Conceived by Ryan Fugger and quite formally defined by Sylvain Poirier, a new P2P-based monetary system is based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks.

By cutting out the institutional middlemen, it is both more community-oriented and more efficient as a means of exchange.

National monetary systems rely on trust in large financial institutions. A bank account balance, stored as electronic bits in a computer, represents a promise by the bank to pay the account holder. That promise is only meaningful if the bank is trustworthy. Banks, in turn, leverage those deposits to issue new money by making loans to trustworthy individuals as determined by an often labour-intensive screening process.

The proposed system cuts the banks right out of the picture by allowing anyone to act as a bank.