# Manifesto > Decentralized finance was built on the idea that money should not depend on trusted intermediaries. Canonical URL: https://docs.polaris.finance/overview/manifesto Markdown URL: https://docs.polaris.finance/overview/manifesto.md Section: Overview Documentation index: https://docs.polaris.finance/llms.txt Full documentation bundle: https://docs.polaris.finance/llms-full.txt --- Decentralized finance was built on the idea that money should not depend on trusted intermediaries. A permissionless financial layer open to everybody, where participation depends on transparent rules rather than centralized institutions. Over the years, stablecoins have become the foundation of this onchain economy, enabling everything from trading and lending to payments and settlement. However, their biggest tradeoff is that the majority of stablecoins rely on centralized issuers that control the underlying reserves, retain the yield those reserves generate, and ultimately keep ownership over the monetary infrastructure, including the ability to freeze assets. At the same time, several other stables evolved beyond simple digital dollars into yield-bearing financial products whose returns depend on external counterparties and increasingly complex financial strategies, becoming more of a tokenization derivative strategy than real forms of money exchangeable 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 and make room for greater transparency, 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?