Public Cash Money
The technology that would make transparent, sovereign, public monetary issuance possible already exists — verified, operational, and deployed by the world’s most powerful financial institutions. The question is not whether it works. The question is who controls it and for what purpose.
When I describe the technical infrastructure required for a monetary system anchored to real productive capacity — one where monetary issuance is governed by publicly verified, real-time measurements rather than by the borrowing requirements of governments and the profit motives of private banks — I am sometimes told that I am describing science fiction. That the technology does not exist. That the complexity is too great. That international coordination at this scale is impossible.
I want to address this objection directly. Not with theory. With verified facts.
The technology exists. The international coordination has been achieved. The infrastructure has been built, tested, and in some cases already deployed at scale. The only thing that has not happened is that it has been built to serve the interests of citizens rather than the interests of central banks.
Let me show you what has already been built — and then let us talk about who it was built for.
1. ISO 20022: The Universal Financial Language — Already Deployed
ISO 20022 is the new global standard for financial messaging — the common language that allows payment systems in different countries and jurisdictions to communicate with each other in real time, with standardized data fields that carry rich information about every transaction. SWIFT — the messaging network that connects more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries — has migrated to ISO 20022. So has FedNow, the Federal Reserve’s real-time payment system launched in 2023. So has TARGET2, the European Central Bank’s settlement system.
This means that the technical foundation for a globally interoperable monetary information system — one where every transaction carries standardized, machine-readable data about its origin, destination, purpose, and value — already exists and is already operational. The plumbing is there. The pipes have been laid. The data flows.
ISO 20022
Global financial messaging standard. Adopted by SWIFT (global), FedNow (USA), TARGET2 (Europe). Enables real-time, standardized, rich-data financial communication across jurisdictions.
Status
Operational. Already deployed at scale across the global financial system.
Sources: SWIFT ISO 20022 migration documentation; Federal Reserve FedNow Service; European Central Bank TARGET2 technical specifications.
2. Project mBridge: Multi-CBDC Cross-Border Settlement — Already Working
In June 2024, a project called mBridge reached what its architects called “minimum viable product” stage. This is not a pilot study. It is not a theoretical proposal. It is a functioning, distributed-ledger-based payment platform that allows central banks in different countries to settle transactions directly with each other, in real time, in their own digital currencies, without passing through the traditional correspondent banking system dominated by the US dollar.
The participants: the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. In 2022, before reaching MVP, the platform successfully settled more than $22 million in real corporate transactions. Twenty commercial banks participated. One hundred and sixty-four payment and foreign exchange transactions were completed. Transaction times dropped from three to five business days to seconds. Costs dropped by up to 50%.
The project was the result of extensive collaboration starting in 2021 between the BIS Innovation Hub, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Digital Currency Institute of the People’s Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Saudi Arabia joined as a full participant in June 2024, the same month the platform reached MVP stage.
In October 2024, the BIS handed the project over to its participant central banks to continue development independently — a sign not of failure but of maturity. In 2025, Chinese banks — first state-owned, then private, then regional — began executing cross-border payments through mBridge at increasing scale, mirroring the rollout pattern of China’s domestic digital currency.
Project mBridge
Multi-CBDC cross-border payment platform. Built on distributed ledger technology. Real-value transactions settled in seconds. $22M+ settled in 2022 pilot. MVP reached June 2024.
Participants
BIS, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, UAE, Saudi Arabia. Tencent involved in validation since September 2023.
Status
Operational at MVP stage. Expanding. China accelerating adoption through domestic banking network.
Sources: BIS Innovation Hub; OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute Journal (Summer 2024); Ledger Insights (August 2025); CoinDesk (June 2024).
3. The BIS Unified Ledger: One Infrastructure to Rule Them All
In its 2023 Annual Economic Report, the Bank for International Settlements dedicated an entire chapter to a concept it called the “Unified Ledger” — a single digital infrastructure where central bank digital currencies, tokenized commercial bank deposits, and tokenized real-world assets such as government bonds and real estate could coexist, interact, and settle on a single shared platform.
The vision is explicit and ambitious: a global monetary infrastructure in which every significant financial asset — public and private, domestic and international — is represented as a digital token on a common ledger, governed by programmable rules, and settling in real time without the friction, cost, and opacity of the current correspondent banking system.
The IMF has contributed its own parallel proposal — the “XC Platform” — described in published working papers as a global infrastructure for connecting national digital currencies through a common intermediary coin, enabling cross-border transactions between jurisdictions with different monetary systems.
4. The Technology Is Neutral. The Purpose Is Not.
I want to be precise about what I am and am not arguing.
I am not arguing that ISO 20022, mBridge, the Unified Ledger, or the IMF’s XC Platform are malevolent. The engineers who built them solved real problems: correspondent banking is genuinely slow, expensive, and opaque. Cross-border payments genuinely disadvantage smaller economies. The technical achievements are real and substantial.
What I am arguing is that the same technical capabilities that make these systems work — real-time transaction data, distributed ledger verification, programmable monetary rules, cross-border interoperability — could be used for a fundamentally different purpose than they are currently being designed for.
