Brian Brooks believes digital currency can help mitigate the dangers of fiat and increase financial stability
Brian Brooks is the US Acting Comptroller of the Currency, and also the former head of the legal department for cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. This gives him a lot of knowledge of the crypto industry to bring to the US regulatory agency, and Brooks recently spoke with Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution – a major US think tank – regarding the expectations for hypothetical financial platforms in the next five years. One of the main things he said was that blockchain is better than the United States’ current bank-dependent payments system, which he describes as a “monopoly.”
“I’m a believer in decentralization. At the end of the day, I think that stablecoins and other blockchain-based tokenization of dollars are the most resilient model for long-term faster payments.
Better than a central bank monopoly on the payments system,” said Brooks. The traditional payment systems have had limitations for a long time, which ended up being exposed in the response the government is giving amid the coronavirus pandemic. In particular, the great difficulty the government found in transferring $1,200 payments to US citizens as part of the relief program has been counterintuitive.
An office within the US Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), takes care of everything related to federal banks. This past week, this same office gave the green light to traditional banking institutions to become custodians of cryptocurrency assets. For both Brooks and Klein, the US is stuck in the past regarding evolving to adapt to how the money operates now. “A hundred years ago we had the most advanced financial system in the world, and we still have the most advanced system in the world c. 1910,” Brooks commented.
