Carlos Tapang

There are at least tens of thousands of tokens claiming to be money. So far not one token is being used as money. Bitcoin is not being used as money, and neither is Ethereum, nor any other volatile token. A token has to have decent velocity to be called money. But first, the issuer has to build the network effect of trust. Bitcoin has earned the trust, but as it gains more trust, it goes up in value. Had Bitcoin been designed to match demand with more quantity, then it would not have gotten off the ground. Bitcoin's network effect was brought about by its limited quantity, but it is this same design (that gained it so much network effect) that prevents it from gaining velocity of use. Stablecoins easily gain trust, because these are merely substitutes for government-issued money like USD that already has the largest network effects. Can stablecoins compete with the same fiat money that it substitutes for? Right now it looks like USD substiture tokens (stablecoins) can't compete with USD itself, because of the par value design. But what if USD inflates and we come up with another kind of stablecoin that cannot inflate with USD? This turns out to be possible, and I am building one such stablecoin. I call it IRMA - Inflation Resistant Medium of Account. IRMA will be reserved-backed by the top six stablecoins in Solana. IRMA will just be an open-source program, but for now I am claiming a patent on the concept. I see a future in which private-issued money will be competing with government-issued money. Is this bad? Definitely not. Hayek has long envisioned such a possibility, but at the time he wrote "Denationalisation of Money" the possibilities of blockchain did not exist. There will not be one, but several large private-issue money competing with each other and also with government-issue money. The most stable ones will win, and it will benefit the whole world, maybe the whole universe. Stability of money is a public good that can be provided by private-issue competition.

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Understanding Money The question "What is Money?" can be answered on several levels. When we were kids, the sun was what we experienced: daylight, intense heat, so bright we can't look at it. As we grew, we gained more knowledge of what the sun really is, until we realize it's just another star. For some people each knowledge gained about anything is a source of joy. Let me give you a little joy. I was glad to learn this about money also, so I think you will be glad too. Money is a signaling mechanism. What kind of signal does money provide? Almost everything has a price and that price is measured in money. In any free society where people are free to trade with not many constraints, the price of something reflects its scarcity against demand. In other words, if you are hungry, you go buy something to eat. We engage in trade on a daily basis. So, here's what happens if rice supply in a city is reduced, say because of delivery issues: its price goes up. Price going up simply means there is demand, but less supply. An entrepreneur sees this and finds a way to supply more rice to the city. Price goes down some. Soon, other entrepreneurs, seeing how profitable selling rice can be, the way the first entrepreneur does it, sell more rice in the city. Price goes down more than necessary. Competition among rice suppliers becomes very intense. There are winners and losers. The losers stop selling rice. The price of rice goes back to normal: just enough to make a little profit. And that's how money is a signal that provides us with what we need, at the most reasonable price. No central planning, just money and the price signal doing its magic. This sounds so simple, but like concluding that the sun is just another star, this simple knowledge is not available to everybody. Sometimes people believe in something else. Some people even attribute god-like properties to the sun. In several countries today, money is not allowed to deliver its signal. The economy in each of these countries is bound to make life difficult for everybody, unless capitalistic or free market reforms are allowed. Socialism is just another religion. No, it is a cult.

If you don't know where the yield comes from, you are the yield. During the crypto craze of 2021, the industry tried to defy basic economics. Protocols promised massive 20% APYs by simply printing new tokens out of thin air to pay their users. But you cannot create value from nothing. When you try to manufacture wealth without underlying economic activity, the math always catches up. Let's break down the mechanics of financial returns: Fake Yield (Dilution): A protocol prints new tokens to pay you a reward. This instantly dilutes the circulating supply, mathematically guaranteeing an eventual collapse in price. Real Yield (Utility): A borrower pays actual, over-collateralized interest for the temporary use of your capital. Honest Architecture (Solvency): A system captures this real yield transparently, without creating fake secondary tokens to manipulate the numbers. Real yield only comes from real economic activity. This is the exact foundation of IRMA. It does not rely on unsustainable token-printing mechanics to manufacture a fake return. Instead, IRMA is engineered to honestly capture the underlying yield of the top Solana stablecoins in its reserve basket. Stop chasing magic money and start demanding mathematical solvency. Are your assets generating real economic yield, or are you just being printed into dilution?

