Universal Basic Income in a Blockchain-Based Community Currency

Recent advancements of blockchain technologies ensure security and trustability of Community Currency Systems (CCSs), enabling their increasingly widespread adoption. These systems aim at empowering the local economies by virtue of a medium of exchange whose governance and circulation are local. Smart contracts enable the enforcement of token economy policies, which facilitate the experimentation of radically new economic models. Recent studies investigated blockchain-based CCSs. Still, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing a CCS providing a token-based Universal Basic Income (UBI). We evaluate the Circles UBI decentralised application utility in delivering an unconditional income to its users, focusing on its main pilot project running in Berlin. We analyse the structural changes in the network, especially in relation to a subsidy program, involving local businesses. We also identify prominent users based on centrality measures, and investigate how the UBI was effectively spent. We adopt a method agnostic to the economic context to identify optimal aggregation windows for the temporal network of CCS transactions based on the Causal Fidelity (CF) index. This aims to provide static representations as accurate as possible in terms of sequential order of edges, which aspect was not considered in previous research on CCSs. Our findings suggest that the pilot project sustained the expansion of the economic network and the system facilitated trade in urban communities in Berlin. Future research is needed to identify methods to ensure sustainability of self-organised CCSs adopting a UBI issuance scheme and to further decentralise their governance.