Empowering Marginalised Communities

Z [Applause] now for [Music] for for can [Music] okay present yeah okay hey everybody um my name is will reik I'm the founder of Grassroots economics we're a foundation that have been doing this work for about 13 years we've seen about a million peer-to-peer transactions on blockchain um we've gone through a lot of different uh organizational models and methods we're currently fully operating on Cell blockchain we have no employees we buy tokens or vouchers from people in communities to do this type of work um we started on paper vouchers originally uh we went digital 2015 eventually went on to blockchain with the POA blockchain and then a whole bunch of others um getting to where we are today I guess what was what was interesting in the last few years was that um these rotational labor practices um were completely changing how we viewed the introduction of uh blockchain into these communities um so I just want to describe these rotational labor associations essentially you can see them as a multic collateral pool in which families will commit to a certain amount of resources publicly with each other um and they'll be able to pull against that mass so like I can ask the community for help in my shamba while giving them my own voucher so you can imagine this is just a big liquidity pool there's assets from all different um actors in here service providers and I can put in my commitments to receive theirs so in this case this family is putting in their commitments receiving um services from the other members they have a debt to the community the others have a positive balance and it keeps circulating around so you can take these traditional practices and you can put them into an economic model using liquidity pools and that's basically the protocols we've been working on over the last few years um these practices are really cool because they build physical assets there's social assets people are having fun they belong to these there's human capital like uh skills being produced um even uh developing assets around uh Food Forest and and a sacred Forest so these groups are huge um this is one superg group each one of these women belongs to a group of another 14 together they represent about 1.4 trillion Ugandan shillings a year um that's that's a good percentage of the GDP of the whole country so these practices are huge and by putting them on to distributed ledgers on cell we're able to connect them together and get them to coordinate in much larger organizational units um there's there's a lot here in terms of like how we build these contracts on chain we think about the the smart contracts as well as different instruments inside them so the Agreements are essentially like large liquidity pools um we'll get into how those work and and then inside the liquidity pools you have instruments we essentially like uh stable coins and so we have stable coins living inside these agreements inside these traditional value systems um I like the work of Mark burges a lot it's good to mention it really the whole essence of a stable coin is about making a commitment your coin represents a promise for Redemption of something real and in communities we're talking about tomato so we're often making commitments for dollars worth of or Shillings worth of goods and services and so it's networks we call them vouchers U we also work with stable coins themselves like cusd and usdc but basically the the ex the creation of those the acceptance by communities and their fulfillment it it really actually builds trust within ecosystems um the essence of our stable coins are basically a promise against a certain amount of product or value unique signatories we usually have expiration dates or rates we've built those into the smart contract so they expire over time you can't hold them forever and then there's um the idea that you can keep trading these so as these commitments move around they create a credit and Deb debt space um so here's how the the protocol works at the Smart contract level essentially you you define a curation so if you're creating a liquidity pool you would say which two pairs go in that pool in this case you could have as many erc20 tokens as you want apples bread carrots these could be any kind of uh promise against some form of production these are given drawing rights to the pool so if you have those tokens you can put them in the pool to pull out any other asset that's in the pool you the way we do pricing is a relative value index so each uh asset that goes into the pool gets a relative value to every other asset so the exchange rate here from a to c would be one over two each one of these assets also gets a maximum capacity so you balance the pool this way really what the way we built this protocol is a layer beneath Unis swap Unis swap assumes a bonding curve this creates an interface so you could you could have an oracle you could have a bonding curve or you can have static updated rates so it's it's a very simple contract it's about 400 lines of code it's really simple to deploy these so anyone can be deploying pools and we're Mo mainly using these as like production financing Vehicles so money goes into these pools you assign a bunch of service providers that have drawing rights to that pool um so yeah I I think it's I we just come from another conference on on collaborative Finance the term money most people don't know it comes from Juno Moneta who was the goddess of money of the Romans and before that it was the Greek God God is Hera and the tradition was to pay a tax or a a tithing to to the Temple of that God that became the taxation model to pay for all the Roman armies and all the Roman colonization when the Romans um fell and collapsed it was taken up by the feudal system so the feudal system let me just get it here so you have 300 BCE that's the the word money comes out of it really the the