The Freecoin ToolChain

The experimentation on the Digital Social Currency Pilots in D-CENT can be conceived as an open-source approach to decentralized complementary currency design, which becomes ever more relevant where pilot communities are already actively designing tools for collective engagement and decision making on monetary economic matters affecting their communities. D-CENT is going to prototype the Freecoin Toolchain as a set of features that are apt to advance the state-of-the-art in two... Read More

DYNDY Reader AC-Adaptor 0.8

The crisis goes on, and so does DYNDY in its effort at proposing new effective landscapes for structurally counteracting the institutionalization of austerity. The goal is to set viable standards for beginning to live the future of money, in the present. During the past year, DYNDY has been critically active within Hacklabs, Social Centers and occupied theaters, alongside with international policy institutions like the United Nations, academic circles, the Complementary Currency... Read More

Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money

Bitcoin is a decentralized system of digital authentication that facilitates the circulation of value on the Internet without the presence of any intermediaries, a characteristic that has often gained it the definition of digital cash or crypto currency, since it can be used as money for payments. This article consists in a technoetic inquiry into the origins of this technology and its evolution. This inquiry will take in consideration the biopolitical dynamics that govern the... Read More

Designing the Credit Commons: Autonomist Cooperative Direct Credit Clearing

The under perfoming state in which the global monetary system finds itself today invites to seek for  more viable alternatives to perpetual repayment of coumpounded interest-bearing debt.  The Credit Commons in the form of re-appropriation of the means of  production / creation of money are the natural evolution to a post-capitalist economic system, and society. The goal is to democratize money by reverse-engeneering the existent clearing system and eliminating the need for... Read More

Occcu: Occupy Currency – Basic-Income Global Community Currency

Alternative forms of money are designed to compete directly against global financial power, and this is a good news. Indeed, on 28 January 2012 at the gates of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, it was presented to the media a new version of community global currency, i.e. the OCCupy-CUrrency or Occcu. The project has been developed in Austria by a team of students  led by Roland Alton Scheidl at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences with the aim to offer a Basic-Income... Read More

NU Spaarpas – The Netherlands

Another exemplification of the possible complementarity between conventional money (i.e. the Euro) and other types of currencies comes from the domain of ‘green currencies‘. For instance, according to Peter North, in Rotterdam the NU Spaarpas was a ‘green loyalty point’ currency that was piloted from May 2002 to September 2003. ‘Green points’ were earned when residents separated their waste for recycling, used public transport, or used locally owned shops. Residents... Read More

SCEC – Italy

In general complementary currencies are designed to create new wealth, both financial and social. In a nutshell, they are thought of as financial resources to increase social capital while maintaining in the best conditions the natural capital. Therefore, they foster co-operation, because they resemble some of the features a gift economy presents: horizontal and a-centered connection between peer-participants. Both complementary currencies relationships respectively with scarcity... Read More

C3 – Uruguay

The primary driving mechanism for the functioning of the conventional monetary system is fiat-money central banking. The booms and busts impelled by such systemic configuration drive economies toward full employment in booming periods, but then, during busts, they create significant unemployment. During contractive stages of the business cycle such as that one initiated with the credit crisis of 2008, the Commercial Credit Circuit – C3 – creates more liquidity in the... Read More

WIR – Switzerland

The best documented modern example to show the effectiveness of implementing a dual-currency system by means of the adoption of a complementary currency to use in mixed payments in parallel with the national one comes form Switzerland. Back in 1934, a group of Swiss entrepreneurs agreed to use a means of payment issued by a Basel-based Economic Circle in parallel to the Swiss Franc in order to lubricate the wheels of local commerce and, eventually, re-emerge from the ashes of... Read More