From Soft Power to Hard Bargaining
From Dollar Dominance to Money Unbundled
The systems your organization uses to move money are more fragile than you think. Not broken — not yet — but fragmenting. And the world this week is giving you an unusually clear look at what happens when that fragmentation accelerates.
How This Forecast Surfaced
When we started talking about the changing role of money in mid-2025, Trump’s tariffs had raised a provocative question: was weakening the dollar actually part of the plan? Was it intended as a deliberate move to cut America’s debt and rebalance trade? Even as we were thinking about trade, technology, migration, media, money and its changing nature kept surfacing.
We had discussions about gold, art, and crypto. About what gets funded, where and how. About how that funding moves, in what forms and over what networks. We asked ourselves, what holds value when the system shifts? And underneath all of it, a simpler question: when the systems people trust to store and move value start to feel unreliable, what do they reach for instead? Out of this, F09: From Dollar Dominance to Money Unbundled was born.
Separately: we've been paid in sugar beets, speakers, a bike, a pie, Ethereum, lamps, emergency sysadmin, and champagne for various work.
Why Does This Matter Now?
Start with something you can see in real time.
The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly 20% of the world's oil normally flows — has been effectively closed since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28th. Iran achieved it not with a naval fleet, but with cheap drones. Insurers stopped underwriting ships. Shipping companies stopped sending them. Oil hit $112 a barrel at last check — its highest point in the war — and Goldman Sachs expects elevated prices to last into 2027. Trump asked allied nations to send warships to reopen it. Six eventually said they were open to it — so far.
The detail that sharpens the picture: Iran isn't blocking everyone equally. Ships from China, India, Turkey, and Pakistan have been allowed to transit — some through diplomatic negotiation, some by declaring political neutrality, some by paying. Western-flagged vessels remain excluded.
Then this week Iran moved from filtering to monetizing: a paid corridor through its own territorial waters, with at least one operator reportedly paying $2 million for the right to pass. The world's most important energy chokepoint now has a toll booth. Access to oil — and to the money that flows from it — depends on which side of the new divide you're on, and what you're willing to pay to prove it.
The same logic is spreading into territory most organizations haven’t mapped.
China turned control of rare earth minerals into a negotiating lever, restricting exports until the US agreed to tariff reductions. The lever worked. The US is running the same play: a draft State Department memo obtained by the New York Times proposes withholding HIV and malaria medications from 1.3 million Zambians unless Zambia opens its copper and lithium deposits to American companies. Not confirmed policy — but Canada’s resource minister has already said supply chains are “being weaponized.” That’s no longer an analyst’s metaphor. It’s the official framing.
Poland has been watching all of this, and accumulating gold — 550 tonnes so far, more than the European Central Bank — and is targeting 700. Its central bank governor calls it a national security measure. Meanwhile Wall Street has started treating Nvidia chip clusters as financial collateral, bundling GPU-backed loans into bonds the same way mortgages once were. Pension funds are buying in.
The pattern is the same at every scale: find something scarce, make it the thing that others need, use that need as leverage — or as the foundation of a new kind of value. Oil. Minerals. Medication. Gold. Computing power. The search for new things to anchor value to isn’t a response to the dollar’s fragmentation. It’s accelerating it.
The Forecast, Applied
For most of history, money has done three things: store value, enable exchange, and keep score — who owes what to whom. For eighty years, the dollar did all three, globally, more or less reliably. What’s changing isn’t that the dollar is collapsing. It’s that those three functions are coming apart from each other, and different things are filling each role in different places.
The dollar is simultaneously doing two contradictory things: acting as a financial weapon — frozen assets, sanctioned corridors, conditioned aid — and acting as a safe haven that everyone still needs. The more aggressively it’s used as a lever, the more its counterparties (the other parties in any financial relationship) build exits from it.
The clearest recent example: in December 2025, Standard Bank of South Africa became the first African bank to connect directly to China’s CIPS payment system. (CIPS is China’s alternative to SWIFT — the network underpinning most international bank transfers.) African businesses can now settle trade with China in renminbi, no dollar intermediary required. That friction wasn’t a bug, it waspart of the design. The new system removes it, live across 21 African markets.
