Cambiatus: Social Currencies as tools to educate and onboard more people into ReFi

🌱Cambiatus is an open source platform to empower the creation of new organizations through social currencies on blockchain.

We are live since 2019, and currently have 7 partner communities in Brazil, Costa Rica and Ethiopia, with a total of around 9,800 members using Cambiatus.

We allow community members to exchange goods and services in our shop, using their social currency to connect members skills and profiles with each other while saving their fiat currency for other interactions. This way the community gains collective strength to face the challenges presented to us all in the present day.

Cambiatus has been open source since day 1, and we believe our communities contribute a lot to the Regenerative Finance movement that is happening in web3. We were awarded the Shapers Awards in 2021 Blockchain 4 Humanity Prize and were also finalists at the Top Tier Impact Awards in 2021. We are collaborating with the ReFi Spring movement and always looking for ways to collaborate with planetary regeneration efforts.

Our partner communities became more financially resilient and less dependent on fiat money because they are using their own social currencies. They can reward members for actions that are related to their collective objectives and create an internal economic cycle.Those actions promote the community objectives, acting as an engaging tool that fosters the collaboration of people from different perspectives and experiences.

Examples of those actions are: participating on beach cleanups, as a volunteer in an agroforestry task force, contributing to a given forest conservation area, and many others, that depend on the community context and objectives.

Complementary currencies are very important in the context of a financial crisis. When economic crises arrive, there's an incentive to stop the circulation of fiat money in a given community, mostly because of the scarcity mindset. By empowering those communities to create complementary currencies, that are built based on objectives and actions crowdsourced from the community itself, we can design new types of money, created in accordance with their context, that help circulating value and changing the mindset of community members about how money is created and circulated, promoting an abundance mindset.

To make this design possible, we added a human layer to enable our partner communities to use our tools and be able to promote change in their economic context. Our methodology starts with a learning path (in the Mindset change) that helps community leaders understand what is money, how money is created, what are social currencies, examples, and then we start explaining about crypto, blockchain, and DAOs / collaborative businesses (DAOs applied to co-ops).

Only after this we start the co-design sessions, and we take the educational approach very seriously, because at the end of the day, it’s a mindset change. We believe social currencies are an onboarding tool into the ReFi ecosystem, and we would like to use this grant to keep onboarding new partner communities and develop educational resources about ReFi and social currencies.

The educational content will be created in Portuguese and Spanish, with real use cases from the Latin American context, aiming to inspire and onboard more people from the Global South into social currencies and ReFi.

Communities can use social currencies to enable a transition to a low carbon economy, focused on financial resilience, connection with nature, wellbeing and the pura vida spirit. We will promote examples of how to combine social currencies with other web3 tools to empower communities, like gitcoin and giveth. Cambiatus has an open source business model, and works on a voluntary contribution basis from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, as you can see in our website. We also have ample experience doing deliveries, being a group of practical and hands on attitude.

We work with decentralized technologies combined with centralized ones, making one effective transition tool that has its head aiming for the future, but with our feet on the ground, using the best tools for the challenges that may arise.

🎯 Deliverables and budget:

Q2 2023

For the next three months, we want to raise $35k to fulfill the following objectives:

• Objective 1: Keep Cambiatus growing organically and support active communities
• Objective 2: Spread the word about Social Currencies and ReFi
• Objective 3: Educate our community members about web3 tools that can promote financial resiliency

✅ Expected key results:

1. Onboard at least 1 new community in the Cambiatus social currencies platform;
2. Keep the community building support and tokenomics review to our 7 active communities, with 9,800 members;
3. Host 2 workshops on Gitcoin, quadratic funding and Giveth for our community members and other stakeholders - one in portuguese and another one in spanish;
4. Record the workshops and upload them in our youtube channel.
5. Update and promote our open-source learning path on social currencies and ReFi - this learning path contains content created by Cambiatus and also content curated by members;
6. Create online educational content on regenerative finance and social currencies in Portuguese and Spanish;
7. Attend to conferences and meetups representing Cambiatus, such as:

• Peru Blockchain Conference;
• Rio Innovation Week;
• Espírito Santo Innovation Experience (ESX);
• Ethereum São Paulo;
• NFT Brasil;

In order to fulfill these objectives, we need 30k during Q2 to provide a salary for our core team of 7 part-time members, across a variety of functions:

• Community Building
• Partnerships
• Fundraising
• Tech
• Design
• Operations

The remaining funds (5k) will be allocated to travel budget for conferences and paying software providers (Zoho, Discord, Amazon, Miro...)

✨ Your donations will help make this all possible!