CoinDesk's annual conference on the future of the global financial system is happening this week. Consensus: Distributed features hundreds of hours of programming with more than 150 speakers over five days, from May 11th-15th.

Highlights

Yves Mersch on Central Bank Digital Currencies

Member of the Executive Board, Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board • European Central Bank

Yves Mersch was appointed to the Executive Board of the ECB in 2012 when serving his third term as Governor of the Banque centrale du Luxembourg, a position he had held since 1998. In 2019 he was appointed Vice-Chair of the ECB’s Supervisory Board.Before setting up his country’s central bank, he represented his country in the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Investment Bank and other multilateral organisations, as well as in private companies where he has been globally active in both financial and industrial areas.Mr Mersch holds postgraduate degrees in political science from Paris Sorbonne, and law from Paris Panthéon University. He is the longest-serving member on the ECB’s Governing Council.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers & fintech author and futurist Dave Birch 

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers is one of America’s leading economists. In addition to serving as 71st Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Summers served as Director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, as President of Harvard University, and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank.Dr. Summers’ tenure at the U.S. Treasury coincided with the longest period of sustained economic growth in U.S. history. He is the only Treasury Secretary in the last half century to have left office with the national budget in surplus. Dr. Summers has played a key role in addressing every major financial crisis for the last two decades.

David G.W. Birch is an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services. He is Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion (the secure electronic transactions consultancy that he helped to found), Technology Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (the London-based think tank) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey Business School.

Chris Giancarlo and the Digital Dollar Project & Dante Disparte of Libra Association

The Honorable J. Christopher (“Chris”) Giancarlo is an American attorney and former business executive who served as 13th Chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Dante Disparte is the vice chairman and Head of Policy and Communications for the Libra Association, a newly-formed organization that has brought together social impact organizations and a diverse group of leading businesses from around the world to create a low-friction, high-trust payment system that empowers billions of people.

Gavin Wood on Chain Mergers and Acquisitions

Gavin Wood, an original co-founder of Ethereum, took a few good swipes at the second-largest cryptocurrency he helped create, calling out its lack of “agency” when upgrading to its next version, Ethereum 2.0.

Plan B discussion: Saifedean Ammous, Erik Voorhees

Saifedean Ammous is the author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the first academic study of the economics of bitcoin. He also runs saifedean.com, a platform for online courses in economics.

Erik Voorhees is among the top-recognized serial Bitcoin advocates and entrepreneurs, understanding Bitcoin as one of the most important inventions ever created by humanity.

US Banking Regulator Suggests Federal Licensing Framework for Crypto Firms - Brian Brooks, chief operating officer of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the nation's national bank overseer, said Monday he believes crypto companies could fall under a federal licensing regime – if they provide what can be described as payment services. Speaking at CoinDesk's Consensus: Distributed virtual conference, the former Coinbase chief legal officer said many crypto companies are payments companies, and it therefore might make sense to treat these startups – and other fintech firms like Stripe – the same way as banks are treated federally. "Crypto is one of those areas where we have to ask ourselves, does it make more sense to think of crypto projects as local projects or global projects. If they're global, then the rational for a single national license makes more sense," he said. "Increasingly, it looks a lot like crypto is banking for the 21st century."This would give these startups an alternative to the state-level money transmitter licenses when building operations.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is looking into what a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) form of the euro might look like - The ECB set up a task force earlier this year to look into what its potential CBDC could look like, and the group expects to publish a preliminary report in the coming weeks, said Mersch, an executive board member at the ECB. "A wholesale CBDC, restricted to a limited group of financial counter-parties, would be largely business as usual," Mersch said. "However, a retail CBDC, accessible to all, would be a game changer, so a retail CBDC is now our main focus." A retail CBDC could be based on a digital token circulated "in a decentralized manner," without a central ledger, Mersch said, though he stopped short of saying the words "blockchain" or "distributed ledger." He acknowledged that the traceability of digital transactions would raise privacy concerns among a population used to paying for some things with paper notes.

Cold Currency War is brewing - Every sector is competing in a type of arms race to be a leader in the digital currency race.

Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum 2.0 protocol upgrade in July - Eth2 will change the consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS), is well on its way to launching sometime in July.

Zcash Alliance Aims to Bring Privacy Tech to Bitcoin, Cosmos and Ethereum -A handful of big names in crypto want in on the privacy features offered by Zcash. The Electric Coin Company (ECC) announced Monday the launch of the Zcash Developers Alliance (ZDA), an invite-only working group that includes the Lightning Network startup Bolt Labs, the cross-chain technology startup Thesis, the Ethereum conglomerate ConsenSys and two leading startups working on the Cosmos project, Agoric and Iqlusion, just to name a few. “The ZDA is an attempt to introduce a way to collaborate with the ECC, and the Zcash ecosystem, which focuses around other people’s priorities,” Iqlusion founder Zaki Manian said. “Product-market fit is other people [beyond fans and founders] actually caring about it.” Manian said the “Zcash anonymity set” is a “valuable public good,” describing how the privacy coin allows shielded transactions and the construct that allows individual transactions to get lost in the metaphorical crowd.

References: CoinDesk