Introducing Grassroots Economics and the Barter & Beyond Game – San Francisco 2025

a warm-up that we would do in Kenya we're going to do a quick set of claps okay so you're going to clap four times then you're going to clap two times and you're clap one time so four three 2 one okay so we're going to do that together on the count of four ready two just a little uh social synchronization we do a lot of games in community groups around coming into some form of symbiosis together so I was a physicist at the Stanford lyia accelerator I got pulled into Econo physics uh which was a physics uh modeling economics and fell in love with the idea of community currencies and um the idea was that everyone's missing money no one has enough money so can we just make money can we go and create money in communities and so I went to Kenya um worked with all kinds of community groups I was a peace cor volunteer I learned Swahili um and we started making paper bills back in about 2010 we quite quickly got quite good at doing that and quite quickly went to jail uh in Kenya and um they thought we were a secessionist plot we won our court cases and more and more communi started doing this they were saying well we can create little barter vouchers if you will we call them vouchers they were backed by goods and services they would be like gift cards that would be swapped around these these communities uh we moved uh into a database version because it was expensive to print those with security features we moved into blockchain in about 2018 the first POA blockchain we've moved four blockchain since then um now we're on cell we're very happy there we're soon to be a more part of the ethereum ecosystem and there's been a lot of things that have changed along the way um we work a lot with the Red Cross and world food program and and the groups that were creating these instruments now on blockchain they were creating little erc20 tokens that they were trading like a local currency the the groups that did amazingly well were doing this thing we call Rola in in Academia it's a rotational labor associations and so the last almost five years has been to really understand why they were doing 10x 20x the impacts they're building houses every week they were doing way more than just pure market right they were they were doing something that their ancestors had always known how to do and it took me about 10 years and uh to sort of really understand what that was um so there's this really really beautiful history of uh rotating labor associations in Kenya it's called muia and muia is from a Bantu language group that stretches all the way down to South Africa um the term Ubuntu you might have heard before it's made up of two words it's ubu in Swahili you would say KU and really it means ubu is to become and is a person so the process of becoming a person is to is to be in relationship with other people and if you're not a person you're not in relationship to others you lack utu which would be person or humanity and the process of coming into relationship with each other was called muia so muia and there's there's many many many names for this tradition it seems to be prelingual it's so old uh was a way that the community could exchange uh goods and services and resources and commitments with each other in what would be called like an intangible or economic Commons and it it had many many forms so we'll I'm going to step you through a very simple one um here you have uh three families the middle there just imagine it's like an intangible Commons in in blockchain we can think of this as a pool so we'll use the term pool like eler ostram would call this a common pool resource it is the collective memory of their commitments and reputation to each other okay each family there has some commitments for the year we've represented them as little tokens here they could represent a days worth of Labor let's say so there's a there's a pool that's seated with the Goodwill and intention of the community this family on the left is going to say I need some support from the community I want you all to come help me so they're they're drawing on a common pool resource they're pulling the commitments out of the pool and saying you guys please come and help me build a Grainery right these guys are fulfilling their commitments right this uh family on the left there is now indebted that what's left in the basket is their um liabilities their their uh commitments that they need to fulfill the next family does the same thing finally the last family does the same same thing and they've completely cleared their credit and debt obligations with each other right they've reached a full cycle from the outside you can look at this as a mutual credit but from the inside it's a it's a it's a common pooled resource right so Mutual Credit is a view right debt and credit into this I don't have a lot of time but these practices are quite amazing um they're everywhere in the world every culture um there's a book out now called Grassroots economics and you you'll see in the glossery every culture in the world has a version of this this was it predates any form of barter it seems to be the the original economic system that we evolved into and it and it matches very well with my Kofi micro risal Finance um there's a lot about uh what we would call a human society the the term Caya was a way of identifying the social structure of people that included the sacred Forest where they're practicing these these practices um there's a lot around asrom these are aom's eight principles that you can pull into protocol so most of our work has been to say how do we take these observations and these practices and pull them into something that we can functionally use um and the the protocol looks a bit like this so you've got four major functions here you've got a curation on the left here of what is valuable in that Community these could all be represented as erc20 tokens you've got a valuation mechanism right so this is a way of in in Unis swap on you have bonding curves connecting values but you could have all kinds of ways to do that a community can say one day's worth of Labor um is equivalent to bringing a lot of mud for the wall patching there's a way to create fairness between those exchanges and then there's a way of limitation so if I'm a woman in the community and I get everyone to help me and then my my debt is in the community right and if I don't help everyone else in the community there's a limit to how much I can keep drawing from the community and that would be paid back through things like forgiveness as possible uh bringing a goat and a chicken and having a feast with everyone there's all kinds of ways to limit the reciprocity to to make sure that the the ecosystem is going to actually survive and then there's an exchange function so we've got curation valuation limitation and exchange that might have been done in these rituals of of rotational labor it might have done in marketplaces and that that function the basket maintaining this is something that is also a service to the community and if you think of a micro risal fungi doing the same role it needs to survive as well so there's a there's an in incentive usually through fees on on on doing these practices like during the exchange practice you're feeding the community right um in South America these would be called aminga for instance and then these these structures they don't scale really they're trust networks right it's it's dunbar's number esque you know they get out to Village size but then you have one woman who is in multiple communities right she's part of another Community doing funeral rights and so they scale through connections between each other and so that's really important to understand that you know we're not trying to scale single trust groups we're trying to create connections between them we do a lot of work in Kenya around just realizing the abundance and um going back and relearning how to do these ancient traditions because most of the Le they've been lost um this is kind of the some of the games and practices we do we work with a Visionary approach quite a bit we we make sure that everyone can access ethereum more cell blockchain without internet we've been doing this since 2015 2018 making sure that the telecoms act as a relay between the blockchain and people without internet this has been huge we've had 60,000 businesses um this is the network now across the whole world it's expanded way out of Kenya uh we have a website called cfu.net workk uh we have folks in Italy using this we were just in Jackson Mississippi where they're putting millions of dollars into these pools of resources that they enable the community to swap in and out of we work with Islamic Finance groups as well where they're consider those endowments so there's a lot there and if we kind of understand the basic formulation here you have commitments which are usually dollar worth of product right but they can be expressed in many different ways this is a curation right of commitments across the community um and finally I've got too many slides here um we're working with red cross to seed uh endowments into curated service providers around refugee camps the refugee camp service providers can swap in their commitments for future value they're getting production financing and it leaves them in a relationship where they now have credit against each other so it's been a way to bootstrap really kind of digest or compost the dollar into these reciprocal exchanges right and and this is what they would call in the community Ubuntu to become a person is to to be in these relationships with each other I think I'm going to pause there but we've had a really really amazing uh Awakening around the humanitarian sector of being able to go into communities recreate these traditional structures and and be able to leave that Community with these systems in place on the blockchain so the the blockchain holding you can imagine these as as contracts on a blockchain they can stay in indefinitely as long as the blockchain exists so that's been a way that we could avoid being worried about being shut down right we can continue these and there's starting to spread all over the world um it's quite exciting and uh yeah thank you let's let's continue pooling our commitments on the trajectory of our beautiful shared Heritage thanks everybody [Music]