Inspiration
The Japanese recession ave rise to one of the most successful time exchanges yet, called Fureai Kippu, or "Caring Relationship Tickets."People no longer had enough cash to pay for their parents' or grandparents' health-care services -- but because they had moved far away from home to find jobs, they couldn't take care of their relatives thenmselves either. The Fureai Kippu exchange gave people the ability to bank hours of eldercare by taking care of old people in their communitities, which they could then spend to get care for their owne relatives far away. As the Caring Relationship Tickets became accepted things of value, people began using them for a variety or services.
Ithaca Hours are a local currency for the town of Ithaca, NY. The value of one Ithaca Hour is tied to the average hourly wage in the city. You can get Ithaca Hours at local banks and there is a directory of local businesses that accept Hours as payment. It is meant to keep wealth circulating within the community among locals and locally-owned businesses.
Forefront is a Web 3.0-native online publication and community, which writes primarily about DAOs and social tokens. It has a native token, $FF, which is used to reward contributors and engaged community members. Forefront uses bounties and rewards to create high community engagement as well as high quality content, and a highly collaborative culture.
As an example, some Forefront bounties include:
400 $FF tokens: Publishing an article on Forefront
30 $FF tokens: Asking good questions during community meetups
20 $FF tokens: surfacing interesting stories to be included in the daily newsletter
The tokens are both distributed monthly by a treasury and also are sometimes tipped natively within the FF Discord.
Within a time bank, people within a network provide services to each other in exchange for time credits. Normally, these time credits are recognized in an egalitarian way of 1 hour = 1 hour. This is similar to the way the Ampled time bank functions, where an hour of time of a senior software engineer is worth the same as an intern.
More info: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_time_bank_solution​
Here is a definition and example of "community currencies" from Cambiatus:
Community currencies can help engage individuals from a community to execute actions that contribute towards achieving certain objectives.
For instance, a community needs to reduce its carbon emissions and in order to do so, they want to promote the use of public transportation and bikes for going to workplaces. So as to incentivize this action, they create a currency called “BikeCoins”, which is created each time someone from the community uses public transportation or a bike to go to work. These “BikeCoins” can be then used to have access to products and services from commerce and individuals from the community who are also part of the system and are interested in reducing carbon emissions and improving traffic."
DisCO stands for "distributed cooperative" views the concept of DAOs through a cooperative and feminist economics lens.
Here is their manifesto: https://disco.coop/manifesto/​
Musician, RAC, launched a community token, $RAC in October 2020. There are a total of 10M tokens minted, and a portion of them were retroactively distributed to his fans that bought his music, supported him on Patreon, or purchased merch.
​$RAC tokens can even be purchased through a decentralized exchange like Uniswap using ETH. Holders of more than 10 $RAC tokens are able to access a private Discord server, as well as receive early access and discounts for merch. For RAC, holders of his community token do not receive access to revenue sharing or publishing rights. Instead, the $RAC token symbolizes the mutually beneficial relationship between creator and community and is a genesis for a unique alternative economy.