Yanis Varoufakis on blockchain, the digital euro and being a class traitor

I spoke to Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek finance minister, at Web3 Summit in Berlin on June 18th, 2026, about why he thinks blockchain is one of the few tools left that can actually pull power away from Big Tech and the banks. Truly a privilege that I had the chance to speak with him on such a stage.

We dig into his concept of techno-feudalism and cloud capital, his monetary commons proposal for a transparent monetary system that could undercut private banks, and the digital wallet system he tried to build for Greece during the crisis. Yanis also lays out why he thinks the digital euro is dead in the water.

 You can read my reflections on the interview here. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The reason why I'm a left wing libertarian is because I loathe concentrated power, whether it is public or private, whether it is state or private. The whole point is not to live under the weight of somebody else's power. A technology can be a very useful tool as part of a political movement, as part of a political process. Look at what happened in the United States. Trump walks in there, Trump 2.0, and what does he do? He writes the legislation in such a way that blockchain is being used for tyrannical purposes. Speculation bores me. Now, those of you who make a lot of money out of it, well done. I'm not being I I hate moralists. I'm not a moralist. The greatest revolutions would happen because there were some members of the privileged aristocracy that turned against the class. They were class traitors. So, you know, be rich and be a class trader. I'm a weird Marxist libertarian. I would never ban anything like that. I would want to see that these experiments take place.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

So a few weeks ago was Web3 Summit here in Berlin, and I got to do one of the things that I've been trying to do for years, which is to be able to speak to none other than Janis Verofakis, which is just like an absolute dream come true for me. So big thank you to the Web3 Summit team for making that happen. Our conversation ranged from why he's interested in blockchains in the first place, his work around the monetary commons, and why he thinks a digital euro is basically dead in the water. And so if you enjoyed the conversation, then make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel. Since doing that really helps out with the algorithm and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Because, you know, look at what happened in the United States. Trump walks in there, Trump 2.0, and he introduces the Genius Act. And what does he do? He writes the legislation in such a way that blockchain is being used for tyrannical purposes. So what we need to do is we need to capture Congress. We need to capture, you know, the Budestag in this country. We need to capture the European Parliament. We need political power. Without political power, the technology is not going to do anything. You know, you may create, you know, since the early 19th century, uh the labor movement, the socialist movement, created, you know, people who had enough of tyranny. They created the carved-out little niches and oasis within capitalism. Robert Owen, whoever remembers Robert Owen, they created communities in Modragon in Spain, already they have one today, that tried to move away from the usual capitalist uh exploitative system and create their own, you know, democratic communities. And they worked for a while. But you see, the problem with that is that if that if you succeed, then you are taken over. Somebody comes and gives you, makes you an offer you can't refuse. Uh I remember when I when I was uh a student in Britain under Thatcher, uh she did something remarkable which informed me on this. There was a bank called the Trustee Savings Bank, TSB. Now that bank was created in the early 19th century by working class people who had no access to banks. So they created their own bank. And it worked magnificently, it was very profitable, and it was totally, totally, totally democratic. You opened the bank, I had an account there. If you even if you had one quid, one pound in there, you were a shareholder and you had one share. It didn't matter how much money you had in your account, you had one share. And you voted. You voted in, you know, the board of directors, and it was one of the most profitable banks. And you know what Thatcher decided to do? She decided to to destroy it. And how did she how did she destroy it? Initially she said, I'm going to privatize it. But her minister said, her bureaucrats, her civil servants, but Prime Minister, it's not owned by the state. It's owned by these people. And you know what she did? She nationalized it to privatize it. So you see, the technologies were always here for democratic control. But, you know, if you if we don't have political power, they will these technologies will be usurped. You know, JP Morgan, as we speak, is creating a very powerful cryptocurrency that will be a stable coin, that will be registered according to the Genius Act. And you know what they intend to do? Not only compete with tether, effectively to have a chunk of the dollar privatize it, because that's what tether is, it's you know, a privatized chunk of the dollar zone, right? But they want to do something else. They want to effectively take over the stock exchange, because they will have something more like Ethereum, so they you know that they will be share trading on the same blockchain that runs the JP Morgan stablecoin. So JP Morgan, if it succeeds, will own the stock exchange and the dollar. Now, blockchain was meant to be was meant to be an emancipator uh emancipatory um uh technology and it still can be. But we need the political power to wrestle away from them all those tools that could have been emancipatory but are being used against us. Don't look at me. I'm I I have no power.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Josh Joshua is right behind you just hi. Ah, there it is. I think we're on to the next part of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

