Rod Garratt, Department of Economics, University of California at Santa Barbara
Rod Garratt is a professor in the economics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. He has worked as a Senior Advisor at the Bank for International Settlements, a Research Advisor to the Bank of England and is a former Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has also held visiting scholar positions at the Bank of Canada and the International Monetary Fund. During his time at the FRBNY he co-led the Virtual Currency Working Group for the Federal Reserve System. From 2015-17 he was a member of the team that completed Project Jasper (phase 1 and 2), the first proof of concept for a wholesale interbank payment system that uses distributed ledger technology. In 2018 he testified before the Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, U.S. House of Representatives at a hearing on “The Future of Money: Digital Currency.” While at the BIS from 2023-25, he helped initiate and implement Project Agorá, a seven-country, public-private initiative to improve correspondent banking that drew on research he coauthored with colleagues in the Monetary and Economic Department. Garratt received his undergraduate degree from the University of Waterloo and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He has published in the top economics journals including Econometrica, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. He is an Associate Editor of the European Economic Review and Digital Finance.
Interviews and Comments
Washington Post, PayPal applies to form its own bank to expand small-business lending, December 16, 2025.
Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock ‘n’ Roll podcast, A Journey Through the Digital Era of Money, October 2025.
Deutsche Bank What’s Next A Form of Digital Gold April 8, 2025
UCSB Magazine The Economy of Running Fall/Winter 2024
The Paypod The Current State of Central Bank Currencies July 28, 2020
TSE Sustainable Finance Center, Protect Privacy With Electronic Cash, November 2019.
The UCSB Current The Tipping Point August 9, 2018.
Computerworld Is the U.S. headed to a cashless economy through blockchain? April 25, 2018.
The World Weekly Central governments and cryptocurrency: an unlikely pairing? January 11, 2018
CNBC Next stop in the cryptocurrency craze: A government-backed coin November 30, 2017
Financial Sense Fedcoin and central bank cryptocurrencies October 18, 2017
MIT Technology Review Governments are Testing Their Own Cryptocurrencies September 25, 2017
The Street Bitcoin: The World’s Most Expensive Nothingburger August 23, 2017
Coin desk Decentralizing Central Banks: How R3 Envisions the Future of Fiat April 5, 2017
American Banker Cheat Sheet: Radical visions of central bank-issned digital currencies March 14, 2017
Selected Paper Presentations and Panels
Fireside chat with Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas, Moderator, The Evolving Landscape of Bank Funding, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2025.
Perspectives on Cross Border Payments, Moderator, 2025 BISIH Innovation Summit.
Tokenization Platforms and the Future of Financial Infrastructure, panel discussion at 2025 New York Fed Innovation Conference, April 2025 (start at 5:52:00)
The Crypto Multiplier, presentation at the Economics of Payments XII conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Board, October 2023.
Digital Money Revolution: Central Bank Digital Currency vs. Stablecoins, panel with FRS Board of Governors member Chris Waller, Riksbank, November 2023.
DC3 Conference: From Crypto to CBDCs, January 2023 (start at 15:40)
Privacy and Central Bank Digital Currencies, Luohan Academy Webinar, 2022
On Interest-bearing Central Bank Digital Currency with Heterogeneous Banks, CB & DC Seminar, 2021.
Estimating Policy Functions in Payment Systems using Reinforcement Learning, Best Empirical Paper, 2020 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop.
Panel Discussion on The New Digitalisation of International Finance and the future of the International Monetary System, Dialogue of Continents 2020, The Age of Imagination, Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee.
Why Fixed Costs Matter for Proof-of-Work Based Cryptocurrencies, San Francisco Blockchain Week 2020.
TSE Panel Discussion on Digital Currencies, Toulouse 2019.
Panel Discussion on Private Digital Currencies or Central Bank Digital Currencies? Third Annual Fintech Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, November 2019.
Trust – 2019 Payments Canada SUMMIT
Tokenomics 2019, Paris: Entrepreneurial Incentives and the Role of Initial Coin Offerings
Testimony before the Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, U.S. House of Representatives, at a hearing entitled The Future of Money: Digital Currency.
Cryptocurrencies and Global Monetary Policy – MIT Technology Review: Presentation, Roundtable.
Blockchain Unbound, Puerto Rico, March 2018: Cash, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Payments
GRIT Talk: From Bitcoin to Central Bank Digital Currencies
Payments Canada Summit: Project Jasper Phase II Distributed Ledger for Central Banking
ESI Lecture Series, Chapman University: Let Me, or Let George? Motives of Competing Altruists
rodgarratt.com 