After closing the Token Sale in mid-February, we focused the bulk of our work during March on planning our long-term strategy and post token sale impact.

In this post, we would like to share with you a peek into our long-term vision, and go in depth on what our main efforts will be over the next quarter.

Going Forward

In the current iteration of our application, Colu manages and deals with all the steps necessary to run a community currency. These steps include, but are not limited to payment processing, holding a reserve of funds flowing in and out of the network and onboarding new merchants.

We have now started the long process of building a token economy and integrating the CLN into the Colu stack.

Our long-term goal is for the Colu Local Network to not be centralised around Colu’s efforts but to instead provide a platform upon which anybody will be able to issue and run their own community currency. This process involves onboarding many stakeholders including issuers, merchants, payment gateways and more.

All of these community currencies will be interconnected by the network.

While working on the long-term plan, our main focus is to test the community currency model on our existing communities and validate our model.

The next few months will be focused on three high level goals:

Issue the first CLN-backed community currency.

Create a dApp for the CLN contracts.

Engage with different types of issuers and communities.

1. Issue the first CLN-backed community currency for our existing communities

In our previous blog post, we gave a brief introduction into our current communities. We plan to issue community currencies for each of these communities and distribute them via an airdrop in each city in at the end of May. We will follow this by switching the current reward system we have from a cash-based reward to a community currency based reward.

We see the CLN as an ecosystem of local economies. All the economies are interconnected through the CLN, thus the success scenario of our economies is that they will be independent and be able to run without interference by Colu.

2. The Colu Community dApp

As part of the development of the Colu Local Network, Colu has developed multiple Ethereum smart-contracts that facilitate the creation of community currencies. We are working on a dApp that will wrap the contracts into a user-friendly interface, expose community activity and connect between CLN holders, the Blockchain community and our current community currencies. This dApp will evolve into the network interface.

Below is a sneak peek of the first version.

3. Engage with different types of issuers and communities

We are getting approached by a large number of different communities that wish to issue community currencies. We are looking in to the different opportunities that will offer the most value to the network as the first batch of community currencies. For inquiries regarding creating a community currency for your community please send an E-mail to joey@colu.com.

We hope that we have provided a good overview of what our main efforts will be over the coming months. We will release a long-term roadmap outlining our plans beyond the next quarter soon so keep your eyes peeled.