Inspiration
Different successful experiences of local currencies used for different communitary purposes :
- Reach social development in full autonomy : Conjunto Palmeiras in Fortaleza, Brazil, raised from poverty and government neglect by using the Palmas Community Bank, recognized by Brazil central bank after 20 years of proven capability to be operated by the local citizens to become a Solidarity Fintech. https://www.localfutures.org/programs/global-to-local/planet-local/local-business-finance/banco-palmas/
- Global settlements among biggest commodity trading companies : even though major trading companies sign trading contracts for goos all over the world, most of the money flow happens in local territory or cross-border, so a common local currency is adopted to avoid movilizing internal tresor liquidity and be safe from fiat market volatility and geopolitical phenomena. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/understanding-the-growing-use-of-local-currencies-in-cross-border-payments/
- Complimentary / collaborative business ecosystems : Companies willing to strenghten collaboration while protecting the local economy have implemented a modern way of bartering by paying employees with local digital currencies accepted only by the ecosystem partners but covering most of their daily needs : accomodation, restauration, transportation, local goods, etc. https://bartercard.com.au/
Besides, recent studies show that even though volunteering, as traditionally known (through an established organization), has decreased during / after Covid; however, people (specially young generations) are still willing to find fulfillment though civic service, as long as certain conditions are met:
- Flexibility to engage for short term or one time only participation
- Reduce administrative overhead and management / budget inefficiency within organizations
- Ability to see directly (or locally) the impact of their action, knowing that they are benefiting a tangible cause
- Motivation by acting together with members of their close circle / loved ones https://recherches-solidarites.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/LFB-etude-24-05-2022.pdf
What it does
Provide a seamless way to join a community by sharing common interests / pain points and manage a local / free currency to reward members taking action or fulfilling a service in a gamified experience.
Temporary members can explore and suggest services / pain points on a map or by discovering near located community suggested services (Tinder like profile swiping) according to their privacy / filtering choices
Either by regular voting or funding, Certified member's (through third party DID/KYC) can participate on defining global services for the community and the rewarding policy / contract rules, as well as the amount (and the subjective value) of the local currency.
The idea is to favor local service and product providers in order to strengthen the communities resiliency against monetary crisis / globalization threats, or even environmental hazards. At the same time, administrative overhead for projects that can be self managed with local manpower and businesses is reduced, all while preserving real liquidity / treasury for projects requiring external trade.
We take advantage of the private sharding features on Near chain (no fees for inner transactions, tokens are not tradable), in order to make natively possible the basis of a local currency's economic model (no trade value). NFTs on the other hand are linked to the user's main account to serve as a reputation / membership proof or grant ownership on other decentralized applications in a permission-less way.
Besides, by using analytics, we leverage the value of every DAO's transactional data to provide credibility on the community's capacity to handle its own economy and to use the full potential of their own members skills and local businesses value, so they can be granted external funding (in FIAT or tradable crypto), by government officials or private investors, to build more ambitious infrastructure projects.
Furthermore, in the case of communities built at a city / county level, thanks to insights on global members participation / self funding dynamics, government officials can better assess the strengths and opportunities as well as the pain points of their citizens, and in consequence redirect public budget in a more strategic manner.
New communities can just deploy the platform on a new private shard and experiment token prices / minting amounts in a safe environment, before eventually deciding to support more ambitious community projects (through participative budget) or making trading agreements with other communities with a common token / NFT grants.
How we built it
Blockchain :
- member / service registry : Near Data Access
- Voting / escrow / Service Factory : WASM Contract on Aurora
- Event triggers (reputation badge / rewards / vote ready / service deploy) : Near Indexer, GraphQL on QueryAPI
Account abstraction :
- KeyPOM for temporary users (trial accounts)
- FastAuth for enrolled users, allowing them to join different communities
- Deployed Service's contract accounts : sub accounts made by using the project administrator's public key
- "I'm a human" NDC on Fractal ID to recognize KYCd users,
Rewards / Tokens
- Private shard Token on Near
- Proof of service : POAP by Tekuno
- Service proof / Community grants / Reputation badges : NFTs from Near Core Contracts (W-Near)
- Prevent trade of local tokens outside of the community : SBT Token linked to each community / private shard
- Settlements among future meta communities on other chains : XRPL EVM or Circle UBI
Member interactions
- Chats on community suggested services : Calimero
- Fronted and user's interactions on social media : Near Social widgets
- Communities official communications : mailchain
Challenges we ran into
New to Near ecosystem. It took time to curate the available / most suitable components and solution partners
Since the existing smart contracts were built with solidity and ethereum ecosystem tools, I'm in the process of translating them into Rust in order to use all features built on top of Near Private Shards.
Little Frontend / BOS component creation skills. But the widget perspective and Jutsu.ai helped a lot to avoid managing the ReactJS / NextJS details while developing
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For the moment, the idea of using DAO for the common good seems to passionate people by itself, which is energizing. I'm willing to give a considerable part of my time to this project after the event. I also have the support of a group of people from problemattic.app, willing to volunteer during short coworking sessions or prospecting / supporting test communities.
An strategical collaboration with Popula.io (engagement centered platform for social causes) is not out of the picture.
A first community is willing to try this platform, Madeira Friends (Digital Nomad community in Madeira Funchal, sponsored by government to manage DigiMads events and promote DigiMads volunteering to motivate local students to pursue a carrier in Digital / Web3 professions). Other structures, like associations affiliated to the Colibri network in south France (Nice) or bolsadovoluntariado in Lisbon might folow.
I hope I could present a working prototype on Near by the end of Hackathon, otherwise I'll continue to work in close contact with NearDevHub and if possible their Incubator program.
What we learned
A lot about the inner workings of Near Blockchain and the advantages of private sharding A viable way to assemble existing components and partner solutions on Near ecosystem to get a fully integrated / low fees architecture Near is a community of support for people building dApps with social components that promote privacy and high quality user experience on Web3. We could as well as feel great consideration for dev and founder needs, and a strong will to make everyone grow whatever the stage of our projects / idea progression.
What's next for Lokwer
- Boostrap : Build a functional prototype on Near
- Test : with Digital Nomads community in Madeira as a beta tester, mature into a production ready platform with volunteering service only trade as first use case
- Diversify communities : Expand to other type of communities in Portugal and West Europe to asses the common patterns of communities growth and difficulties to manage local currencies / voting policies
- Include producers / consumers model = prosumers : Start trading local products in addition to services, and include participative budget mechanisms
- "Twin" communities : Start linking communities sharing similar size / voted policies, which could find complimentary interests to trade or share grants to favor inter community member exchange,
- Vertical expansion : Create a meta community with a tradable token to federate communities who want to scale their model
- Horizontal expansion : Expand the concept of local currency in a way that we could target specific economical activities with "flavored" incentives and "token scarcity" regulation, for example to reflect the link with environmental issues and prioritize sustainable / responsible production and consumption trends.
- In parallel: Let virtual communities play and innovate in the Metaverse, so we can have a synergy of human growth between the real world and the digital world
I would also be interested to collaborate to expand the OpenWeb Educational programs to other areas of Portugal, UK, Mexico and France, where I have academical and business contacts.
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