This is the next part. This is we we go back from decentralization to centralization of questions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:57

Maybe I can't. Um so yeah, it's a super great honor, Yannis, to have you at Web3 Summit. And I'm super honored to be able to speak to you for a little bit of time and ask some of my burning questions I've been having for years. Um, in case maybe just for context for people, I've been running a uh a platform called the Blockchain Socialist for uh quite a few years now. So it's been quite some time. Uh I've been thinking about these questions around the intersection of left-wing politics and the crypto space. Um, but one thing I can definitely note of my time doing this is that it's quite a um uh it's a small space. It's a it's a lonely one, and there aren't too many other I mean, I I would say that uh uh the community of people who are uh proudly on the left within the crypto space, I probably know 90% of them. Um and uh so like I think the the impression that I think a lot of people would have on the outside of you coming to Web3 Summit uh is perhaps that you are crossing enemy lines, right? You have been uh crossing, you have been uh talking about stable coins, and I think uh if you if you uh talk to at least like a broader left that is quite uh skeptical of cryptocurrency, and uh I would say, at least in my conversations with some, very anti-cryptocurrency uh or blockchains in uh not in in the sense that they don't want to really entertain the idea. Um and I know you have been you have been vocal about uh having some tacit amounts of support, but I think the the first question that came to me when they announced that you were coming was why are you here? Um and I mean that in the sense of like, is there something interesting for you here and what types of potentially like uh um strange political alliances you think may be uh worth exploring by being here at Web3 Summit?

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Well, look, when uh Satoshi published his famous paper, I read it a few weeks after it was published, and I was mesmerized. So I don't feel that I'm crossing any enemy lines here. Uh I I I I was interviewed by Wide magazine in early 2009, and I was asked what I thought about you know Bitcoin. And I said it's a fantastic solution to a problem we have not discovered yet. Right? So I'm still trying to find out what this you know what that solution is and what the problem is actually. And look, I really don't feel that way. I think that uh everyone in here is interested in technologies that can be utilized for the betterment of humanity, for our emancipation, for us to become free of tyranny. So in that sense, we are comrades. Now we may disagree on how that works out and how it is applied and what we do. But you know, that that's the beauty of dialogue. You know, we we learn from each other. And you know the the reason why we need democracy is because there is no uh blueprint that is hidden somewhere and it's up to some LLM model to discover it. Um good ideas have to be crowdfunded and crowdsourced. So, you know, that's why I'm here. Now, let me tell you something that and all of you that might be of interest to you. Look, I am an uncom uh unreconstructed lefty Marxist, right? Now you can boo. But um, you know, Marx was a libertarian, not a Marxist. Remember, you know, remember, maybe you didn't know that. When he when when Marx was an old man, very old man, just before he died, three or four young Marxists went to talk to him and they talked to him about you know their plans and what they think should happen to the world, and he listened to them, and then they said to him, So, teacher, what do you think of what we said? I said, And the answer was, if you are Marxists, I am not. So, you know, but look, I I'm saying this so that we know where we are. Uh but I fear the reason why I'm a left-wing libertarian is because I loathe concentrated power, whether it is public or private, whether it is state or private. The whole point is not to live under the weight of somebody else's power. Um, so allow me to just say something briefly regarding my background, which may connect with you folks. When I became finance minister of Greece, Greece was completely bankrupt. Our banks were bankrupt, uh, our people were bankrupt. And the powers at B in Frankfurt, in Berlin, in Brussels, they wanted to ask to take another bailout for the banks. So that we, you know, you when you can't repay your mortgage, they give you a credit card to draw money from it to pretend you're paying your mortgage. And then when that credit card runs out, they give you a second one, and then a third one, and then the fourth one. This is kicking the can down the road. So I knew that when I I was elected to say no, no more. You know, we want to be allow us to be bankrupt. We want to experience bankruptcy because it is the only way of ending that vicious cycle, right? Uh they they wouldn't allow us to be bankrupt, even though we were as bankrupt as anyone can get. So I knew they were going to shut down our banks, which is what they did. Uh so and I had foreseen that a year and a half before we won the election and became finance minister. And together with people whose name I'm not going to reveal because they will be demonized like I am, um, they were not Greek. They were from one was, but the rest were from Singapore, you know, from the crypto space. Uh the whole point was to create automatically digital wallets for every citizen or resident based on their uh tax file number. And to allow the liquidity to be created and to be um distributed. Uh so you know we owed pensions, well, paid in the form of this cryptocurrency, which however is publicly owned and is based on um tax file numbers. We were ready for it. Unfortunately, my prime minister, once we got 62% of the vote in favor of this kind of resistance, defected to the central bank side. And I resigned, and the rest is no, is I'm here with you. Um, which is great. So, you know, I is this crossing any lines?

