Dear Gnosis Community,
My name is Julio. I am an economic anthropologist from Guatemala & I represent the Circles UBI Coop & the Circles DAO. Since we launched CirclesUBI in late 2020, Circles has gathered significant attention world-wide, with more than 100,000 Gnosis safes deployed to date and communities joining every month in different parts of the world. Since launch, we have been tirelessly working to bring Unconditional Basic Income to the world, starting with the Berlin Open Pilot, holding monthly international assemblies & participating in the wider UBI debates world-wide.
As I am sure many of you know, the CirclesUBI protocol relies on a very interesting technology called the Web of Trust (or WoT, for short), which basically sets the basis for a robust and non-bureaucratic decentralised identity system, whereby people are able to verify and trust that other people are who they say they are without the need for a central authority and creepy biometrics. We at Circles think it’s time to bring this gift to Gnosis as a whole and strengthen the social relations within our ecosystem in order to ignite more collaboration between the projects running on Gnosis Chain. Leveraging CirclesUBI’s WoT as a basis, we would like to propose the creation a Gnosis-safe WoT dapp and create the necessary tooling so that other Dapps, DAOs and projects using other WoT networks can integrate with the existing Circles WoT and use it for their own specific purposes. We think the Circles WoT holds immeasurable value and we would like to take concrete steps in order to share it with others and do the necessary R&D in order to bring this into being.
Furthermore, in order to achieve our mission of bringing UBI to the world and making Circles a global monetary system, we would like to request funding from the GnosisDAO in order to expand the current Berlin pilot and create new ones in different parts of the world within the next 18 months. We believe UBI should be seen as a Public Good for the 21st century economy. Gnosis is well positioned to provide the infrastructural backbone in order to make UBI happen. To support our efforts we are planning to build a fully open-source Payment API so that people everywhere can plug Circles into their existing preferred payment methods and co-pay using their UBI and significantly increase adoption. Lastly, we are also planning to add Group Currencies to the Circles ecosystem. To support this and start accruing revenues, the Circles team wants to develop a social DEX, whereby businesses, cooperatives, farms and any other groups that issue their own currency can create markets to sell them for DAI and other digital assets, allowing investors to support the development of decentralised basic income economies.
We think the time is ripe to create more formal synergies between CirclesUBI and GnosisDAO and begin to transition into a more decentralised and ecological economy. 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. In order to fulfil this, this proposal would fund the Circles Coop e.G. and the Bitspossessed developer collective via the CirclesDAO to support the team’s operational costs for a period of one and a half years plus the expansion and creation of new Basic Income Open Pilots for a total of $3.571 Million, given 50% in GNO and 50% in DAI.
To recap: we are promising development of a WoT dapp for Gnosis-safe, expanding the Circles UBI pilots as Public Goods to increase uptake of Gnosis technologies, improving our core infrastructure and creating a social DEX as an investment vehicle.
Do you think this is something that the GnosisDAO community would support? We look forward to your thoughts and show you our fully fledged-out proposal!
Unconditionally,
Julio
Circles UBI