GIP-59: Should GnosisDAO fund Circles UBI R&D work?

GIP-59 : Should GnosisDAO fund Circles UBI R&D work?

  • Let’s do this!! Go Circles!
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Simple Summary

This proposal would fund the Circles Coop eG and the Bitsposessed developer collective to support the CirclesUBI team’s R&D costs for one and a half years and expand operations. The following Circles UBI proposal would foster the mass adoption of key Gnosis technologies like the Gnosis Safe via the establishment of UBI Open Pilots as well as fostering internal collaboration between GnosisChain dapps through the development of a Circles Web of Trust (WoT) GnosisSafe native app and other tools at a total of USD - $3.571 Million, paid 45% in GNO and 55% in DAI, administered by the Circles Coop eG.

Abstract

With over 120,000 accounts deployed so far via the circles.garden interface, CirclesUBI has established itself as a power dapp within GnosisChain, developing, maintaining and promoting basic income public good infrastructures built within programmable accounts via Gnosis Safe technology. The present proposal seeks funding for the team’s operations plus a UBI Open pilot funding program for 1.5 years, and includes a detailed budget on how the team plans to allocate the requested funds of USD - $ 3.571 Million equivalent. Through funding the present proposal, GnosisDAO would establish clear alignment with its core values of funding public goods and support the development and improvement of infrastructure critical to ensuring the sustainable scalability of the GnosisDAO and GnosisChain ecosystem.

See Phase 1 here.

Motivation

CirclesUBI is a basic income system for communities built on the GnosisChain. CirclesUBI was coined first by Martin Koeppelmann during the early days of Ethereum, merging ancient traditions of mutual credit with the idea of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) into a system of personal currencies. Since CirclesUBI launched in Berlin in October 2020 it has gained significant attention from individuals and communities world-wide, with over 120,000 successfully deployed GnosisSafes to date. Beyond the ongoing Berlin Open Pilot and the communities who use Circles around the world, there are new instances of the application being developed around the world, including a campaign by Expedition Grundeinkommen in Berlin that started from May 2022 (circles.pink). This proposal will support the development of a world-wide Circles Movement DAO to serve these as well as other emerging communities.

To ensure our mission to make Circles a planetary movement towards bringing UBI into the world, the Circles Coop and the Bitspossessed collective have successfully relaunched Circles in order to have an issuance rate based on time so that communities world-wide can more easily anchor Circles to their own Units of Account and start exchanging using CRC. You can read more about the recent transition and its benefits here.

With the goal to further increase uptake, Circles Coop and Bitspossessed are now focused on creating a resilient payments infrastructure without single points of failure (SPOFs). Based on the online Circles Market, the team is currently designing the specification to develop an OpenAPI so that people across the planet can use their existing preferred payment methods to co-pay with their CRC currency.

After the successful merge of XDAI/Gnosis, we believe it’s time to deliver on the promises of “developing the Gnosis Chain ecosystem and incentivize usage”. In order to have a more resilient and interdependent ecosystem, the CirclesUBI team wants to bring mutual benefit to the different dapps within GnosisChain via the development of a Circles Web of Trust (WoT) dapp within GnosisSafe. A native WoT GnosisSafe app would provide pathways for interoperability and integration between dapps, DAOs, GnosisChain POS validators, other WoT networks like Proof of Humanity, BrightID and more, embedding trusted relationships and token systems within a modular and integrative WoT for GnosisChain.

Circles UBI Coop approaches its mid-term development through establishing revenue-generating income sources to cover cost of production and re-invest the overflow into R&D. The CirclesUBI team will develop a Community Currency Exchange, a social DEX that promotes community finance (Co-Fi) via CRC group currencies and other alt-coins like our sister project Trustlines (recently decided to move to GnosisChain), where SMEs and COOPs and municipalities can issue their own community currencies and sell it for digital assets and DAI stablecoin in return for future promises to their own production, creating healthier relationships between investors within the Gnosis ecosystem and community/business members in the Circles network, new DAO structures and more. The Gnosis ecosystem can further benefit from the uptake of GnosisSafe infrastructure via CirclesUBI to non-crypto natives, with over 120,000 safes deployed as of mid-2022 on Gnosis Chain (source: Dune Analytics).

