Yup. One of the original tokens people used as money was kaori shells. They held value because they were considered pretty decorations, were limited in the number that entered society and were easy to serve as a intermediary trade good. All you need for a currency is for people to treat it as a currency. The other bit that usually ends up being a factor is scarcity. You can either create scarcity artificially for things like coins or bills where you make replicating them a crime or you choose a natural resource where new stuff coming in does slowly enough it doesn’t destabilize the system. If ever there is a sudden glut of new currency stuff entering the system the currency gets devalued because you are tying it to stuff you need to survive like food, shelter and tools which are finite and have actual concrete value.

Gold for instance historically was not particularly super useful but it doesn’t corrode, can be infinitely reused, enters the system at a trickle and is nice and shiny so people like it. It is functionally just like trading seashells.