The end game for tomorrow's payment systems is inherently more inclusive, but if you build it will they come?

Should payments networks inherently be a free public utility?

It's a question that resurfaced this week with a story out of Vice profiling a New York state proposal for the Inclusive Value Ledger, the country's "first publicly owned electronic banking platform; a system that could support a digital dollar currency that can be exchanged for good and services and used for p2p transactions within the state."

The proposal — put together by New York State Assembly member Ron Kim, Senator Julia Salazar, and Cornell law professor Robert Hockett — and self-proclaimed "public Venmo," was floated to lawmakers back in November. Ironically, The Block's Aislinn Keely published an exclusive interview for our Daily product on this proposal in late October, which I completely missed this first time around (it's impossible to keep up with all of our content these days).