In short, the Circles Coop & the Bitspossessed have assembled an extremely well positioned team to stress-test, develop, maintain and expand underlying Gnosis core infrastructure and drive Gnosis technologies to mass adoption via the implementation of UBI on a planetary scale, which we believe to be a paradigm shift in how society is organised. Gnosis currently provides the backbone infrastructure for this transition to take place and our mission is to improve it through everyday usage with a wide range of people.

Specification

The Circles Coop and the Bitspossessed collective seek to increase the size of the teams to a total of 24 full-time positions, which will be employed over the course of 12 - 18 months, in order to develop, maintain and expand the described tools. Furthermore, the proposal includes funding for a Circles international ambassador position leading the community work within the Circles Movement DAO and transferring the Circles Coop’s Berlin pilot learnings, best-practices and research tools to better implement other Circles hubs around the world.

The total budget requested for the CirclesUBI team (USD - $ 1.948 Million in DAI, 55 %) and to equip the Circles Movement DAO via the development of Open UBI Pilots (USD - $ 1.5 Million in GNO, 45 %) is USD - $ 3.571 Million. The full budget details of the present CirclesUBI proposal can be found here.

Rationale

The CirclesUBI technical roadmap is public and was created by the Bitspossessed, the team that maintains and develops the CirclesUBI core codebase. Its chief priorities for 2022 include improvements to the pathfinder algorithm, including hardening transfer through transactions to improve the overall functionality and usability of the Circles network, as well as developing a Circles Payment API & co-payment functionality. For Q4 2022 and 2023, priorities lay on developing a general purpose GnosisSafe Web of Trust (WoT) native app and tooling based on the Circles WoT to encourage more on-chain collaboration and a Community Currency DEX. All of this is to ensure that the already existing living communities using Circles can have a better user-experience. In terms of promises to the GnosisDAO, we divide these into two:

1. Development of Gnosis Infrastructure & Public Goods:

  • Development of a GnosisSafe Web of Trust (WoT) native dapp & modular tooling for the GnosisChain ecosystem: The Circles WoT provides a network of trusted peers which can be used by different projects building on GnosisChain so that other dapps can build on top of it using their own token network or connecting it with other WoT networks (e.g. BrightID, Proof of Humanity, etc) and established more aligned strategic pathways for collaboration. R&D will take place in the following areas:

    • Robust network reputation system for staking on GnosisChain via the future Gnosis WoT & R&D on scaling GnosisChain through the Circles WoT and projects like Dappnode.
    • Trust relations between and within DAOs using GnosisSafes.
    • Modular collaboration and integration between dapps in the GnosisChain ecosystem. Think Proof of Humanity, Trustlines, BrightID, Circles and many more!
    • Embed real time economic trade data onto the blockchain to support the development of more transparent, sustainable and trusted supply chains via the UBI pilots research.
    • Pathfinder algorithm R&D - useful for other projects with native tokens to do their own transactions using an integrated WoT dapp.
    • Modular extensibility of the transfer through methods.
    • More non-market driven transactions, such as recent Proof of Active Participation (POAP) efforts. * R&D into a future $WOT token for the Web of Trust dapp for GNO token holders, similar to the $SAFE token proposal.
  • CirclesUBI Open Pilots: Leveraging Gnosis technology, the CirclesUBI Open Pilots provide a strategic framework to go from basic income pilots to basic income policy and basic income systems around the planet. The Circles Coop is currently expanding the Berlin Open Pilot and plan to spread CirclesUBI more formally into other regions as part of a Circles Movement, planning to expand the support for open pilots by the end of 2023, where the joincircles.net will become a neutral platform for all projects using Circles and other wallet instances, such as circles.pink (Expedition Grundeinkommen). The Circles Movement DAO will work as a governance mechanism to allocate funds accordingly for the implementation of these pilots to the communities that want to implement Circles locally in a transparent way. Our go-to-market strategy is working with the B2B sectors to increase productive capacity, develop infrastructure and go to key stakeholders, such as established communities already using CRC, local municipalities and regional governments interested in implementing basic income, in order to create more ecological and transparent value chains. UBI is one of the main pillars for the 21st century economy and a social ecologically just transition, especially given the current context of supply chain disruptions and rising inflation. We strongly believe GnosisChain and Gnosis technologies more generally provide a strategic backbone for this transition to take place.

