The Röbel Münzen economy, end to end
We have written about why a town would choose this kind of money and how it scales. This note is the plumbing: the actual, live economy of Röbel Münzen as it runs today, with the parts you can verify onchain marked so you can check them rather than trust us.
Two tokens, not one
The thing most people miss is that there are two tokens involved, and only one of them is the money.
| Personal CRC (shown in-app as your Münzen) | Röbel Münzen (RCRC), the group token | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | each Circles human's own hourly issuance (~1/hour) | the town's single shared currency |
| Who can create it | every registered human, citizen or tourist | only citizens (see the gate below) |
| What backs it | the protocol's own issuance | 1:1 by personal CRC locked in the group vault |
| Who can hold it | the person themselves | anyone, freely transferable |
| Its job | a personal basic income and onboarding | the spendable local currency |
When a citizen taps "collect today," two things happen under the hood: they mint their own personal CRC, then the system locks that personal CRC as collateral and mints them Röbel Münzen against it. The citizen walks away holding Röbel Münzen; their personal issuance sits in the vault as the backing. No coin is ever conjured from nothing.
How a coin is born, and how the rewards recycle
The mint is the self-faucet: citizens make their own money. The reward economy on top of it is a deliberately small, closed loop. A reserve Safe holds the town's float and tops up a hot wallet; that hot wallet pays out civic rewards and receives what people spend on lootbox keys. Because the same float pays rewards and collects spend, the reward economy recycles rather than draining, and the hot wallet stays small so its risk is capped while the Safe holds the reserve.
Earning them
A short list of verified actions pays out Röbel Münzen, each one paid at most once. The amounts live in config and can be tuned without a deployment.
| Action | Reward | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Cast a vote | 1 | participation only, never the choice; the ballot stays secret |
| Checkpoint | 0.5 | a light, regular civic ping |
| Submit an event | 3 | |
| Refer a citizen | 2 | paid to the referrer |
| Attend an event (scan its QR) | 5 | once per event, a "was in Röbel" badge |
Two design choices matter here. Rewards are idempotent: the record of a payout is written before the payment, so a crash or a retry can never double-pay. And the vote reward pays for taking part, not for how you voted, so the secret ballot stays secret and there is no way to buy a vote.
Spending them, and the visitor on-ramp
Today Röbel Münzen buy lootbox keys in the app: the user pays the float, the payment is verified onchain, the key is granted, and the money flows back into the same pool the rewards come from. That is the loop closing.
The other live surface is the Smart Event QR: a single, time-limited code a citizen generates for an event, printable as an A4 poster. What happens when it is scanned depends on who scans it.
| Who scans | What happens | Funded by |
|---|---|---|
| A first-timer with no Circles account | they get onboarded, start minting their own Münzen, and receive the event badge | the operator |
| Anyone already onboarded, tourist or citizen | a 5 Röbel Münzen "was in Röbel" badge, once per event | the float |
This is how a visitor becomes part of the money without being a citizen: they can be paid in Röbel Münzen and carry a real attendance badge, but they still cannot mint.
Only citizens mint, and that is enforced twice
Holding Röbel Münzen is open to everyone. Minting them is not. To create a coin you must be a Circles human with personal CRC and be trusted by the group, and the group only trusts holders of the town's soulbound citizen credential.
That gate is enforced at two independent layers, so a failure of one does not open minting to outsiders:
- Off-chain: the auto-invite service only ever trusts an address it has confirmed holds the citizen credential. Verify a new resident and the invitation into the currency follows on its own, with no hand-maintained list.
- Onchain: the group carries a membership condition that re-checks the credential inside the contract on every trust through the service path. So even if the service key leaked, it still could not trust a non-citizen into minting.
Live, and checkable
None of this is a description of intent. Here are the contracts; follow the links and read the state yourself.
| What | Verify onchain |
|---|---|
| Röbel Münzen group (the currency) | explorer.aboutcircles.com |
| Group vault (holds the collateral) | 0x0476…8763 |
| Mint gate (citizen membership condition) | 0x1064…76f6 |
| CitizenNFT (the credential) | 0x6FF3…04DD4 |
| Circles Hub v2 | 0xc12C…13e8 |
| Stadtkasse Safe (reserve and owner) | 0x3A08…FDEa |
What is next
The system is deliberately conservative today, with room to grow as circulation justifies it:
- Merchant acceptance, a pay QR that is the inverse of the receive one, so shops take Röbel Münzen at the counter.
- A euro on and off ramp at the edges (via a regulated euro stablecoin), so the treasury can hold hard money while the currency stays 1:1 internally.
- Tipping and creator rewards, peer payments on posts and events.
- A small mint fee to the treasury, once volume warrants it, instead of today's fee-free 1:1.
- Cross-town federation, where other towns trust Röbel citizens and the coin becomes regionally spendable while each town keeps its own gate.
The shape is the point: a parallel, human-scale money for one town, backed by its own people, gated by its own credential, and verifiable by anyone. The rest is adoption.