Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster.
LIST PRICE $32.95
Free shipping when you spend $40. Terms apply.
Buy from Other Retailers
Table of Contents
About the Book
Trust is the invisible currency of the global economy. It underpins markets, governments, society, and every contract we sign. Yet today, trust is fragile, expensive, increasingly extractive, and trapped within centralized institutions prone to failure.
In TRUSTSHIFT, William Mougayar argues that we are witnessing a historical shift: Trust is moving from organizations to infrastructure.
For the first time, trust can be embedded directly into neutral, programmable code, independent of traditional intermediaries or corporate gatekeepers. This is not a theoretical upgrade; it is a structural revolution comparable to what the Internet did for information and cloud computing. Ethereum is the settlement layer for this new economy, serving as a digital public good that transforms how value, coordination, and agreements operate globally.
Drawing on decades of experience in technology and strategy, Mougayar provides the first macro-level framework for valuing Ethereum not as a speculative asset, but as essential global infrastructure. He demystifies the technology revealing a stark business reality: this shift is not optional.
Written for executives, forward-thinking individuals, institutions, and policymakers, TRUSTSHIFT moves beyond the noise of crypto to answer the most consequential question of the next decade: As the world moves to neutral trust infrastructure, who will adapt, and who will be bypassed?
In this book, Mougayar takes the reader on a journey to understand the Ethereum blueprint,- decoding the logic, culture, and economics of the world’s first neutral trust infrastructure. Inside, you will explore:
• The World Computer vs. The Cloud: Discover why Ethereum’s modular architecture and "living system" culture (from Degens to Regens) create a resilient moat that centralized competitors cannot replicate.
• The New Physics of Trust: Learn how mechanism design is slashing the "cost of trust" by replacing friction-heavy institutions with neutral, programmable guarantees that work where legacy systems falter.
• The Sovereign Stack: A guide to "Practical Sovereignty", moving beyond ideology to usable tools that restore individual agency over data, identity, and assets.
• Valuing Public Goods: The first comprehensive investment framework for valuing Ethereum not as a company, but as "economic infrastructure," separating Captured Value from Trust Surplus and the Flow of Value.
• The Global Settlement Layer: How the "Universal Upgrade" is driving the great migration of Real-World Assets, tokenized treasuries, and DeFi to a single, immutable ledger.
• Ownership & Governance Reimagined: From "object-based ownership" to the rise of DAOs, understand how we are rebuilding civil service and coordination without hierarchy.
• The Privacy & AI Frontier: How Zero-Knowledge Proofs are reconciling transparency with privacy, and why Ethereum is becoming a critical on-ramp layer for the autonomous AI economy.
• The Five Futures: A strategic forecast of the road ahead, analyzing why Ethereum is destined to become the dominant "neutral backbone" of a multipolar world.
Product Details
- Publisher: Ideapress Publishing (March 30, 2027)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781646872732
Browse Related Books
Raves and Reviews
“A decade ago, The Business Blockchain taught a generation what blockchain could do for business. With TrustShift, William Mougayar asks the far bigger question: what happens when trust itself becomes infrastructure? His answer is persuasive, sober, and free of hype. This is the rare crypto book that will still be worth reading ten years from now.” ––J. CHRISTOPHER GIANCARLO, Former Chairman, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Author of The New Adventures of CryptoDad
“I met William in 2014, when Ethereum was a white paper and a handful of people in a house in Toronto, and he was already asking how enterprises would use it. He has been asking the right questions ever since. TrustShift is the fullest answer anyone has given in a single document. It sees Ethereum for what it was always meant to be: not a cryptocurrency but a trust machine, a public layer where well-formed transactions, programs and agreements are guaranteed to execute, ownership is real and self-custodial, and intermediaries—usually in the form of smart contracts—add value or reduce costs and frictions rather than siloing control and extracting rents. The institutions arriving now are discovering what William understood twelve years ago. This book will enable them to speedrun this set of discoveries.” ––JOSEPH LUBIN, Co-founder of Ethereum, CEO, MetaMask, and Chairman, Consensys and SharpLink
