Section five recap: How people are actually using Open Money

If earlier sections traced the philosophical and infrastructural scaffolding of Open Money, Section 5 grounded the conversation: how are people actually using these systems today?

This section surveyed real-world examples — some headline-grabbing, others quietly revolutionary — that show Open Money isn’t just an abstract ideal or a promise deferred. It’s already reshaping how value moves, how trust is built, and how financial sovereignty is accessed. The technologies might feel emergent, but their impact is already measurable.

We explored several mini case studies where Open Money is either displacing or extending the reach of traditional financial infrastructure:

• Borderless value transfer: Stablecoins now rival Western Union and SWIFT, facilitating global remittances with lower fees and fewer intermediaries. Whether it’s workers sending wages across continents or DAOs coordinating treasury payouts globally, the frictionless movement of money is no longer theoretical.
• From Bitcoin to BTC ETFs: We compared the decentralized nature of Bitcoin itself to the tightly regulated, custodial ETFs built on top of it. This contrast illustrates a key tension in Open Money: the push-and-pull between permissionless innovation and institutional adoption. Both are expanding access, but with radically different implications for user agency.
• Memecoins vs. Meta ads: One is community-coordinated attention-as-asset, the other a top-down monetization engine. The memecoin phenomenon isn’t just speculative froth — it’s a glimpse into how narrative and culture are being financialized in real time, challenging Web2’s grip on monetized attention.
• Gold onchain: The tokenization of physical assets like gold is more than a gimmick — it’s infrastructure. Projects that bring traditionally illiquid stores of value into composable, programmable financial ecosystems are expanding what can be collateralized, traded, and owned across borders.
• Reputation without a middleman: We touched on the nascent but powerful idea of onchain reputation — a transparent, user-controlled alternative to credit scores and KYC processes. These new forms of identity and trust don’t rely on gatekeepers. They’re built from participation, proof, and permanence.
• Web3 authentication vs. Web2 credentials: Wallet-based login flows are already replacing email/password and OAuth for millions of users. It’s a small UX tweak with big implications: users keep control of their data and identity, rather than handing it over to platforms.

Each of these examples underscores a central idea: Open Money is not waiting for permission. It is being used, adapted, and iterated on in real-time. While critics argue that these tools are too immature for serious use, the evidence tells a different story. Adoption may be uneven, but it is accelerating — especially in places where the incumbent systems have failed to deliver.

The momentum is already here. And perhaps most importantly, these are not marginal use cases — they’re early signals of a system shift. Open Money is not a monolith, but a modular toolkit: programmable, interoperable, and increasingly indispensable.

As this section made clear, we are not speculating on a distant future. We are documenting an unevenly distributed present — one in which Open Money is not just competing with legacy systems, but reimagining what finance, ownership, and coordination can look like in a digital-first world.

Learn more about the Open Money Project.