Exonomy and Exocracy represent a decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) economic and project management ecosystem. This system empowers individuals, termed Exonomists and Exocrats, to create, exchange, and manage vouchers that represent goods and services within localized economies. These vouchers function as units of exchange, referencing real-world currencies for value assessment while remaining distinct from traditional money. By enabling structured, voucher-mediated interactions independently of banking institutions, Exonomy fosters economic resilience, fluid market participation, and community-driven decision-making. The system minimizes unnecessary data replication, ensuring that only relevant economic activities are recorded and propagated efficiently.
Exonomy serves as an alternative pathway for economic activity, prioritizing voucher-based interactions, self-regulating economies, and community-driven decision-making, offering economic independence from direct reliance on financial institutions for exchange. Its ecosystem supports real-world monetary transactions via third-party payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal (allowing cash to purchase existing vouchers), yet remains autonomous from banking institutions for the core exchange mechanism. The Exocracy extension further enhances this model by providing a lightweight yet robust project management framework that facilitates community-driven initiatives. Through Exocracy, Exonomists and Exocrats can collaborate on large-scale endeavors, including infrastructure rehabilitation, humanitarian aid, and resource pooling, utilizing vouchers as economic instruments for crowdfunding and crowdsourcing efforts instead of relying solely on conventional financial capital.
To create a decentralized economy where trust is built through direct, tangible exchanges facilitated by vouchers, and communities thrive through autonomous collaboration and project management.
Consider a region where multiple towns rely on a single bridge for inter-community trade and access, but the bridge is destroyed, severely disrupting economic life and access to essential services. Exonomy and Exocracy facilitate reconstruction through decentralized resource allocation:
- Voucher Exchange: In one town, a farmer mints vouchers for fresh produce, defining their value in a widely accepted currency (e.g., USD). A baker needs produce and mints vouchers for bread of equivalent USD value. They mutually agree to exchange their vouchers. The farmer now holds bread vouchers, the baker holds produce vouchers.
- Redemption: Later, the farmer presents the bread vouchers to the baker to redeem them for bread. Similarly, the baker redeems the produce vouchers with the farmer. This completes the cycle for this interaction.
- Broader Circulation: A mechanic accepts the baker’s bread vouchers (received from the farmer or others) as payment for vehicle maintenance, minting vouchers for their mechanic services in exchange. The cycle continues, ensuring economic activity can flow without direct cash exchange at each step.
- Bridge Reconstruction (Exocracy):
- An Exocrat (perhaps a civil engineer acting within the Exocracy framework) initiates a project to rebuild the bridge, defining tasks and milestones.
- Crowdfunding: Local businesses and individuals act as Exocrats (stakeholders) by contributing material vouchers (e.g., for cement, steel, tools) to specific project tasks. These vouchers represent their investment in the project. They are not compensated directly for these contributed vouchers; their value is the restored bridge access.
- Crowdsourcing: Local laborers act as Exocrats by offering their services. They mint service vouchers (e.g., for welding, construction labor). Project managers review these offers.
- Compensation: If a laborer's service voucher offer is accepted for a task, they are compensated with other vouchers (like the farmer's produce vouchers, the baker's bread vouchers, or contributed material vouchers they might need) that have been crowdfunded/allocated to that task. This compensation happens via a mutual exchange of the laborer's service voucher for the compensation vouchers.
- A humanitarian coalition or external funders inject liquidity by purchasing existing vouchers from Exonomists with cash (via payment processors), making more resources available within the voucher economy for project needs.
- Long-Term Value & Sustainability (Example): Upon completion, the bridge restores economic integration. The stakeholders (those Exocrats who contributed vouchers without being compensated) might decide, through community governance, to use the bridge for free. Non-stakeholders (including those fully compensated for their work/materials) could potentially be required to pay a toll (perhaps via vouchers). A digitally administered system could manage access, with toll proceeds distributed as dividends (e.g., based on initial contribution value) back to the original stakeholders, sustaining long-term growth and rewarding community investment.
- Voucherization of Economic Interactions: Goods and services are represented through vouchers, standardizing value exchange and enabling a structured, reciprocal exchange economy. Vouchers represent concrete value (e.g., "10 hours of welding labor" or "100kg of wheat"), explicitly tied to real-world currencies (USD, EUR) for valuation but distinct from money itself.
- Selective Replication: Economic data (like voucher details or project updates) propagates only to relevant parties (e.g., interacting peers, followers, project members), ensuring efficiency and reducing unnecessary data distribution via the P2P network.
