What If Money Worked Like Email?

Send £50 to a friend in London and it can be instant and free. Now send it to someone in Manilla and suddenly you're paying fees, waiting days, wondering if it arrived. Try sending £0.50 anywhere and the transaction costs more than the money itself.

 In the 1990s, email made communication instant and free regardless of distance or amount. You could send a message to Tokyo or a file to Berlin without calculating costs per kilobyte. It just worked.

Money still operates like postal services in the 1980s. A few countries built instant payment rails, Faster Payments in the UK, Zelle in the US, SEPA Instant in the EU. 

But try sending that £50 to someone in Nigeria or Vietnam and suddenly you are back in Western Union territory: 7% fees, two-day waits and the requirement of visiting a physical location. While accepting payments as a small business means paying 1.5-3% per transaction. In addition to these issues, what if your bank decides to debank you, or if you're among the 1.3 billion adults worldwide without a bank account? These ‘instant’ systems only work within their walled gardens, propped up by the banking infrastructure they supposedly bypass.

There's another problem, although much less visible, even when your bank transfer feels instantaneous, it is running on energy-hungry infrastructure of data centres, clearing houses, and verification networks processing billions of transactions daily. That £50 you sent? It powered through institutional machinery that's been consuming electricity since the 1970s.

Email didn't just make sending letters faster, it removed the postal system from the equation. What if money could experience the same revolution? Nano is digital money that can be sent anywhere in the world in under half a second, with zero fees, using less energy than a blink of an LED. Bypassing banks, crossing all borders and transferring solely under the control of the individual. 

Why Efficiency Matters Now

Technology follows similar principles to biological evolution. Systems that waste resources are filtered out. The difference is that while biological evolution takes millennia, technological evolution can happen in decades or years when the pressure is intense enough. Right now, the pressure is immense.

The climate crisis is putting evolutionary pressure on every human system. We're being forced to ask which of our technologies work in a resource-constrained world? Which can adapt, and which will collapse under their own inefficiency?

Data centres already consume 1-1.5% of global electricity. With AI's growth, this could reach 3-4% by 2030. We can't afford to add more energy-intensive systems. Every inefficiency in our existing infrastructure, including how we move money, becomes a liability.

The systems that survive aren't always the strongest or most established. They're the ones that can do more with less.

Why "Solved" Payments Aren't Actually Solved

Domestic instant payments are impressive. The UK's Faster Payments Service processes over 5 billion transactions annually. For those of us with stable bank accounts in stable countries, money has never moved more smoothly. But this convenience hides a crucial reality: these systems aren't solutions, they're privileges.

Although the existing solutions work well enough inside their own walled gardens, people face issues when trying to operate beyond these limits. Popular financial platform, Revolut charges up to 5% or a $10 flat fee (whichever is greater) for transfers to non-Revolut accounts, plus weekend conversion fees. Global remittances, money sent by migrants to families back home, cost an average of 6.49% per transaction. That's £34 billion extracted annually from people who can least afford it. A Kenyan domestic worker in London sending £200 home loses £12.50 to fees before their family sees a penny.

There exists this 'permission problem', wherein your Faster Payment only works because your bank allows it to. Lebanese citizens who watched their banking system collapse starting in 2019 know exactly how "instant" their payments felt when banks refused to process withdrawals. Or Cypriots who woke up in 2013 to discover the government had taken 47.5% of their deposits overnight. Or Canadian truckers in 2022 whose accounts were frozen without judicial process. These weren't authoritarian regimes, these were developed Western democracies with 'robust' financial infrastructure.

The infrastructure problem runs deeper. Every Faster Payment, every Venmo transfer, every SEPA transaction relies on the same energy-intensive centralised banking system. Visa's network processes 65,000 transaction messages per second at peak times, requiring vast server farms running 24/7. One transaction uses approximately 0.0008 kWh, infrastructure that requires constant power, constant maintenance, and constant intermediaries extracting value at every layer.

Despite this extensive system, 1.3 billion adults globally remain completely excluded from the formal financial system. For them, these instant payment systems might as well not exist. When we talk about ‘solved’ payment problems, we're really talking about solved payment problems for the privileged minority with stable banking systems in stable countries.

The Macro Context: Why This Matters Now

Climate displacement, the forced or voluntary movement of people due to climate change impacts like floods, droughts, and sea-level rise, is already here. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded 32.6 million new internal displacements due to disasters in 2022 alone. By 2050, as many as 1.2 billion people may be displaced by climate change. These are people who need to move wealth across borders, often without documentation, often without banking relationships. When your village floods, you don't have time for correspondent banking.

