If you looked at a map now, it would look pretty similar to how it did back in 2025. Some borders have been pushed a few miles one way or another, and breakaway states claw at independence, but most players have remained stationary. This is a westphalian fantasy however, as states have shifted and power bases no longer reside with those decrepit old institutions. This became most obvious in The Great Taiwan Freeze of 2032.

But the story really begins in the early 2020’s with a world-wide plague, soaring national debts, prideful trade wars, and a climate crisis that was being painted over by the powers that be. The ever lasting and universal dollar had lost much of its luster with other currencies like the yuan finding a place in this multipolar world order, but in reality this last act of defiance was the last sputters of a flame that had been quietly being put out for decades. Major companies had built closed-loop credit systems long before the Freeze, be it compute, kilowatt-hours, or even just grain. Furthermore the centralized fiat stations that had been so carefully managed began to share their space with transparent, transferable credits backed by the blockchain. During this teething period of the 2020s some (at the time) large companies began a series of multi-trillion dollar corporate mergers in the American tech-sector that formed the roots of many of the Credit Unions we see to day

From these roots we have seen the six major unions we live with today. The first organization that could reasonably be called a Credit Union appeared with the Apple, Google, Microsoft merger of the late 2020s in response to the intense instability of their time. Of course, they became the North American Tech Union we see today, dealing in credits pegged to compute cycles and IP flows. Following this first merger many around the world followed suit: the East Asian Manufacturing Union with its credits tied to semiconductors, metals, shipping capacity, the Middle Eastern Energy Union with its credits tied to oil, gas, hydrogen, and solar, the European Precision Union with its credits tied to aerospace, advanced automotive, and chemicals, the African Resource Union with its credits tied to Cobalt, Lithium, and water rights, the South American Agricultural Union with its credits tied to Biomass and agri-biotech. Now these credit unions found themselves quickly appearing as their mergers caused an explosion in hyper-specialized human capital and their interdependent stability made them seem like a natural course of action.

In the same way that employees may have been compensated with stock in addition to their salaries in the past, these Credit Unions began offering their employees credits backed by their unions' capacities. An engineer in Seattle may have been paid largely in NACC (North American Compute Credits) which could be transparently transferred to for energy for their lights with MEEC (Middle Eastern Energy Credit) or buy their lunch with SAAC (South American Agricultural Credits). Due to the hyper efficiency, transparency, and reliability of this credit system, salaries were willingly left behind by many and digital wallets displayed resource credits in addition to or instead of traditional fiat.

This change happened quietly, with few thinking about the implications, and most just happy to not deal with customer service for hours on end. But this ignorant bliss was shattered beneath the plum rain of a warm day in May, 2032. For months, the American and Chinese governments have been hurling insults at international events, increasing tariffs beyond all reason in a fifty five trillion dollar game of chicken, and declaring the other marxist invaders or imperialist neo-colonialists. The People's Republic of China had been preparing for months for the large-scale ground invasion of Taiwan, finally undoing the mistakes of 1949. and once more having a unified, single China. The South Sea Fleet had been deployed and the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force had been put on standby, all as the American seventh and third fleets had begun steaming towards the small island, only separated by 100 miles from their aggressions across the waves. Much of the cultural and political posturing was for the cameras of course, everyone involved was keenly aware of the microchip manufacturing prospects and the untold wealth the expertise and machinery could bring to whoever established control.

Just as an unthinkable conflict seemed on the brink of eruption, a deal was struck over a zoom conference. The North American Tech Union and the East Asian Manufacturing Union decided that it would be too much of a financial black hole were a war to break out between the nations they resided in, so they both put sanctions on World War 3. Suddenly, all over the ring of fire, the ever in motion modern ports came to a halt, once bustling factories laid idle, cargo ships loaded with several tons of goods each sat in port. Across two continents “HTTP 503 Service Unavailable” greeted billions, and the whirring of AI training data centers fell silent. The Credit Unions of the belligerent nations had decided that the short-term shutdown of the 2 largest economies of Earth would be less costly to business than a protracted conventional conflict, so the call was made. Washington and Beijing had simultaneously realized that further escalation, no matter how much they may have wanted it, would be functionally impossible. So World War Three was not ended through a clever treaty or a new secret weapon, but a ledger on a bureaucrat’s desk.

We now know that The Great Taiwan Freeze was a hinge point in global history. Where we have for hundreds of years seen sovereign state actors as the arbiters of global order with their implicit social contracts and prideful insistence of superiority over one another, we now understand that the Credit Unions are now the de facto sovereigns. Traditional governments of course still run, but they operate understanding that there is a ceiling to their authority. Much in the same way that the kings of old lost their influence piecemeal and became symbolic heads of state, traditional governments slowly felt their grip become more of a formality. For everyone was keenly aware and found affiliation with the new world order of the Credit Unions.

While many old guard persisted, insisting that these new systems were expressions of corporate feudalism with monopolistic boards and disenfranchised resource-poor regions, the vast majority found the unparalleled transparent, inflation-resistant, resource-based stability and deterrence from all state-sanctioned violence to be too tempting an offer. Households now diversify credits to hedge across resources, farmers monitor rainfall for currency risk, and engineers gauge relative salaries in the amount of compute they bring in.

Even now, fierce debates rage on whether this new order represents a decline of sovereignty or a maturation of globalization, a new gilded age of centralized power or as an incorruptible and infinitely transparent breath of fresh air. All agree though, that although the system may be imperfect, it has remained resilient with wars deterred and confidence everpresent.