When payment rails (the infrastructure through which money moves between banks and countries) become geopolitical choices, what does your organization depend on to keep functioning? This is the legibility question. A European NGO wiring money to a partner in a sanctioned country may find its bank won’t process the transaction — not because the NGO did anything wrong, but because the compliance systems flagged the corridor. Legible to Western banking, invisible to whatever route its partner uses. An organization running entirely through one set of rails is dependent on whoever controls them.
Why It Matters
Most organizations working across borders were built for a world where the dollar was universal, payment infrastructure was neutral, and aid relationships were governed by humanitarian logic. That world isn’t gone. But it’s no longer the only operating environment.
The Zambia memo isn’t really about Zambia. What used to be humanitarian architecture is being renegotiated on material terms, openly, as policy. Any organization working in resource-rich contexts, or dependent on dollar-denominated funding, is in some version of that negotiation. Most just haven’t been told yet.
What To Do With This
The people most exposed to this aren’t hedge funds. They’re organizations whose expertise is in what money can do when put to good use, not how it moves.
An NGO moving money to a partner in a sanctioned corridor. A foundation making grants in a currency under pressure. A civil society organization whose funder just restructured its aid as a minerals deal. A university research program whose cloud computing budget just became subject to export controls. These aren’t edge cases anymore.
The practical question: whose systems is your organization legible to, and what would it take to stay legible to others? An organization with relationships and reporting in more than one financial system — dollar-based and otherwise — has more options than one running entirely through a single correspondent bank. Most organizations haven’t mapped that exposure. Map it before a corridor closes, not after.
If you’re here because you watch for structural shifts before they become headlines: the hierarchy of what counts as reliable collateral or trustworthy infrastructure is being actively rewritten. Naming what’s changed is where the response starts.
Where This May Be Headed
The question isn’t really about the dollar. The dollar will survive this period — diminished, contested, but still the largest node in a fragmented system. The question is what fills the spaces around it.
What’s emerging isn’t a replacement currency or a clean new order. It’s a proliferation of leverage instruments, each with their own geography, each requiring different relationships to access. Dollars, Chinese payment rails, energy contracts, mineral offtake agreements, computing access, medication supply chains. The scramble to hold positions across multiple systems isn’t preparation for a transition. It is the transition.
In F09, we laid out three hypothetical scenario pathways this transformation may follow:
In the first scenario, fragmentation stabilizes into something workable. Multiple systems coexist — dollar infrastructure, regional alternatives, bilateral arrangements, direct exchange. Expensive and friction-heavy, but navigable for organizations that built flexibility early.
In the second, nothing resolves. Corridors open and close unpredictably. The squeeze logic spreads further into development finance, health systems, logistics, energy, food supply. Organizations that assumed stability pay the highest price.
In the third — further out — the response to this chaos is infrastructure that routes around obstacles entirely. Not a new currency. Something quieter. In Venezuela, businesses already pay wages in USDT because the banking system can't be trusted to hold value overnight, and since the US intervention there, probably even less so. Gulf states are pricing some oil contracts outside dollars entirely. Zambia now accepts Chinese renminbi for mining taxes and royalties — meaning a sovereign government has restructured what it will receive as legitimate payment. Further out still: AI agents are beginning to execute payments autonomously between organizations, using stablecoin rails their human operators never touch. The logic underneath all of it is the same: if the pipes are controlled by someone who may shut them off, build different pipes, and maybe keep building them as the situation shifts. The organizations best placed for that scenario are already thinking about this now.
Bring the Conversation to Your Community
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Download the Local Convening Toolkit at 10fconsortium.org/convening-kit and run your own.
Let Us Know How You’re Using the Forecasts
Our 10F Forecasts and AREAS Framework have been out in the world for just over one month. Well over a thousand downloads later, we’re curious how they’re landing.
If you’ve read some or all, downloaded the full forecast collection or just one or two, or sat down with AREAS, we’d love to know where you’re finding value. We’ve found AREAS extremely useful in understanding some very fluid transitions emerging at the moment.
What forecasts have been most useful or enlightening? Which are closest to home? How are you thinking about applying them?
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The Forecasts are open access. The expertise behind them is also available to help you extend, deepen, or explore what they mean for your organisation. Many 10F contributors are independent practitioners who can work with organisations to localise forecasts to your region or sector, run AREAS mapping workshops with your team, turn the analysis into actionable strategy, develop a 10F-focused keynote for your audience, develop forecast briefings, or help you figure out which shifts matter most for your specific context.
Contact us at info@10fconsortium.org with your need, and we’ll connect you with the right people.
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