Can money be programmable?

In 2019 I wrote a book with a ridiculous title, Bitcoin Pizza, about a serious idea: money that carries its own rules.

Money that can only be spent on food. Aid that releases when a shipment is confirmed. A contract that pays itself when the work is done. People thought it was a fantasy. Then it was a bubble. Now it's quietly infrastructure.

What's the pattern?

Money has always been programmable. It just used to be programmed by institutions. A food stamp is money with a rule attached. An escrow account is money that waits for a condition. A gift card is money that expires. We didn't call it programmable because a person, not code, enforced the rule.

What changed is who can write the program. Code can now carry the rule inside the money itself. And in 2025, the United States passed its first federal law for stablecoins, digital dollars backed one-to-one, which was the moment programmable money stopped being a fringe experiment and became something a bank could build on.

But here's the pattern I keep coming back to. The credit card wasn't trusted until 1970, when the law capped your liability for fraud. Programmable money will be trusted the same way: not because the code is clever, but because someone is clearly accountable when the code is wrong.

I built supply chain systems on this idea at Chronicled. The technology worked from day one. What took years was the trust: who's liable, who can reverse, who do you call.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Start with a rule you already enforce by hand. Escrow, milestone payments, expense limits. Programmable money is easiest where the program already exists on paper.

Ask who reverses it. Code that can't be undone is a feature for the person who trusts it and a nightmare for the one who made a typo. Design the undo before the launch.

And watch the law, not the coin. The interesting news in this space is regulation, because regulation is what turns a clever demo into money people use.

Money with rules inside it is here. The pizza was worth it.

What's one rule your company enforces by hand that the money could enforce itself?

Related: Would you let an AI agent spend your money?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote