From a DeFi Summer to the Explosive Growth of Bitcoin: A Year in Retrospect

It’s hard to believe it has been a year since Michael Casey and Sheila Warren launched the “Money Reimagined” podcast.

This episode is sponsored by Quantstamp

And what a year it has been: some rich, probing discussions about the past and future of money, the challenges of regulation and blockchain governance, the battle for financial inclusion, the shifting geopolitical landscape, the anthropology of money and much, much more. All of that while the crypto market soared to a valuation of more than $2 trillion, NFTs went parabolic, the U.S. government got tougher with the sector, China kicked out its bitcoin miners, El Salvador made bitcoin a legal tender, DeFi innovation exploded, and a relentless pandemic continued with no end in sight.

To look back on all of that and to help them celebrate this anniversary, Michael and Sheila were joined by a pair who delivered one of the more memorable discussions of the past year: Jill Carlson, the founder of the Open Money Initiative, and Raoul Pal, CEO and founder of Real Vision.

With the controversial recent rollout of El Salvador’s bitcoin project as its backdrop, the discussion updated the somewhat competing perspective that Carlson and Pal had explored in a Dec. 11 episode last year on whether speculation on bitcoin as an asset is compatible with its prospects as a tool for payments and financial inclusion for the poor.

This episode was produced and edited by Michele Musso with announcements by Adam B. Levine and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Our theme song is Shepard.