Nicolas Colin & Marieke Flament — "The Great Financial Reset Has Begun"

0:01 Introductions — Flament: Circle, Metal, a layer-one protocol, now boards

• Flament is a computer engineer and 10-year fintech veteran. She started at Circle ("today the issuer of USDC"), was CEO of the UK neobank Metal (Colin was her adviser), and then led a layer-one blockchain protocol.
• She now sits on boards and advises Qivalis ("a European consortium of stablecoin"), N26 and IG Group.

1:47 Colin: French Ministry of Finance to Munich deep tech

• 15 years in European tech (Paris, London, Munich). Before that he was a senior civil servant in the French Ministry of Finance.
• He is head of research at Vsquare Ventures, writes his own newsletter (Drift Signal), and co-writes Currency of Power, "on the new monetary order with a stablecoin entry."

3:21 Origin story — a 2018 Bitcoin debate and the stablecoin "aha"

• They met in 2018 and started debating Bitcoin while Colin was writing on it and Flament was at Circle.
• Early in 2025 Colin interviewed her for Drift Signal. He wasn't convinced "until I spoke about stablecoin." Her pitch of stablecoins as "the actual first large scale convincing valuable use case for crypto" is what left Colin "convinced somewhat."

5:39 The euro is missing from the stablecoin race

• Flament's point: stablecoins "are all denominated in dollars," so other currencies are "left behind in that race to reinvent money."
• For Europe that is "a problem… from a sovereignty perspective, from a strategic power perspective, from a financial perspective." It was "so important but also so niche" that nobody covered it, so they launched Euro Stable Watch.

7:26 Rebrand — from euro stablecoins to "the reinvention of money"

• Within a few months they had covered everything in euro stablecoins, so they widened to dollars and China. "It's about something much bigger, which is the reinvention of money," and the newsletter became Currency of Power.

8:52 What crypto actually adds — peer-to-peer value, then programmable money

• Flament: transformation one is sending value "truly peer-to-peer over the internet without having to have a central party." Transformation two is Ethereum's smart contracts.
• In SWIFT "there's a decorrelation between the action and the message." On a blockchain they are one, so money becomes programmable. The same logic extends to any asset (stocks, gold): "tokenization."

11:09 Decentralized tech, recentralized market — and the naming problem

• Colin: any decentralized system with interesting features "will soon be… conquered or colonized by large players and will recentralize quite fast." Crypto-as-financial-markets "is already dominated by large players."
• He prefers "programmable money, programmable capital or automating money" to "tokenization," but "we need Larry Fink and Scott Bessent to convert to that as well for it to become market consensus."

13:17 The SPV analogy — fusing the legal layer and the financial layer

• Running SPVs at a pan-European accelerator showed him two layers that barely interact: bank accounts (the financial layer) and contracts (the legal layer, covering carry, expenses and splits), reconciled by a human doing the math and instructing the bank.
• Programmable money plugs one into the other: "when the money arrives on the bank account that triggers execution of a contract that's been preloaded in the system."

15:49 ~150 blockchains, a few winners

• Flament: chains multiplied because early ones were too slow, lacked privacy or were unfriendly to users. Now the field is consolidating: "a few are going to win… Ethereum and Solana."
• Some chains are emerging specifically for payments or for banks. On trust, she thinks open source and decentralized can be trusted "way more than something that's closed."

17:15 "The Great Financial Reset Has Begun"

• Kofinas quotes the post: the "turbulent summer of 2026 is not a series of isolated market tremors, but the initial grinding gears of a structural shift in the global monetary order."

18:06 Carlota Perez — great surges and the maturity phase

• Colin draws on Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002). A revolution about every 70 years creates a "techno-economic paradigm," and the nations that upgrade their "institutional framework" to match it reap the rewards.
• In the final maturity phase the new entrants "have become big and a bit exhausted," markets plateau, and "you need to pull different levers, not technological levers." The last one was the 1970s end of "the age of oil, automobiles and mass production," with stagflation, social unrest and political upheaval.

21:05 The 1970s financial reset, itemized

• A reset of "who participates in the market, what is traded… how companies are funded." The list: the Nixon shock (1971), Milken's junk bond market, LBOs (Kohlberg and KKR), the Bloomberg terminal, NYSE May Day (1975, the end of fixed brokerage fees), and a decade later the London Big Bang, which made London "the second financial hub."

24:20 The thesis — today's paradigm is mature, so finance gets reinvented

• When technology "fails to deliver additional productivity gain," the lever is finance: new products (junk bonds), new tools (Bloomberg), new regulatory frameworks (May Day, the Big Bang).
• "If you assume as I do that we've now reached the maturity phase of… semiconductors, computing and networks, then that maturity phase should give birth to a new financial system." So he looks "everywhere for signals that the financial system is changing."

26:33 Add passive investing — Vanguard

• "One that I forgot was the invention of passive investing… the launch of Vanguard by John Bogle." Kofinas adds the institutionalization of retirement investing, "at least in the US, not so much in Europe."

27:26 Why Nixon cut the cord — refusing a humiliating devaluation

• Via Martin Wolf on Odd Lots: after Vietnam and the Great Society the US "normally… would have had to devalue the dollar." Because devaluing was humiliating for the hegemon, Nixon chose to "cut the cord… and let exchange rates float."

