Privacy is Fungibility: Why Endogenous Tokens Are Not Money

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 May 2026] Privacy is Fungibility: Why Endogenous Tokens Are Not Money Alex Lynham, Geoffrey Goodell In this paper, we make a case that endogenous tokens such as cryptoassets are not money. First, we define and classify tokens found on public, permissionless ledgers, contrasting them with privately issued stablecoins and proposed CBDC designs. We then discuss the work of Kahn et al in Money is Privacy on cash versus simplified credit, and we extend their analysis to the situation found on most public, permissionless ledgers. Many public, permissionless ledgers utilize an account-based abstraction for balances, resulting in a default state that maps onto the most harmful models of agent interaction enumerated in Money is Privacy. The conclusion is threefold: that most blockchain economies lack a cash-like primitive; that stablecoins do not intrinsically fulfil this role; and that the reliance of a network on an endogenous token for security exposes holders even of a privacy-preserving asset to the same risk, if that asset relies on the same global ledger state as the endogenous token. Comments: 20 pages, 2 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2605.15934 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.15934v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15934 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Geoffrey Goodell [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 13:15:32 UTC (24 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)