Background on Circles:
Circles (or CirclesUBI) is an application on Gnosis Chain that tries to implement a fair global currency based on the principle of UBI - money issuance is done as UBI (universal basic income). Each registered account gets 1 CRC each hour.
While there are a number of “UBI currencies” (Worldcoin (kind of), Gooddollar, UBI (connected to proof of humanity)) they usually all require to do some form of authentication. This is of course necessary to prevent people from signing up 100x. However - this is a huge factor for centralization. Whoever controls the “signup mechanism” effectively controls the coin. Just a random example, Worldcoin claims to be decentralized but then e.g. excludes full countries from participating.
In Circles this problem is solved differently. Anyone can sign up anytime. This also means that theoretically, you can sign up as often as you want. However - everyone creates their own individual token. Always at the rate of 1 CRC/h. So if you just sign up and create new tokens that no one cares about you don’t get any advantage from it. Circles only become meaningful if you “connect” to others. Connecting (or trusting) essentially means that 2 people say: I accept your Circles and you accept mine. Technically speaking “trusting” means that you are willing to exchange all Circles you currently hold 1:1 for the Circles of the person you are trusting.
Consequently, this means when e.g. a business is accepting Circles (see the first market place for Circles here) they always need to define whoms Circles they accept. (Who do they “trust”). So the need for verification does not go away with Circles but it is possible to decentralize it and to have many competing verification mechanisms.
I am proposing here to start a list of “trusted Circles” accounts called “humans of Gnosis”. If the list proves to be useful entities that accept Circles will start using that list, basically saying, if your account is on the list, I will accept your Circles.
The rules I propose for the list are very simple:
- You must be in some form active in the Gnosis ecosystem (e.g. posting occasionally in this forum would be sufficient
- You must have backed your own personal CRC token with at least 1 GNO - more concrete, you should establish a AMM liquidity pool between some of your CRC and 1 GNO
At this point to do that requires a handful of manual steps but I think they are quite educational for understanding components of the Gnosis ecosystem we are trying to build.
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You need a Circles account: https://circles.garden/
If you don’t already have one circles.garden will guide you. You will need to find 3 people already participating in Circles that will trust you. -
Once you have a Circles account it is important to understand that your Circles Identity is actually a (Gnosis) Safe. While circles.garden will only let you do things related to Circles - it is actually possible to load your Circles identity into web Safe interface (or mobile) and do any kind of transaction on Gnosis chain. Check out Circles UBI | Wallet
Under Profile address you will find your Safe address - this you can simply load into the safe app - here is e.g. my Circles Safe:
Safe – Dashboard -
To not just view your Safe but do actions from it you need to load your private key into a wallet like Metamask or Rabby (Rabby is a Metamask alternative and for this case very interesting as you can also load your (Circles) Safe in it. For some applications it is more convenient to interact with them through Rabby (similar to Metamask) instead of loading them with the Safe Web interface.
Your private key can be derived from your Circles seed phrase. However - the easiest is to simply copy the private key from the “Chrom developer tools” (View->Developer->Developer tools) here:
The value of the private key can be copied and added to Metamask (“Import Account”) but also e.g. the Safe mobile app or Rabby. Here is also another tutorial how to do those steps.
To execute transactions from this newly important account against your Safe you will need xDAI on the account → https://gnosisfaucet.com/
Now as you have taken full control over your Safe you can also e.g. add an owner of another account you are using.
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Finally - you can proceed to add liquidity:
Send 1 GNO to your Circles Safe. -
Connect your Safe to: Swapr with e.g. Wallet Connect (or Rabby directly)
→ Add liquidity
Find your personal Circle Token address here:
Copy your token address into Swapr and select GNO as the second token:
Now you need to define how much of your Circles should be worth 1GNO.
As a help - in Berlin currently, the convention is that 3.886 CRC (this is displayed in the interface as 10 Circles - read more about why here and a technical post here) equals 1 €.
At the time of writing 1GNO = ~100€ so 1 GNO = 388.6 CRC
After supplying liquidity you should find your personal Circles pool as something like this:
AAAAnnnd that is 
If you follow those steps - please respond in this thread and we will create this (on-chain) list of “Humans of Gnosis”. In fact, it can be turned into a “Circles group currency”. But more on how that works in another post.
I’m delighted to see this experiment as a long time Circle user 
I think I found Circle soon to its inception, glad to it evolve further and be part of this journey! Thank you for the work you are putting into this initiative.
