Social Wallet
Description
Sune Sandbeck et al:
“At this reduced scale, blockchains have been deployed with real success, as part of commons-based projects that are attuned to the needs and desires of local communities (Gloerich, Lovink, de Vries eds, 2018). The project that has taken this vision the furthest is the Social Wallet, a series of pilot projects across Europe. One implementation of the Social Wallet is Macao in Milan, a community of artists who have organized themselves using the Social Wallet’s blockchain, which records the distribution of resources amongst the community. This ledger is visible to all members of the community, ensuring that the distribution of resources is fully transparent, which provides a vital incentive to maintaining fairness and equity. The primary resource distributed is a basic income, but community members are also endowed with the power to cre-ate, assign, and track the distribution of resources and exchange coins based on hours contributed to the community. These contributions are in service of organizing events, taking care of public space, or contributing to an urban commons, and they are based on labor time (www.macaomilano.org, 2018).
The implementation of the Social Wallet is suggestive of a very different conception of value. Unlike value in Bitcoin, which is linked to the idea of the speculated worth of a financial asset’s exchange value, for the Social Wallet, the value is derived from fairly rewarding all facets of labor related to social reproduction without reducing that value to an exchange value. According to the developers of Freecoin, whose blockchain architecture provides the basis for the Social Wallet, the specific architecture was designed to “let people run reward schemes that are transparent and auditable to other organisations. It is made for participatory and democratic organisations who want to incentivise participation, unlike centralized banking databases” (https://freecoin.dyne.org/, 2018). Blockchains are essential to this system because they create a trust management system that allows communities to uphold the sanctity of their contributions without the reduction of these contributions to an exchange or monetary value. This means trust is not located in a central authority, nor is itlocated in a ‘trustless architecture’, but rather it is located in the community, which is vested with the capacity to assert the value of particular contributions. These hours are tracked, logged, and reciprocated. Members put in time by contributing to community goals and in return receive coins which they might spend on other services provided by other contributors to the community.”