Nicolas Colin · head of research at Vsquare Ventures (Munich deep-tech fund), author of the Drift Signal newsletter and co-author (with Marieke Flament) of Currency of Power, on the new monetary order and stablecoins.
Flament: the smart-contract chain that made money programmable — one of the few of ~150 blockchains she expects to win as traditional finance moves on-chain (adoption view, not a price call).
Flament: named with Ethereum as the chains where “more and more of the traditional financial system” is moving as the blockchain field consolidates to a few winners.
Reference — USDC issuer and Flament’s first fintech employer; dollar stablecoins are the reinvention of money the thesis tracks, but no view on the stock.
In one line: a great financial reset has begun. Today's semiconductors-computing-networks paradigm has reached its Carlota Perez maturity phase, and as in the 1970s, growth now comes from reinventing finance. The new instrument is programmable money (dollar stablecoins, tokenization). The dollar's reserve role is sticky for "a few more decades," even as trade use starts to fragment. (Co-authored with Marieke Flament; views attributed where hers.)
Perez maturity phase → financial reset. Technological revolutions come about every 70 years. When one matures (incumbents "big and a bit exhausted," productivity gains fading), the lever becomes finance. The 1970s end of oil/autos/mass production produced the Nixon shock, junk bonds, LBOs (KKR), the Bloomberg terminal, NYSE May Day, Vanguard and the London Big Bang. Colin sees the current paradigm as mature and collects signals of the next financial system (2026-SEP-14).
Programmable money is the real innovation. Crypto's lasting contribution is peer-to-peer value transfer plus smart contracts that fuse the legal layer (contracts) with the financial layer (bank accounts). He prefers "automating money" to "tokenization." Decentralized technology recentralizes fast under large players. Flament expects ~150 blockchains to consolidate to a few winners (Ethereum, Solana).
Stablecoins extend the dollar. Like eurodollars and petrodollars after 1971, dollar stablecoins such as Tether are an "outsourcing of the dollar" that spreads US reach. The euro's absence from the stablecoin race is a sovereignty problem for Europe, the founding motive of Currency of Power.
The dollar is sticky: network effects, rails, liquidity. Like English, a lingua franca no one is forced to use. A challenger faces a cold start: rails without users, or users without liquidity.
Reserve currency is the last thing an empire loses. The US became a deficit nation in 1976–82 (Dalio's empire cycle), and the Trump trade agenda implies the reserve role must eventually go. But on the sterling precedent (Marko Papic) the dollar "is here to stay for a few more decades." Flament: separate reserve currency from trade currency, and discount de-dollarization headlines ("the Hong Kong dollar is the dollar").
The product
Grounded in what Colin and Flament said in the 2026-SEP-14 appearance.
What it is:Currency of Power, a newsletter and podcast co-written by Nicolas Colin and Marieke Flament "on the new monetary order with a stablecoin entry." It launched in 2025 as Euro Stable Watch, a niche title on euro stablecoins, then widened to dollars and China ("the reinvention of money") and was renamed. Colin also writes his personal newsletter, Drift Signal. Pricing is not discussed.
Offering
What it is
How they run it
Seen in the index
Newsletter essays
Long-form pieces on stablecoins, tokenization and the monetary order
Signals collected over "one year and a half" and organized into a thesis, e.g. "The Great Financial Reset Has Begun" (summer 2026)
How it serves retail investors: it covers a niche that, in Colin's words, nobody else was covering: non-dollar stablecoins and the plumbing of money. It gives frameworks (Perez maturity phase, reserve vs trade currency, the sterling lag) for reading monetary-regime headlines, rather than security picks.
Transcripts
One dated page per appearance — each has its stock table, talking points, and the saved transcript. Newest first.