Price is what the central bank dictates; value is the actual energy you expend. If you look at the Truflation index today, you will see a Year-over-Year US inflation rate hovering around 1.2%. The official BLS reports are celebrating ~2.4%. The media is telling you inflation is "tame." But disinflation is not deflation, and this creates a dangerous economic hallucination. Here is how the math actually plays out against your labor: The Illusion: Inflation drops to 1.2%. You get a slight salary bump. You are told the economy has stabilized and you are getting ahead. The Reality: Look at Truflation's Aggregated Index. Over the last few years, we have experienced a cumulative 28% inflation hit. Prices didn't go back down; they just stopped rising as violently. The Deficit: That 28% loss of purchasing power didn't vanish. The permanent extraction of your wealth is now baked into the baseline. You are working the exact same hours, but the system permanently captured over a quarter of your life's energy. Current stablecoins are engineered to track price. Because they are rigidly pegged to $1, they permanently lock in that historic 28% loss. The dollar leaked, and your stablecoin leaked right along with it. IRMA is engineered to track value. It decouples from the fiat leak to preserve the true purchasing power of your life's work, refusing to accept compounding decay as an acceptable baseline. Stop storing your energy in a system designed to measure price instead of value. Are you measuring your wealth by the numbers on a screen, or by the energy it can actually buy?

You think your house went up in value. Part of it did. But the rest of that gain? The ruler you used to measure it just shrank. In the physical world, a unit of measurement must be an absolute constant. A meter is always a meter. If you constructed a building with a ruler that shrank 3% every year, the math would fail. Yet, we accept this structural flaw in our finances. When your house goes from $300k to $400k over a decade, you feel richer. But to understand what actually happened, we have to separate the mechanics of that price increase into two distinct forces: Real Demand (True Value): The city expanded. The land became scarcer. The location became more desirable. This is a genuine increase in economic energy and real wealth. The Shrinking Ruler (Fiat Inflation): The house didn't magically grow more bricks. The physical asset is identical. The US Dollar just leaked purchasing power, requiring more fiat units to represent the exact same structure. Because our primary Unit of Account is constantly depreciating, these two forces are tangled together. Your financial measurements become an illusion. You might assume you made a massive profit on your property, when in reality, a large portion of that gain is just you treading water against economic entropy. We need a constant ruler to accurately measure our progress. This is why I am building IRMA on Solana. IRMA isn’t just another stablecoin tethered to a sinking fiat currency. It is a mathematically sound Unit of Account. When USD inflation crosses 2%, IRMA’s mint price dynamically adjusts upward to preserve its purchasing power. Stop measuring your life's work with a defective ruler. Are you actually gaining wealth, or are you just measuring the exact same asset with a shrinking metric?

Free Money No, this is not about money that is given away. The effect of giving away money is to lower its per unit value. We don’t want that. This is about your freedom to use whatever medium of exchange you like. There will be many moneys. You will have a choice and that’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about, as envisioned by F.A. Hayek. How would it be like to have several moneys to choose from? It won’t be much different from having many banks. Convenience What if I hold only USDT in my wallet, but the grocery only accepts USDC? Your wallet will swap my USDT for USDC, and myself and the grocery won’t have to worry about it. Guarantees (in follow-up post after the two phases) What happens when an issuer collapses or goes bankrupt? It won’t be like a corporation going belly up in which its shares of stock become worthless. When a fiat stablecoin issuer goes bankrupt, its users continue to have network value. Other issuers will want to serve these users and would offer a good deal for each unit of the tokens issued by the bankrupt issuer. Towards a standard per unit value As long as stablecoins derive their value from USD, the USD is the standard unit value. If / when USD hyperinflates and the stablecoins become private issue fiat money, all of the issuers will tend to follow a standard per unit value. This is because the competition is about stability and the easiest way for users to detect instability is the deviation of any one fiat stablecoin from the standard unit of value. There will be other measures of stability, like total amount in circulation, or purchasing power. Each fiat stablecoin will have its own measure of CPI. The most visible and easily discernable measure is simply the per-unit value of each fiat stablecoin compared to the rest. This then tends to align all fiat stablecoins to a single, standard per-unit value. If an apple costs 1.00 USDT, it would also cost 1.00 in terms of USDC.

