Cryptocurrency has the power to usher in a new world of user-generated currencies, says co-founder of Bancor Protocol Galia Benartzi, giving everyone the opportunity to achieve liquidity with their coin.

Speaking in-depth on the history and future of money at the Crypto Investor Show last week, Benartzi was optimistic about the potential for ‘user-generated’ currencies to establish the third era of money – or Money 3.0.

She said: “In this era of money, money comes from the people. This is a brand new concept in its modern manifestation. When I say people, I mean the folks who invented Bitcoin, whomever he or she may be. The folks who invented Ethereum; the folks that invented the hundreds, maybe thousands of currencies that you’re now familiar with. These are user-generated currencies.”

Bancor aims to create ‘smart tokens’, which would talk to each other and be aware of each other’s exchange rates, taking humans out of the equation.

But with any currency, she argues, value does not exist without liquidity. If no one wants to accept or use a particular coin, then it is essentially worthless to the person or persons holding it.

“Only when a currency is liquid, when it can be traded and exchange for the things you want – the food or the house or the lunch – is it really valuable,” she continued. “Including when what you want from your currency is other currencies.

“Today you almost need to be a nation in order to achieve liquidity. But when we look forward to this decentralised consumer internet, we wanted to create a paradigm via a protocol that would allow all currencies to be liquid to each other, really blowing the doors off for opportunities on who could make a viable currency to begin with.”

The current system, Money 2.0, is based on efficiency above all else, allowing humanity to move forward and evolve at a faster rate. Diversifying money and where it comes from would move the dial towards resilience, and perhaps help to fix some of the problems that currently threaten us.

Benartzi added: “If we ask ourselves what’s better for people – is it very, very efficient systems or very, very resilient systems? Most scientists and thought leaders in this space would say it’s somewhere balanced in the middle, where we’re efficient enough to make continuous progress, but not so efficient that we’re decimating neighbourhoods, or communities or entire countries when our system hits bumps.”