- Decentralized Trust Mechanisms: Verified voucher exchanges and completed project tasks establish trust, with peer-to-peer validation reinforcing the integrity of the system. Trust scores (e.g., EXO-SCORE) are derived from historical contributions and community feedback.
- Community-Directed Development (Exocracy): Exocracy extends Exonomy by enabling localized project management through decentralized decision-making and voucher-based resource allocation (crowdfunding/sourcing).
- Economic Independence (from Finance): While vouchers reference real-world currency values for valuation, their exchange mechanism functions independently of banking institutions, allowing economic activity without requiring immediate cash flow or financial intermediaries for every interaction.
- Unanimous Governance: Decision-making within specific contexts (like task completion approval, community membership changes) is consensus-driven, often requiring 100% approval from defined stakeholders. This ensures collective accountability and prevents unilateral decisions, fostering fairness and transparency.
- Inclusive Economic Participation: Individuals lacking access to traditional banking can engage in trade and community projects through vouchers, enabled by the economic independence from finance. Even finance itself is included as an option, as cash can be used to purchase vouchers from willing Exonomists.
- Adaptive System Design: The framework is designed to scale dynamically to accommodate increasing complexity and participation.
- Localized Resource Allocation: Communities manage economic resources and projects collectively, reducing reliance on external capital structures for initiation and execution.
- Resilient Economic Model: The decentralized nature protects against single points of failure and can maintain economic stability during external financial system crises.
- Offline-First Design: Conflict-Resilient Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) utilized by the underlying P2P database (OrbitDB) and potential mesh networking (Bluetooth/Wi-Fi Direct) enable functionality in low/no-internet environments.
- Human-Centric Trust: Reputation metrics (e.g., EXO-SCORE) prioritize positive reinforcement (trust accrual through successful interactions and contributions) over punitive measures.
- Integration with Fiat & Crypto: Payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, Square, and others allow cash injections into the ecosystem by facilitating the purchase of existing, minted vouchers from Exonomists, ensuring legal compliance for cash-based entry points.
- Creation & Issuance: Vouchers are minted by Exonomists, who define attributes including issuer identity (DID), associated service/product description, and equivalent currency value. Vouchers are flexible in content, supporting background images, videos, titles, detailed descriptions, specified currency, and amount. Upon creation, the voucher contains its author's DID, which also serves as the owner DID until the voucher is exchanged.
- Exchange & Replication: Vouchers replicate primarily during active exchanges or when one Exonomist follows another. Exchanges trigger replication only to interacting peers. Following replicates public feed data. This ensures efficiency and decentralized trust.
- Discovery & Engagement: Exonomists can search publicly available vouchers without replicating them locally unless explicitly needed. Search mechanisms include category filters, geographic proximity, and availability updates. Public voucher feeds can be indexed using the P2P database's querying capabilities, enabling discovery potentially over minimal metadata subsets.
- Redemption & Validation: The original issuer remains the sole entity capable of redeeming a voucher, ensuring accountability. Exonomists maintain redemption records. The redeemer validates fulfillment of the voucher’s value (goods/services delivered) through confirmation (potentially cryptographic). Partial redemptions can be supported, with proportional value adjustments recorded.
- Social & Humanitarian Applications: Vouchers facilitate economic activity in regions with limited cash flow. Aid organizations and individuals alike can participate equally by purchasing existing vouchers with external funds to support essential community needs or projects, ensuring localized economic impact.
- Customization & Context Awareness: The content of vouchers can be adapted to seasonal, regional, or specialized use cases (e.g., specifying unique terms, conditions, or expiration dates), enhancing flexibility.
- Lifecycle Management: Vouchers have states (e.g., Draft, Listed, Exchanged, Redeemed, Expired). Expired vouchers might be reassessed or reissued. Automated renewal features could enable configured vouchers (e.g., subscriptions) to refresh periodically under specific conditions.
- Multi-Tiered Accessibility: Users can issue private, semi-public, or fully public vouchers, controlling their visibility and accessibility based on trust levels and market requirements, managed through P2P database access controls.
- Decentralized Arbitration for Disputes: Conflicts over voucher interactions can be resolved through community-defined decentralized arbitration protocols, ensuring fair adjudication.
vBay represents the decentralized implementation of a global marketplace, enabling Exonomists to broadcast and discover vouchers. As one of the three foundational tenant apps (alongside Vallet and Exocracy), vBay plays a critical role in facilitating voucher visibility and accessibility across the Exonomy ecosystem. While newer tenant apps may be introduced in the future, these three—Vallet, vBay, and Exocracy—form the essential foundation for the basic mechanics of Exonomy and Exocracy.
