Open Money should be like email for your wallet

Does moving money need to be so complicated?

Imagine if sending money worked as smoothly as sending an email. Not just between friends on the same app, but to anyone, anywhere — whether they use PayPal, Venmo, or a bank in another country.

This might sound like sci-fi, like the replicator from Star Trek, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s a technical problem that’s solvable today. That’s where Open Money comes in — a concept that takes the lessons of email — standardization, interoperability, and accessibility — and applies them to finance.

While we’ll focus on the money aspects right now, it’s also important to note that Open Money is actually a new way of handling valuable digital information, such as identity or non-monetary value. We’ll get into those aspects a little bit more later.

Right now, the way we move money is stuck in the past. Bank wires can take days. Remittances often come with double-digit fees. Payments between apps don’t talk to each other. It’s as if we were still using fax machines while carrying smartphones.

Open Money lays the groundwork for something different: building a shared infrastructure, much like email, so that money can move freely between different systems.

Open Money works as a set of open protocols — rules that let different systems exchange value. It’s a practical way to connect financial tools without forcing everyone to use the same provider or network. This design also has the benefits of giving users control and allowing products and services to be tailored more to individualized needs.

At its core, Open Money is about risk management — rebalancing where financial risks are held and who has control.

Today, we trust banks and centralized financial institutions to manage risk for us, from securing deposits to processing transactions. But this trust has limits, as seen in banking crises or the increasing centralization of global financial power. We are also starting to see the downstream effects of that centralization.

Open Money shifts risk and the rewards from these centralized players to distributed, open-source networks. Think of it as moving from a single point of failure to a system with no central choke points.

In a world of interconnected protocols, risk isn’t concentrated in the hands of a few banks or payment processors — it’s spread across the network, creating a more resilient system. It also means that the economies created to manage that risk can also be distributed across networks.

This approach isn’t about replacing banks or breaking financial systems. It’s about adding new layers of security and adaptability, especially in situations where current systems can’t compete efficiently, mainly in terms of speed and ease of use.

What makes now the right time? Several factors converge:

Digital reliance: More of our lives are online, and traditional systems haven’t kept pace. Financial tools need to reflect the speed and fluidity of a digital-first world.
Global interdependence: As businesses and families operate across borders, Open Money provides a system that avoids the inefficiencies of money constrained by time zones, banking hours, or geo-political borders.
Mature technology: Recently, crypto wallets, on-ramps and off-ramps, analytics, and explorers have all made it easier and more intutive to use open systems to conduct financial transactions.
Lessons from other industries: From email to open-source software, we’ve seen how decentralization and interoperability can transform outdated models into something stronger and more adaptable.

Open Money isn’t about tearing down banks or replacing currencies. It’s about making what already works better. Think of it as an upgrade to the plumbing of the financial world, hopefully with an eye toward making money systems easier and more accessible.

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