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Without vibrant payment-centric communities that are the primary beneficiaries of its technology, Fuse would not be where it is today. Last week, another exciting experiment was launched in the Cannons Creek suburb of the city of Porirua, New Zealand. The Wellbeing Protocol started the pilot of its Cannon token (CAN) and mobile app aimed at testing the potential of a community currency in Cannons Creek.
Testing a new trading model for Cannons Creek
The Cannons Creek token community is the first implementation of the new social welfare model developed by The Wellbeing Protocol. According to the latter’s website, the model “uses simple governance tools to gather the community voice while new financial tools, such as a digital community currency, enable supporters to directly fund community-led wellbeing initiatives.”
Another key objective of the Cannons Creek project is to boost the local economy by keeping the money (i.e. the CAN tokens) circulating within it as much as possible. This aligns with the broader vision behind the Wellbeing Protocol which is inspired by the work of the Nobel Laureate in economics Elinor Ostrom and stresses that local communities are best placed to solve the local problems.
The Cannon token (CAN) and the mobile app
The Cannons Creek community’s economy is powered by the CAN token. CAN is fully backed by New Zealand’s national currency, the New Zealand Dollar (NZD) that is held on the Wellbeing Protocol’s bank account.
Initial seed funding for the CAN economy was provided by Wesley Community Action and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. Those who wish to donate more funds to the initiative can do it via the Cannon Coin page on Open Collective.
Like other major communities running on top of Fuse, in order to facilitate payments and other CAN token-powered interactions, Cannons Creek relies on a custom mobile app forked from the Fuse white label wallet. The app also enables users to select the community wellbeing projects for consideration for support from the Community Fund using the quadratic voting approach. The video below showcases some of the functionalities of the app.
The pilot program and beyond
In order to test the feasibility and appeal of the token-powered community, Cannons Creek has started small with a pilot program. The pilot will last for six weeks and will involve 50 participants . The participants will be able to use their CAN tokens and the test version of the mobile app to purchase fruit and vegetables at the Hauora Kai Co-Op, make peer-to-peer trades among themselves or contribute tokens to the community initiatives. They can also already vote on the community wellbeing projects straight from the app.
If the pilot turns out to be successful, The Wellbeing Protocol team behind Cannons Creek stands ready to publicly release the Cannon Coin mobile wallet with a view to recruit more members of the local community and local businesses to its microeconomy. The community will determine the membership and shop eligibility criteria.
The Wellbeing Protocol is also already preparing to replicate the Cannons Creek model in other communities in New Zealand. To this end, the project team is working on launching New Zealand’s first Impact DAO to help fund a wider rollout of the platform across New Zealand and the world. They have also created a Gitcoin grant to obtain additional funding for the project and they are keen to connect with like-minded individuals and projects.
The Fuse team is delighted to see another promising token-powered community deploy the Fuse tech stack. We hope that Cannons Creek and the future communities to be started by Wellbeing Protocol will bring even more real-world adoption to our platform and demonstrate its utility for addressing the needs of millions of people all over the world.
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