the usage of a coin so if you wanted a stable coin back then it was it was stable because the state required it for taxation that was it the states made coin stable right so you talk about stable money even the term money itself is a Roman tradition after Rome fell the feudal Lords took that up all across uh Europe when the feudal Lords fell we had European Colonial Powers imposing taxation onto these other colonies and then you have uh the rise of nation states after that doing exactly the same thing so really the the tradition of money is to enforce stability through taxation models and it's it's you know we work a lot with the community groups on these sort of tradition so you see this tradition hitting these other indigenous Traditions like we saw in the video you have Traditions that enable uh endogenous creation of credit or commitments where an individual or a group they could create their own stable coin right against their own value value and then you have stable coins created by Banks right so you have completely exogenous so the Roman systems essentially were a form of control and Taxation then you had local stable coins which were a form of commitment and shared pooling across groups the way we work with Community groups is a lot of planning asset mapping uh uh Network design um we work with all kinds of Rural and and urban businesses we develop uh Visions like basically uh business plans for these groups with um their assets and we create action steps to to link the two together and that's where these practices come in so if you have a bunch of resources and you ask how do we actually take those resources and put them into a a fair use po division these liquidity pool type instruments are are a way to do it and it matches with what their ancestors would have been doing so this is an example of like just issuing a stable coin into circulation as a community group so the community group is creating a supply of tokens right they're audited they're backed by services this is it think of it like a gift card they're selling these gifting them or putting them into these rotational practices and then they're settled by the products of the issuer so usually these are Shilling uh denominated stable coins backed by products okay and then we put those into markets together so you end up with a whole bunch of these small tiny tiny stable coins inside these pools together and there's also settlement by expiration so this is a big thing is that you don't have a promise for something that lasts forever that's very sort of anti- um Traditional Values you wouldn't trust a promise that is forever because the person who made the promise is going to die um 90% of our users are using SMS and USS um they are creating um a pins that give them a blockchain address in the back end and so onchain they can access their blockchain account through an SMS and ussd little Dynamic menu they don't need internet they can select their vouchers we call these stable coins vouchers yeah um they can select those they can send them to anyone they get SMS receipts it's a really simple system this is our our network over the last month this is starting to spread globally each one of these each one of these dots is a wallet and each color here is a different stable coin Network so they have this would be a group issuing a stable coin against their products and they're exchanging against each other through these pooling systems yeah um I I often have to explain to people why we use blockchain I don't have to do that here but I I like to describe it as the virtual environment that provides memory execution layer meaning that you can you can create agreements and provably execute them you have authentication and you have the ability to design agreements in that system and that actually Maps really perfectly into a village system you have memory systems in people's brains you have execution of uh the the elders and the community groups will have rule sets and there's Au authentication in terms of who is using those systems so um we went to jail when we first started doing these systems uh back in 2012 and we won our court cases but we wanted to make sure that our servers weren't going to be shut down by the government so we said well let's move everything to blockchain so we started doing that about in 2018 um we're happy to be on cell we're we're now one of the top validators on cell so anyone if you know anyone who wants to do staking on our node that's how we do all of our work so we we don't have to have grants we don't have to have anything else we just need stakers on our node and that's one way that we give back to the whole ecosystem um immutability accountability uh interoperability so anyone can interact with these pools across networks and the fact that we can actually be part of the the cell ecosystem by running validator nodes is huge um you know this is me trying to explain how blockchain Works to folks in terms of of layers we have public private interfaces and we have custodial interfaces so when we're dealing with people without internet we're using custodial interfaces meaning that they're creating a little SMS account and then we have a server that locks their private key to their SMS and SIM card um just to understand the concept here we would consider all of these things right here stable coins right a $25 gift card is a promise against $25 of products right it might not be a dollar behind it but it is product worth $25 so we're creating networks of vouchers we're putting them into baskets so they become tradable so we've really we've moved away from talking about currencies we're just talking about tools that connect value systems together and we also put in cusd and other stable coins into these so we've got a we've got a Dap here called s. Network you can create vouchers on there you can by the end of the uh next month you can create your own pools