From Credit Theory to Digital Reality
Money has always been credit and debt. Alfred Mitchell-Innes established this in 1913. David Graeber confirmed it anthropologically a century later. Yet the world's monetary systems still behave as though this insight is either incomplete or impractical.
TrustyCity's mission is to make it practical.
The Credit Theory of Money was never wrong — it was simply missing one ingredient: a mechanism by which people could trust that a debt called "money" would be repaid, without a government standing behind it. The Trust Theory of Money (TTM) supplies that ingredient. Our mission is to build the digital infrastructure that makes it real.
Our Mission
To implement the Trust Theory of Money — a complete, digital realization of credit-based money — and to build the infrastructure that allows trust to function as the measurable, verifiable foundation of economic value.
Core Values
Trust over Scarcity Money's value does not come from being hard to produce. It comes from confidence in the issuer's ability and willingness to honor their commitment. Scarcity is not the cause of value; it is a symptom of trustworthy issuance. TTM makes this explicit.
Checkpoints over Targets Goodhart's Law tells us that any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. Bureaucratic certificates are targets. Credit scores, updated continuously through the checkpoints of everyday life, are not. Our trust infrastructure follows the credit score model — not the certificate model.
Accountability without Gatekeepers In the current system, governments are trusted unconditionally while individuals are continuously evaluated. TTM applies the same checkpoint-based accountability to all issuers of money — individuals, institutions, and eventually governments — without requiring a central authority to adjudicate.
Privacy by Design Every transaction in the TTM system preserves the privacy principle: parties are publicly identified, but only the buyer and seller know the transaction amount. This is not a feature added on top — it is enforced cryptographically, at the algorithmic level.
Openness as Trustworthiness The person who builds the infrastructure for your trust system should themselves be trustworthy. TrustyCity publishes its research openly, claims implementation rights transparently, and develops in public. We believe a society where ideas can be shared without fear of misappropriation is one of the long-term outcomes of TTM working correctly.
Vision
Near Term: Deploy TTM transaction infrastructure — wallet management, privacy-preserving verification, and checkpoint-based trust scoring — as B2B APIs for financial institutions and B2C applications for individuals.
Medium Term: Enable any individual or institution with a credible track record to issue a TTM-backed spendable digital check — a personal or institutional currency, redeemable by pledge, legally formalized, and tracked by the system.
Long Term: A monetary ecosystem where value is determined by trust earned through demonstrated accountability — where hype cycles fail because capital follows credibility, not spectacle, and where the architects of inflated promises cannot take ordinary people's livelihoods hostage when those promises collapse.
Someone can say software industry was young until 2010, then it gets to its middle age since 2020, and it's about the time for the software industry to get old! We are looking for software solutions that works for the next millennium, even when humanity scattered across the galaxy.
Why Now
The 2008 financial crisis revealed the fragility of unconditional institutional trust. The cryptocurrency movement responded, but with the wrong solution — replacing trust with scarcity, and inadvertently reintroducing hidden, unaccountable trust in its place. The decade since 2020 has accelerated the problem: hype cycles have grown larger, more destructive, and more difficult for markets to self-correct.
The theoretical foundation has existed for over a century. The cryptographic tools to implement it exist today. The missing piece was the algorithm connecting them.
That algorithm now exists. The work of building it into the world begins here.
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