SPEAKER_02 12:22

I I mean, I think we are comrades in arms. I mean, for me, no, of course. I'm like super glad to uh invite you to be here. I think it's um it's just something that's like kind of surreal for me, at least, uh based on my uh my experience of trying to talk to the broader left about this um in a in a in any meaningful sense. Um so no, you're you're totally welcome to be here, and I'm glad you are. I think so. One of the the other question I had, because you kind of um you said this quote, I wanted to mention it uh as well, that you thought uh I don't I can't remember if it was Bitcoin or blockchain, but it solves a problem that we don't yet have. You mentioned that, and I know you've also mentioned smart contracts as like a pretty interesting innovation. Of course. I was wondering if there was any relation to these things with your concept of cloud capital and in technofeudalism. Like uh, does is the crypto space a form of cloud capital or is it something different? Is it is it opposed to it?

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Not at all. The crypto space is not a form of cloud capital. Uh well, stable coins are becoming that. Stable coins are becoming that.

unknown 13:28

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Because that's not a crypto space, right? We're talking about decentralized, pu properly decentralized uh stuff like you know, like uh Bitcoin, like Ethereum. Uh that is really the opposite of cloud capital. Cloud capital is machinery, networking machines, the purpose of which is to manipulate your behavior. You know, Bitcoin is not hard. I may I have my criticisms of Bitcoin, and my main criticism is the fixed money supply, the pre-programmed quantity of money. As a macroeconomist, I I think this is a catastrophe. Uh it's it's a very big but it but it's not a try an attempt to manipulate people's behavior. Right. It's an attempt to create scarcity in order to keep its value um you know either constant or increasing. Uh but no, cloud capital is all about machinery that converses with you, that it trains you to train it, to train you, okay, to impart information so that it gives you good advice, wins your trust, and then comes the whopping uh modification of your behavior, which is in the interest of the owner of this cloud capital. Bitcoin doesn't have owners. Right. There are people who have bitcoins, but nobody owns Bitcoin, and that's the beauty of Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

So uh I can so to get back to one of the quotes that I mentioned, like um you're saying it didn't solve a problem yet. Do you think there are problems now around technofeudalism that uh the crypto space should be looking at that it can perhaps provide solutions for?

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Absolutely. Uh for instance, how do you run a real estate uh system um as uh social housing, for instance.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

That was one of I I read about this.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Now I think that blockchain has a lot, a lot to offer when it comes to creating social housing and making the system by which space in social housing is allocated fairly, squarely, and in a democratic manner. That's just one example. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:39

