Manifesto

Decentralized finance was built on the idea that money should not depend on trusted intermediaries. A permissionless financial layer open to everybody, built on transparent and verifiable rules.

Over the years, stablecoins have become the foundation of the onchain economy, allowing value to move across decentralized markets.

However, their biggest tradeoff is that the majority of stablecoins rely on centralized issuers. Those issuers remain in control of the underlying monetary infrastructure, capturing the yield generated by the reserves and often retaining ownership over those assets, together with the ability to freeze them.

At the same time, several other stablecoins evolved beyond simple digital dollars into yield-bearing financial products whose returns depend on external counterparties and increasingly complex financial strategies. In doing so, they became closer to tokenized investment strategies than forms of money designed to function as currencies.

Both these approaches helped DeFi grow and showed strong product-market fit. At the same time, they gradually introduced new dependencies into an ecosystem originally built to remove them, leaving a fundamental paradox.

Blockchains gave us decentralized financial infrastructure that anyone can access and verify, yet the different forms of currencies flowing through that infrastructure mostly depend on centralized rails or mechanisms whose risks are often difficult to assess.

This makes it clear that we have not yet managed to answer one of the fundamental questions in crypto: what should permissionless money look like at global scale?