Pinto: Prints for the People

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” — Satoshi Nakamoto, February 11th, 2009

Fiat: A Double Edged Sword

The money printer is the most powerful force in the modern economy. Since 1972, when Nixon closed the gold window following a multi-year depletion of the United States gold reserves, the global economy has officially run on fiat (i.e., credit backed) currency.

The defining feature of fiat currency is that it can be printed out of thin air. Although it may seem counterintuitive that something producible at will could serve as better money than a scarce, physically grounded asset like gold, it is precisely this freedom from physical limitations that gives fiat its unique utility.

Money is understood to have three primary use cases, storing value across space and time, serving as a medium of exchange between various forms of value, and functioning as a unit of account for value and loans of value.

In both cases of acting as a medium of exchange and as a unit of account for loans, the primary driver of money’s utility is its low volatility. The power of fiat money lies in the ability to use the printer to minimize its volatility.

Unlike gold, the supply of which is almost entirely unrelated to the economy, access to fiat money can be meticulously controlled in direct response to economic conditions (e.g., expanding in response to growth and shrinking in response to contractions) to minimize the volatility of its value and thereby maximize the health of the economy.

Unfortunately, the money printer is currently governed by human judgement that is arbitrarily based on “feel”. Moreover, the use of the printer has been corrupted such that the vast majority of value printed is to the benefit of corporations and other parties that have close ties to the government.

The preferential and concentrated distribution of freshly printed fiat creates high levels of inflation that erodes wealth, exacerbates massive inequality and distorts the truth discovered through markets (i.e., what people value).

Friends of the Printer

The corruption of the money printer has broken capitalism’s engine of creative destruction. The traditional pressure on companies to compete in the creation of goods and provision of services has been compromised by unequal access to the money printer. The traditional requirement for lenders and investors to manage risk responsibly has been removed for those deemed “too big to fail”.

These companies offer terrible quality and take dangerous risks, but never have to pay the price because a bailout, whether in the form of a cash infusion, access to cheap credit, or a government contract, is always just a phone call away.

• Boeing dominates the commercial aircraft market despite safety lapses, production issues, and cost mismanagement because government contracts, financing, and support insulate it from competitive pressure.

• Major airlines offer horrible service while maintaining high levels of debt and colluding to avoid competing on price. Because government regulation makes market entry so expensive for new competitors, the only way to afford to play is with government subsidies. Of course, the new company on the block never gets the same degree of assistance from the government as existing companies that can heavily lobby for special treatment, leaving consumers with limited options.

• Big banks are no longer subject to practical risk management. Despite introducing massive leverage into the financial system, they are shielded from the consequences of failure by central banks and government interventions that encourage lending to politically popular, rather than economically productive, ventures and foster heedless risk-taking bound for disaster barring further government intervention.

• Backed by low-cost, government-subsidized financing, private equity firms like Blackstone now own a significant share of single-family homes in certain metro areas – sometimes 5-20%, and increasing – driving up prices and pushing ordinary buyers into the rental market. These firms are paying excessively high costs that are only justifiable given the expectation of the government propping up the value of the housing market.

The corruption of money prevents the market from discovering and serving people’s needs. Instead, people's work and consumption serve major companies that do not care for or about them, and despite the tremendous deflationary effect of the proliferation of software over the past three decades, people are less well off than their parents.

A transparent and unbiased algorithm can control the money supply more accurately, ethically and sustainably than arbitrary human control and correct the perverse incentives created by the corrupted money printer.

Crypto’s Missing Half

Bitcoin was a direct response to the corruption of the money printer, and has started a revolution to create an economy free from capture by powerful interests. Many bitcoiners believe that requires ditching fiat currency altogether. However, Bitcoin’s monetary policy (i.e., predefined minting schedule) makes it much better suited to serve as a store of value across space and time and a unit of account for value than as a medium of exchange between various types of value or unit of account for loans.

A medium of exchange and unit of account for loans is such an important part of a modern economy that even on networks like Ethereum, which have been meticulously designed around the principles of trustlessness and censorship resistance, the dominant media of exchange and units of account for loans are trusted wrappers of good old federal fiat money (i.e. USDT, USDC), which can be easily censored by the companies that issue them or governments that have the ability to control those companies. In reality, there is so much value on the Ethereum network that is dependent on these centralized wrappers for fiat money that the independence and integrity of the Ethereum network itself has been compromised.

Pinto is a response to this existential threat.

Crypto Fiat

Pinto is founded on the beliefs that fiat money is the best money if the printer is used wisely and ethically, and that credit is an infinitely scalable source of endogenous value.

What the Bitcoin (and now Ethereum) community miss is that fiat has outcompeted hard assets like gold as the global currency in spite of the abuse of the printer. To ignore the success of fiat over hard money is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Pinto leverages the power of smart contracts to create a crypto-native fiat monetary system in which every Pinto is printed directly to the people who have value in the system, thereby decoupling inflation of the money supply from the devaluation of people's wealth.

Because every Pinto printed is distributed deterministically, verifiably and such that participants accrue wealth during the system's growth rather than lose it, Pinto has the benefits of modern fiat currency without the drawbacks.

A variety of novel incentive mechanisms make Pinto possible. Anyone can take their Pinto, or various whitelisted Pinto LP tokens, and Deposit them in the protocol to earn a portion of future prints. Similarly, anyone can lend Pinto to the protocol to earn a portion of future prints. The incentives the protocol offers participants for any given action changes every hour, contributing to a living monetary system that grows and adapts to meet the needs of its participants.

Pinto is an experiment at the frontier of money. It’s still early. Pinto's incentive mechanisms have room for improvement. Pinto's trustless and censorship resistant governance mechanism is still a few months away from implementation. But, Pinto is the foremost attempt to date at delivering the money printer to the people.

If Pinto succeeds, it has the power to restore markets to their proper function and complement BTC or ETH as a base layer currency of the crypto economy. See Ben's original post from August 20th, 2025 here.