"Humans of Gnosis" - an experimental Circles group currency

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:

  1. You must be in some form active in the Gnosis ecosystem (e.g. posting occasionally in this forum would be sufficient
  2. 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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  1. Finally - you can proceed to add liquidity:
    Send 1 GNO to your Circles Safe.

  2. 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 :slight_smile:
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.

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Any recommendation where to look for these people? Do I need to visit Berlin?;-).

edit: not sure if a bunch of small pools with different CRC tokens paired with GNO are of any value besides proving the existence. Even if I like to pay someone who doesn’t accept my own circles I am not sure how to find a pool with the right one(s) and payment will most likely be limited to small amounts due to the slippage.

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@mkoeppelmann Thank you for all the provided information and instructions.
The concept of Circles, with its decentralized and trust-based approach to currency issuance, could also prove to be a solution for countries facing high inflation rates such as Argentina. It would be worthwhile to test this idea within developer communities to see its potential and gather feedback.

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@mkoeppelmann thanks for all these infos. Never heard about Circles before but i’m interested by the experiment.
Like Refri was asking earlier, how to find the 3early circles adopters to be able to join ?
Refri could vouch for me as i could vouch for him (#realt gang) but we still missing 2other contacts…
Thanks :+1:

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SEC Derailed Circle’s Plans to Go Public via SPAC Deal: Report

Circle, the company behind stablecoin USDC, has said its $9bn plans to go public didn’t go through because the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) did not sign off…

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Circle (the stable coin) has nothing to do with Circles(UBI) (https://joincircles.net/).
Circles (the UBI project) has been using this name since >7 years.

Many people in the crypto world have already signed up for Circles. There is unfortunately not yet a great way to discover others that have already signed up.
Here is one tool that lets you explore the trust path between 2 people. This is e.g. me and @ernst

In any case - happy to connect to you.

So the main point is not the liquidity that is provided for your individual Circles - the main point is the SIGNAL that is provided if your liquidity is still available. Remember, Circles is a permissionless system. It is very easy to write a bot that will create 1000 Circles accounts (and people are doing it already). However - the key point is the trust network. If you are careful and only trust people that want to actually participate in Circles they will likely not bother and take all their Circles to drain your liquidity. If on the other hand you are not careful and you would just trust random accounts (and there are plenty of telegram groups where people try to get trust) you can be certain that a bot owner with 1000 accounts will immediately take any opportunity to exchange their fake Circles into cash.
A real life analogy would be, if you are with friends in a room it should be safe to leave a $10 on the table. If you leave the room and you come back you’d trust it is still there. If on the other hand someone takes it in the Circles analogy it becomes very obvious that you have trusted fake accounts.

So generally speaking - Circles accounts that provide (even just very little) liquidity and the lqiudity is not drained are very likely held by real people that also only connect to real people. This can be used as a signal to decide to accept Circles from that person.

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Thanks, I will try it out once I have enough circles to fund a pool. If anyone inside circles come along and think I am trustworthy I will be happy if you scan my code.

profile deleted: will be glad to send as pm to anyone who is trustworthy :wink:

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I’m interested in joining.

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hello martin
, thanks for writing this guide . I’m interested in joining this experiment.

I need to find 3 person to verify me first

https://circles.garden/profile/0xC6a3a2950705B979E229CD2AD2f8e2dfA0Ef6867

here is my twitter https://twitter.com/whiskeyrobber_/status/1621516351465734153

I know no one that uses circleUBI to verify me .

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How should I find three people to trust me? Seems to be a bit of a paradox in a distributed, privacy-oriented world of blockchain.

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Has anyone been about to get 3 people to trust them?

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not me, still stuck at 1.

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Dear @refri, @annandale, @whiskey, I’ve just giving you trust. If you happen to be in FullNode (Berlin) right now, you can also catch up with the Circles team to give you more trust.

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Thanks a lot, it’s working.

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Much appreciated! Will work on the next steps in the next few days.

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thanks for trusting me

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Hello :slight_smile: I’m delighted to see this experiment as a long time Circle user :smiley: 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.

Edit: idk for what reason when I copy my Circle token addy into Swapr it shows 0 balance…can anyone help pls?
image

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Are you sure you’re connected to Swapr using your Safe and not another address? You can connect to your Safe via Wallet Connect. When presented with the QR code, you can copy the connect link to clipboard and then paste it within the WC app in Safe.

I’ve done this.

My Swapr Pool

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this seems a valid argument, but it regards only my very own circles that have been given to me as UBI

Just giving them trust won’t giving them the opportunity to drain the pool, at least not if I understand the system right, they need my very own circles, so I had to pay them for something in advance, and only these CRC can be exchanged.Or did I got this wrong?

Thinking about this, another question arose: if I send circles using my circles.garden wallet, how are these handled if I have a lot of different CRC from different participants (presuming the recipient would trust them all):

  • will it take my own CRC first or others?
  • or use them in a balanced proportion reflecting my holdings?
  • or will this be chosen randomly?
  • or can I choose which one should be used first?
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