🪞Manifesto
A Manifesto: Money Reimagined
The Great Unbundling
For centuries, money has remained fundamentally unchanged - trapped within national borders, controlled by central authorities, and limited by aging infrastructure. Today, we stand at the precipice of a transformation in how humanity thinks about and uses money.
Money is humanity's most complex and widely-adopted technology. Yet for most people, money remains a black box - a system they use daily but don't truly understand. This isn't by accident. The current financial system obscures its inner workings behind layers of intermediaries, regulations, and aging infrastructure.
Perena is building the foundational infrastructure to enable this future - where money is borderless, efficient, and accessible to all. Just as the internet unbundled media and communications from their traditional gatekeepers, blockchain is unbundling money from the constraints of the past.
Why Now: A New Financial Primitive
The rise of stablecoins marks a pivotal moment in monetary history. For the first time, we have programmable money that combines the stability of traditional currency with the efficiency of digital infrastructure. Yet we're still in the dial-up era of this technology - the pipes are narrow, the connections unreliable, and the interfaces crude.
Today's stablecoin landscape mirrors the early banking system: fragmented, inefficient, and lacking standardization. Each issuer operates in isolation, creating artificial barriers to liquidity and adoption. The market has grown to hundreds of billions despite this friction - imagine what's possible with proper infrastructure.
We are witnessing an unprecedented shift in digital money:
Major financial institutions like PayPal, Robinhood and others are launching their own stablecoins
Traditional banks are exploring tokenization of deposits and assets
The stablecoin market has grown to hundreds of billions
Current infrastructure cannot efficiently handle the coming wave of adoption
The financial world is ready for change, but lacks the infrastructure to make it happen.
The Missing Layer
The problem isn't with stablecoins themselves, but with how they connect to each other and the broader financial system. We need infrastructure that can:
Unify fragmented liquidity across different stablecoins
Enable efficient price discovery and settlement
Provide risk-adjusted yield opportunities
Connect traditional and decentralized finance
Scale to handle institutional adoption
This is what Perena is building - not just another financial product, but a new primitive layer for digital money.
Beyond Stablecoins
While stablecoins are our starting point, our vision extends to the future of money itself. We believe that:
Money should be composable - Different types of money should be able to interact and combine in novel ways
Money should be efficient - Moving value should be as easy as moving information
Money should be transparent - Users should understand exactly what backs their assets
Money should be accessible - Financial services should be open to anyone, anywhere
As money becomes increasingly digital and programmable, entirely new financial primitives will emerge. Perena will evolve to support these innovations while maintaining our core focus on security, efficiency, and accessibility.
Why This Matters
The stakes couldn't be higher. Money is the foundation of human coordination - how we measure value, facilitate trade, and store wealth. Improving how money works means improving how society works.
The current system, built on decades-old technology and controlled by a small number of institutions, is showing its age. Settlement delays, artificial barriers, and systemic risks are not inherent properties of money - they're artifacts of outdated infrastructure.
Just as the internet needed TCP/IP before we could build the web, the future of finance needs robust, secure infrastructure before we can realize its potential.
Perena aims to be that foundational layer - the infrastructure that powers the next generation of money.
Visit perena.org to learn more or follow @Perena__ on X.
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