Okay, no, I mean that's that's so validating because I wrote about this so long ago. Um uh in the uh in a more comedic way. But um one thing that I was interested also uh uh your thoughts on is you know, a lot of people in here are, you know, maybe consider themselves on the left and they also engage with uh speculative capital, as in they engage either they work for uh a company that involves speculative capital or in some way they they have some sort of relationship to it. I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts uh strategically, how should the left be engaging with speculative capital?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Well, look, uh I personally find it very boring. Speculation bores me. Now, those of you who make a lot of money out of it, well done. I'm not being I I hate moralists. I'm not a moralist. The reason why I would never work in the city of London or in the Wall Street is because I would be bored. I would kill myself, I would slash my wrists. It's not interesting to me. Um I'm I'm very interested in working out how these derivatives work, you know, how did they construct them, how did they evolve. But for me to be a trader, you know, these things, you know, it's it's not uh a life worth living from my perspective. And but I do believe in not being moralistic. Um people say to me, Yanis, you know, you talk about the working class, you're a lefty, you call yourself a Marxist, but you're rich. Well, by the way, I'm not rich. I'm very privileged, exceptionally privileged. I choose my projects, I choose my partners, you know, in this day and age to be able to choose your projects as you will and not to have to work for a capitalist. That is, you know, that's the greatest monopoly power in the world, the greatest wealth in the world. Um and I'm far better off than the vast majority of people out there. Uh but you know, on the other hand, who was it that helped the slaves free themselves from slavery? It was rich people in London with the anti-slavery society. I mean, who funded Marx to write Das Capital? It was Friedrich Engels, who was a stinking rich capitalist with factories exploiting workers in Manchester. Now, is this hypocrisy? No, I don't think it's hypocrisy. Because, you know, the greatest revolutions happened because there were some members of the privileged aristocracy that turned against their class. They were class traders. So, you know, be rich and be a class trader.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

Yeah, so um I'm also a big fan of being a class trader. So any rich people want to give me money, let me know. Um so one of the uh more uh recent ideas you mentioned before is the the monetary commons. Um and it kind of comes out of as far as I can understand, it's a critique of the existing financial system. It's also uh in part a critique a little bit of even the the stable the current existing version of how stable coins exist. Um I'm wondering like uh yeah, if you can maybe explain a little bit about it and where you kind of see maybe crypto could potentially play in the monetary commons. Because I think when I read when I read the piece that you wrote um with some of the with some of my friends actually, uh, and and other things I've heard you I I've read of yours, it almost felt like you were describing a blockchain without saying it. It is a blockchain. Oh, okay. So I can we can confirm that it's a blockchain.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Okay. Well, why not say it then? Because you know, it was a piece of political economy. I didn't need to talk about the actual technology, right? I mean, for me, technology is a tool. Yeah, it's not I'm I'm not uh fetishistic about technology. Blockchain is very useful. I've said this before, I'll say it again. And the system that you're referring to uh is blockchain-based, like the one that I was designing when I was in the in the finance ministry in Greece. You know, blockchain is my go-to technology for decentralization, but it's that's by itself is not enough. You need other stuff, of course. Of course. So just for the benefit of uh the audience, the idea of the monetary commerce is this. Imagine that um, you know, like stick to Germany or Europe, the the Eurozone, since we're here. Um imagine you could take your phone and download uh an ECB app, European Central Bank app. And that you know, immediately you have a digital wallet which is offered to you by the central bank. And um you can tell your employer, your friends, whoever owes you money, uh put the money in there. And you have a PIN number, like you have with Google Pay, whatever, but underlying that is a blockchain. In the same way that the Chinese did this with uh you know Brickspay. Brickspay is based on a blockchain. Right. Right? Because it works and it's decentralized, and they don't have to, you know, uh India and China to fall out as to who's controlling the ledger. Right. So, you know, we have that. So the the the okay. And why would you want to transfer your money from you know Deutsche Bank, Finance Bank to uh your digital wallet? Well, firstly, because you are guaranteed free transactions, no fees. Secondly, because you collect the overnight the interest that the the bank the the European Central Bank pays the bankers for their reserves. Effectively, you have a bank account with the AECB and you get the overnight rate, which is always much higher than what private banks will give you. So that creates competition for the private bankers. Not a bad thing if you believe in competition. Okay and then the exciting thought emerges. As money is being transferred from private bank accounts to these ECB digital wallets, the quantity of money falls precipitously. Why? It's the negative multiplier effect. We know, don't we not don't don't we know that with every dollar that a private banker gets from a central Bank from you, from me, they create another 20. This is the money market multiplier. So it that works in reverse. When a dollar goes from the private banks to the digital wallet, right, many dollars that are privately minted have been destroyed. So the money supply comes down. Which is a bad thing because it's deflationary. So we want to keep it up. How do we keep it up? Well, how about the ECB granting everyone a trust fund to everyone? A large sum of money to ameliorate for the drop in the money supply as a result of having transferred funds. So the more money migrates from the private banks to the to the these digital wallets, this crypto system, which by the way will be totally transparent. The ACB will not be able to inflate without you knowing, because it's that being a blockchain, everybody will know how much money there is in the system. Unlike now, when we have no idea what the ACB is doing, no idea what the private bankers are doing in terms of money creation. So suddenly we have a universal basic trust fund for everyone. That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? I I'm not opposed to it. Well, you know, you tell this to a Frankfurt banker, and the hitmen come. Immediately, they will get you in your sleep.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Right. As a disrespector of private property, um, yeah, I I appreciate it. But do you do you think that um the crypto space is a place to uh to experiment with something like this, to take to take what you're kind of describing. I think one of the things that, at least for me, what was kind of why I find it worth my time and interesting to engage in this space, even if there's a lot of things that I don't disagree with that I disagree with it, um, at the very least, this space is something is a place where you can take what is available and begin to experiment and show that something like this is possible.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