on that so it's got a little contract deployer so people can just create their own little curations and then they can actually invest into those this is so USD here this would be an actual what you guys would call a stable coin like usdc we have Red Cross buying stable coins putting them into these baskets and then naming service providers to have drawing rights from the liquidity pool so dollars in any of these tokens now these are erc20 tokens Can go into the pool pull out the US dollars right like this and then you have a pool now that's populated with a whole bunch of vouchers these can now rotate and circulate um just like we saw these indigenous practices and so that's how we're basically exceeding liquidity pools in refugee camps we're in uh three refugee camps across Kenya we've got um hundreds of groups um the same we're doing this with e system restoration groups that are basically listing their services putting them into pools investment goes into those pools the vouchers can be used now for any sort of the products coming out of those so that includes impact data it includes carbon certificates it includes coconut oil and then they go back into the community so you can look at it as a production financing system we we do a lot of Copic Agro forestry this is like by default we're working on food security and all these groups so most of the stable coins are promises against food denominated in National currency um with the humanitarian sector the the reason Red Cross and and wfp have loved us is because this gives them a way to buy from service Industries around refugee camps and and needy areas put that into a pool that can continue circulating they can take those vouchers and give them to idps and refugees s they come back into the pools they keep circulating and when the Red Cross steps away it's still there right versus the the normal modality of the Red Cross is to dump cash on people and walk away and it creates this really you know step function phase transition and so this creates this little market where the people can still trade against each other stable coin to stable coin and anyone can continue to put stable coins into those pools that's it thank you guys yeah cheers yeah yeah I don't know I think we have some time if there's any questions otherwise yeah good to be here yeah right uh great presentation uh super interesting um how do you uh how do you deal with the challenge of figuring out what the relative value should be uh for the different kind of pooled assets yeah so uh when they're creating their stable coin their vouchers they're denominating it usually National currency right so that so the the business will say this is dollars worth or Shillings worth of product right so that's their their denomination we send in an audit team to make sure that that's actually happening right so we'll take pictures of the product and whatnot so on one side you have like imagine you have Burger King saying this gift card is worth dollars of burgers that's their claim but then the amount that we actually give them the relative value in the in the in the pool pool is going to be the the the pool steart whoever owns that liquidity pool that's their choice right in some cases like when we're we're we're putting cusd in there and we're going to put the rate of cusd compared to the Shilling stable point we have an oracle that auto adjust that rate so you can so what's nice about these contracts is they sit at a layer below Unis swap right you're not assuming a bonding curve but you could use one so you could you could point that out just an interface you can point to any any way you want to do pricing is possible but but what's been really simple in Kenya is just everyone just make a a token against the national currency and then they know automatically how to do pricing amongst themselves so we're not trying to get people to do exchange rates in a little Marketplace selling Tomatoes it's it's too complex yeah will they start like let's say instantiate that first kind of price and then afterwards the Oracle will sort of update uh afterwards what the relative value should be yeah exactly I mean we we've got some games where we we also play this with like settlers of Katon if you've ever played the game but where you might notice that one asset in the pool is really not going well so you have a few options you could say either we're going to lower the relative value of that asset like a bonding curve would and so this but this would be controlled by like a group of Elders and they say no that this this product is not needed or it's not as much another option is they can lower the limit so instead of like a typical liquidity pool you have kind of infinite up and down limits these ones have a capacity think of it like a vending machine right how many tomatoes are you going to allow into that vending machine to limit the risk right and so the you know in some ways you're looking at uh trading a little shop or exchange that has very quantitative small small capacity units in there versus like a a with un with Unis swab you're talking about massive uh uh liquidity within those and so very little you change so you know we tried to use those for years and we found that communities just couldn't handle floating exchange rates like that so they start usually one to one and if there's problems usually that's when we shift it but then if we want to add another erc20 token in there like let's say we wanted to put eth or cell itself that's when we push out to an oracle for that pricing yeah any other questions okay question hi um thank you so much first of all for the for the talk so you were mentioning products um and then how products are easier to price than impact work how do you think about pricing like whether it's conservation whether environmental humanitarian um how do you think about either services or other kinds of impact work