As climate displacement accelerates, the number of people needing borderless, permissionless financial infrastructure will explode. As geopolitical tensions fracture global systems, the fragility of centralised banking becomes existential.

De-globalisation is fracturing the systems we've taken for granted. Supply chains that worked for 40 years are being dismantled for ‘national security’. Trade relationships are being weaponised. Capital controls are returning. Yet people's lives remain cross-border. They need financial infrastructure that works regardless of the geopolitical temperature.

Banking instability is no longer theoretical. In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 48 hours, the second-largest bank failure in US history. Credit Suisse, a 167-year-old institution, was emergency-merged with UBS. When faith in institutions evaporates this quickly, alternatives stop being interesting and start being essential.

Another major issue, previously mentioned, is power consumption. Gartner (November 2025) estimates global data center consumption at 448 TWh for 2025, representing a 16% increase from 2024. The IEA projects that total data center consumption will reach 945 TWh by 2030, comparable to the total electricity consumption of Japan. We cannot add more energy-intensive systems to this load. Traditional cryptocurrency mining already uses approximately 150 TWh annually - more than the entire country of Argentina.

These trends aren't separate but interlinked. Climate displacement creates migration, which triggers political backlash, which leads to authoritarianism, which weaponises financial systems, which excludes vulnerable populations, which creates instability, and our banking systems are woven in at every step.

What Actually Happens When You Send a Nano Transaction

Strip away the complexity and money is just information. "You have this much, I have this much, you're sending me some of yours." Every payment system is about verifying and recording this information transfer. The question is how much energy and infrastructure needs to be used to do it.

When you send money to a friend through traditional banking rails, that information passes through your bank's servers, through clearing systems, through the recipient's bank, each step requiring verification, intermediaries, and energy.

Bitcoin and early cryptocurrencies tried to solve this by removing banks but created a different problem: they require thousands of computers worldwide to compete to verify every transaction through energy-intensive "mining." One Bitcoin transaction currently uses approximately 1,400 kWh - enough to power the average UK household for two months.

Nano takes a completely different approach. Instead of one shared ledger that everyone fights to update, each user has their own blockchain within a "block-lattice" structure. Think of it like everyone having their own account book rather than one giant community book that thousands of people need to verify simultaneously.

When you send Nano to someone, only two accounts need to update: yours (sending) and theirs (receiving). There's no mining, no competition, no proof-of-work arms race. The network confirms these updates through a lightweight voting system run by representatives - nodes operated by users, exchanges, and organisations with a stake in the network's success. These nodes don't get paid; they run because having a functioning network benefits them.

The result? A single Nano transaction uses approximately 0.000112 kWh. That's less energy than a single Google search (0.0003 kWh). To put this in perspective:

• Nano transaction: 0.000112 kWh
• Google search: 0.0003 kWh  
• Visa infrastructure per transaction: 0.0008 kWh
• Bitcoin transaction: approximately 1,400 kWh

Bitcoin currently has the following annualised footprints which are frankly shocking (taken from https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption) while only ever able to make 7 transactions per second, globally taking anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours, or even days. 

Nano on the other hand has transactions settle in under a second, typically 0.3 seconds. There are no network fees, not "low fees" but literally zero, because there is no mining to pay for. It works the same whether you are sending across the street or across the world, £5 or £5,000. No intermediary can block it, no government can freeze it, no bank can decide whether you are not allowed to participate.

Where Crypto Should Be Going (But Mostly Isn't)

The cryptocurrency space is having an identity crisis. Most of the industry is still copying Bitcoin's homework  with proof-of-work mining, energy-intensive verification, speculation over utility. The environmental devastation is treated as an acceptable cost of ‘decentralisation'. It isn't.

The "Bitcoin uses renewable energy" argument has become the industry's go-to defence. This is nonsense. Using renewable energy for wasteful computation doesn't make the computation less wasteful - it makes the renewable energy wasted. Every megawatt-hour spent on Bitcoin mining is a megawatt-hour that could replace fossil fuels elsewhere, be stored in batteries, or power industrial processes. The opportunity cost is enormous. Most Bitcoin mining still relies on fossil fuels, estimates from Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance in their Digital Mining Industry Report (April 2025) state: 52.4% from non-fossil sources (42.6% renewables + 9.8% nuclear), with fossil fuels at 47.6% (38.2% natural gas, 8.9% coal, 0.5% oil).

