Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, journalist Thomas Bollen, and researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden have collaborated on "The Waterworks of Money," a project mapping the hidden architecture of the financial system through drawing and animation. The initiative emerged from two years of research involving interviews with over 100 experts across banking, government, and academia. Kingma spent more than 2,200 hours translating these findings into an intricate visual landscape that depicts money as a network of reservoirs, channels, and pumps, illustrating how liquidity flows unevenly to banks, governments, businesses, and households.
A central theme of the work is the misconception that banks merely act as intermediaries for savings; in reality, they create new money when issuing loans. This mechanism has exacerbated inequality, particularly during periods of cheap credit, driving asset inflation that benefits wealthy households and large multinationals while leaving others without access to capital. Van der Linden notes that despite post-2008 regulatory reforms, the underlying fragility of the banking system remains unaddressed, as evidenced by state-backed rescues of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse in 2023.
The project also explores bitcoin’s potential role in Europe’s monetary future. While traditional institutions like BlackRock and Vanguard have integrated bitcoin as an investment asset, this shift risks compromising its original promise as an alternative payment system. However, the rise of stablecoins and bitcoin has pressured banks to innovate, leading to initiatives such as Wero, a European bank-led payment wallet launched in 2024. Bollen highlights that bitcoin’s design resembles full reserve banking, avoiding the run risk inherent in fractional reserve systems, though he cautions against replicating past failures like FTX.
The visualization of monetary mechanics serves as a critical corrective to public misunderstanding regarding money creation. By exposing the structural biases that favor asset holders over wage earners, the project underscores how policy decisions around credit availability directly influence wealth distribution. This transparency challenges the narrative that financial instability is solely due to external shocks, pointing instead to inherent design flaws in fractional reserve banking that persist despite regulatory patches.
Bitcoin’s integration into traditional finance presents a paradoxical outcome for monetary reform advocates. While institutional adoption legitimizes the asset class, it potentially dilutes its utility as a decentralized payment alternative. The emergence of bank-led innovations like Wero suggests that incumbent institutions are adapting to competitive pressures rather than ceding ground, indicating that the future of European finance may involve hybrid models where crypto assets coexist with, but do not replace, regulated banking infrastructure.
