The Internet Of Money Wants To Be Free

Today, Coinbase unveiled a bold new white paper, proposing permissionless networks as the key to transforming payments, finance, and beyond. But to grasp why this is significant, we have to travel back in time.

When Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper on October 31, 2008, he likely could not have fully foreseen the profound impact his invention would have on the world. In history, this had occurred only twice before: in 138 BC, when Emperor Wu of Han dispatched diplomat Zhang Qian to establish trade with the Western regions, and in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee introduced his technical proposal for a hypertext system—the foundation of the modern web.

What do Qian, Berners-Lee, and Nakamoto have in common? Their actions were pivotal in creating entirely new types of networks. For Qian, it was the distributed trade network connecting China and Central Asia; for Berners-Lee, the distributed information network of the web; and for Satoshi, the decentralized financial network of Bitcoin.

Each of these networks gave rise to other interconnected systems, drastically advancing humanity’s ability to trade—first with physical goods and cultural exchange via the Silk Roads, then with digital content and information through the internet, and now with digital assets and value via crypto. With each iteration, the world’s GDP grew, driven by human ingenuity, relentless curiosity, and innovation.

The Silk Roads, the internet, and crypto networks share a defining characteristic: they are all permissionless. While key individuals, ventures, and governments influenced their evolution, anyone could participate and contribute—whether by establishing a new trade route, developing an internet service, or introducing a new cryptocurrency.

No single empire controlled the Silk Roads—instead, competition spurred the development of alternative sea and land routes through organic growth. Merchants, motivated by profit, negotiated independently, often navigating significant uncertainty and assuming substantial personal and financial risks. The outcome was a remarkable surge not only in commerce but also in the exchange of ideas and cultures across regions.

A similar evolution occurred with the internet, which began as a US-centric project but transformed over the decades into a truly global network. Initially conceived as an academic and military communication tool, the internet became a commercial success due to the foresight of a US administration that early on recognized the transformative potential of combining a permissionless network with global information exchange.

Standardization and measurement—such as the use of proto-currencies like gold or jade—were vital to the viability of the trade routes. Open protocols like TCP/IP for data transmission, DNS for navigation, and HTTP for webpage delivery provided the modular components for global information exchange. In the same way, permissionless networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum introduced native tokens—Bitcoin and Ether—that allowed decentralized digital trade to thrive, first within their ecosystems and now increasingly across their borders.

Throughout history, individual rulers and emperors have attempted to control, heavily tax, and even halt trade along the Silk Roads. In modern times, countries like China, Russia, and Iran actively firewall, surveil, and censor their citizens’ internet access. Similarly, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)—the bank for central banks— has introduced the “Finternet” initiative—a vision for a controlled, permissioned financial network. But just as trade along the Silk Roads persisted even during wars, and individuals bypass internet restrictions daily using open-source tools like Tor and VPNs, permissionless crypto networks are inevitable.

Over the next decade, every digital asset—whether financial or otherwise—will be issued, exchanged, and transformed in innovative ways through crypto rails. Like other general-purpose technologies (GPTs) such as the steam engine and the internet, crypto is embarking on a multi-decade journey to transform economic activity. Beginning with basic payments and financial services, these networks will expand to encompass digital platforms, marketplaces, and applications of AI.

While some believe that these open and permissionless networks can be constrained within outdated regulatory frameworks, such efforts are likely to be as ineffective as the curated versions of the internet once proposed by Microsoft, Apple, and AOL in its early days—ideas that have since faded into obscurity as they misjudged the direction of technological evolution.

The good news is that permissionless networks can be aligned with society’s values and principles and are fully compatible with efforts to combat financial crime and terrorism financing. Claims to the contrary are often disinformation spread by those who fear the technology will render their roles and influence obsolete. The economic freedom unlocked by crypto provides better tools for enabling entrepreneurial experimentation and making it safe and compliant without compromising privacy.

That same economic freedom can restore competition in sectors where market structure has remained unchanged for decades. It will also enable startups to break into previously inaccessible markets and create innovative products and services that are hard to envision today. Just as the decentralized growth of trade routes and internet connections transformed the past, permissionless crypto networks will lead us into a new era of digital experimentation and economic growth. But to understand why these networks are the future of digital exchange and trade, we must start with Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin Breakthrough

Satoshi’s invention was not just a breakthrough in cryptography and game theory but also in how markets are bootstrapped and operated. Bitcoin enabled the direct exchange of digital assets without the need for an intermediary. Before Bitcoin, defining and updating ownership of a digital asset—including money—required assigning control to a third party. This arrangement relied on trust that the intermediary would consistently and accurately authorize and record transactions, even in situations where their own interests might diverge.

