Making money programmable

When money can operate like software, new economic activities become possible

Sometimes people get tangled up when thinking about Open Money because it sounds so fanciful. We covered this earlier — the idea that people dismiss Open Money because it sounds like magic.

The major critique is that internet-based money like Open Money isn’t based on anything, that it’s all just made up and therefore a scam.

But another, maybe more hopeful, way to look at emerging Open Money systems is that they are software-based money. Another way to say this is that Open Money is programmable money.

In the history of humanity, we’ve never had a kind of money that is fluid enough or responsive enough to be programmable.

Gold was inert.

Paper cash required centralized institutions to move.

Even electronic bank transfers were just digital versions of an old system. Now, for the first time, money is infused with logic, capable of executing decisions, responding to conditions, and adapting to the needs of its users.

One of the most accessible ways of programming money is through smart contracts. The basic idea behind smart contracts is that they make money more responsive. Smart contracts, which are code-based rules, allow people to be creative with money.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is built on smart contract functionality, unlocking financial tools that operate without middlemen.

Take automated market makers (AMMs), for instance — protocols like Uniswap or Curve use smart contracts to create liquidity pools that allow people to trade assets without requiring a bank or broker.

Or consider yield farming, where smart contracts allocate capital across lending platforms to maximize returns, something that traditional finance could never execute with such precision and speed.

Even lending itself has been reimagined through platforms like Aave and Compound, where loans are granted not by human bankers but by self-executing contracts that assess collateral and enforce repayment terms automatically.

In the future, we can start to imagine all kinds of functionality made possible by smart contracts. AI agents governed by smart contracts could manage our portfolios, executing trades based on predefined risk profiles.

Budgets and cash flow could be dynamically managed by automated protocols that pay bills, allocate savings, and adjust spending limits based on real-time financial conditions.

A freelancer might receive instant, conditional payments upon completing a milestone, eliminating the friction of invoicing and waiting for clearance.

This is money as code. Liquid, logical, and liberated from the constraints of legacy systems.

Open Money is not magic — it is simply the first iteration of value systems that can be programmed like software. If money is data and if money works best when it can remain stable while moving quickly, then making money programmable just becomes the next logical progression.

Back in the day people use to stamp the images of rulers on money to signify some kind of legitimacy, or signal some kind of trust. Sometime soon, the legitimacy of money will come from the ability to look at its code, and to vet its contract addresses because money becoming code just makes sense.

Recent Open Money project posts