Living through a financial crisis showed me the underbelly of a centralized fiat currency system. I'm building a decentralized one.

I was on vacation with my family when the government, with help from the European Central Bank, imposed capital controls, restricting cash withdrawals, international transfers, and banking transactions to prevent a financial collapse. We were forced to return back home since my father was afraid of losing his job. The home we returned to was unrecognizable. For several months, you could only withdraw up to 50 euros a day from the Bank, causing multi-block queues outside banks and ATMs. Countless people lost their jobs, homes and dignity while the government extracted taxes to cover up their mismanagement of citizen and pensioner funds. There were rumors of the government performing a “haircut” on citizen bank deposits and even opening up their safe deposit boxes. The former happened in a neighboring country where the government forcefully seized 50-100% of citizens' hard earned money. The restrictions had a significant impact across economic and social life, leading to prolonged low public confidence in the financial system and a deep sense of personal frustration and anxiety stemming from the inability to fully control one's own wealth.

I'm reminded of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2016 prediction that by the year 2030, “You’ll own nothing and be happy”, and the appropriate backlash amongst many in the public who know that ownership is power and in many ways, prerequisite to freedom. Experiencing crisis at home helped me realize that when the state has absolute and arbitrary control over the money supply, citizens don't truly own anything. At the state's whim, your property can be seized; your money can be frozen, extracted and inflated to cents on the dollar. Your entire life's work can evaporate due to the corruption and incompetence of those in charge.

This WEF gaf, while to many describing a future distopia to be avoided, has actually been the inescapable state of affairs for centuries.

This stopped being the case on October 31, 2008, the day the Bitcoin whitepaper was published. In a decentralized network, everything that you own is yours in the truest sense. No one can extract your funds from you; no one can force you to opt in to their system. Your keys are yours to keep and yours to lose. No one can override that. Even though it comes with great responsibility, the freedom this technology enabled was unprecedented.

To me, Pinto is a necessary and organic evolution based on the needs of the community that resides in that decentralized network. Bitcoin was created to allow permissionless transactions with trustless money without intermediaries. People then realized that permissionless money needed to be programmable, and thus was born Ethereum. AMMs and the constant product curve were then invented to trustlessly exchange money, solidifying the foundations of the decentralized economy.

It has become apparent that a medium of exchange, a network native currency, needed low volatility to actually be used in true financial and economic activity. This marked the beginning of stablecoins. So far, none of the existent implementations of stablecoins include all the desirable properties mentioned above. Centralized stablecoins with offchain collateral, although popular, still enable centralized control, while also relying on exogenous value. Other collateralized decentralized stablecoins still rely on the value of on chain collateral to be created, sacrificing scalability.

Pinto is a natural progression of that. Much like the US government recognized that gold was no longer a viable backing for the economy’s value, Pinto embodies an understanding that no type of collateral can sustain the on-chain global economy, especially as more value gets bridged onto it. Pinto is, in this way, the next step of money. A truly permissionless, decentralized form of low volatility money that is infinitely scalable, relies on market incentives and AMMs and doesn't impose actions on participants – but merely exists autonomously, creating a positive sum effect for its community, is in my mind a necessity in an increasingly leviathan-ran world.

My first encounter with the system was after the Beanstalk exploit, a few months after the Replant. Even at this stage, the model captivated me. To me, it was the most exciting thing ever—a sophisticated system that embodied all the key principles of permissionless money, wrapped in a lighthearted tone with farming terminology, standing in stark contrast to the rigid, serious language of traditional finance. Built from first principles and fueled by a die-hard community, it was truly unique.

I never got to see that model thrive, until now. And this is why I choose to keep working on it and doing everything in my power to realize its full, infinite potential.

Pinto is the next generation of permissionless money, empowering you to make your own choices, grow your wealth and manifest the leviathan-free economy.

-Default Juice

March 2025