so we have a lot of data right now of like tree growth like we can we can uh soil samples that's all just going into a database right now so our next step on that is basically to register that data with like registry like Pura or red plus to actually get you know accredited carbon or things like that out of it right and the the value against that would be if I have this voucher would be dollars worth of that whatever it is you know so if it's a carbon claim it' be dollars worth of those carbon claims so still using the the normal market like the one to one to the market rate markets of those but you could decouple from them so to us it's sort of like get them on the bus like get everyone just starting with current market rates yeah okay so from a high level um toomics point that I hear that um from an implementation on the ground point someone is making sure that an ACO forest does not get cut down they get the equivalent of the dollar amount of a certain carbon credit let's say or something like that they get the voucher of of that then if they want to get cash for that what's the process for that so so the way we think about these is always kind of like service first so you're saying if if you're going to create a voucher uh it's backed by your promise against your stewardship so if I'm yeah it's good to talk about though so like if I'm promising to keep this uh Forest alive I'm going to say I'm G to issue U $10,000 worth of my Consulting hours on this job my stewardship hours then what we do is we get people to pre- purchase those they're redeemable now for the impacts that come verified later right so it's like I'm making a promise to Steward this land I'm going to plant trees I'm going to do all this stuff I'm going to make a claim against the dollar value of that I'm going to get someone to purchase that rep purchase it so i' I've got money up front they have my claim they have the the stable coin now the voucher which they can now return for any products I develop right what were my promises as well as any data products so like there's certifications coming out of that so everything's kind of a service and you're prepaying so that sounds a little bit like a peer toer lower Tech easier to implement carbon forward and then also is it only ever the two or would it also be implementable with the pool of services that in a community say we have different vouchers for different products and if like is that interoperable ideally so let's say there's a there's a village there are five people who all have different Services different products that have vouchers for that and I interact first with you and give you money forward because you promis to to do the the rers and then I have the voucher and then in the pool can I then go somewhere else and say I'm going to the barber shop I'm using part of my voucher so so that's the idea with these liquidity pools like essentially the liquidity pool will have service providers from the entire value chain around the area and so that's how they become exchangeable so there's there's no currency you just have massive pools of different stable coins that all connect to each other yeah and that and that's the that's the fun and beauty of curating that service industry around there and we do it Village by Village and we connect them all together and and then you can have also pools connected to other pool just like a liquidity pool you could if one token is in several pools it kind of acts as a bridge between the pools right so if your voucher is in three different pools well if I have it I can get anything from any of three of those pools as long as there's still cap capacity in that pool it's not inite because we're generally not using any sort of bonding curve so it's more like vending machines so the whole um stable coin aspect is basically like a via step like a like a crutch towards getting to a voucher only what's it okay sorry so um the whole aspect of stable coin and attaching it to the actual existing cash currency that is essentially the way that makes it walkable right now but ideally it would be vouchers only and no cash like no no currency only vouchers ideally okay great but this makes it doable right now even if it's only one participant in a village it can still work and first it's only one to one so if it's only one person who's particip I don't want to take too much time so if there's any other questions okay so it's important to think about the the national currency stable coins is sort of like it's it's a bootstrap it's a little bit like you're you're taking National currency you're like composting it into these systems so if you're investing a national currency stable coin to this it's going to be and you own that liquidity you're a liquidity investor at that point right so you're investing liquidity into these it's being exchanged for all these different utilities essentially these utility vouchers right and they start being able to trade amongst each other even when the the US dollars are gone from the system but they can still come back and actually what's been really successful for us is seeing that you seed with national currency to get these started because that shows people there is value there right it's like a bootstrap mechanism otherwise you're if you're expecting them to seat it themselves with their own vouchers it's that's a special situation right and so you start with the US dollars in there they pull them out they're able able to start trading and the interface wise if I show up to your shop it just says you have credit here they don't have to deal with the pools that's their you know and and then it keeps going so the the dollar is kind of a way to Pivot you can create value against it and if the if the dollar value drops up and down it actually doesn't matter because they're all relative to each other anyways right any other questions good okay thank you guys