The monetary system is the indispensable missing link in the debate of sustainability and
whether the current financial system can handle these evolved needs. To date the UN
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) primarily have been financed either through the private
sector through conventional public sector taxes and fees or through philanthropic commitment.
Assuming a need of 4 to 5 trillion dollars annually in the 10 to 15 years left to finance our
future these conventional sources of finance are insufficient in terms of both the scale and
speed of funding required to finance our future. Furthermore the inherent instability of our
financial system forces the world community to focus first and foremost on repairing and
stabilizing the existing system.The development of cryptocurrencies using distributed ledger
technologies (mainly blockchain) has prompted leading central banks to study the potential
application of this approach to independently create purchasing power. In this vein this book
offers a new approach namely introducing a parallel electronic currency specifically designed
to finance global common goods and provide the resources necessary to achieve the SDGs.
Furthermore this mechanism would have a stabilizing effect on the existing monetary system.
The book argues that one way this could be achieved is by giving central banks a modified
monetary mandate to inject new liquidity into the system using a top-down approach.
Alternatively liquidity could come from corporate or communal initiatives with crypto- or
communal currencies in a bottom-up approach. The author maintains that by issuing a
blockchain-enabled parallel electronic currency earmarked for SDG-related projects and using
other channels for monetary flow rather than the conventional ones the future could be
financed in a different manner. In the long run abandoning our current monetary monoculture
and introducing a monetary ecosystem would stabilize international financial markets increase
monetary regulatory efforts reduce negative externalities create a social Pareto optimum and
stabilize democracies. This book presents in the same spirit as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of
Physics a Tao of finance-an outside-of-the-box approach to financing global common goods.