Money institutions and why sudden and chaotic revolution fades into quiet and slow evolution. I frequently debate people who conflate the institutions of money with what money actually is. It is like confusing the paraphernalia of power—the crown and the throne—for power itself. Money is a ledger for transferring value from one economic entity to another. Institutions naturally form that make it easy and simple for everybody to deal with specific technology by which that ledger is implemented. Look at history. When gold overcame all other forms of money, institutions naturally formed around its physical constraints. We built institutions to perfect the minting, ensure the safe physical handling, document the possession, and manage the accounting. This process naturally started the original banks. When the world transitioned from gold to paper money, a completely different set of institutions emerged to handle the new "best practices" of paper fiat. The modern banking system we know today was naturally formed by this transition. The institution is just a byproduct of the medium. But there is a fundamental law of human nature: every revolution is opposed by old institutions. The legacy systems will always fight the new technology because their survival depends on keeping the old institutions relevant. Because of this resistance, the process of change takes a long time. The current banks are not going to vanish overnight. In fact, the institutions that formed to assay and store gold are still in existence and going strong today. But make no mistake about the trajectory of the system. Cryptography has introduced a fundamentally superior technology for transferring and storing value. The revolution in the math has already happened, and new institutions are currently being built to support it. Crypto is here, and the infrastructure it creates will only grow.

The only way to stop inflation isn't a policy change. It's a structural upgrade. In 1976, F.A. Hayek delivered an address titled "Choice in Currency: A Way to Stop Inflation." I was recently revisiting this through Chapter 7 of Hayek for the 21st Century (edited by Thomas DiLorenzo), which provides a brilliant summary of his vision for the future of money. Hayek understood the physics of the financial system. He realized that as long as a government holds a monopoly on money issuance, inflation is a mathematical certainty. The issuer has zero incentive to protect your purchasing power because you have nowhere else to store your economic energy. His solution was brutally pragmatic: Choice. Hayek envisioned a bold future where the monopoly is broken. He proposed a free market where private entities issue their own currencies and fiercely compete for the public's trust. The mechanics of this are pure engineering. If a currency starts to inflate and leak value, the market will instantly abandon it for a competitor's currency that holds its purchasing power. The threat of instant capital flight forces the issuer to maintain absolute discipline. For decades, this was just an academic theory. The friction of moving between physical fiat currencies was simply too high. Today, the blockchain has reduced that friction to zero. We are watching Hayek’s future execute in real-time. The rise of stablecoins and decentralized assets is the first true manifestation of "Choice in Currency." We finally have the technological infrastructure to opt out of a depreciating monopoly. The competition for stable, inflation-resistant money isn't a future theory anymore. It has already begun.

A monopoly on money issuance isn't just a political issue. It’s a structural flaw in the incentive system. We generally accept that the government should have the exclusive right to create money. But when you look at the mechanics of this system, you realize it is mathematically engineered to overspend. Why? Because of a simple law of behavior: Money owned by nobody cannot be managed well. When you combine a monopoly on money issuance with a democracy, you create a dangerous feedback loop. In a democratic system, the people who are elected can only maintain their power by getting the most votes. And how do you reliably get the most votes? You grant money to people. You expand entitlements. You fund feel-good politics. The incentive structure is completely one-sided. There is an infinite political reward for spending, and a massive political penalty for austerity. Therefore, the system is structurally prone to overspending. When the entity that needs your votes is the exact same entity that controls the printer, the outcome isn't a mystery. It is a mathematical certainty. The currency will be debased to pay for the promises. This is why a government monopoly on money is inherently unstable. You cannot combine a political need for infinite promises with a centralized ledger and expect the purchasing power to survive. We need systems where the issuance of money is decoupled from the need to win the next election.