  • Circles Payment API: In order to have a scalable system and reach millions of people, we are focusing on creating an open source payment API so that Circles can be used in a plug and play basis, allowing people to co-pay with their UBI using existing payment infrastructures and habits, such as debit cards, marketplaces and other payment applications.

2, Fulfilling the Promise of Investment Opportunities to GNO holders

  • Community Currency DEX: Based on Circles group currencies (currently being developed by third party teams), a social DEX will create incentives for GNO holders via investment opportunities in strategic future tokens emerging from the development and deployment of the platform, as well as ROI from overflow investments in SMEs and COOPs who sell their tokens to the communities that support them, liquidity-pool provider incentives and more. To achieve this, we are exploring collaboration with MakerDAO for integrations and researching deployment of e.g. the Juicebox protocol on the GnosisChain. We are open for suggestions and potential synergies to collaborate with existing DEX infrastructures (e.g. Honeyswap, 1hive, Uniswap, Cowswap) within GnosisChain to design a specific-purpose social DEX that is directed at the real economy.
  • Indirect benefits for GNO holders: Due to further increasing uptake of GnosisSafes and transactions being incentivized by Circles communities, the revenue model of GnosisChain (e.g. transaction fees, staking rewards, etc.) will in turn benefit all GNO token holders and those participating in the maintenance and improvement of Gnosis Chain. We also expect benefits coming from Web of Trust R&D.

All funds not spent will be at Circles Coop e.G. discretion.

Unconditionally,

Julio Linares,
on behalf of the Circles UBI Coop & Bitspossessed Collective

25 Likes

I like this idea :heart_eyes:
Circles is a very promising project that has already won many hearts

5 Likes

Go for it. Wishing you the best of luck!

4 Likes

Circles has proven itself as a dedicated and principled org. Funding would support its visionary trajectory!

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非常期待项目能够做起来,长期还是看好的… crypto才是未来

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we kindly support you!

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Circles 已证明自己是一个敬业且有原则的组织。 资金将支持其有远见的发展轨迹!

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It seems to me that circles is really doing a few different things: 1) attempting to create technology around web identity using your web of trust app 2) experimenting in a ubi. It’s difficult for me to see the usefulness of both. The WoT is obviously something that could fundamentally help problem areas within crypto and on gnosis. The UBI experiment on the other hand seems less useful and successful. The technology behind it seems great for the Web of Trust part but a group of people just decided to change the amount of ubi from 200 plus euros a month to 79 euros a month. How is this fundamentally different from our current centralized system of governance? A group of powerful people determined to make the amount of income less (seems like a standard fiat government) I understand the reasoning behind it but my guess is while these systems are subsidized with fiat they will function well but when you take that funding away this promise of world wide adoption seems grossly exaggerated. How has the experiment shown any real success without being subsidized by fiat (therefore being a part of the very system it strongly critiques) I see more than half of this budget going to an unproven system that really isn’t producing a ubi in the first place. It still has a unit of measurement that people accumulate and over spend called trust, and if you don’t have it you don’t have a ubi and if you do you can purchase more, and while I think it’s an interesting philosophy, it seems a waste of resources. The WoT app technology could be budgeted a lot more than it is and the other reduced (but then the idea of ubi unbacked by fiat would have to stand on its own which it doesn’t seem likely to me that it will do).

4 Likes

I don’t see this proposal benefitting current or future GNO token holders.

I’m sure your project means well and believes deeply in UBI, but unfortunately it will be governments of the world who implement UBI (if ever) not a crypto project.

The above quote is a bit concerning.

2 Likes

yeahh mann! sameee !

