Berkeley's Financial Innovation and Political Economy (FIPE), located on the University of California, Berkeley campus in the San Francisco Bay Area near Silicon Valley, started out in response to Facebook's announcement in 2019 of its digital currency, Libra, and to discussions surrounding the idea of a central bank digital currency. We quickly realized the issues were much larger. In particular, we think Berkeley has a comparative advantage in bringing together monetary economists, computer scientists, cryptologists and technologists; it's this kind of cross-disciplinary perspective, where the scientists tell us why we're wrong, and the economists tell them why they're wrong, that's been missing.