Bitcoin as infrastructure | Open Money Grid

Unpacking the concept of an Open Money Grid and the idea of revolutionizing global finance by using Bitcoin as secure and seamless infrastructure.

This week, I came across a post by David Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Lightspark. Marcus previously led efforts at Libra, Facebook’s ambitious attempt to create a stablecoin pegged to a basket of global currencies.

Launched in 2019, Libra was later rebranded as Diem before ultimately being sold off in early 2022. One of the primary reasons for its failure — or at least its inability to gain meaningful traction — was regulatory resistance.

At the time, policymakers were deeply concerned that Libra would grant Facebook the power to issue its own form of money. Compounding these concerns was the public perception of Facebook, with many people wary of the company's influence and surveillance practices.

Marcus recently published a retrospective on Libra, within the context of the current political landscape — which, to put it mildly, has both embraced the crypto industry and aligned with the agendas of big tech firms.

“Now, seven years after Libra was initially designed, payments have both changed a lot in some ways, and not at all in many others. It’s a tale of two cities. On the one hand, domestic payment networks now settle transactions in real-time at a very low cost or for free; on the other hand, interoperability between these networks remains shockingly antiquated and stuck in the past. Trillions of dollars move daily between countries and currencies, either taking 3-5 days to settle at high cost through the correspondent banking system or relying on large banks leveraging their own global liquidity to move value on behalf of their clients. It’s a bit like being able to use WhatsApp or iMessage only in your country, but if you want to message someone in a neighboring country, you must fax them.”
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Given the regulatory shift and changed political climate, could a project like Libra succeed today? According to Marcus, they underlying problems Libra was designed to solve still exist.

“A revived Libra isn’t the solution, though. Most people and businesses worldwide want to use their country’s currency, in which all their goods and services are denominated, and their governments want that very badly. A massive, fully centralized, privately operated stablecoin substituting itself for a sovereign currency as the main unit of account in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, India, or any major nation would instantly—and easily—be shut down, at least regionally. This design is both undesirable and too fragile.”
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Rather than another highly centralized project like Libra, Marcus is now advocating for something he calls the Open Money Grid — a system designed to make sending and receiving money as frictionless as sending a text message. The banking system’s underlying infrastructure, he argues, hasn’t seen a major update in over 50 years, which is why it still takes multiple business days to transfer money and why transactions stall on weekends and holidays.

His vision? To move money as seamlessly as we move information —instantaneously and at a low cost, which leads back to Bitcoin as infrastructure.

“The world needs an Open Money Grid that enables money to move freely on the internet in the same way any other content type moves. We happen to believe that Bitcoin is the only thing that is neutral enough, decentralized enough, and unassailable enough to be that Open Money Grid.”
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Marcus is now building Bitcoin-based Open Money Grid systems at Lightspark. We’ve previously covered their work on Universal Money Addresses.

The hidden path to mass adoption

The key takeaway here is that crypto — and Open Money as a broader concept —becomes most powerful when it becomes invisible.

Think of Open Money like electricity. Right now, we’re still talking about wiring diagrams and the theory behind electricity itself. But what most people actually care about is whether their lights turn on when they flip a switch.

In other words, the fastest path to mass adoption isn’t necessarily regulatory clarity, stadium naming rights, or Super Bowl ads.

Instead, it might be as simple as abstracting away all the complexity — hiding the wiring that powers decentralized protocols and financial systems. The best user experience will win. And for most users, the underlying infrastructure doesn’t matter — they just want minimal friction, seamless access, 24/7 availability, and the lowest possible cost.

That's why the concept of thinking about an Open Money Grid is useful and aligned with the whole point of why I called this newsletter Open Money in the first place.

Recent Open Money Project posts

There’s an irony in the fact that this issue of the newsletter is largely about how Open Money will work best once it becomes invisible — while most of our recent Open Money Project posts have been focused on exactly how the wiring works.

We’ve been covering the mechanics of exchanges, wallets, addresses, smart contracts, explorers, and how they all interconnect to make Open Money possible.

Who knows? Maybe this phase will seem laughably outdated in hindsight, once using Bitcoin as a financial rail feels as intuitive as sending an email.

Meanwhile, work on the Open Money Project continues. This week, we’ll dive into real-world use cases. As always, your feedback is appreciated.