Accumulating Trust with Group Wallets

Circles general
1

For direct payments in a local, peer to peer communities Circles works very well. For other use cases, there are shortcomings:

  • Paying Users not included in a local community cluster.
  • Paying external digital services with unknown service providers.
  • Creating a stable, reliable unit which can be used for payments and outside Circles.

This is a collection of ideas to mediate the very strong peer to peer trust aspect of Circles and set a broader frame of Circles usage besides the major use case of peer to peer, local communities.

Users vs. Group Wallets
Users vs. Group Wallets600Ă—600 48.4 KB

Group Token

A Group can define rules which all members have to follow, ie. external Users can rely upon the enforcemenr of those rules. Members can easily be removed from the Group, they will keep everything they acquired up to this point, but cannot swap their Tokens for the Group Tokens after being removed from the Group.

Adding a User to a Group is as easy as trusting the User from the Group Wallet, which means that the User can swap her Tokens for the Group Tokens. Removing works the same way, by untrusting from the Group Wallet.

With these prerequisites, Group Tokens might help in facilitating “Circles to Circles” payments, ie. payments of Users not directly or even indirectly known by other Users of the Group, with using their Group membership for credibility.

Group Rules

A Group might set up rules which should be followed by the Members. What could those rules be?

  • Members of the Group accept the Group Token as payment for their offerings.
  • Members of the Group accept the Governance of the Group Token and the Group itself.
  • Members must be identifiable and verifiable by certain means which are specified by the Group, eg. email, Twitter, Github (or not at all)

Payment acceptance

So are Group members forced to accept the Token no matter what? That would not work, so an intermediate solution might be:

  • Group Members accept the Token in a certain value range (eg. between $0.5 and $2). If the valuation is out of this range, Group Members can decide to not accept any payments with the Group Token any more.
  • Group Members are completely free in their price settings - they can take any amount of the Group Token for their offerings.
  • If Group Members do not accept payments in the Group Token though the conditions are met, the Group can decide to remove this Group member.

Governance

Governance alone is a huge topic, almost not solvable in one shot. Therefore, Governance can start very easy and might have to change over time. Changing Governance in a running system is a very complex and risky task, this dynamic aspect of Governance must be understood and accepted by the Group members.

  • Start with a simple Governance, a Gnosis Safe with m…n multisg might be enough.
  • DAOs will be a good solution for Groups getting bigger, can also be combined with multisig Wallets.

Exchanges / Valuation of Group Tokens

With Group Tokens, several Users combine their Circles to a unique Token which technically has one address.
If a Group becomes big enough, people might be interested in buying the Group Tokens. This can then be done by DEX and/or AMMs like HoneySwap on xDai.

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