The promise and challenge of borderless Open Money

Explore how Open Money enables borderless money — and why fiat ramps still limit its full potential as truly global financial system.

One of the earliest promises of crypto was borderless money. From the moment Bitcoin emerged, the idea of a truly internet-native form of value captured the imagination of developers, idealists, and entrepreneurs alike. The thesis was simple: the internet doesn’t stop at borders, so why should money?

The world’s monetary systems were built around sovereign nation-states. But the internet is sovereign to no one, and yet connects everyone. This mismatch —between digital networks that are global by design and financial systems that are geographically siloed — created a natural design space for something new. Crypto stepped into that space with an answer: a way to send and receive value anywhere in the world, as easily as sending an email.

Some of the first crypto companies were built specifically to challenge the inefficiencies of cross-border money movement. At the time (and still in some regards) wiring money internationally could take days, involve multiple intermediaries, and rack up significant fees. Crypto promised to flatten all of that —no banks, no wait times, no middlemen.

The boldest predictions saw crypto replacing legacy money transmitters like Western Union and MoneyGram. And for good reason: here was a tool that allowed anyone, anywhere, to send value to anyone else in the world, nearly instantly and at a fraction of the cost.

Eventually, even those old institutions began to experiment with crypto partnerships. But while crypto delivers real efficiencies in speed, cost, and portability, it hasn’t yet delivered on the full promise of being truly borderless.

That’s because the bottleneck isn’t in the sending — it’s in the bridging.

Today, the biggest friction point in using crypto as borderless money is the interface between crypto and fiat. These on-ramps (getting money into crypto) and off-ramps (getting it back out again) are fragmented, expensive, and often subject to local regulations and banking relationships. In practice, this means that even though a crypto transaction can zip around the world in seconds, the next steps — converting in and out of local currencies — can still take days, cost money, and require trust in centralized providers.

So the real test for borderless money isn’t whether crypto can be sent globally (it can), but whether it can be used globally — to pay for goods, services, bills, and basic needs, without having to convert back to fiat at all.

Until that happens, there’s a ceiling on how useful crypto can be as truly borderless money.

To break through that ceiling, one of two things must change: either it becomes dramatically easier to move between fiat and crypto (fast, cheap, and compliant), or it becomes viable to operate entirely in crypto — earning, spending, saving, and investing without needing to exit the system.

Or to put it another way, borderless money isn’t just a technical problem — it’s a question of access, design, and trust. And solving it doesn’t just unlock a use case. It opens up an entirely new way to relate to money.

This post is part of the Open Money project, an ongoing series that forms the basis of a longer work. Subscribe to get a weekly update as it unfolds.