Redesigning Money: Stablecoins and the Everyday Economy
Designing money as a digital product for how people actually earn today
Digital formats have redefined how we communicate, create, and work—through photos, music, video, and productivity itself. Each time, the shift from analog to digital collapsed old constraints and opened entirely new experiences. But money has resisted this kind of transformation. Despite decades of "digital banking," it still works much as it always has, forcing people to navigate around systems built for a different era.
Stablecoins may finally change that. They represent money's first real mainstream digital format—capable of being programmable, portable, and user-controlled. And if other format shifts are any guide, their impact will be less about reinforcing existing systems and more about unlocking new financial experiences that help people answer the most basic questions: Do I have enough? When will I have more?
The opportunity lies in treating money as a digital product. Properly built, it can collapse complexity, ease the stress of irregular income, and give people more control over when and how they get paid. Money that adapts to an increasingly services-based economy defined by irregular work and fragmented income becomes the foundation for security, mobility, and freedom in everyday life.
This essay builds on Finance's Format Moment, where I argued that stablecoins open the door to the kind of outsider creativity that gave us Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify in their industries. Here, I turn from industry to individual. I explore what this format shift could address: the basic questions people live with—Do I have enough? When will I have more? And I show how a digital product approach to money could better serve a services economy defined by irregular work and fragmented income.
Say “Cheese”
When I take a photo of my children in a crowded park on my phone, I can instantly remove the crowd with just my fingers. Would I have even taken the shot with film? Probably not. Every frame was scarce, saved for special occasions and staged, 'say cheese' moments. But the smartphone collapsed those limits. The camera, the album, and the editing tools all merged into one app, and the scarcity of film gave way to the abundance of digital. Photos became casual, searchable, and shareable, giving me more agency not just in how I edit, but in what I choose to capture in the first place.
Programmable money could offer a similar leap: financial experiences that can be reconfigured, timed, and combined in ways that were impossible with analog systems. The equivalent of the camera app is the digital wallet.
Like early smartphone camera apps, today’s wallets point toward what's possible. Venmo adds social context to spending; Apple Wallet brings location awareness. Crypto wallets add options for enhanced privacy and custody, while digital currencies enable fractional payments for micro-transactions. These are building blocks for modernizing money.
Tomorrow's wallets would give people more agency over their money by collapsing functions that today are scattered across banks, payroll systems, billing platforms, and budgeting apps. They could show upcoming bills as simple heads-up cards, stream earnings as work is completed, and carry your financial history with you across institutions. Just as the camera app turned photos into something casual, editable, and personal, digital wallets could turn money into something timely, predictable, and responsive.
Enough and More
The same logic applies to money's core questions. A wallet that only moves funds is like a camera that only takes pictures. What people need is a way to collapse the effort it takes to answer the most basic questions they live with every day: Do I have enough? When will I have more?
Today’s systems make those questions harder, not easier. They force people to coordinate across multiple banks, payment schedules, and account balances—complexity baked into infrastructure that no interface improvement can fully solve.
Two things would help: First, taking the mental math out of "enough." This means knowing at all times what I owe from past transactions, how much I have now, what I will owe soon, and what income is coming in. A wallet that sees all inflows and outflows could manage this like Outlook manages my calendar, always knowing where I've been, where I am today, and where I need to be tomorrow.
Second, giving people more control over when they get "more." Digital money could offer workers more choice in payment timing, with some preferring continuous streams for immediate needs, others choosing weekly or project-based payouts for easier budgeting. What matters is reducing the mismatch between when bills are due and when income arrives.
The limits of today’s systems make this hard to fix. Even well-designed banking apps and faster payment rails can’t resolve timing mismatches or give true real-time cash flow visibility. They sit on infrastructure where money still moves in batches between institutions rather than flowing directly to users.
This points to an overlooked area in financial services. It remains a post-paycheck industry with little to say about how people earn money and much to say about how they store and use it. Most of the retail conversation around stablecoins today is about payment acceptance. But people's challenge isn't choosing between cash, debit, credit, or stablecoins. It's having enough money to pay bills in the first place.
Instead of competing with card networks on transaction efficiency, stablecoins could help address the very challenge traditional financial services ignore: earnings.
Earnings at the Core
Stablecoins already play this role in developing economies. Where domestic currencies lose value weekly, the same work completed today buys less a week later. By letting people denominate and store earnings in dollars, stablecoins help guard what matters most: that their work today retains its worth tomorrow.
The opportunity for developed economies is to treat earnings as a core retail use case. The challenge may differ—inflation there, irregular income here—but the need is the same: money that protects and stabilizes earnings.
This would direct stablecoins toward the irregular work economy: gig, freelance, creator, and service jobs that fall outside the steady paycheck model. Today's services economy has more people working outside traditional employment promises, requiring money that can move continuously for some, in weekly bursts for others, and in project-based payouts for others.
Banks have multiple reasons for avoiding this segment: irregular income creates higher default rates and more complex underwriting, often with lower balances that reduce profitability. But part of the challenge is also the technical mismatch between existing money systems designed for paychecks and what services workers actually need. "Income smoothing" or "early pay" stretches paychecks rather than redesigning payment timing entirely.
As money becomes digital, the opportunity extends beyond speeding up institutional payments to redesigning money for actual economic conditions. The paycheck era created money for industrial regularity. The services era demands money designed for flexible, real-time earnings, and digital money makes that redesign possible.
Digital Rules for Digital Money
The debate over digital money is often framed as a technical one: do we really need it when faster payments are already here? The more powerful lens is a human one: what problems can a digital format solve for people that no analog system ever could?
To view money this way is to see it as a digital product that must evolve to address evergreen pain points and serve a changing economy. The best digital products collapse, bundle, and streamline, turning what was once effortful into something intuitive. For money, that means solving the daily challenge of "enough and more"—where wallet, currency, and financial tools evolve together to extend the problem-solving power of modern tech into the core of earnings and obligations.
When a format moves from pre-digital to digital, it removes old constraints and opens new possibilities. Infrastructure emerges from user need. Amazon built its logistics to support one-click shopping; Netflix built delivery networks to support seamless streaming. The system becomes whatever it takes to unlock the new user experience.
Finance, by contrast, still tends to start with the system: faster settlement, decentralized ledgers, programmable money. The assumption is that better infrastructure will naturally lead to better user experiences. But decades of digital transformation show the opposite: the winning user experience defines what infrastructure gets built, not the other way around.
Seen this way, stablecoins are not just a payments tool but the enabling format shift. What matters is less the infrastructure itself and more what new experiences it allows. This piece argues that many of those new experiences will center on resolving the everyday pain points of earnings—knowing if you have enough, and making it easier to get more—and on building the infrastructure to support people in an increasingly services-based, irregular work economy.