Enough with aid agencies. Let’s give people cash.

This morning, Fortune was able to exclusively report on the founding of the Mojaloop Foundation, a coalition of companies and nonprofits intended to advance next-generation financial technology around the world. The group’s founding sponsors include the Gates Foundation and Google, and the main thrust is increasing access to banking and digital payments in developing nations.

The group will do this by advocating for an open-source software package, Mojaloop, that makes it easier for countries and central banks to adopt technology comparable to the U.K.’s Faster Payments. Those enhanced banking pipes will in turn enable better digital finance tools for users, making saving and trading easier and more affordable, and economies more robust.

The news is emblematic of ongoing changes in how we think about developing countries, international aid, and disaster relief. After all, the idea that an enhanced banking system is a way to improve the lives of subsistence farmers or small traders in, say, rural Gambia, is a relatively recent one.

Instead, the standard model for development and disaster relief has for decades too often exemplified the Aid Industrial Complex. The system of nonprofits and agencies who provide goods, services, and training to reduce global poverty do crucial, life-saving work, but they also inevitably bring their own foreign biases and motives, and have moreover become self-protecting institutions with large, sometimes well-paid staffs.

At their most extreme, these agencies and nonprofits become part of Anand Giridharadas’ “elite charade,” just another way for the richest people in the world to show how smart and effective they are (and hey, maybe advance their own goals a little along the way). They’re why Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has singled out the supposed do-gooding of the World Economic Forum to skewer its chi-chi meetings at Davos. (Though it has other reasons for existing, it’s also hard here not to think of the Peace Corps, which for decades has sent American college students abroad to, somehow, teach Africans to farm).

Implicit in the DNA of many traditional development projects is the idea that the person dispensing the aid ‘knows better’ than the people receiving it. Agencies often engage in top-down planning of what a developing economy should become, effectively deciding what people in need really need.

But this old model of development and aid is being slowly but steadily replaced by a much simpler, less self-aggrandizing ethos: Give People Cash.

That was one of the main takeaways from my recent conversation with economist Richard Davies, a former advisor to the U.K. finance minister who recently published an amazing book on disaster economics. Cash relief is suddenly a major topic of U.S. political discourse thanks both to coronavirus relief, and Andrew Yang’s advocacy for Universal Basic Income.

Cash aid assumes that every human knows what they need, and that given the economic raw material, they can find it or build it. It rejects the implicit superiority of the Development Industrial Complex, and the idea that you can know what’s best for someone else just because you were born in a developed country, or because of your skin color, or your family name. A growing laundry list of scientific studies has borne that premise out.

Mojaloop pitches itself as a key part of that new aid formula: the part that helps actually get money directly to people, wherever they are. Ultimately, that helps make people worldwide richer, happier, and healthier – on their own terms, not someone else’s.

David Z. Morris

@davidzmorris

david.morris@fortune.com

DECENTRALIZED NEWS

Credits

Community banks show their value with SBA loan program ... Chime leads U.S. digital banking ... Cryptocurrency companies raise coronavirus relief using "quadratic funding" ... You can now mine Bitcoin inside Animal Crossing (sort of) ... SEC eases crowdfunding rules due to coronavirus ... Local currencies can be vital during a crisis ... Irish donors return Choctaw generosity a century later ... Bitcoin price touches $9,000 ... Crypto exchange Bitfinex saw revenue rise 96% for the quarter ... Crypto services firm BlockFi hires former Amex exec.

Debits

Europe's five largest banks see a 40% drop in market cap ... Lobbyists helped shape the SBA program to benefit larger businesses ... Credit Karma cuts salaries ahead of Intuit acquisition ... Cash piles up in L.A. as coronavirus cripples global money laundering ... States, unlike companies, must match federal relief funds to get help ... Ripple paid MoneyGram $16.6 million in Q1 to use its RippleNet tech ... The White House's coronavirus modeller also predicted the Dow would hit 36,000 ... Researcher says BitMEX exchange is driving up Bitcoin fees ... The U.K. frowns on firing anyone during the crisis, except investment bankers ... WeWork founder sues SoftBank for giving him too much money, then not enough.

BUBBLE-O-METER

$2.999 Trillion

The amount the U.S. Treasury says it will borrow between April and June to pay for massive rescue packages in response to the coronavirus. That's more than five times the previous record for government borrowing in a single quarter, $569 billion, a level reached at the depths of the financial crisis.

FOMO NO MO'

This initial bubble does two crucial things: First, it gives a proven narrative of an asset's ability to grow in value quickly, regardless of if that's rational or repeatable. Second, it creates a large fanbase of investors who have the stories to tell of their huge gains and every incentive to keep that narrative alive.

Derek Mead of Vice discussing the narrative and social similarities between Tesla stock and Bitcoin. On Friday, May 1, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he believes Tesla's stock price is too high, sending the stock down 10%. It was a bizarre choice for any CEO, especially one previously punished for his tweets by the SEC

Mead argues that Musk is well aware of the intense, emotional hype that his company's stock has in common with Bitcoin, and "decided to tank the stock because high prices and high expectations from stans were setting him up for more long term scrutiny than him being in trouble with the SEC short term." Which is about as reasonable an explanation as any.

THE LEDGER'S LATEST

Andreessen Horowitz doubles down on crypto with new $515 million investment fund - Robert Hackett

Robinhood raises $280 million in push for global expansion - Jeff John Roberts

Goldman Sachs doesn't think there will be a third round of small-business relief - Anne Sraders

Saving lives vs. saving the economy is a false choice, say economists - Jeremy Kahn

Cannabis retailers see highs and lows in the pandemic - Rey Mashayeki

Court throws ECB coronavirus relief efforts into doubt - David Meyer

Inside the chaotic rollout of the SBA's PPP loan program - Anne Sraders

Whole Foods is restricting cash payments in some stores - Jeff John Roberts

 

MEMES AND MUMBLES

As coronavirus guts the restaurant industry, delivery apps keep on eating.

This edition of The Ledger was curated by David Z. Morris. Contact him at david.morris@fortune.com.