Abstract: Money is the commodity that acts as universal equivalent. The emergence of money and its evolution have certain objective laws. The demand for separation of supply and demand caused by the inconvenience of early barter gave birth to a new economic thing—money. Under the restriction of social production, the early commodity money experienced two stages: commodity money of necessities and its coexistence with the commodity money of luxury goods. Metal currency, especially gold and silver, strictly belongs to commodity money, but compared with the former commodity money, it has many excellent properties and breaks through the space and time constraints. The birth of credit currency is the result of the progress of papermaking technology and the strengthening of centralization, and it is also a leap from the form of money with use value to money without use value. No matter what kind of money is, it is the representative of abstract labor. It is only attached to concrete things in the early stage and non physical things in the later stage. People’s trust in money is also a law of evolution from direct trust to indirect trust.

Key words: monetary form, evolution, trust, commodity money, metal currency, credit currency, digital currency