1 Like

Dear maessedai,

thank you for your inputs and concerns. Let me explain a few things:

  • Circles didn’t transition from 240 € to 72 € a month, but from 240 CRC to 720 CRC, the fiat price signal is just a local incentive in Berlin, nowhere else (here is the full article about the transition: “As before, outside of the laboratory (Berlin Pilot), the pricing of products and services offered in Circles is up to the community to agree upon, which determines how much value people can claim with their CRC.”)

  • this price signal in the Berlin Pilot is just one out of many (possibly millions), if you consider every market participant can set their own rate, so central groups of power can possibly only have a timely advantage, but no lasting leverage

  • the reasonable budget for incentivising the Circles economy is not simply planned for cashing out, rather incentivising ambassadors to onboard communities without the huge extent of a subsidy or cash-out program while launching minimal-viable-circles (MVCs), which are closed and enable businesses to spend CRC instead cashing them out

  • we are working closely with the FRIBIS (University Freiburg) comparing how these MVCs work in comparison with other basic income systems around the world, so a final conclusion of its success cannot be drawn yet

  • our strategy is that Circles can be used by local governments as an infrastructure/protocol to deploy UBI and we are actively exploring collaboration with public bodies, so in our view it is not public vs. private UBI, but rather a partnership

Hope that helps a bit to digest our work.

Cheers, Andreas (in behalf of the Circles Coop)

6 Likes

I was aware that I was referring to the change in fiat backing in Berlin which was a change in the amount of fiat and an increase in the amount of circles coin. So the question becomes with this change will prices of items go up in circles? Of course they will because they are worth less now in fiat. If the system actually worked the purchasing power of the increase in circles would compensate the change in backing of fiat but it won’t because of economics. Imagine maker changing the basis of the peg to decrease the amount of collateral. This really isn’t different. Where is the proof that this idea is anything but fantasy when unbacked by fiat? Look I do not begrudge you the experiment (although I would say historically this philosophy has been proven to fail time and time again with larger population sizes) but the ask is for much more budget towards the less proven answer to a need. This is my issue. And my issue is that it proposes to be a more fair system than our current system when we have already seen an abuse of power to change the amount of fiat backing. Did everyone in the Berlin community agree to that or was it directed by those in charge of the experiment? I appreciate your work and particularly the usefulness of the technology, but it seems an unproven philosophy is eating a lot of the success of the tech rather than being utilized for the most common good.

4 Likes

I believe This project will work and succeed.

3 Likes

Do it lets see 🫣 I am so excited

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Short form:
I am all for Gnosis supporting Circles and Circles becoming a driver to get users involved with Gnosis Chain. However - I am against this specific proposal as it is done only by one of the many teams working on Circles and I feel Gnosis should support a united effort instead of uncoordinated approaches.

Long-form:
I came up with the idea for CirclesUBI many many years ago (around 2013) and in 2015 formalized the ideas with pseudo code and described it as a system running on Ethereum. In November 2015 I presented the idea to a wider Ethereum audience at Devcon1 in London. Since then many people and groups have been working over the years on Circles. Including a “spoke” within ConsenSys and a group of people connected to the MakerDAO ecosystem.

Today there are at the very least 4 groups working on and around Circles. Coop/Bits; Circles Land, Circles Bali and Bootnode working on Group currencies under Gnosis supervision. Now this proposal was unilaterally done by Coop/Bits and did not coordinate with the other groups. To me, for Gnosis to support Circles and such a significant way a few more requirements are necessary: a united approach and already more clear traction for this shared approach.

Cirlces is a project I am very passionate about and I do believe it can be a great usecase for Gnosis Chain but it will only succeed in a united effort.

Attached a “timeline” of Circles and different projects/people involved.

10 Likes

How does this forum defend against someone creating fake accounts and voting on a GIP?

most likely not at all, but fake accounts wouldn’t help for outcome of snapshot voting result. And for my own decisions making I don’t look at the voting results here but the discussion.