28:28 The deeper reason — hard assets can't stretch with a productive economy

• From their podcast's first guest, a Bitcoin skeptic: "you can't anchor the entire economy on hard assets because hard assets by definition have a limited volume." Kofinas's gloss: without an elastic currency "the cost of borrowing money becomes punitive."
• So "every regime that relied on some hard asset, whether the gold standard or the Bretton Woods regime… was ultimately brought to an end. Not because it didn't work but because the economy grew so much." Mass production created so much value that "all the gold in the world was not enough."

31:34 Flament — exorbitant privilege, petrodollar, electrostate

• The French perspective: de Gaulle and Giscard's "exorbitant privilege" marked "cracks in how the system is perceived."
• If fiat "is backed in essence by nothing then what is it?" The petrodollar followed, making the dollar a representation of energy. The open question is whether that system survives "if we move into an electrostate."

33:11 De-pegging made the dollar stronger — stablecoins as the new eurodollar

• Kofinas: devaluation was expected, but "by decentralizing the international financial system, the dollar actually became stronger," strong enough to need the 1985 Plaza Accord.
• Flament: petrodollars and eurodollars are dollars "not directly controlled from the US and the Fed." Today "Tether is a perfect example of that… an outsourcing of the dollar." Let it flow, and "you can also dictate the rules." They debate whether stablecoins are the new petrodollar, the new eurodollar, or "the money for compute because compute is the new oil."

35:43 "The most decentralized currency on the planet"

• Flament agrees "100%": "China will de-dollarize. And then you look at it, it's completely linked."
• Kofinas: the dollar is "at its core a denomination… a lingua franca. It's like English." Nobody forces its use, and it isn't easy to stop.

37:03 Colin — why the dollar is sticky: network effects and rails

• A French speaker and a Brazilian trading will switch to English, and likewise to the dollar, because euro or real markets may not be "deep enough… to secure the exchange rate over the duration of the transaction."
• Second factor: "the financial rails matter a great deal." The dollar's infrastructure has been "overinvested" and is the default. The euro is "close enough" only inside the eurozone (SEPA).

39:27 Flament — availability and liquidity; a challenger faces a cold start

• Stablecoins spread for the same two reasons: availability (the rails exist) and liquidity ("even in the most remote places there will always be liquidity").
• Changing that "is going to take a long time… It's a cold start thing. You can build the rails and nobody comes on it. Or you can build the rails, but there's no liquidity."

40:53 Kofinas — Treasuries are held because they're needed

• US public debt markets supply much of that liquidity. People own Treasuries "not because they think it's a better long-term investment than… gold or art… but because they need it" to manage dollar liabilities.

42:04 Flament — today's drivers: 2008, 2014, Covid, the GENIUS Act

• 2008 brought the financial crisis and the birth of Bitcoin. 2014 brought the Crimea sanctions, "a wakeup call" that pushed China to build a "full stack society" with independent rails "no one… can cut."
• Covid brought "a tremendous acceleration of… digitalization." Trump's comeback brought the GENIUS Act, on the view that "the dollar has power through network effect but… the money of the future is technology."

44:26 Colin — the US became a deficit nation in 1976–82 (Dalio's empire cycle)

• Echoing Ray Dalio's rise and fall of empires: when the empire flips from net exporter to net importer, discontent builds slowly and then peaks, "because the empire imports so much and has to provide everyone with its own currency."
• Trump's trade agenda "implies that the dollar has to cease to be the reserve currency" and that trade barriers go up. The imbalances are culminating in China's surplus, and "the empire becomes predatory towards others… Canada… Europe… South Korea."

47:00 The reserve currency is the last thing to go — the sterling precedent

• Dalio: the reserve currency is "the very last thing that will still be in place when all the rest is gone."
• Marko Papic: Britain lost its top-economy status at the end of the 19th century, yet sterling stayed the reserve currency through WWI, the return to and exit from gold (1931), and WWII. "You needed all that." So "the dollar is here to stay for a few more decades. But the signs that its demise will happen at some point are already here if you know where to look."

49:32 Flament — reserve currency vs trade currency; the Hong Kong peg

• Kofinas reads their recent writing as less certain about lasting dollar dominance. Flament agrees, with a distinction: "what it is to be a reserve currency from what it is to be a currency used in trade… you could continue to be a reserve currency but maybe some other stuff is being used in trade," which is the China signal.
• But the dollar "is so entangled everywhere." Hong Kong, "the key door from China to the rest of the world," is pegged: "the Hong Kong dollar is the dollar."

50:53 Stablecoins as Washington's next-generation dollar tool — but slower than headlines

• Seen from US policymakers, stablecoins "have all the tools and the instruments" to keep dictating trade and oversight: "freezing and being able to seize… this is part of the power of the dollar."
• How fast? "Uncertain." Flament: "things are not like they look in the headlines… a headline like de-dollarization is there… It's going to take way way longer."

52:24 Second-hour preview (premium, not captured)

• Kofinas lists the drivers he wants to cover: rearchitecting money through dollar-backed stablecoins, geopolitical fragmentation and localization, and machine-to-machine commerce as the dominant economic layer.
• Also queued: debasement, capital controls and financial repression, and whether rising Treasury yields reflect US fiscal worries or money pouring into the AI trade.