Crypto’s Free-Market UBI Revolution: Inside GoodDollar’s Global Impact

What we talked about.

In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with Anna Stone, part of the team behind GoodDollar, the universal basic income project founded by eToro CEO Yoni Assia. Stone traces her path from growing up in New York City, exposed to inequality on the subway, through studying economics and public policy, working at the Clinton Foundation, and earning a master's at Tufts' Fletcher School focused on global political economy. She later worked in Tel Aviv's tech scene before joining the Bancor Protocol and eventually GoodDollar. The conversation explores what makes a business a social business, using Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank as a touchstone, and how billions of people worldwide remain underbanked, even within wealthy cities like New York. Stone and Ray discuss why a free market based approach to universal basic income, built on crypto and blockchain rather than currency debasement, might offer a real solution to income inequality accelerated by automation and AI.

Anna Stone joins Sunny Ray to explain how GoodDollar is building a free market case for crypto powered universal basic income.

The questions, and the answers.

What's your story, where does it begin?

I grew up in New York City riding the subway and seeing inequality firsthand, which drove my interest in public policy and economics. I worked at the Clinton Foundation in economic development, then got my master's at Tufts' Fletcher School focused on global political economy around the time social impact investing was emerging. I moved to Tel Aviv for tech, worked in enterprise tech and AI, then discovered crypto in 2017 and eventually joined Bancor Protocol before coming to GoodDollar.

What is a social business, and how do you quantify impact?

There are roughly two branches. One is ESG businesses, large public companies rated on environmental, social, and governance factors. The other is companies like Grameen Bank that pursue a double bottom line, making money while creating real social benefit. It's not charity or donation based, it's a business model innovated to serve people the conventional financial system overlooks, like lending without traditional collateral.

You mentioned Muhammad Yunus, can you explain what he did with Grameen Bank?

Yunus innovated lending for people with no traditional assets by leveraging their social networks instead of collateral. One person receives a loan but the whole community is collectively on the hook, which created strong incentive to repay. He specifically focused on lending to women, and the bank ended up with something like a 99 percent repayment rate decades later.

How big is the problem of people being underbanked globally?

The number of underbanked people worldwide is upwards of 5.5 billion. People assume this is only a developing world issue, but even in New York City something like 30 percent of residents in the South Bronx don't have a bank account. There's a lot of latent human and economic potential in these populations, plus informal money flows our conventional financial system never captures.

When did you first learn about Bitcoin, and how did that lead you to GoodDollar?

I first learned about Bitcoin in late 2017. I fell in love with the narrative of decentralization, one human one wallet, and financial inclusion, though I later learned inclusion isn't automatic just because you use blockchain. I joined Bancor Protocol, which ran community currency work in Kenya, and realized I wanted to work purely in the impact space, which led me to Yoni and the GoodDollar team.

Did you grow up around tech, or was your background more creative?

I grew up in a really creative community, my mom was a chef and my dad was an artist, so tech and business weren't part of my worldview until my twenties. My grandfather instilled philanthropy as central to how we lived. Watching my dad's resilience as an artist, willing to put work out into the world despite criticism, shaped how I approach challenging problems today.

How did you connect with Yoni Assia and the eToro world before GoodDollar?

I was connected through mutual friends, one directly through Yoni who I've known a long time, and another through a mutual friend named Leor. Yoni is the founder and CEO of eToro, the world's largest social trading platform with over 20 million users, and he's been thinking about universal basic income since around 2008.