The main goal of ChronoBank is to create LaborX, a decentralised marketplace where those in the real-world professions will be able to sell their person-hours for LH tokens or other crypto on a fully decentralised basis.

ChronoBank’s model differs from classic timebanking in at least one critical aspect: in the traditional form, one hour of labour is equivalent to any other hour of labour. A one-hour of work is uniformly interchangeable, no matter what form it takes. While this may work relatively well in small and limited local economies, or in specific instances where there is an emphasis on a particular type of work (such as elderly care), it is entirely unsuitable for the needs of a globalised labour marketplace.

At the same time, the overheads of administrating a more complex system that would reflect these realities are prohibitive for the kinds of local communities that have adopted traditional timebanking successfully to date. This is why traditional timebanking has remained limited in scope: it simply lacks the flexibility to scale.

A blockchain-based free market approach will allow ChronoBank to differentiate between labour of varying forms, as well as allowing workers to be ranked according to skill and performance. Thus the one-size-fits-all paradigm of timebanking has been updated to take into account such factors as training, experience, average hourly wages in different sectors and countries, and performance.

The ChronoBank project is backed by Edway Group, a large company in Australia with 400,000 customers on its books, who will be the first potential users of LaborX as a testing ground. LH tokens will act as a substitute for payments in fiat currencies and will enable people to be rewarded for their work on a decentralised basis, but without the signature volatility risks of cryptocurrencies.

LaborX has been designed with great care to present a low-friction system optimised for ease of use, to make sure that the exchange of labour time for LH tokens and vice versa is efficient and straightforward.

The key to ChronoBank’s distinctiveness and its appeal over traditional timebanking is the use of a reputation system. Reputation is assigned to each participant, allowing them to secure appropriate compensation for their hours of work. The better the individual’s reputation, based on feedback for previous work, the more they will be able to command for their next hour. Initial reputation will be set based on the individual’s experience within the partner company. For those who have not participated in the system in any previous capacity, a nominal, average reputation is assigned. Every care is taken to encourage the user to increase their reputation and maintain it at the highest level.

LaborX will, therefore, represent a truly global and free market approach to timebanking by leveraging the fully decentralised architecture of the blockchain, with the additional benefit of significant initial adoption by key labour-hire companies.

One major problem this mitigates is that of the network effect, which has hampered cryptocurrency adoption to date, the issue being that a given technology is often not worth adopting by newcomers until a critical mass of people already use it. By ‘bootstrapping’ ChronoBank using Edway’s labour force, we are able to bring significant users and utility to the system. This, in turn, promotes a liquid market for LH tokens on LaborX, minimising slippage and other inefficiencies of thinly traded markets, and bringing wider benefits to the cryptocurrency community.

On Ethereum and blockchains that support smart contracts, TIME token holders will be rewarded with transaction fees from any LH ‘send’ or ‘redeem’ transaction, including LH payments on LaborX. Therefore, the greater the volume on LaborX, the higher investors’ rewards.