I thought The U.S. Constitution needed to be amended for F.A. Hayek’s idea to be constitutional - I was wrong I am not a constitutional expert, but history according to George Selgin in fact shows that banks used to issue their own money in the form of “bank notes”. There was not one currency, but several. Article I, Section 8 of The Constitution authorizes congress to coin money (among other powers), but it does not say that nobody else can “coin money”. What needs to happen is not a constitutional amendment, but rather a repeal of the laws that granted the Fed exclusive power to issue money. The constitution clearly does not intend for the federal government to monopolize the issuance of money. F.A. Hayek was not advocating for the abolishment of the Fed. There is no problem with the government issuing money; the problem is the exclusivity of money issuance. Why was competition among bank moneys quashed? There were problems with bank notes endemic to the U.S. George Selgin, in his book “Money: Free and Unfree”, describes how laws meant to fix the inelasticity of bank note issuance with respect to demand exacerbated the problem instead. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which gave all the powers to issue money to the Fed, was supposed to fix the problem once and for all. Without competition, we can say that things did not improve at all. Now it can be argued that it became worse. Blockchain has allowed anybody to issue money, so in practice the Fed no longer has exclusivity in the issuance of money. That is, if we consider any blockchain token to be money. As it turns out, there’s only one kind of token that is used like money and this is the stablecoin. We should not forget that the issuer of the first stablecoin (Tether for USDT) did not peg it to USD for compliance. USD was chosen only because most crypto exchanges were already accepting USD from buyers of crypto. Stablecoins are just USD substitutes, so these are not what F.A. Hayek had in mind. However, if / when USD inflation goes intolerably high, I predict that most stablecoins will dissociate from USD. Stablecoins then become “fiat”, private-issue moneys - borderless and truly in competition with each other and with USD itself.

The blockchain has allowed us to do tens of thousands of experiments in money. Here are the results. I am currently organizing the gist of these lessons into a book. It will serve as a logical organization of these outcomes, a compendium of my posts and thoughts on the architecture of blockchain finance. Over the last decade, the blockchain has allowed us to run tens of thousands of live experiments in money. We tested countless models in real-time against the physics of the open market. The results of those experiments are now clear: we know that the best kind of token or coin is a stablecoin. This shouldn't actually be a surprise. It is the exact same conclusion that TradFi (Traditional Finance) has come to after thousands of years of its own experimentation. The market inevitably gravitates toward stability and a reliable medium of account. So, with that established, what does the future hold? F.A. Hayek has already shown us a bold future. Rather than a monopoly on money issuance for each jurisdiction in which no competition is allowed, F.A. Hayek has proposed a free market for money. Allow an unlimited number of borderless money to compete in the arena of stability of value. If we can’t trust the government to handle all our snail mail, why should we continue to trust it with exclusive issuance of money? The blockchain has shown us that anybody can create money. Whether a token actually becomes money is all up to the people. More than hundreds of thousands of tokens have freely competed for use as money, in tens of thousands of blockchains. Out of these tokens, only one class has proven to be useful as money: stablecoins. Now there are flatcoins, which are even better than stablecoins.

Let me explain how stablecoin stability actually works. No new token can gain network effects in a short period of time. Bitcoin took more than a decade to gain the critical mass of network effects. The quickest way to gain “no questions asked” (NQA) status is by substituting for another token or currency with pre-existing NQA. Because of this, a startup token has to base its value on something that has already gained enormous network effects, like USD. However, the USD, the currency with the largest network effects of all, can lose per unit value. It all depends on how many units total are released into the world. Continued overspending of the US government is causing the over-issuance of USD. Therefore, the very same USD pegging of the top stablecoins that imbue them with value have a massive problem: if / when USD inflates, so will these stablecoins. The substitute dollar you are holding will lose its purchasing power along with USD. How is IRMA any different? IRMA is a new kind of stablecoin called “flatcoins”. It is designed not to inflate with USD. How? Like the other USD-backed stablecoins, IRMA also derives its value from USD. However, because USD is not programmable, IRMA is not directly backed with USD, but with the top stablecoins, which are all programmable and exist in Solana. IIRMA is reserve-backed not by a single stablecoin, but by at least six compliant stablecoins. Here is IRMA in a nutshell: when you buy or mint IRMA using USDT (for example), your USDT is deposited in a blockchain vault and an amount of IRMA is returned in your wallet, according to the “mint price”. If you then want to get your stablecoin back (maybe as USDC rather than USDT), USDC is sent to your wallet in the amount according to the “redemption price”. How does that make IRMA a flatcoin? For normal stablecoins, the mint price is always equal to the redemption price is equal to one dollar. For IRMA, the mint price is independent of the redemption price. The mint price is a function of current USD inflation and the USD price of the reserve stablecoin, while the redemption price is just total reserve backing divided by total IRMA in circulation. That’s it. “Are you saying that the mint price can be higher than the redemption price? Why would I buy something that has a lower price when I want to get rid of it?” Here is IRMA’s guarantee: if you buy IRMA whenever its mint price is equal to its redemption price, then you are guaranteed to get at least an equal amount of reserve stablecoin that you paid for it when you redeem. Just remember that IRMA does not earn you yield. This guarantee exists in IRMA’s blockchain program, which anybody can inspect. The program simply deposits the extra reserve (gained by increasing the mint price) into the reserve vaults, thereby increasing the total reserve amount faster and which then causes the redemption price to increase also, until it approaches the mint price.

