From Libra to Open Standard’s OUSD: What Facebook's Failed Stablecoin Teaches Us

**Christian Catalini** (0:00)
I think that the bull case for Circle and some of the peer play issuers right now is that governance is hard, and so this is another effort that will fail. I think the bare case is that, look, Genius made stable coins fungible. That's the whole point.
My co-founder, Zein Mersary, wrote a nice article about the synchronous of money. If money is showing equivalent across all these tables, then the stable is a commodity, and I think Circle will have to reckon with that.

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**Renato Mariotti** (1:05)
Welcome to The Policy Protocol, your weekly espresso shot of the latest in crypto law and policy.
Everything that happened is still down to what actually matters. I'm Renato, I have my co-host Rebecca here. Happy birthday, Rebecca.

**Rebecca Rettig** (1:20)
Thank you. This is our birthday episode. We just found out we're like three days apart. This is really our birthday episode. I'm excited for what we do next year because now we'll really be able to celebrate now that we know.

**Renato Mariotti** (1:31)
Absolutely. We're twinsies. We've got a lot to talk about this week.
I think we're going to talk about the SEC ETF Rule Review. We're going to talk a lot about open standard, and we're bringing in a fantastic guest, Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He'll talk about open standard and more. Then we're going to have our person of the week. Rebecca, what are you thinking about this week? What's your topic?

**Rebecca Rettig** (2:00)
I've actually been thinking about crypto ETFs in many ways for a number of years, actually. Yesterday's request for comment from the SEC was really interesting. They asked for comments on what they call novel ETFs. It covers crypto asset ETFs, prediction market slash event contract ETFs, single-stock ETFs, and I think also high-leverage ETFs. Anything that doesn't fit the traditional ETF mold, they're looking for it. You have 60 days from yesterday, my birthday.
By the end of August, you need to get in comments on this.
I would say for me, it's particularly interesting and important from the crypto side because, while we feel maybe in the crypto space, well, now we have a number of different ETFs. We have the Solana ETFs, which have done very well. We have the Ethereum and the Bitcoin ones. Also, we have staking in the Ethereum and Solana ETFs. There's still a lot of variations around crypto ETFs. Back in February of 2025, right after the crypto task force was constituted at CEC, I went in with my founder, Lucas Bruder, to talk about having LSTs or liquid staking tokens, or what the SEC calls staking receipt tokens or SRT in ETFs. That's something that I've been having ongoing dialogue with them about. You can see it from the lists that they make public. I think others have really had the same types of discussions around some of these novel tweaks where there's a real appetite in the market for it. I'm excited that we all have a chance to do public comment, actually, and the transparency part around this. It remains, I would say, novel as well for the SEC given what we saw from the last administration. I think it'll be good. But what do you think about it, Renato?

**Renato Mariotti** (3:43)
Yeah. Look, as a starting point, I'm just happy that we have an SEC that's agile. I don't know if I ever would have guessed that we would, but we do. Right now, that's great. ETFs as an instrument, as a class, are something that's really attractive to a lot of people, easy to get in and out of.
Certainly, for crypto, it's important because you don't have to deal with custody. So very interesting and important on the crypto side. But I actually think it's cool that thinking about things like prediction market ETFs, Rebecca, there's a lot of folks who are scared about prediction markets or don't want to dip their toe in the water with prediction markets. But they actually can hedge unique risks, like let's say tariffs being imposed in a particular country, something like that, using prediction markets. An ETFs may be a great way for them to access them. So all in all, I think that's a fantastic and potentially important development.