CommonsHood: A Blockchain-Based Wallet App for Local Communities

In this paper, we present CommonsHood, a Blockchain based Wallet app aiming to provide the general public with the tools to not only use, but also create new kinds of cryptographic tokens for their own purposes, something that currently resides only in the hands of technologists. It provides communities with instruments for financial inclusion to support the sustainability of the local economy. It provides commons and associations with instruments to help finance themselves with tokens representing prepaid cards, crowdfunding, complementary currencies, to share tools and infrastructures with tokens representing access rights. It provides small retailers with tokens representing loyalty tools and institutions with purpose-driven tokens to reward volunteers for, e.g., recycling. It allows the dematerialization of tickets and collectibles. All tokens can be distributed to the Wallet app of other users, via websites, QR codes, or proximity marketing using geolocalization. The use of Blockchain allows us to construct an open decentralized and disintermediated infrastructure to avoid the fees and data control of services such as group-buying or crowdfunding websites, and to have a general purpose single app, rather than different ones for different associations and retailers. Thanks to its flexibility, actually CommonsHood is used in different projects for supporting communities in the co-creation of local economy models.