What makes a dollar a dollar? It’s not the paper or the green ink. It’s a property economists call "No Questions Asked" (NQA) trust. When you hand a cashier a $20 bill, they don't ask about its history or its previous owner. They just take it. That is the ultimate Network Effect: universal acceptance without friction. Here is how that principle is reshaping the world of digital assets: 1. The Stability Secret Why did Bitcoin take a decade to reach NQA while Tether (USDT) took a day? Backing Matters: Stablecoins succeed because they are backed by assets that already have NQA status. The Failure Point: Most failed stablecoins didn't collapse because of their "algorithms", they failed because their backing lacked NQA trust. 2. The Evolution of "Meme" Money Not all meme coins are created equal. We’re seeing a shift from "hype-only" tokens to experiments in utility: The Bonk Model: By airdropping tokens to users and then accepting them back as payment for real services (and burning the supply), a token moves from "zero value" to "real-world utility." 3. The "Boring" Goal In crypto, everyone wants to "go to the moon." But true money aims for the opposite. The goal for IRMA is to be boring. We want to be stable enough and accepted enough that nobody asks where the token came from. They just ask, "How much?" Real-world utility isn't found in the spikes; it’s found in the silence of a seamless transaction.

The bank lends your money, keeps the profit, and tells you it’s for your safety. In physics, you cannot create energy out of nothing. In banking, they try to do exactly that. Here is the difference between the "Old System" (Banks) and the "New System" (Stablecoins/DeFi) in a nutshell. 1. Bank Lending: The Magic Trick (Double-Counting) When you deposit $100 into a bank, the money doesn’t sit in a vault. The bank keeps $10 (reserves) and lends out $90 to a borrower. Now, look at the ledger: You think you have $100. The borrower has $90. Total claims in the economy = $190. They just created money out of thin air. This is called Fractional Reserve Banking. It is "double-counting" the same dollar. The borrower pays 8% interest on that loan. The bank pays you 0.5%. Who kept the extra energy generated? The bank. 2. Stablecoin Lending: The Conservation of Mass In DeFi (Decentralized Finance), we respect the laws of physics. When you lend stablecoins (like USDC or eventually IRMA) on a protocol like Aave or Kamino: You deposit 100 IRMA. You receive another token (e.g., 100 aIRMA) in your wallet as a “receipt”. A borrower puts up $150 in collateral (Bitcoin/Solana) to borrow your $100. Total claims = $100. There is no magic money creation. No double-counting because the token you received is not IRMA, it’s aIRMA, a completely different token. You can re-invest this aIRMA if you want. Even though you can, you wouldn't want to spend it because every unit of it stands for your original IRMA plus interest. This kind of lending does not inflate IRMA, because the DeFi lending app does not pretend that IRMA is still there when it isn’t. There is no double-counting. Plus, you earn the interest, not the DeFi app. Using your USD, to earn even just a fraction of the interest from what you get with DeFi apps, you’d have to buy Certificates of Deposit (CDs). The big disadvantage of CDs is that you can’t withdraw any portion of it while it has not matured. If you do, you lose all the interest yield. It is Over-Collateralized. The system is solvent by mathematical definition, not by bank promise. But here is the most important part: The borrower pays 8% interest. You receive ~7.5%. The protocol is just code. It doesn't need a skyscraper, a marketing budget, or a bonus pool. It takes a tiny fee and passes the rest to the person who actually provided the capital: You. The Verdict: Banks: Dilute your money (inflation) and keep the yield. Stablecoins: Preserve the supply (no double-counting) and give you the yield. Stop letting middlemen violate the laws of thermodynamics with your life savings.

