Greetings from a brisk and sunny Davos! Casper Labs is back to host the third annual iteration of The Hub — and we’re honored to be joined by The Financial Times this year as a presenting sponsor.
Programming officially kicked off today, with an all-star roster of speakers, including David Rubenstein (CEO, Carlyle Group), Jeremy Allaire (Founder & CEO, Circle), Sheila Warren (CEO, Crypto Council for Innovation), David Treat (Senior Managing Director, Accenture Innovation), Frank McCourt (CEO, McCourt Global and Founder, Project Liberty) and Anthony Scaramucci (Founder, Skybridge Capital).
Casper Labs CEO Mrinal Manohar set the tone with an introductory keynote focused on the importance of building over breaking, and working within established systems to affect change from within, as opposed to always “moving fast and breaking things.” Though we live in an era of historically low poverty and unemployment, public trust and sentiment is also at an unprecedented nadir. Institutions, Manohar pointed out, are the route source of this disparity — and also poised to play a key role in navigating out of this environment. That process starts with institutions doing a better job of clearly articulating their visions, and emphasizing the long term outcomes they’re pursuing.
Hot Takes By the Fireside
The afternoon continued with a series of firesides, moderated by the eminently quotable Anthony Scaramucci (“I should sign up for your family office,” he quipped to Carlyle Group CEO David Rubenstein, after the latter related an anecdote of being pitched and subsequently passing on an opportunity to invest in a pre-meltdown FTX).
Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, in conversation with Anthony Scaramucci (photo credit: Mark Sandusky)
Scaramucci and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire discussed the state of stablecoins, including an outlook on regulation (don’t expect any major new pieces of digital asset regulation this year, per Allaire), the considerable opportunity the U.S. has to extend the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency to the digital realm — and the risks posed by regulatory inaction. The USDC is a digital dollar, pegged 1:1 to the U.S. Dollar — and, in Allaire’s estimation, it’s currently being governed by rules written by non-U.S. governments. It’s not a tenable situation in the long term, if the government wants to maintain USD’s long-held global reserve status.
Carlyle Group CEO David Rubenstein then took the stage for a candid and free-flowing conversation, which touched on everything from confirming Scaramucci’s 2024 U.S. presidential endorsement (“If it ends up as Biden vs. Trump, it’s Joe Biden. I’m for patriotism over partisanship.”) to his uncertain initial view of Sam Bankman-Fried before FTX’s collapse to Bitcoin’s increasingly effective lobbying arm in Washington, DC.
From there, CoinDesk’s popular Money, Reimagined podcast recorded a session with Animoca Brands Co-founder and Chairman Yat Siu and Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad. You can access that episode, along with all previous episodes, here.
Closing Keynotes
Evening programming concluded with a literary bend.
First, McCourt Global CEO Frank McCourt and CoinDesk’s Michael Casey held a fireside discussion that focused on fixing a broken internet before it’s too late. In their view, we’re in a crisis in regards to how our personal data is being managed and monetized by a small number of gigantic and disproportional influential organizations. A critical first step in fixing this crisis, they argued, is to ensure that people are more aware of just how much of their data is being taken by technology platforms for their own personal gain, at the expense of the individual. They co-authored a book, Our Biggest Fight, that will be available in March (pre-order it here).
Best-selling author Daniel Doll-Steinberg delivered the closing keynote, and focused on the importance of seeing major technology shifts — namely AI, blockchain, AR/VR, 5G communications and additive (aka, 3D) printing — in the bigger picture, and not as standalone entities. Understanding how these evolutions are changing established value layers is key to successfully adapting to them, or not. Bloomberg recently included his new book, Unsupervised, on its year-end “Best Books for Business Leaders list.
Coming Up at The Hub
On Tuesday, January 16, The Hub’s programming will be all about AI. Be sure to check this space in 24 hours for a recap of an action-packed day that will explore how the world’s largest technology companies are working towards defining universal standards for responsible AI, how critical AI regulation is evolving (and pitfalls to avoid), how AI is reshaping cyber defense, among many other topics.
The full stream of that day’s programming (and all subsequent days from The Hub 2024) will be available on Casper Labs’ YouTube page.
