3 Money facilitates payments as a medium of exchange, serves as a store of value that can be relied on for future use, and simplifies transactions by providing a common unit of account to compare the value of goods and services.
A decade ago, Bitcoin was heralded as a new kind of digital money that would address frictions in payments as well as serve as a unit of account and store of value without the need for centralized governance. Bitcoin’s emergence created an entirely new payment instrument and asset class exchanged over a set of payment rails supported by distributed ledger technology.