Eswar Prasad
Eswar Prasad is a Cornell University economist and senior fellow at the brookings-institution. He is a former head of the IMF’s China Division and a prominent commentator on global finance, digital money, and cryptocurrency.
In 2021, he published “Five Myths About Cryptocurrency” (originally in the Washington Post, republished by Brookings) — see prasad-2021-five-myths-cryptocurrency — arguing that while bitcoin and other coins largely fail as practical money and carry enormous speculative risk, the underlying blockchain technology is genuinely transformative via stablecoins, CBDCs, and smart contracts.
He is also the author of The Future of Money (Harvard University Press, referenced in the article).