“The economic interdependence between industrial countries would be ‘the real guarantor of the good behaviour of one state to another’ … the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous.” - Norman Angell, “The Great Illusion”, 1909 This graph and the associated quote have continuously lived in my head since the moment I saw them and are the strongest illustration for the tectonic once-in-a-generation shift that is happening right now. Historically capital mobility has been singularly driven top-down, while it may have looked to Angell like globalization had solved world peace in 1909, 1914 quickly showed just how wrong that was and the glorious capital mobility and economic freedom had in 1909 wasn’t seen again for almost another 80 years. War, tariffs, capital controls were the constraints of individual economic freedom and economic mobility and 100% of these policies were decided at the level of the nation-state. The world has changed and stablecoins have been the bellwether. @Tether_to has just announced that they have recently surpassed 500M users across the emerging markets and developing countries. 500M users holding the US dollar completely from the bottom up. Unanimously these countries don’t actually want their users holding other currencies and want them locked into holding only the nationally issued currency and yet the fact is that anybody with a cell phone and connection to the internet now has access to financial instruments completely denied to their parents' generation. Tether, arguably the best business in the entire world, has been built on this incredible transformation of financial freedom directly to the individual. This is only the beginning. Global and permissionless markets have proven to be the most important outcome of decentralized technology and now the entire financial industry is racing to move the world's asset base onchain. If you asked me to think of a larger shift in how the world works than literally the transition of MONEY and the entire global financial system I’m not sure I could think of any. We’re talking about a truly once-in-a-generation shift of how the world’s population has access to money and all financial instruments and a transition from a top-down authoritarian structure to an open financial system with bottoms up available to every connected person on the planet. Our vision with @LayerZero_Core is to live at the heart of this transition to a global and permissionless financial system and to accelerate the world's adoption of better money.