Onboarding
How do I verify my account?
In order to get verified you must be trusted by three people already trusted in the Circles system.
Please note that people should not verify each other if they have not met in person. It’s very easy for someone to attack the network if they can gain trust from strangers online. You could potentially lose your Circles to a fake account.
How do I start receiving a basic income with Circles?
After creating a new wallet you will need 3 incoming trust connections to verify your account. You can request trust by sharing a link to your profile, or in person by having someone scan your profile QR code.
We are hosting regular meet-ups in Berlin during our test phase, where you can come meet the team and connect with other Circles users in person.
Once 3 people have trusted your profile the app will automatically deploy two smart contracts for you to use Circles: your Safe and your own Circles token. You will receive 50 Circles as an initial payout and continue to receive a regular UBI.
What is a Circles Safe?
Your Circles Safe is a smart contract that holds the keys to your account.
You can add multiple devices, such as your computer or phone, to your Safe. Adding devices to your Safe can help with account recovery if you lose your seed phrase.
You can read more about Safes here.
What blockchain is Circles using?
Circles is using the xDAI blockchain. xDAI is functionally almost identical to Ethereum but has substantially lower transaction costs by being operated by only a limited amount of validators instead of using high energy and cost consuming “proof of work”. You can learn more about xDai here.
UBI
How are my Circles Produced?
Your Circles tokens are created automatically by the Circles smart contracts. Every day when you open the app, it checks the smart contracts for updates. The start emission rate of Circles is 8 Circles per day. This number is increased by 7% each year.
The money is not coming from anywhere outside the contracts - for example, we do not collect and deposit Euro into the system. It’s also not being mined the way some cryptocurrencies are, where it’s paid out to the people who maintain the network. Instead, Circles is paid out to you every day as a reward for being part of the community, and becomes more valuable over time as the Circles community becomes stronger.
Security
How do I secure my Circles account?
There are two ways to secure your account - saving your seed phrase, and linking other devices.
Saving your seed phrase: We recommend going to your profile page in the app and writing down your 24 word phrase, this is called your seed phrase and you should keep it somewhere safe. You can think of it like a password - we use it to generate your Circles keys.
For security reasons, your seed phrase is normally kept hidden. You can reveal it by clicking on “Export your seed phrase” on your profile page.
Linking devices: We also recommend adding a second device as soon as possible, for example, both your phone and your computer. Adding a device makes it easy to reconnect to your account if one device fails for any reason. You can add a device by going to your profile in the app and clicking “Add new device.”
I logged out or lost my device - what can I do?
If you have lost one of your devices or reset your browser, you will still be able to recover your account with your seed phrase. You can go to the Circles app and click “Connect to existing account” then “Restore from seed phrase.”
If you have a second device that is currently connected to your Circles account, you can still access your account from there. You should also remove the device that was lost or logged out. You can remove lost devices from your profile page in the app.
If you do not have your seed phrase saved, and do not have access to another device where you are logged into Circles, we cannot retrieve your account. You are welcome to create a new account. Note that if your safe and Circles token were not deployed, your account was never fully created and there is nothing to restore.
What information does Circles collect about me?
The only data we store is your email address and username - and we will never share it with anyone. Your wallet’s private key lives offline on your device browser, and is not shared with us.
The data recorded by blockchains is publicly accessible, and includes the trust network and your transaction history, but it is not associated publicly with your username or email address.
Trust Network
How does trust work in Circles?
You can send Circles to someone who trusts you. This means that sending Circles to someone is the reverse direction of trusting someone eg. “I trust you, therefore I accept your Circles” or “You trust me, therefore I can send my Circles to you.”
When you trust someone, you can also send Circles to people in their trusted network, without directly trusting those people yourself. This is called transitive trust, and allows the Circles network to grow more easily.
Example: The person might not trust you, but you happen to own someone else’s token besides your own. You can still pay that person with this person’s token. Example: A wants to send B 10 Circles, B does not trust A but B trusts C, A owns 10 C Token and can therefore send these 10 C Tokens to B
You can own multiple different Circles tokens. You are not necessarily only sending your own tokens to someone when you send Circles. You are sending the ones you have a high enough balance of + which has a large enough trust limit.
Read the Circles whitepaper to read more about transitive transactions.
Why does the app say I can’t transfer Circles?
Sometimes, there is no path we can send tokens between you and another person in the Circles ecosystem. Every trust connection in Circles does not only have a direction (“from”, “to”) but also a limit. Once the limit has been hit, no more Circles can be sent along that trust connection until some Circles are sent back. In a healthy Circles economy, we won’t hit these limits very often, but it may still happen from time to time.
Trust limits protect you from losing all your own tokens via transitive transactions. This can happen when someone uses your own tokens to send Circles through you to someone else.
A trust limit is the percentage (0-100%) of your Circles supply that you are willing to hold in a given person’s tokens. Example: I trust you 50%, the amount of Circles I have received since I signed up is 100, therefore I am willing to hold max 50 of your tokens
The current default limit is always set to 50% which is very high, and may be lowered in future versions.