflows at a speed no human organization can match. The bottleneck becomes deciding what is correct, useful, safe and trustworthy. Senior expertise does not vanish in this world. It becomes the filter through which machine output gains value.
Catalini rejects vague comfort words such as “taste” or “judgment” when they obscure the mechanics of what humans still contribute. Verification is more precise. It describes the human ability to compare output against lived experience, domain knowledge and context that has not yet been fully captured by data.
This has profound consequences for work. Entry-level roles are exposed because young professionals often enter the market with knowledge that resembles what large language models already possess: book learning, pattern recognition, general competence. The old career ladder, from internship to junior analyst to manager, is under pressure.
Catalini’s view is not bleak. AI may compress the apprenticeship period, allowing ambitious people to learn faster, test themselves more often and reach mastery with tools previous generations would have envied. The easy use of AI will produce shallow work. The demanding use of AI may produce unusually capable people.
Agents Will Want Better Money
Once AI agents begin acting on behalf of people and businesses, financial infrastructure must change again. Existing payment systems can support many consumer transactions, especially where card networks and processors already perform well. More complex agentic commerce will demand rails that are programmable, interoperable and available beyond domestic silos.
That is where crypto infrastructure returns to the center of the discussion. Stablecoins are not merely faster payment tokens; they are potential building blocks for software-driven economic activity. Tokenized deposits may serve institutions. Stablecoins may serve open networks. Banks, fintechs and crypto companies will compete less over slogans than over reliability, reach and integration.
Bitcoin enters the conversation with a different role. Catalini does not present it as a clean inflation hedge. He sees it more as a high-beta bet on new infrastructure, while acknowledging its historic novelty: a monetary asset independent of any central bank or financial institution. Its future depends partly on whether open networks can resist being replaced by curated, semi-closed systems that borrow crypto’s language while abandoning its spirit.
The Architecture Still Being Written
The striking feature of Catalini’s argument is its refusal to treat finance, crypto and AI as separate revolutions. They are beginning to compound. AI increases the need for verification and programmable action. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits create new settlement layers. Open networks offer a possible counterweight to closed platforms. Regulators can either shape this transition with intelligence or freeze themselves around yesterday’s fears.
Libra failed as a product. As a warning, a blueprint and a provocation, it has aged differently. The system that once rejected it is now rebuilding parts of it under other names, with new sponsors and better timing. Money is becoming software. Intelligence is becoming abundant. Trust, once again, is the scarce ingredient.
May News Episode on Stablecoins in Europe:
Full paper “Some simple economics of AGI”
Summary “Some simple economics of AGI”
Forbes Article “Babysitting the Slop”
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Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock’n’Roll Telegram Channel
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