A town that mints its own money
Imagine a small German town with its own money. Not a loyalty-points gimmick and not a euro voucher, but a real circulating currency that you earn simply by being a verified resident, spend at the bakery and between neighbours, and that flows rather than sits, because it loses a sliver of value if you hoard it. A town-sized economy that belongs to the town. As of this week, Röbel runs one. Röbel Münzen are live onchain, and the two halves that make it possible are both in place.
The two halves
The first half is Circles, a protocol on Gnosis Chain where every verified human can mint their own personal money, around 24 units a day, forever. Money becomes spendable through a trust graph: you accept the currencies of people you trust, and a pathfinder routes a payment along those trust links even between people who have never met. Personal currencies can also unite into a single shared group currency, one fungible unit a whole community accepts. Balances carry a small demurrage, about 7 percent a year, so the money keeps moving instead of pooling.
Circles has one well-known weakness: nothing stops a person from registering a thousand fake humans and minting a thousand incomes. Its fairness depends on everyone being real.
The second half is Röbel, which already solves exactly that. A resident becomes a citizen through a soulbound credential that two existing citizens have to vouch for, and that no one can buy or transfer. Röbel knows who is real.
Put the two together and the weakness disappears: only verified citizens get the right to mint. That single move turns Circles' open sybil problem into Röbel's built-in strength, and what comes out is a credibly-neutral local currency, Röbel Münzen, with anti-fraud guarantees from day one.
How Röbel Münzen work
The gate is the whole trick. Circles gives you the faucet and the trust graph; Röbel decides who is allowed to stand under the faucet. Because the right to mint rides on a credential a person cannot buy or duplicate, the money supply is pinned to real, counted humans rather than to whoever spins up the most wallets.
Where the value sits
A currency needs more than issuance. It needs to be backed by something, owned by someone accountable, and spendable on things the community cares about. Röbel Münzen have three places where value sits, and only the parts that exist onchain today are marked live.
The group is owned by the same three-of-five citizen Safe that guards every other lever in the stack, so no single operator can quietly change the money. The one piece still ahead is the town treasury: once it holds Röbel Münzen, a passed private vote can release funds to a community project, which is participatory budgeting that nobody can game.
How it went live
None of this is a diagram of a plan. It is the output of two scripts that ran this week. First the identity layer moved to Gnosis: every citizen and attester re-minted natively, not bridged, with ownership handed straight to the town's multisig.
Then, on top of that verified population, the currency itself was registered and gated by trusting the fifteen citizens, with ownership handed to the same Safe.
The group is live, the gate is the fifteen real citizens, and the keys belong to the town.
The town, live
This is not a diagram of a plan. It is the Röbel Münzen trust graph as it stands right now, read straight from the chain: the currency at the centre, the verified citizens it trusts arranged around it. The filled nodes have joined and can mint; the dashed ones are invited and a step from joining.
Build the spine once, hang everything off it
The tempting mistake is to read the list of things a town currency could do, a dozen features, and see a dozen projects. It is really one foundation and then a set of thin surfaces that all reuse the same primitive: a single "send Röbel Münzen" action. Build that once and every feature becomes a few days of UI, not a new system.
The faucet is a civic dividend: holding the citizen credential quietly earns you currency every day. The first thing worth spending it on is a shop, which is why merchant QR payment is the first surface, and paying at a counter also leaves an honest, un-gameable trace of having actually shown up and transacted, which becomes a real reputation signal later.
What you would actually do with it
Every row below is the same payment action wearing a different hat.
| Surface | What it does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant QR pay | Shops accept Röbel Münzen at the counter by QR | Gives the currency somewhere real to go |
| Marketplace settlement | Pay for local listings in Röbel Münzen | Keeps peer-to-peer value circulating in town |
| Mutual aid (Hilfe) | Pay neighbours for small favours | A flowing favour economy, deeply on brand for a town |
| Tipping | Support local journalists, clubs, and performers inline | Money reaches the people creating civic value |
| Participatory budgeting | A passed private vote pays out from the town treasury | Sybil-resistant voting that moves real community money |
That last row is where it gets genuinely new. Röbel already votes privately and provably onchain. Point a passing vote at the Röbel Münzen treasury and the town can fund its own projects through secret, sybil-resistant participatory budgeting. Nobody else can offer that, because nobody else has both halves.
A sensible order
Each phase is independently useful, and you can stop at any of them and still have something real running.
One honest line about the money
We treat Röbel Münzen as an experimental community currency, not a euro you can redeem one-for-one, and keep them cleanly separate from any euro voucher. The point is a living local economy, not a stable-value claim, and demurrage is a feature, not a bug: money that flows is money that does work for the town. Every new citizen is seeded with trust to the town currency on day one, because an empty trust graph is worth nothing and a connected one is worth a great deal.
Why this is bigger than a feature
This is the project's whole thesis made literal. Every town that adopts the stack inherits, for free, a sybil-resistant local currency: verified citizens, a town unit, a merchant network, mutual aid, and participatory budgeting, the civic economic stack in a box. A garden does not just decide together. It can trade, support, and fund together too, on money it mints itself and nobody can fake.
Röbel is the first garden. Röbel Münzen are the first thing it grew.