What if money's value came from trust — not governments, not scarcity?
Money is a form of credit and debt. We've known this for over a century. But nobody has fully implemented it — until now. TrustyCity is building the digital infrastructure for the Trust Theory of Money (TTM): a system where value flows from verifiable, checkpoint-based trust between real people.
We start with the algorithm. The rest follows.
Why is the money system broken?
Modern Money Theory (MMT) — the framework behind every central bank today — partially acknowledges that money is credit and debt. Credit cards and credit scores exist precisely because of this. But when it comes to government-issued fiat money, the system behaves as though we trust governments unconditionally, with no need to track any kind of "government credit score."
This inconsistency has real costs. Since 2008, and especially since 2020, hype cycles have repeatedly allowed bad actors to capture enormous capital — not by creating value, but by manufacturing waves of speculative excitement. When those waves crash, they take ordinary people's livelihoods with them, and governments are forced to absorb the losses. Left unchecked, this dynamic erodes the foundations of society itself.
The root cause? Bureaucratic systems fail because of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Certificates, credentials, and institutional approvals are all targets — and people learn to game them. The system still runs on trust, just an unreliable form of it.
Didn't Bitcoin already solve this?
No. Cryptocurrencies approached the problem by discarding trust entirely — engineering digital scarcity instead. The argument was: gold is valuable because it's scarce, and no one controls it, so let's do that digitally.
There are two fundamental problems with this. First, gold cannot actually function as money precisely because its supply cannot be adjusted by any issuer. A productive economy needs money that is "scarce enough," not absolutely scarce. Second, after more than a decade of use, cryptocurrencies have quietly reintroduced trust — placing it in whoever holds the most computational power or the most coins. The claim of being "zero-trust" turned out to be false; the trust was just hidden and unaccountable.
Blockchain threw the Credit Theory of Money out the window. TTM brings it back.
So what is the Trust Theory of Money?
The Credit Theory of Money (CTM), proposed by Alfred Mitchell-Innes in 1913, holds that money is nothing but credit and debt — and that governments are not strictly necessary for money to function. The theory is compelling, but incomplete: it never explained how people could trust that a debt called "money" would be repaid, without a government to guarantee it.
TTM is the missing piece. It asserts that to assign value to a debt, you must trust the entity that issued it. The scarcity principle doesn't disappear — it re-emerges from trust in the issuer's ability to keep their debt valuable. And crucially, trust can be measured, tracked, and verified — without bureaucratic gatekeepers — using checkpoint-based data that is resistant to Goodhart's Law.
Credit scores already demonstrate this principle. Your credit score is not a target you study for; it is continuously updated from the checkpoints of your actual financial life. TTM extends this logic to the issuance of money itself.
How does TTM actually work in practice?
Imagine an issuer — call them Γ (Gamma) — with a publicly visible track record of honoring their debts. Γ issues a spendable digital check backed by a pledge: whoever returns x units of this check after a specified date receives y units of something of real value. The check is legally formalized. If Γ fails to honor it, the system records this, and Γ's trust score decreases — just like a missed payment on a credit report.
Γ spends the check to acquire goods and services from people who have reviewed their record and trust them enough. Those holders can then spend fractions of that check with others who also trust Γ. If two parties share no common issuer they both trust, they simply cannot transact — exactly as in the real world.
The privacy principle is preserved. Like paying cash in a store, both the buyer and seller are publicly identified — but only they know the amount of the transaction. This is enforced cryptographically, using a modular arithmetic construction that is more secure than RSA and not vulnerable to quantum decryption attacks.
"Trust is not a soft concept. It is the operating system of every productive economy."
Every exchange of goods or services requires trust — between buyers and sellers, between producers and their supply chains. Brand loyalty exists because people express this trust explicitly. TTM makes it quantifiable, verifiable, and actionable. We don't eliminate the need for trust. We give it the infrastructure it deserves.
How is TTM more decentralized than cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrencies claim to decentralize money, but in practice they centralize it around mining pools, whales, and protocol developers. TTM supports an arbitrary number of independent currencies — one per trusted issuer. Any person or institution with a credible track record can issue a spendable check. There is no single protocol, no single ledger, no single point of control.
This is genuine decentralization: the same kind that exists in a free market, where value is distributed across countless bilateral relationships built on trust. It is the foundation of a truly free market — and it is what money was originally intended to be.
Research & Development
1 / TTM Whitepaper Published
The Trust Theory of Money (TTM) — Fix the Money is now publicly available. The paper presents the theoretical foundation of TTM, its relationship to MMT and CTM, and a full cryptographic algorithm for digital implementation.
2 / Algorithm Specification Complete
The TTM transaction algorithm — including wallet encryption, privacy-preserving verification, and the extended Euclidean proof of sufficient balance — has been fully specified and is undergoing implementation.
3 / Infrastructure Development Underway
B2B components (APIs and libraries for banks and credit bureaus) and B2C components (mobile applications for trust data analysis) are in active development.
Build the infrastructure of trust with us.
TrustyCity believes that the person who builds the infrastructure for your trust system should themselves be trustworthy. We are developing this openly, claiming full implementation rights, and publishing the research publicly — because that is what a trustworthy actor does.
Read the whitepaper · Understand the mission · Explore the solutions