I was hoping for this kind of discussion! Let me pull the different threads together and explain more clearly where Grassroots Economics has arrived.
During the COVID phase of our work, we used an airdropped community token. Later we developed personal and group tokens. Over time, we realized that token supply was not the important constraint. A person or group could mint as many tokens as they wanted. Minting alone did not create a claim on anyone else’s goods, services, or pool inventory.
The scarce thing was not issuance. It was acceptance.
A personal token created pool-based credit access only when a trusted market accepted it, assigned it a value, and set a limit on how much could enter or move through that market.
Unlimited issuance therefore did not mean unlimited credit. That insight became the basis for the Commitment Pooling Protocol and later Cosmo-Local Credit.
A pool might value a merchant’s token using a 1:1 national-currency reference while accepting only a limited amount, based on the merchant’s ability to fulfill, the pool’s inventory, and demand for that merchant’s goods or services.
We also stopped treating demurrage as a universal requirement. One marketplace may find demurrage, fees, expiry, or another circulation rule useful. Another market may not need it. Those choices should belong to the people stewarding each market.
This remains the key shift for us:
Credit does not come from restricting token supply. Credit comes from curated acceptance under clear values and limits.
A personal or business token can be expressed as a voucher redeemable for goods or services, national currency or stablecoins, or supported by a reserve, guarantor, or combination of these.
A steward lists that voucher in a pool, agrees its redemption terms, gives it a value, sets a limit, and decides what evidence or fallback is required. Think of a shop deciding which third-party gift cards it will stock and in what quantities.
The issuer can then swap their voucher for other vouchers or stable assets held by the pool, but only up to their limit and only when the pool has the outgoing inventory.
That is the credit line.
Stablecoins can also purchase merchant vouchers, allowing productive credit to grow outward from the existing economy while keeping clear routes back to external settlement assets. We already operate versions of this model in Kenyan merchant networks.
This is why the Circles Web of Trust feels so closely aligned with Commitment Pooling. Circles already makes acceptance relational. Its Web of Trust, Groups, routing, and personal-currency backing are moving toward the same underlying structure.
Commitment Pooling makes several additional elements explicit:
-
what the token is redeemable for and what supports that promise (backing),
-
how it is valued (often using a national-currency reference, like a conventional gift card),
-
how much the market will accept,
-
what fees apply,
-
and what counts as fulfillment, delay, or repair.
A Circles personal token could remain a trust-based personal currency. It could also carry an explicit commitment to goods or services, or be supported through stable backing. In our terminology, that second form is what we call a voucher.
Circles Groups could function as curation markets that list personal CRC, Group CRC, merchant vouchers, stablecoins, and other commitments under their own rules.
Those markets could provide building blocks for credit, routing, savings groups, lending, guarantees, insurance, and direct stablecoin purchase of local vouchers.
@hhh I also see the potential you describe. gCRC could be one common asset for purchasing and routing vouchers through the Gnosis App and Card, without making it mandatory for every pool.
… on success measures, I would add one more to those already discussed: the actual income earned by local stewards. A healthy cycle is one where people earn by providing something useful, spend with others, merchants redeem or recirculate what they receive, and fees support the person maintaining the market.
David, I agree that steward economics must be core functionality.
We train local champions or stewards (trusted local market operators) to help merchants create vouchers, join pools, support users, monitor fulfillment, and develop the market.
They cannot be expected to do that work indefinitely as volunteers.
Pool fees can pay the local steward, while a small network share of those fees (a network rake) supports routing, software, reporting, gas sponsorship, and shared infrastructure.
David was also a key reason Grassroots Economics found a home at Celo. You helped us secure a validator node, which gave us a reliable way to cover gas for several years. Thank you for always supporting this work far beyond just Celo.
Njambi your concern about gas is absolutely right. We cannot introduce infrastructure whose costs exclude the communities we serve. Based on current Gnosis fees, I am cautiously optimistic about direct transaction costs, particularly if a small network rake sponsors gas for users. Still, we should test that against actual data.
@kamikazechaser, I believe our historical Celo volume is available here: Grassroots Economics | Dune. We can use that data to estimate monthly gas sponsorship costs at current volume and at 2x volume, as David suggested.
Cash to stablecoin access remains one of the hardest parts. In Kenya, M-Pesa on- and offboarding has worked very well for us through Pretium. Outside Kenya, comparable access has been extremely difficult.
David’s description is accurate: this is not one global product integration (I wish it were). It is a corridor-by-corridor licensing and partner problem.
From the user’s perspective, the experience should still be simple. Someone should be able to use mobile money, e-money, Visa, Mastercard, a bank transfer, or another familiar rail and enter or leave the network without first becoming a crypto specialist.
What I think we need technically is an integrated API or relay layer backed by licensed local partners in each market. A partner network or relay through Gnosis Pay would be extremely valuable.
Vamos!
We are now actively exploring a Gnosis deployment of CosmoLocal.credit, our PWA and successor to Sarafu.Network, over the coming months.
The application is EVM-first, and we are working on the practical path toward a Gnosis deployment. There is still technical and community work to complete, but I am very excited about the direction.
Once CosmoLocal.credit is running on Gnosis, I expect Circles integration to become much simpler.
The architecture I currently see is:
- Circles provides personal and Group issuance, identity, trust, and relational routing through its Web of Trust.
- Commitment Pools provide curation, values, limits, inventory, fees, fulfillment, and repair.
- Cosmo-Local Credit routes between independently governed pools.
- Gnosis provides EVM settlement, Safe custody, stable assets, and potentially card and e-money access.
The point is to let people and businesses express what they can genuinely provide, then give trusted markets the ability to decide what they will accept, at what value, and up to what limit.
Curation markets are where issuance can become credit.
