We’re very excited to share with you today something we have been working on for a while. Today, we begin taking our first steps in realizing our long-term vision of generating increased economic activity within communities using cryptocurrencies.

We are proud to announce that Colu has issued the first three community currencies on top of the Colu Local Network. Starting today, users in our current communities will be able to sign up to be the first to hold the new Community Currencies. We will be “airdropping” the newly minted Community Currencies to eligible users on June 13th.

As you know, an airdrop in the traditional sense is when specific tokens are sent to a set of users that meet a certain criteria. An example of this is OmiseGO’s airdrop where OMG tokens were sent to all ETH addresses holding ETH.

Our airdrop will differ greatly from traditional airdrops.

In Colu’s case, our community currency will only be given to users who have reached a certain volume of transactions by June 13th. For example, individuals in the UK would have to complete at least £30 worth of purchases and they’ll only have 2 weeks to do it. On June 13th, 2018, all eligible users will receive their community currencies into their Colu wallet.

The new Colu wallet

Supporting local communities with the Community Currency

Colu runs four communities in Tel Aviv, Haifa, London & Liverpool. These communities have over 150,000 users combined and have almost $2,000,000 in monthly transactions. The airdrop campaign allows us to introduce crypto backed community currencies to our users, but more importantly the community currency airdrop supports our long-term vision of creating strong local communities by bringing crypto to the masses.

We firmly believe that a ‘strong’ local community is a place where small independent businesses are thriving, and the individuals in that community support these local businesses and are dedicated to make the community, as a whole, a better place. By rewarding everyday individuals for supporting local businesses we encourage more money to flow to local businesses. We think that this is extremely important because these independent businesses are the backbone of our communities.

We also believe that the community currency empowers individuals by giving them a stake in their local communities, becoming, in part, an ‘owner’ of their local community.

The airdrop is our first giant step in fulfilling our vision, and we’re extremely excited about it.

How are these Community Currencies created?

Without going too much into technical detail, to create a community currency, all one needs to do is set the amount of CC that you want to create and then insert an amount of CLN into the mechanical market maker contract to act as a reserve for the community currency, effectively purchasing a community currency from the contract.

You can see the exact number of CLN in the contracts for each coin here:

TLV Coin — https://etherscan.io/address/0xa27d94001a2a58395b1bb34ea2f842912a906163

Haifa Coin — https://etherscan.io/address/0xb74a54b41ea5501117d6d39d6bf7f182aec176fd

Liverpool Coin — https://etherscan.io/address/0x90caea54c91883473998af705b3f9a2511787dec

When paying at a merchant terminal, the main payment will be made in fiat currency and a small percentage of that fiat will be taken and converted in real time into a CC which will be then returned to the user.

In future, once users have the Community Currencies in their wallet, they will be able to use it to purchase things in their local community.

The CLN dApp

Another feature, that is available very soon is the CLN dApp. The dApp is an intuitive user interface for all of our Community Currency contracts and is able to show you the price of the CC, how much CLN is in the reserve and what cities have Community Currencies. Later on we will be releasing the option to buy and sell CC’s directly in the dApp!

CLN dApp

This is an exciting step in establishing our vision of multiple local economies worldwide. We’re excited we’re finally able to share this with you and hope that together, we can empower communities one token at a time.