I agree entirely. I'm I'm a libertarian. I'm a weird Marxist libertarian. I would never ban anything like that. I would want to see that these experiments take place. Look, uh, because I'm I'm an old uh fart, as you can see. Um I remember it was 1991. I used to live in Australia. That was well before crypto. We didn't even have the internet at the time. We didn't call it the the internet, we used to call it Janet. Seriously. I am old enough to remember the internet being called Janet, joint academic network. Uh no, seriously. Um back then there was a recession in Australia, it was a global recession. Uh and in unemployment rose substantially, and there was a community in the Blue Mountains, a very beautiful area just outside of Sydney, where they'd created their own local currency. I mean, we've seen this in many parts of the world, but that worked beautifully, and it was done based on labor time. So you'd, you know, you would uh work uh at a grocery for you know eight hours, and you get the equivalent of eight hours of um credits. And then you could use these credits uh at the butchers to buy meat. And so because the people were in bacon, most of them were unemployed, there were stores that had the capacity to sell stuff, but they were there was no demand. There were people who could work, but there was no labor demand. So they resolved that by creating their own local currency. Now they didn't have blockchain then. But if they did, it would be brilliant. Right. So, you know, let a million flowers bloom. Crypto flowers bloom. Sure, yeah. I mean, I think but it won't be a replacement for fear. The monetary commons is.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Totally. I yeah, I think I I think this is interesting that you say that just because I think it's helpful to recontextualize history of it, of the left being also a political project that has engaged with monetary and economic experimentation, and that isn't just something that libertarians get to do, right-wing libertarians get to do with Bitcoin, but as it is, in fact, there is a long legacy on the left of these experimentations. Um so I I think maybe the just the last question I was curious to um ticket your thoughts on. Uh, because you mentioned the um with with the monetary commons and the exist the the digital euros coming, I think, in 2030 is is what they said.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

They will never come. Okay. It will come in a decrepit and um circumscribed manner because the bankers will they will actually harm it very substantially. They will just injure it and you know create um a ridiculous you know version of it so that nobody really wants it. Right. They will, you know, it will suffer a death by a thousand cuts. Because it's completely against their interests. You know, Christine Lagarde, the president of the ECB, was ready to launch it. But now they're going to put limits on it. You won't be able to have in the in your digital wallet more than what, a thousand, two thousand euros. Uh you you will only be made there will be a limit in the number of transactions per month. I mean, you know, these people have no com compunction what whatsoever. They know no shame.

SPEAKER_02 27:28

It's a very bad blockchain. Uh more or less.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

I'm I'm not even sure what technology they're using, but it it in the end, you know, it doesn't matter because it is being created to fail. Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:42

Okay. So I mean, I guess that is.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Unlike the Chinese currency.

SPEAKER_02 27:46

Right. I mean, do you have any I mean any last words to say about like the in the geopolitical context, like with the Chinese use blockchain very, very effectively.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Yeah. They have now three payment systems that are based on blockchain, three, and they are working beautifully. They, you know, when the Chinese do something, they do it well these days. So blockchain is something that they really must.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Cool. Awesome. Well, I think I'm at I think I'm at time. So okay. Thank you so much for coming and thank you.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Thank you. Thank you.