- Decentralized Marketplace: vBay acts as a decentralized platform where Exonomists can broadcast vouchers to others. It does not function as a centralized marketplace but rather as a P2P notification system for voucher discovery.
- Broadcasting Vouchers:
- Exonomists can broadcast vouchers to:
- Their entire contact list.
- The inbox of an Exocracy project.
- An individual Exonomist.
- An existing community.
- A community they define themselves.
- Exonomists can broadcast vouchers to:
- Notification-Based Visibility:
- Vouchers appear in vBay as notifications. They remain visible until their notification expiry unless manually pinned by the Exonomist.
- The global marketplace is visible only from the perspective of individual Exonomists. If one Exonomist wants another to know about a voucher, they must send a notification or share the voucher directly using the notification's sharing features.
- Pinning Vouchers:
- Exonomists can pin vouchers in vBay to ensure they remain visible beyond their notification expiry.
- Pinned vouchers serve as curated listings that persist in the marketplace.
- Facilitating Economic Activity: vBay ensures that vouchers are discoverable and accessible, enabling Exonomists to engage in economic exchanges seamlessly.
- Supporting Exocracy Projects: Exonomists can directly contribute to Exocracy projects by broadcasting vouchers to project inboxes or associated communities, facilitating voucher-based crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.
- Project Definition & Structuring: Exonomists, acting as Exocrats within the Exocracy context, initiate and define projects, segmenting them into tasks with clear milestones.
- Voucher-Based Crowdfunding: Exocrats (acting as Stakeholders) contribute service and material vouchers to project tasks instead of direct monetary investment. These contributed vouchers represent the project's resources/funding.
- Task Assignment & Execution (Crowdsourcing): Other Exocrats (acting as Workers/Contractors) offer their service vouchers to complete project tasks. If accepted, they perform the work and are compensated by exchanging their service voucher for other vouchers (goods, services, or even contributed materials they need) allocated to that task from the crowdfunded pool. Skilled Exonomists might contribute vouchers to crowdfund a project and also offer their skills (via service vouchers) to work on tasks within that same project.
- Project Management Oversight: Exocrats designated as Project Managers oversee progress, ensuring transparency and accountability. Task dependencies and status updates are managed within the system.
- Consensus-Based Validation: Community-driven verification ensures the authenticity and successful completion of tasks. Task completion often requires unanimous agreement among involved members (e.g., PM, worker, relevant stakeholders) within the task's defined community scope.
- Sustainable Planning: Long-term initiatives can incorporate phased funding models and potentially mechanisms for ongoing revenue (like the bridge toll example) to ensure continuity and maintenance beyond initial implementation.
- Trust Development: Verified voucher exchanges and completed project contributions build an Exonomist’s/Exocrat’s reputation. High EXO-SCORES reflect trustworthiness and reliability. Evidence of work (e.g., photos stored on IPFS) can support validation.
- Unified Reputation Metric: All scoring (Exonomic or Exocratic) is unified under EXO-SCORE, which aggregates all activities. Attributes and characteristics contributing to the score are displayed on the Reputation Card within the dashboard. Detailed calculations and components of the reputation score will be provided in a separate document titled Reputation Scoring.md.
- Immutable Histories (via CRDTs/IPFS): The underlying P2P data structures provide verifiable history, deterring fraud.
- Consensus-Driven Decision Making: Key actions within a defined scope (e.g., approving task completion, admitting/removing members from a project task's working group, releasing crowdfunded vouchers as compensation) often require unanimous agreement among the relevant stakeholders for that specific context.
- Conflict Resolution Protocols: Mechanisms like asset-freezing (where only the voucher author can freeze their own voucher if disputed before exchange completion) can pause contested interactions. A peer-selected jury or pre-defined protocol might resolve conflicts based on evidence.
- Autonomous Community Oversight: Governance is largely decentralized, relying on participant-driven rule enforcement and consensus within specific project or interaction contexts.
- Fraud Mitigation: Built-in transparency and potential community arbitration protocols aim to resolve disputes equitably.
- Top Navbar: Occupies 1/10 of the screen height, providing access to DID profiles, payment options, and authenticator management.
- Left Navbar: Occupies 1/5 of the screen width, housing the Reputation Card panel.
- Tenant App Area:
- Divided into two decks:
- Upper deck: Dashboard panels (2/5 of tenant app area height).
- Lower deck: Tenant apps (3/5 of tenant app area height).
- Supports up to three visible tenant apps at a time, with synchronized swiping for navigation.
- Divided into two decks:
- On mobile devices, only one tenant app is visible at a time, requiring swiping to navigate.