By Jodi Stanton, Founder & CEO of Rush
Bernard Lietaer rarely sought the spotlight, yet few people have done more to shape how we think about money. An engineer, economist, and one of the architects of the Euro, he was equally comfortable in central banks, boardrooms, and think tanks. But his most important contribution wasn’t designing a currency – it was questioning what money itself could become.
Lietaer argued that money is not neutral. Its design – how it’s issued, what it rewards, what it ignores – determines whether economies become cooperative or competitive, resilient or brittle. The dominant model, he warned, had evolved into a monoculture: one global system built on debt, leverage, and short-term profit. Like a biological monocrop, it was efficient but fragile – prone to collapse when conditions changed.
In The Future of Money and later in Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link for the Club of Rome, Lietaer outlined how complementary currencies and asset-backed systems could stabilise economies and restore balance. One of his most prescient concepts, the Terra, was a global reference currency backed by a basket of real goods – gold, metals, commodities – a practical way to anchor value in the physical world while allowing global trade to flow. Decades later, that idea resonates in the growing appetite for real-asset-backed systems and programmable digital gold.
A Foundation for Rush
Bernard was part of Rush’s original design team. In our early European workshops, his influence was profound. He challenged us to think of gold not as a relic, but as infrastructure: a base layer of trust in a digital, uncertain world.
Those meetings taught us something else – something that’s proven even more relevant with time. Large investors, pension funds, and family offices weren’t just looking for returns; they were looking for control. They wanted to eliminate middlemen and counterparty risk. They wanted assets that couldn’t be frozen, defaulted on, or inflated away.
At the time, the conversation was about a potential “GFC Mark II” – a second great financial crisis. What came instead were rolling shocks of a different kind: a pandemic that froze supply chains, tariffs and trade wars that fractured global markets, and then geopolitical conflict that redrew the map of trust itself. And after each, the same pattern emerged: centralisation breaks, confidence erodes, and capital searches again for something solid.
Lietaer predicted this cycle of fragility. “Every monetary system creates its own crises,” he wrote, “when it loses balance between efficiency and resilience.” The lesson was not to abolish fiat currencies or central banks, but to diversify the forms of money that coexist – to create a financial ecosystem that mirrors the complexity and adaptability of nature itself.
Money That Reflects the Real World
In his work with the Club of Rome, Lietaer called this approach “monetary ecology.” Just as a forest thrives on diversity, an economy thrives when it contains multiple layers of money – national, local, and global; fiat and real-asset; digital and tangible. The monoculture of debt-based currency, he argued, drives short-term thinking and environmental depletion because it discounts the future – literally. Interest-bearing money values the present over tomorrow, leading to the overuse of both natural and human capital.
By contrast, real-asset systems – like gold, commodities, or even regenerative “natural savings” – keep value grounded. They’re not speculative abstractions but reflections of the physical world that sustains them. In a time of inflation, deglobalisation, and resource constraints, that principle feels less idealistic and more like sound engineering.
The Next Monetary Layer
Today, the tools Lietaer could only imagine – tokenisation, smart contracts, programmable finance – make his vision practical. Digital infrastructure now allows gold or other tangible assets to move with the same speed and convenience as cash. The architecture he anticipated has arrived.
Rush’s technology builds on this foundation. Our systems allow gold ownership to be direct, divisible, and usable – bringing physical value into digital circulation without adding layers of intermediaries. It’s a small but important step toward the multi-layered, resilient monetary ecosystem Bernard envisioned: one that combines the stability of real assets with the flexibility of modern networks.
The Enduring Message
Bernard Lietaer passed away in 2019, but his message has only gained relevance. He understood that money is a mirror of its society – and that when our systems feel unstable, the fault often lies in the mirror itself. He saw the future of money not as a single global currency, but as a diverse web of instruments designed for different purposes, each supporting resilience in its own way.
There will always be another crisis – whether financial, environmental, or geopolitical. But the answer is not to retreat; it’s to design better systems. Lietaer’s legacy reminds us that the evolution of money isn’t about replacing one model with another – it’s about restoring balance between the world of numbers and the world of things.
And that balance, increasingly, is being rebuilt in gold – real value, made practical again.
