A town’s own money that remembers how far it has travelled: free to spend in town, backed one for one, and costing something to leave only if it never went round. The first local currency whose rule is on the money itself.

Money that leaves a town does not come back. Wages earned at the mill are spent in the city, and the bakery, the market and the clinic get thinner every year. Local currencies have been tried for a century, from Wörgl to the Bristol pound, and they die two ways: the payments cost more than the forty pesos they carry, or the rule meant to keep money local, a flat exit tax or money that shrinks in a drawer, punishes the shopkeeper who imports flour and the grandmother who saves cash.

Dollars in, town money out, one for one; the contract holds the backing. Paying anyone in town costs nothing and lands in under a second. Every unit remembers how many hands it has passed through, and leaving costs five percent only for money that never went round, four after one hand, down to nothing after five. Your most travelled money leaves first, so an honest shopkeeper pays little; money that came in and went straight out pays the most. The town keeps the change: what leaving costs goes to a pot the council spends with a memo anyone can read. And you can watch it: how many times each unit changed hands, how much of what was spent stayed, and which places send it out.

A town runs on forty-peso payments: bread, a jeepney, a kilo of fish. A town’s own money only works if each of those costs nothing to move and lands at once, and if the money can carry its own memory. On Arc a payment costs a fraction of a cent and is final in under a second, in dollars, so the contract can count the hands and the town can keep the change.

• A fifth of what leaving costs. Already in the contract, already flowing to the deployer.
• Towns as customers. A barangay, a council or a co-op runs its own instance for a yearly fee, with its name on it and its pot to spend.
• Merchant pages. Every shop gets a page to be paid on; a small fee for the till, the receipts and the “stayed in town” badge.

A thousand towns with a million dollars a month going round each, five percent leaving at an average two percent, is a hundred and twenty million dollars a year in exit costs, a fifth of it to the platform, before a single town pays for its name.

There are forty-two thousand barangays in the Philippines alone, and every one of them has a market, a mill and a road to the city. Local-currency projects have never lacked demand, only rails: the payments were too expensive and the rules too blunt. Arc removes the first, and money that remembers removes the second.

• Barangay, live on Arc mainnet
• Your money
• The council
• Barangay.sol: mint, pay, redeem, spend, setName, withdrawFees. Deploy it from your wallet
• The twelve, on Subsecond

1. Live nowThe board, the tokens with their hands, a worked town, merchant pages, the council’s pot with memos, and Barangay.sol with every function on a screen.
2. 90 daysA till for merchants: a code on the counter, receipts, and the “stayed in town” badge; the board in the local language and currency name.
3. 6 monthsTen real towns, each with its own instance and council; wages paid straight into town money from Basket.
4. 12 monthsA council’s budget page the whole town can read, funded by the pot; the first province with a town on every road.

A developer grant of USD 60,000 over six months funds the merchant till, local-language boards, and the first ten towns, with milestones at a hundred merchants paid on their pages, a million units gone round, and the first council budget spent from the pot. Draft figure, to be set with the programme.

Built by one person, in the open, on a foundation that puts a new product on Arc in under an hour. Name your price, or free.

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