"Providing reserves and exchanges for the whole world is too much for one country and one currency to bear." —Henry H. Fowler, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Distributed ledger technologies enable the coordination of people without a central authority. And while this technology has cultivated a mass of new ideas across many domains, we continue to believe that the most salient opportunity presented is that of disintermediating the issuance and regulation of money. This belief has led us to think extensively about what qualities an independent money should have, and what problems an independent money can solve that a sovereign money cannot. And we have concluded that the single greatest advantage of independent money is its ability to remain solely focused on the responsible regulation of supply—such that purchasing power remains undiminished by cycles of inflation. There is a very real possibility that a digital asset can make obsolete the problem of nonuniform inflation; and a solution to this problem would decouple us from the conflict between national and international interests that has been so troublesome for sovereign monies and the global economy to date. Many stablecoin projects today are recreating fiat on distributed ledgers, and we think this is worthwhile because it opens up the free trade of money—lifting the floor of quality to that of the best fiat money. However the true potential of independent money lies not in lifting the floor, but in lifting the ceiling of money quality. For this reason, we have chosen instead to address this much older, bigger problem of inflation and its connection to national policy. The Bitcoin protocol has made enormous strides in this direction, but its fixed supply policy limits functionality to that of a digital gold. Our mission is to produce a money that is both sound, like gold; and stable, like fiat. For the first time ever, this is possible.