Ethereum's pivot to proof-of-stake in September 2022 was presented as a solution. And to be fair, it was significant: Ethereum's energy consumption dropped by approximately 99.95%. This deserves recognition, it is proof the industry can change when the pressure is sufficient.

But proof-of-stake creates different problems. It concentrates power in the hands of large holders. It requires complex mechanisms to prevent bad behaviour. It still involves substantially more computational overhead than necessary. Ethereum reduced energy consumption from catastrophic to merely substantial. Progress? Certainly. Sufficient? Not remotely.

What's happening in regulatory rooms matters more than crypto Twitter. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation includes disclosure requirements for energy consumption and environmental impact. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority is exploring similar frameworks. As banks and payment processors face increasing ESG scrutiny, energy-intensive cryptocurrencies become liabilities rather than innovations.

Central banks worldwide are exploring Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), over 130 countries representing 98% of global GDP. China's digital yuan is already in widespread use. The EU's digital euro is in development. The Bank of England is actively exploring a ‘digital pound’.

Most CBDCs are designed for maximum control, not maximum freedom. They are programmable money that governments can switch off, redirect, or constrain. China's digital yuan already includes technical capability for the government to control exactly how and where money is spent. This is banking infrastructure with authoritarian characteristics baked in at the protocol level.

Money must become simpler, faster, cheaper, and cleaner - or it will be replaced by systems that are. 

The UN estimates there are currently 100 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, a number that's doubled in the past decade. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre projects 1.2 billion climate migrants by 2050. The number of people who exist outside traditional financial infrastructure won't decrease, it will only climb further.

Lebanese citizens weren't 'unbanked’ until suddenly they were while Cypriots didn't expect bail-ins until it happened. SVB depositors thought their money was safe until a Friday afternoon when it wasn't. The uncomfortable truth is that we are all potentially one crisis away from joining them.

The privilege of stable banking isn't permanent. It's a temporary luxury afforded by fortunate geography and timing. As climate change accelerates, as political systems destabilise, as banking crises recur with increasing frequency, the question stops being ‘who needs alternatives?’ and becomes ‘who doesn’t?'

"Too Good to Be True" 

The inevitable response is if Nano is so efficient, so fast, so cheap, why isn't everyone using it already? It's a fair question. The answer has two parts: network effects are real and powerful, but they can be overcome when conditions change.

Email took decades to replace fax machines despite being obviously superior. Electric vehicles languished for a century. The internet existed for military and academic use for 20 years before the general public saw any value in it. Transformative technologies typically have long gestation periods where they seem like solutions in search of problems - right up until they become obviously essential.

Nano has been running since 2015, nearly a decade of proven reliability and security without the spectacular collapses that have plagued other cryptocurrencies. But it lacks the speculative hype that drives mainstream attention. There's no mining to incentivise armies of evangelists. There are no transaction fees to fund marketing campaigns. It simply works, efficiently and quietly, for people who need it to work.

The Nano Foundation operates as a non-profit volunteer organisation with no equity, no shares, and no venture capital funding. Its directors and ethics cannot be bought. There's no ICO wealth to fund Super Bowl advertisements. This absence of profit motive means Nano lacks the marketing machinery that propelled other cryptocurrencies into mainstream consciousness, but it also means the technology can focus purely on utility rather than investor returns.

Conditions are currently shifting with energy costs rising and climate pressure intensifying. Banking instability is recurring more frequently while political systems are fragmenting. Each crisis creates a new wave of people who discover that ‘wait and see’ isn't an option when your bank has collapsed or your currency has hyperinflated.

The early internet comparison is instructive. In 1995, most people couldn't explain why they'd need email or web browsing. "I can already send letters and read newspapers," they'd say. By 2005, the question seemed absurd. What changed wasn't the technology, email worked the same in 1995 as it did in 2005. What changed was that conditions made the old way increasingly untenable.

Daily Mail US

Choosing Your Path Forward

Money is just information about who owes what to whom. The question is how much infrastructure, energy, institutional control, and extraction we're willing to tolerate to move that information around. For decades, the answer was ‘however much it takes’ because we could afford it. We no longer can.

The tools exist now. Nano is proof that money can be instant, free, borderless, and efficient without sacrificing security or decentralisation. Whether Nano specifically succeeds or whether other efficient systems emerge matters less than the principle: the future belongs to technologies that waste nothing because there will be nothing left to waste.

We can build better infrastructure, or we can insist that the old systems are unsinkable. Either way, we're going to find out what survives.

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Learn more about Nano here: https://nano.org/en

Try for free Nano here: https://nano.org/en/try-nano