In 1976, Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize winning economist, postulated that great economic benefit, including the elimination of inflation, would result if governments were to relax controls over the issuance of currency.1 In Hayek’s view, when a central currency issuer uses the money supply to achieve a particular end—such as the regulation of interest rates—it actually hurts the price mechanism equilibrium in the long term. This, in turn, can provoke significant currency fluctuations, the opposite of what good monetary policy seeks to achieve. His stated belief was that the application of “free-market” principles to the issuance of currencies would help reduce or eliminate these fluctuations.Now, more than 40 years later, we see his assertion playing out in cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings (ICOs) and stable coins. While some banks and regulators still have some reservations, there is no contesting that these new financial instruments show great promise, even in their infancy.