In his final remarks, Professor Filippo Zatti closed the third BABEL International Conference in the same spirit in which it had been conducted: provocatively. If the panellists' closing words had been "inclusive, interconnected, collaborative and open", his own candidate for the word underlying them all was infrastructure. Recalling Andy Haldane's quip that CBDCs are "a solution in search of a problem", he reversed it through Charles Goodhart's 1975 question — what makes a currency serve as money? — and Goodhart's observation that societies have always needed a standard means of payment embodying enough information to be generally acceptable without detailed checking.

From there, a deliberately uncomfortable question for a room of central bankers: could a monetary system be privatised? Drawing on his chapter in the newly published volume "Decentralised Autonomous Organisations in the Legal Landscape" (edited by Florence Guillaume and Sven Riva), he pointed to the network state and to the American CryptoFed DAO — whose white paper reads like a strange constitution, complete with economic axioms — not to answer the question, but to insist it be asked. The conference closed with one last Caravaggio: the Medusa of the Uffizi, and a wish of good luck to everyone.