April 8–10, 2025 · Carrousel du Louvre, Paris
Consider the geography for a moment, because nobody involved seems to have noticed how funny it is. Some ten thousand people gathered to debate the future of money in the Carrousel du Louvre — which is, to be precise about it, a shopping centre in a basement, directly beneath the greatest museum of the human past on earth. Upstairs: the Mona Lisa, Babylonian law codes, coins minted by emperors whose empires are dust. Downstairs: a man explaining decentralised AI agents to a woman from Goldman Sachs. And on the Tuesday evening, dinner beneath the glass pyramid itself, followed later in the week by an after-party at the Moulin Rouge, because this is Paris and one must observe the proprieties.
I find that stack of floors genuinely instructive, and I’d like to unpack why — including for those of you who have never bought a coin in your life and are reading this out of pure curiosity. You are, as it happens, my favourite sort of reader.
Boardroom, not basement
Paris Blockchain Week returned for its sixth edition with over 400 speakers, and the organisers reported some 9,600 delegates from ninety-five countries, roughly two-thirds of them C-suite. That last figure is the tell. This is not a hackathon full of hoodies and energy drinks; it is a boardroom conversation conducted at scale, and the guest list reflected it.
Charles Hoskinson of Input Output, the company behind Cardano, shared the billing with Adam Back of Blockstream — one of the few people cited in Bitcoin’s original white paper, which in this world is roughly the equivalent of a papal blessing. Monica Long, Ripple’s president, spoke on payments. Silvio Micali, who has an actual Turing Award on his shelf, was there. So were the global head of digital assets at BNY, a vice president of digital assets from Goldman Sachs, and a senior figure from JP Morgan’s blockchain payments arm. And, in a signal that would have been unimaginable five years ago, Clara Chappaz, France’s Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, turned up to speak in her official capacity.
What they were all talking about
Let me translate, because the vocabulary is designed to make you feel excluded, and it really shouldn’t. A great deal of the week concerned tokenisation of real-world assets — a mouthful meaning: take something that genuinely exists, a bond, a property, a share in a fund, and represent it as a digital token so it can be bought, sold and settled in seconds rather than days. There was a whole day devoted to Bitcoin’s arrival in institutional portfolios, another to decentralised AI agents — software that acts on your behalf and, crucially, can pay for things itself — and a strand on DePIN, which means paying ordinary people in tokens for lending real equipment to a network, a spare hard drive here, a rooftop sensor there.
And, inevitably, MiCA. Europe’s crypto rulebook is the most complete attempt any major bloc has made to govern this industry, and the room could not stop discussing it. Its defenders point out that it gives firms one clear set of rules across twenty-seven countries, and gives you, the customer, protections that did not exist before. Its critics counter that comprehensive rules are expensive rules, that compliance costs fall hardest on small innovators, and that Europe risks regulating an industry it never quite manages to grow. Both arguments are made in good faith by intelligent people, and I shan’t pretend to settle it from a keyboard.
Money is memory
Here is the idea I’d like to leave with you, and it is the reason that the basement beneath the museum has been rattling around my head ever since.
In 1998, an economist named Narayana Kocherlakota published a paper with the arresting title Money Is Memory. He argued that money, at bottom, is not a thing at all. It is a record. In a small village, nobody needs currency — everyone remembers who helped whom, who owes what, who can be relied upon. Money is what we invented to replace that memory once our societies grew too large to hold it all in our heads. A coin in your hand is a portable, anonymous record of a contribution you once made.
Now think about what a blockchain actually is. Stripped of every acronym, it is a shared ledger — a record of who did what, kept by everyone, alterable by no one. It is not a clever new kind of money so much as an attempt to rebuild the village’s memory at planetary scale. This is precisely why it seemed so apt to be arguing about it in a cellar beneath the Louvre, a building that exists for no other purpose than to keep humanity’s memory safe. Upstairs, they preserve the past in glass cases. Downstairs, they were trying to build a memory that cannot be quietly edited by whoever holds the pen. Same instinct. Different technology. Roughly four thousand years apart.
How I read it
Two things struck me, and they pull gently against each other.
The first is that the presence of a government minister and a Goldman Sachs vice president in the same room tells you the argument about legitimacy is essentially over. Nobody schedules a Turing laureate and a French cabinet member for something they consider a fad. Whatever this is, it is now a permanent part of the financial furniture, and pretending otherwise is a luxury none of us can afford.
The second is that legitimacy is not the same as certainty, and I would not have you confuse them. Rules can be written badly. Tokenised assets can fail. A room full of impressive people has been catastrophically wrong before and will be again. What I take from a week like this is not a conviction about any particular asset but a direction of travel — and the reminder that the single best protection any of us has is to understand the vocabulary well enough that nobody can baffle us with it. That is, quite deliberately, why I write these things at all.
So I watch the ministers arrive, I note where the serious money is quietly building, and I make my own decisions slowly, in my own time, with sums I can afford to be patient with. The Mona Lisa, after all, was not painted in a hurry.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a read on the room, not financial advice. What you make of a ledger the size of the world is entirely your own affair.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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