The hardest problem in Fintech isn't code. It's "Impedance Mismatch." In electrical engineering, if you connect a high-voltage line directly to a low-voltage appliance, you blow the fuse. You need a transformer. Right now, Crypto is running at Light Speed (24/7, instant settlement). TradFi is running at Human Speed (9-to-5, weekends off, T+2 settlement). When you try to connect them directly, things break. Banks freeze accounts. Exchanges get de-banked. Compliance officers panic. The solution isn't to force the banks to speed up. They can't. Their legacy COBOL mainframes hold the weight of the global economy. The solution is for Crypto to build adapters. We need to slow down at the edges. We need protocols that can "speak" T+5. We need stablecoins that respect compliance delays. This isn't "selling out." It’s engineering. If you want to connect the future to the past, you have to build a bridge that can handle the vibration of both sides.

Why does the Fed target 2% inflation? It’s not arbitrary. It’s thermodynamics. If money gains value over time (Deflation), nobody spends it. You hoard it. Why buy a car today if your money will buy two cars next year? The economy freezes. The "kinetic energy" of commerce drops to zero. This is why Bitcoin is pristine collateral, but terrible currency. Nobody wants to spend Bitcoin. And nobody in their right mind wants to borrow Bitcoin. Imagine borrowing 1 BTC when it’s $50k, and owing 1 BTC when it’s $100k. You would go bankrupt just by holding the debt. The system targets 2% inflation to create just the right intensity of "hot potato" effect. It nudges you to spend or invest. It keeps the energy moving. It allows us to spend without regret, because we know the cash is a melting ice cube anyway. This is why Stablecoin Lending is the sweet spot. You lend a stable asset (USDC/IRMA). The borrower knows exactly what they owe (no volatility risk). You earn the yield. We need Hard Money (Store of Value) and Soft Money (Medium of Exchange). One is the battery voltage. The other is the current. You can't run a circuit without both.

Crypto is obsessed with speed. It should be obsessed with friction. In traditional finance (TradFi), if you make a mistake, there is a "Undo" button. It’s called T+2 or T+5 settlement. It’s a time buffer. A delay. In engineering, we call this hysteresis, a lag introduced intentionally to prevent rapid, unstable oscillations. In crypto, we removed the lag. We made settlement instant. And what happened? We enabled the most efficient engine for theft in human history. If a hacker drains your wallet, the money is gone in seconds. No reversible transactions. No 5-day hold to verify the identity. We need to humble ourselves and learn from the bankers we claim to disrupt. Custodial wallets and delayed settlements (holding funds for T+5) are not "bugs." They are safety features. They are the circuit breakers that stop a house fire. I am a proponent of "Sovereign Money," but I am also a realist. Most people do not want to run their own power plant (self-custody). They just want the lights to turn on safely. If crypto wants to onboard the next billion users, we need to re-introduce the one thing we fought to remove: Friction.

Why does the Fed target 2% inflation? It’s not arbitrary. It’s thermodynamics. If money gains value over time (Deflation), nobody spends it. You hoard it. Why buy a car today if your money will buy two cars next year? The economy freezes. The "kinetic energy" of commerce drops to zero. This is why Bitcoin is pristine collateral, but terrible currency. Nobody wants to spend Bitcoin. And nobody in their right mind wants to borrow Bitcoin. Imagine borrowing 1 BTC when it’s $50k, and owing 1 BTC when it’s $100k. You would go bankrupt just by holding the debt. The system targets 2% inflation to create just the right intensity of "hot potato" effect. It nudges you to spend or invest. It keeps the energy moving. It allows us to spend without regret, because we know the cash is a melting ice cube anyway. This is why Stablecoin Lending is the sweet spot. You lend a stable asset (USDC/IRMA). The borrower knows exactly what they owe (no volatility risk). You earn the yield. We need Hard Money (Store of Value) and Soft Money (Medium of Exchange). One is the battery voltage. The other is the current. You can't run a circuit without both.