The open source internet transformed humanity, and crypto is open source money.

The noise of your favorite meme coin or latest drama can crowd out the bigger picture of what Synthetix and other permissionless protocols are building. If you look closer at open source money, you'll see the building blocks of our future is being created before our eyes.

The scale of the transformation under way could be analogized by how the internet, which turned 30 this year, and has reshaped our species. The internet managed to emerge relatively permissionlessly - generally speaking you don't need approval to send an email, put up a website, learn to code, or create an online business. Limitations do exist and some short-sighted politicians would like to add further constraints, but humans have benefitted enormously from the innovation and progress that has stemmed from a relatively open internet. If we can learn anything from the internet is that the benefits of progress due to openness far outweigh the downside of people saying and organizing bad things.

Decentralized finance goes a step further and in some ways is more usefully described as permissionless finance - as the really important innovations have tended to be permissionless. What does permissionless mean in this sense? Anyone can join come and use the tools to create new things. This importance is hard to overstate - can you imagine asking your local financial organization to allow you to look inside or connect your contraption? With crypto you can send money to anyone else, you can store transactions or information on a blockchain, learn to understand blockchains, or create a new financial product. Trade is the cornerstone of prosperity, and has lifted our species out of the mud to aim rockets at Mars. This freedom to transact, participate and build is the magic that continues each day, on an unstoppable network of computers relying on math rather than the bureaucrats of the time.

That same math underlies the attention-grabbing price volatility, and far from being a dirty word, speculation is important to new industries, as it attracts the capital to fund the lasting innovation. But we mustn't get too distracted by the volatility and speculation, to miss or dismiss what is really being built. Looking more closely we see enduring crypto protocols and organizations have recreated some of the most important functionality from the traditional finance world, but implemented in a permissionless way. Bitcoin is money that can't be artificially inflated, Aave is lending and borrowing without discrimination, and Synthetix makes the largest financial market permissionless, derivatives.

With Synthetix, anyone, anywhere can orchestrate capital, and put it to use. Holders of capital can allocate it to various risk and reward profiles. Creators of financial products can vie for the capital, so that end users can transact. Derivatives are coming out of the dark and into the light, on a blockchain near you.