Central banks, commercial banks, and traditional fintech wallets are all examples of trusted intermediaries in financial services. While these intermediaries generally serve their stakeholders well in countries with strong institutions, this is far from the case in many parts of the world. The financial freedom taken for granted in the United States is unimaginable in regions lacking independent central banks, robust rule of law, and a competitive financial sector. The same holds true even in countries with well-functioning financial systems for certain segments of the economy—such as crypto, creators, or political dissidents—that have been actively deplatformed by governments, banks, or card companies due to their activities.

Bitcoin restores economic freedom by creating a new form of store of value—often considered as “digital gold”—that anyone can exchange and custody directly, regardless of the trustworthiness of their country’s institutions. In countries with strong institutions, consumers and businesses often delegate the safekeeping and movement of Bitcoin to trusted, regulated wallets. However, even in such cases, the ability to self-custody Bitcoin acts as a check on the market power of these intermediaries.

While Bitcoin was the first application of permissionless crypto networks, it laid the foundation for many others to follow. The same principles of direct ownership and intermediary-free exchange of digital assets have now been applied to a wide range of problems, including decentralized computing, prediction markets, file storage, social networks, AI agents, and more.

These new networks are built on the same permissionless principles as Bitcoin: anyone can access them, build upon them, or adapt their core components. As entrepreneurs and developers uncover new primitives and modular building blocks, increasingly complex financial and non-financial applications are emerging on decentralized and open infrastructure. While the financial sector was the first to be reimagined—since financial assets are already digital—permissionless networks are increasingly bridging the gap between onchain and offchain economic activity. They are powering applications ranging from digital identity to the tokenization of real-world assets like real estate, commodities, and natural resources.

Today, many of the obstacles that hindered permissionless networks just a few years ago are being overcome: from scaling these systems to outperform the centralized counterparts they seek to replace, to resolving last-mile challenges linked to identity verification, to balancing transaction privacy with compliance requirements. As the technology has become more user-friendly and intuitive, adoption has accelerated rapidly in regions of the world—such as LATAM, Africa, and parts of Asia—that lag in financial services. From cross-border remittances to Bitcoin and USD-denominated stablecoins as alternative stores of value, crypto provides a new financial stack that startups and neobanks are increasingly building on.

While this new technological paradigm began in finance, it is now expanding beyond payments, lending, and other financial primitives into broader domains. The concept of digital asset ownership is expanding into the creator economy, the creative arts, digital platforms for messaging and social media, AI, and even communications infrastructure. With each iteration, developers are reimagining transactions and interactions—between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, mobile hotspot data providers and users, and more.

The key is that each of these marketplaces is being redesigned without a central intermediary. Unlike the platforms that dominate much of our personal and business lives today, permissionless networks are owned by their participants. From an economic perspective, this enables contributors to benefit from the network’s growth and share in its success. More importantly, it prevents any single platform architect from unilaterally changing the rules to their advantage, restricting access, or blocking others from participating.

Because these networks are permissionless, anyone can build and experiment on them, fostering robust experimentation and innovation. Unlike proprietary APIs, which often impose top-down restrictions on what can be developed, the standardized interfaces of permissionless networks are open, flexible, and modular. Much like the open protocols that power the internet, they are ushering in a new era of digital platform innovation—one unbound by existing business models and dominant players.

Ultimately, Satoshi’s most significant legacy was demonstrating that a new type of architecture was possible and that bottom-up experimentation could revive innovation, not just in financial services but across a broad spectrum of digital platforms. This new architecture offers clear advantages over the walled gardens of existing big tech and fintech players. It also outperforms top-down approaches, such as the BIS’s “Finternet,” in identifying and addressing new solutions and challenges.

Centralized approaches excel when the problem is well-defined and already understood—such as upgrading a domestic payment system to enable real-time payments. However, they are poorly equipped to address unstructured problems that require a diversity of approaches and ideas. This is where the same decentralized approach that shaped the trade routes, the internet, and now crypto networks is uniquely positioned to succeed.