Neha on Currency of Power Podcast
Money Is a System You Can Redesign
Neha Narula on programmable money, quantum risk, and why the dollar is still the game to lose
With Marieke Flament and Nicolas Colin
Neha Narula started her career building databases — fast, scalable, multi-core systems designed to handle the cloud infrastructure of companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta. The work was intellectually interesting. It was also, as she eventually concluded, being used mostly to keep people scrolling and clicking on ads. That dissatisfaction sent her looking for harder problems.
She found one in Bitcoin. Not the ideology, and not the investment thesis, but the engineering puzzle: why is a payment system so difficult to scale? The question pulled her into the mechanics of how money actually works — central banks, fractional reserve banking, the basic plumbing of the global economy — and she emerged with a view that has shaped her work ever since. Money is not a natural fact. It is a system built on design choices, and those choices encode political decisions about who gets access, on what terms, and at whose expense.
That view now sits at the centre of some of the most consequential debates in finance. As Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT’s Media Lab, Neha led Project Hamilton, the research collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that laid the technical groundwork for a potential digital dollar. She has written on the hidden risks in stablecoin infrastructure and on what it would actually take for Bitcoin to become quantum-resistant. She sits on the board of Block and advises the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In this conversation, Neha explains why CBDCs and stablecoins are less different than most people assume, what Project Hamilton set out to do and what it left unresolved, why zero-knowledge proofs are not a privacy solution on their own, and what a decentralized community like Bitcoin can realistically do to prepare for quantum computing. She also takes the geopolitical temperature: what Iran’s reported willingness to accept Bitcoin payments actually signals, and why, in her view, the dollar remains the game to lose.
Her website is at nehanarula.org. The Digital Currency Initiative is at dci.mit.edu. She is on X at @neha and on LinkedIn.