What it is being built for
Central bank control of digital currencies. Programmable money with potential restrictions on what can be purchased, when, where. Surveillance of every transaction. Settlement within a system where money is still issued as debt. More efficient extraction — not liberation from extraction.
What it could be built for
Transparent, publicly verified monetary issuance anchored to real productive capacity. Inflation measurement that is incorruptible because it is public. A reference framework that every area can audit. Sovereignty preserved. No programmable restrictions on citizens. The same pipes. Different water.
The Central Bank Digital Currency — the CBDC — is programmable money. This is its defining characteristic and its most important one. Programmable money can be issued with an expiry date — spend it by December 31 or lose it. It can be restricted geographically — only valid in certain regions. It can be restricted by category — cannot be used to purchase certain goods. It can be linked to a social credit system, a carbon budget, a compliance status. It can be turned off.
None of these capabilities are theoretical. They are documented in the technical specifications of CBDC systems already deployed or under development in China, Sweden, the Bahamas, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries. The programmability is not a bug. It is a feature — and who programs the money determines whose interests it serves.
The technology that could make monetary issuance
transparent, publicly verified, and incorruptible
is being used instead to make it
programmable, centrally controlled, and surveillable.
The same infrastructure.
The same distributed ledgers.
The same real-time data flows.
Different owners.
Different purposes.
Different consequences for you.
5. The Question Nobody Is Asking
Here is the question that the architects of mBridge, the Unified Ledger, and the XC Platform have not been asked in any public forum I am aware of:
If you can build a distributed ledger system that settles cross-border transactions in real time between central banks in five jurisdictions — if you can build a messaging standard that carries rich, standardized data about every financial transaction across 200 countries — if you can build a programmable monetary infrastructure that enforces complex rules automatically without human intervention — then why can you not use the same infrastructure to make the measurement of real inflation publicly verifiable, available to every citizen on their smartphone, impossible to manipulate, and constitutionally binding on the monetary issuance decisions of every participating government?
The technical answer is: you can. Easily. The infrastructure for doing so is more straightforward than what has already been built. A publicly accessible ledger recording verified price measurements from a standardized basket of goods, updated continuously, cryptographically signed by independent validators in each participating jurisdiction, is technically simpler than a cross-border multi-currency settlement platform handling real-value transactions between five central banks.
The reason it has not been built this way is not technical. It is political. A monetary system whose inflation measurement is publicly verifiable and whose issuance rules are constitutionally binding removes the discretion that central banks and governments currently exercise over money creation. It removes the ability to manage the inflation number. It removes the ability to expand the money supply beyond what the real economy justifies. It removes the tool that has been used, for seven centuries since the Venetian bankers of 1374, to extract value from savers and wage earners through the silent tax of monetary debasement.
The technology is ready. The infrastructure exists. The international coordination has been demonstrated. The only thing preventing its use for the benefit of citizens rather than the control of central banks is the political will to direct it differently.
Conclusion: The Pipes Are Already There
The next time someone tells you that a transparent, publicly governed, sovereign monetary system is science fiction — that the technology does not exist, that international coordination is impossible, that the complexity is too great — you can point them to the BIS’s own website. To the ISO 20022 migration documentation. To the mBridge MVP announcement of June 2024. To the Unified Ledger chapter of the BIS Annual Economic Report 2023. To the IMF’s XC Platform working papers.
The infrastructure has been built. The coordination has been achieved. The technology works. It is settling real transactions, in real time, across real jurisdictions, right now.
The only question is who it will serve. The institutions that built it — central banks, the BIS, the IMF — built it to serve themselves. That is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive structure. Institutions build infrastructure that serves their interests. Central banks built monetary infrastructure that centralizes control over money in the hands of central banks. This should surprise no one.
What would surprise the architects of mBridge and the Unified Ledger is the suggestion that the same infrastructure could be redirected — the same pipes, the same ledgers, the same real-time data flows — to serve the people whose productive capacity is what money is supposed to measure in the first place.
The technology is not science fiction. It is already running. The question is not “can we build this?” The question is “who controls what has already been built, and for whose benefit?”
They said the technology did not exist.
It exists. It is operational. It is expanding.
They said international coordination was impossible.
Five central banks coordinated across four jurisdictions
and settled $22 million in seconds.
They said the complexity was too great.
The BIS built it. The IMF designed it. SWIFT deployed it.
The technology is not the obstacle.
The question is who programs the money.
And who decides what the program is for.
$2+2=4. Period.
Davide Serra · Systems Analyst & Independent Monetary Analyst
publiccashmoney.com · @postaperdavide on X
Sources: BIS Innovation Hub (mBridge); OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute Journal Summer 2024; BIS Annual Economic Report 2023, Chapter 3 (Unified Ledger); IMF Working Paper on XC Platform; ISO 20022 technical documentation; SWIFT migration reports; Ledger Insights August 2025; CoinDesk June 2024; Kapronasia July 2024.