I’m confused by your use of the term ‘fiat backing’ here. This currency is not a commodity backed by fiat or other asset. It’s not a bearer asset either, and the WoT performs a critical fundamental function that helps alleviate the problems associated with the Trilemma any currency faces when attempting to interface with other economies.

Using the existing units of account in place is a natural Schelling point of coordination because everyone has assets, ongoing expenses, and/or debts that are valued in it. This just serves as a control, even when using some % of that standard instead of 1:1.

You’re right that if you came in unilaterally & made a change to that for everyone in an existing economy, it’d be disruptive to say the least. But that’s not what happened here (on either end of the stick). There’s no ‘economy’ yet; no unpaid wages, debt, or inventory was locked in at the old ratio. No one bought Circles. There are no unrealized losses involved, just sellers adjusting their price tags, as they do on a regular basis anyway. In this case, the control values of the listed goods in EUR doesn’t change, only how many CRC are moving.

Importantly, this change came about from outside of the Circles Coop and Berlin, an important indicator of decentralization. The Circles community in Munich instigated the idea in autonomous style (they are established as Circles Land & even have their own UI). This was neither centrally enforced nor a product of the market or other coordination beyond Munich. Even though the 2 groups did not agree on the change, maintaining the coordination outweighed ‘market sovereignty’, or whatever you want to call it.

Also, if you want to add an ‘unproven philosophy’ to the table, please name & describe it. It’s not clear what you’re referring to.

2 Likes

Your comment really highlights the differences in language that we all are using, some from the old paradigm & some from the new. It can be very confusing, especially as new combinations of familiar concepts are presented.

I think most will agree that a united effort is important for a project’s success.
I also think most will agree that decentralization is important for a project’s success too.

It appears necessary that we outline an early systems map of the different groups involved, and the roles each plays, connections between, etc.

To my eyes, the layers beyond the core Coop/Bits group exist externally because they want to focus on other areas or ideas. IE, they identify as separate (fork) intentionally, to free themselves of the constraints of the base mission of the Coop, as well as the time it would take to always coordinate their own ideas with other groups. From this POV, it seems strange to require coordination between groups on topics that they essentially opted out of.

But maybe your focus was not aimed at the past so much as the future? If significant investments are coming from Gnosis, it certainly makes sense to look at the big picture, and try to identify if there are similar needs in the other groups before committing to one.

What kind of shared approach would you like to see?

One issue I think is less complicated: the funding for salaries (both new & existing) enables human existence in this world, and those key member nodes of the network should not still be living like seasonal/migrant workers. Knowing your job is funded beyond a month or 2 is important to well being, as well as attracting quality people.

Maybe it would be better to separate these issues into separate proposals?

4 Likes

I have a few things to say here, in relation to Martin’s critique of the proposal above

  • The proposal explicitly states that the funding is for the Circles Coop eG and Bitsposessed. It never claims that these teams represent the whole of the Circles Ecosystem, and it does not downplay work being done by other teams. It is totally within the right of any team to make a proposal

  • As far as I understand, many Circles teams have been (at least partially) funded by Martin up until this point. In seeking funding from GnosisDAO Coop/Bits is now obviously seeking a degree of independence and funding stability. I am sympathetic to how that might be challenging for Martin, especially given that he started the project, but much of the recent day-to-day work on Circles has been spearheaded by Coop/Bits, and they have a right to seek more formal funding

  • I feel the history laid out by Martin downplays the work of the Coop/Bits team somewhat. In my experience they are a highly active team who have initiated many Circles projects. For the record, I actually have followed the Circles project since it was just a rough blog post written by Martin, and over the years I’ve seen the various groups that have been drawn into it - for example, I even advised Jason Hickel (mentioned by Martin in his diagram) in London when he was trying to figure out what Circles was and whether it was promising

  • Martin says he is resistant because he wants the teams to be coordinated, but I don’t see any plan for how that will be acheived. The Coop/Bits team is making a concrete proposal for moving ahead, and in the absense of seeing a concrete alternative multi-team coordination proposal I don’t see a strong reason for why they should be blocked on this

Thanks,
Brett Scott

6 Likes