Money shapes housing costs, access to credit and the accumulation of wealth, but the system that creates and distributes it is often difficult for the public to see. A new project by artist Carlijn Kingma, investigative journalist Thomas Bollen and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden aims to make that architecture visible.
According to Bitcoin Magazine, their project, The Waterworks of Money, presents finance as a landscape of reservoirs, pipes, channels and pumps. The image is designed to show how liquidity moves among banks, governments, companies and households—and why some parts of society receive abundant flows of money while others remain financially dry.
The work is simultaneously an artwork, an educational project and an examination of financial power. Its creators developed it through two years of research and interviews with more than 100 experts from banking, government, academia and monetary-reform movements. Kingma spent more than 2,200 hours turning that research into the project’s detailed visual world.
Making the monetary system visible
A central point in the project is that money is not distributed evenly through the economy. Bollen argues that one of the most important facts people misunderstand is how commercial banks create money. When a bank issues a loan, he says, it creates new money rather than simply passing on deposits saved by other customers.
That distinction matters because bank lending can influence who gains access to purchasing power and at what cost. Bollen said that even some banking professionals, including the chief executive of a major bank interviewed during the research, did not understand that they worked for institutions that create money. He believes schools and universities should do more to explain the process, saying that many economics textbooks continue to describe banks primarily as intermediaries.
The project also links monetary arrangements with inequality, while acknowledging that no single figure can isolate the effect of the monetary system from every other economic force. Bollen says years of exceptionally cheap credit intensified inequality because wealthy households and large companies were better positioned to borrow.
That credit was used in part to buy assets, including shares and property. As asset prices rose, those who already owned them benefited more than households without significant assets and smaller businesses that lacked comparable access to inexpensive financing. Bollen describes this as a form of asset inflation, rather than a uniform increase in the prices of everything across the economy.
For Kingma, the hardest artistic problem was not choosing the water metaphor but showing how the different parts connect. Financial language already refers to liquidity, cash flows and money drying up, making the metaphor intuitive. However, money exists in several forms, including public money, private credit money, commodity money and instruments such as short-term debt and repurchase agreements that can function as money or near-money. Representing all those distinctions as different kinds of water was not possible without sacrificing clarity.
A system repaired but not fundamentally changed
Van der Linden argues that the response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened rules and supervision without changing the underlying structure of banking. Post-crisis reforms addressed issues including excessive leverage, opaque securitisation, shadow-banking risks and fragmented oversight in Europe. New crisis-management procedures were also introduced.
In his view, however, the basic vulnerability remained: banks fund long-term loans with deposits that customers can demand at short notice. That creates the possibility of a bank run, because a bank cannot immediately provide all depositors with their money at once if confidence collapses. The system therefore continues to rely on public safety nets and special protections for banks, he says.
He points to the problems at Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse in 2023 as examples of how crisis procedures worked in practice. US authorities guaranteed all SVB deposits, including the portion above the insured limit, while the Swiss state supported UBS’s takeover of Credit Suisse. Van der Linden says large non-bank financial firms have gained influence, but they do not occupy the same central position in money creation and payments as banks.
Bitcoin’s place in the future of money
The project includes a scenario in which bitcoin shapes a different monetary future. Bitcoin was created as money outside the direct control of governments and banks, but its growing role as an investment has brought it into closer contact with traditional finance. Van der Linden says institutional participation has helped bitcoin as a financial asset while weakening its original promise as an alternative payments system.
At the same time, bitcoin and stablecoins have put pressure on established payment infrastructure. European banks have responded with initiatives such as Wero, a payment wallet launched by a group of banks in 2024. The project’s collaborators distinguish this type of innovation from a fundamental redesign of money and banking.
Bollen sees bitcoin’s design as resembling full-reserve banking because a bitcoin is not a claim on another party. A bank deposit, by contrast, is a promise that the customer can withdraw funds while the bank uses deposits to support lending. He cites the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, founded in 1609, as a historical example: it began as a full-reserve institution but later failed after secretly expanding lending to the Dutch East India Company.
That history, he says, illustrates the risks faced by monetary experiments. Companies in the crypto sector also copied banking practices by lending customers’ bitcoin while continuing to display the assets in their accounts. The collapse of FTX demonstrated how damaging that approach can be.
Moneyiar market picture
Moneyiar data at 22:34 on October 19, 2026, showed Bitcoin at $81,997.02, up 0.67% over 24 hours but down 0.58% over seven days. Monad was at $0.0209307, down 0.54% in 24 hours and 15.60% over seven days. AI Rig Complex stood at $0.0433254, up 6.88% daily but down 28.59% weekly, while ONEchain traded at $0.102789, up 2.61% in 24 hours and down 17.47% over seven days.
Bollen is scheduled to join two panels at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 6, 2026, covering Europe’s monetary history and future, as well as the balance between government and markets in money. The Waterworks of Money is also available as a two-part animated exploration, with signed prints and donations supporting the project’s continuing research.
