In exploring new ways of seeing money and finance, this book has aimed to empower and embolden the reader to start to look at money differently and to question the purpose of our finance system, both what it is now and what it should be. After all, alternative finance was created by a wide social movement across business, academia and civil society, involving many collaborations between people outside of finance with those who were and are utterly disaffected within it.

As well as encouraging more social movements to see the importance of money and finance for furthering their own causes, we hope also that many more practitioners within the finance industry will begin to challenge themselves to develop financial innovations that are founded upon a belief that money can be a force for public good and that finance ought to be more than a complex machine for creating and extracting private profit. The world out there is not an external resource to be mined in the interests of creating financial value. That world out there is nothing less than the lives of billions of people and countless other species in the natural world. The future of finance needs to take far greater care of both if it is to keep hold of its social licence and play a role in delivering the transformation we need to protect people and planet from the urgent threats that both currently face.

In this final chapter, we extend our analysis to set out what we think are some of the most pressing and difficult questions that need to be addressed if we are to free our understanding of finance from its gilded cage and continue our journey towards a world were money is something social, collaborative, accountable, democratic and sustainable. Right now, however, there are those who would interpret the mission of democratizing finance in a very different way to us, seeking to remove the state completely and further eradicate human decision-making from the apparently smooth functioning of tech-enhanced market mechanisms. The rise of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain, and the cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets these technologies have created, has been interpreted by many as a democratic revolution – putting power into the code-writing hands of people who are free to manage transactions without the need for such cumbersome legacy hardware as banks, law firms and governments.