“William Mougayar has been involved with Ethereum since the beginning and brings unmatched clarity to its purpose and implications. TrustShift explains why Ethereum matters—and how it is transforming trust in the global economy.” ––ANDREW KEYS, Co-Founder, DARMA Capital
“As Wall Street upgrades from legacy rails to modern infrastructure, Ethereum is emerging as the global trust layer. In TrustShift, Mougayar explains why trust is the scarcest institutional resource—and why Ethereum is positioned to secure it.” ––VIVEK RAMAN, CEO & Co-Founder, Etherealize
“William Mougayar reframes Ethereum not as a speculative asset, but as essential economic infrastructure. TrustShift is the clearest business case I’ve read for why ‘neutral trust’ will define the next era of digital value and institutional coordination.” ––OLIVER T. BUSSMAN, Founder & CEO, Former Group CIO, UBS, and SAP
“We built Aave on the idea that credit should be a public utility, open to anyone. TrustShift is the first book to take that idea seriously as the future of finance.” ––STANI KULECHOV, Founder, Aave
“From stablecoins to tokenized funds to the payment rails of the next decade, this book maps how deep Ethereum already runs through the real economy. Adoption isn’t the question anymore. Scale is.” ––JOSEPH CHALOM, CEO, Sharplink and former Head of Digital Assets Strategy, BlackRock
“I’ve spent my career thinking about markets as systems, which is why William’s work has always resonated with me. He has consistently been early on Ethereum because he understands how technology changes incentives, then institutions, and finally market structure. In TrustShift he brings that perspective forward, showing what the next decade of programmable trust and digital ownership means for the broader economy, and why it matters now.” ––JORDI VISSER, Macro investor, Founder, Visser-Labs, and Host of the Jordi Visser YouTube Channel
“Our clients ask what Ethereum is for, and the honest answer has always taken longer than a session. Now it takes a book. TrustShift is the clearest institutional case for Ethereum I’ve read, and I’ve written a few myself.” ––GEOFFREY KENDRICK, Global Head of Digital Assets Research, Standard Chartered
“Having supported funds natively on Ethereum since 2016 via Enzyme, we’ve watched institutional needs evolve firsthand. TrustShift is an honest account of what’s ready in onchain asset management today and what’s still hard. A must-read for institutions.” ––MONA EL ISA, Founder of Enzyme
“Every week I interview the people building this industry, and most of them can't explain Ethereum to a banker in a way that lands. William Mougayar can. TrustShift takes the biggest idea in crypto, that trust can be produced by a network instead of rented from an institution, and makes it concrete enough for a CFO to act on. It's the Ethereum book the mainstream has been waiting for.” ––SCOTT MELKER, host of The Wolf Of All Streets
“In our conversations with banks, asset managers, and regulators, one question keeps coming up: what is Ethereum, and why should it matter to them? The hardest part is rarely the technology itself; it is the framing. William Mougayar has been thinking about that problem longer than most, and TrustShift addresses it directly. A valuable read for anyone trying to explain why Ethereum matters.” ––DAVID WALSH, Executive Director, Ethereum Institutional
“I spent years documenting Ethereum one week at a time, and much of what was written about it didn’t survive the next week. This book will. It’s the rare account that gets both the technology and the stakes right.” ––EVAN VAN NESS, Founder of Week in Ethereum News
“William and I ran the first Token Summit together in 2017, when almost nobody knew what tokens were. He knew then, and TrustShift proves he gets why Ethereum is so unique and important to our collective future.” ––NICK TOMAINO, Founder, 1confirmation and Co-founder, Token Summit
“Ethereum is a big idea, and it deserves a big book. This is it. Whether you’re bullish or bearish, expert or novice, TrustShift will help you think around the edges of what Ethereum really is and what it might become.” ––MATT HOUGAN, Chief Investment Officer, Bitwise Asset Management
“In a world still experiencing future shock, William Mougayar helps us see how emerging technologies are shifting the balance of power, changing what we expect from institutions and one another, and creating new possibilities for building trust. In TrustShift, he offers a valuable way to understand the transition from the systems we have inherited to those now taking shape and reminds us that we have a hand in shaping what comes next. That is reason for hope.” ––DEBORAH WESTPHAL, CEO, Karen Toffler Charitable Trust and Author of The Pulse of Tomorrow
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
-
Book Cover Image (jpg): TRUSTSHIFT
Hardcover 9781646872732







