Design Principles for Community Currencies

Determine a recommended set of design principles for community currencies that ensure they successfully achieve their intended social and economic goals within both local communities and virtual agent economies.

Background

The paper proposes community currencies as a vehicle for localized alignment and modular risk isolation in virtual agent economies, with potential benefits for sustainability goals and equitable resource allocation. However, it warns that success depends on careful design choices and acknowledges variability across contexts.

The authors explicitly flag that identifying a recommended set of design principles is an open problem, motivating systematic study of criteria such as competitiveness, transparency, governance, circulation dynamics, transferability constraints, legitimacy, and locality to guide practical deployments.