Not all exchange needs to pass through the same narrow set of institutions. Sometimes the point is to keep value circulating among people who already share risk in a watershed or a neighborhood—to make credit visible as trust, and to slow the drain of wealth toward centers that will never feel the consequences of extraction. These experiments sit beside conventional finance; they do not replace it so much as they widen the moral imagination of what “the economy” can be. The hardest part is rarely the instrument itself. It is the culture around it—who can issue, who owes whom, and what prevents a new tool from reproducing old hierarchies in fresh packaging.