Trade what you have. Get what you need. No money required.

Proposition

Most businesses have things going spare. A quiet period, some unused equipment, a team with capacity between projects. Somewhere, another business needs exactly that and might have something to offer in return. The problem is the match: you need to find someone who has what you want and also wants what you have, at the same time.

An algorithm can solve this directly. Searching across dozens of businesses, it spots chains where everyone gives something they're not using and gets something they need. No cash changes hands.

Money was invented to solve the same problem, just differently. Rather than finding the match, you sidestep it: sell to anyone, hold the value, spend it later on what you need from whoever has it. It's worked for thousands of years, but it's not without its own problems. For example, fees at every step, needing cash upfront before customers pay, and businesses sitting on real capacity because the money isn't there at the right moment. We can do better.

This is a proof of concept: working code exploring whether AI can solve the matching problem that money was invented for.