Late 21st Century Earth

Pundits used many names.

The next money's common name was Atlanticcoin.

One POTUS, pushed to the wall by the polls "to do something", began as digital money but it mutated like a sci-fi monster.

It was a hybrid of ideas from a hydra-headed committee of experts from the self-appointed, self-anointed elite of Earth.

Politicians, depending on voters, either hailed or condemned it.

Based on who was in a room, on a holo, or on the street, it was either an abomination, a compromise, a necessity, or the least dirty shirt. It was both the worst and best in debates.

It was soft-power airdropped into wallets of citizens, residents, and allies.

Its supply rode up power-law curves when expatriate variants, wrapped in bespoke contracts, scurried through grey markets and dark exchanges everywhere.

It replicated itself without banks on its own and took over.

It was money for everyone. It towered over dollars, euros, renmenbi, and orphaned stablecoins.

Petri-denizens in dense sprawls of the fourth world's recyclepolises, traded air-gapped homemade derivatives.

It was in the walled gardens of privilege, orbital villages, private homestead-states, and rich hermetically sealed hamlet-states of broken nations. It was a reserve asset off-world.

Everyone used, needed, and borrowed against it. It flowed through financial pipes, turned flywheels, and rebuilt the world.

It accumulated in vast reservoirs of the Space Cooperative, in its thousands of entities, which seemed to grow without end.

Until "The Storms", both on Earth and from the Sun, hit the brakes everywhere.

The bill for the future had come due.