‘Money commons’: review of the Collaborative Finance (CoFi) Gathering

Katja Durrani of Lowimpact.org | July 15, 2025 | 0

Katja Durrani of Bristol Commons and Lowimpact.org went along to the third annual Collaborative Finance Gathering in Austria, June 16-20. It’s an annual event – everyone welcome. Alternative finance is crucial for building a successful commons movement.

On their website, they describe the gathering as a way to “delve into the intricacies of alternative financial systems, like mutual credit, mesh credit, local voucher systems, and multilateral offset clearing. The mornings will feature focused discussions and presentations, while the afternoons will allow for organic exploration through working groups. These sessions aim to create space for participants to address specific challenges, share insights, and advance ongoing projects. The inclusive and open vibe of CoFi ensures a welcoming atmosphere for diverse voices and perspectives, encouraging meaningful exchanges that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries”.

Here’s Katja’s review of the gathering:

For a long time, I wasn’t quite sure if I should go to the CoFi #3 conference in Austria. But collaborative finance fascinates me, even if my knowledge of it is a bit fuzzy, and there were going to be speakers whose work I admired. Curious to learn more, I therefore travelled almost at the last minute to the venue in the Austrian Alps.

Turns out I was one of several people with backgrounds in adjacent fields who were relative newcomers. But we didn’t feel like newbies for long. Everybody was open and welcoming, making CoFi #3 the perfect spot for learning about new financial models, which can be tricky for outsiders.

The conference venue was a beautiful spot, too. Right at the foot of the Alps, the Hirschwangerhof has been lovingly restored by the brothers Felix and Emil Fritsch. Housing the CommonsHub, it had ample room for Open Space sessions and direct access to the mountains for anyone who wanted to go hiking.

About 50 people had come to the event from all over the world, including the US, Canada, Central and South America, China, Scandinavia and many Western and Middle European countries. Several in fact were “digital nomads” with no permanent base. Backgrounds were varied too: from blockchain technologists, computer scientists, engineers and designers to community currency practitioners and activists.

A perfect blend of the analogue and the digital

The organisers of the conference, Stephen deMeulenaere and Matthew Slater, have decades of experience implementing community currencies.

“We’re doing this to bring people from the community currency movement together with people in the blockchain/web3 movement to cross-pollinate our ideas, values and desired outcomes,” they say of their aims for CoFi.

Collaborative Finance is about settling obligations between parties in a network without recurring to state money. This can be done in a completely analogue way, or with sophisticated digital technologies like blockchains or graph algorithms. You can find an introduction to Collaborative Finance here.

At the gathering, there were lots of analogue activities, like financial board or card games. The organisers also deliberately did not record everything, favouring participation over documentation. As a speaker you had to ask for a recording if you wanted it to happen. If you sat in the front row — the “inner circle” — you were asked not to use your phone or laptop.

Conference and unconference

Matthew kicked off the conference by reflecting on the current state of affairs: “What does success look like in this field of alternative systems?” There had not been much visible impact. “But there’s always the chance that what we do is a spark,” he said. “We can’t compete with the global economy. It could be that it all unravels, and if we’ve done our homework, maybe we will be able to create useful systems.” The measure of success would be change in the world. “At the moment CoFi is just a conversation, when it could be a lot more.”

Each day followed a fixed pattern. Mornings began with five minutes of silence, after which we were invited to share our reflections on the previous day. There were then three or four presentations — and unconference-style sessions in the afternoon, based on suggestions posted after lunch on sticky notes.

Sessions were varied and engaging. Some invited you to test new games. In Nicolas Franka’s Coins game, for example, you were an emperor of an ancient culture. Stef Kuyper’s Happonomics card game, meanwhile, had two rounds each using different money distribution systems. From Scott Morris we learned about the origins of the Monopoly board game, which were not capitalist at all, quite the opposite. It was in fact invented by Elizabeth Magie as the Landlord’s Game which included two sets of rules, one of which made for a much more egalitarian outcome.

One talk by Teodoro Criscione showed how hierarchies and power structures always emerge, even in decentralised or egalitarian systems. Interestingly, this gathering did not exhibit those power structures much at all.

It was also interesting to see some sessions that looked beyond CoFi. There was a “Bitcoin maximalist”, Hubertus, who presented on local Bitcoin projects and challenged the group to a debate about why Bitcoin could be the only successful crypto blockchain, and Sara and Cristof presented on “Compassionate Economy”, a type of gift economy that managed to get a number of representatives into an Austrian local council.

In the evenings, conversations continued at the bar and in the garden. You could also take a dip in the “liquidity pool” – a Hot Tub.

One evening we watched the nerve-wracking movie Escape from Pretoria about then anti-apartheid activist Tim Jenkin’s escape from a high-security prison. He later started the successful Community Exchange System that I will come to later.

The faces of local currencies

On the first day, we heard from Stefan Schütz about the Chiemgauer, a successful regional currency that arose from a game started at a German Waldorf school by a team of seven girls. The vouchers created in the game became so successful that they were turned into a local currency backed by the Euro in 2003. The Chiemgauer, which is still going strong 22 years later, now exists in digital form. In fact, it has become more popular through a new climate initiative. Stefan attributed the success to a dedicated core team, a committed leader person, and a strong community of early adopters.

While the Chiemgauer involves paper notes, many community currencies, like LETS (Local Exchange Trading Schemes) and timebanks, only use a digital ledger. Different pieces of software exist for that. One example is CES (Community Exchange System), which is as old as the Chiemgauer and now has hundreds of groups. There’s also Community Forge and Cyclos, the latter being much closer to a banking app.

As communities running these schemes are usually small and risk accumulating trade imbalances, there’s long been an idea of federating them. Matthew, the creator of Community Forge, has written the Credit Commons Protocol which can integrate with CES communities as well.

Another long-standing effort is IntegralCES, which has been used in Spain, Italy and Greece. It is just being updated based on the platform Komunitin, as is CES itself, putting mobile functionality first. Esteve Badia, developer of IntegralCES and Komunitin, gave a talk on that.

Kevin Sundar Raj discussed Citizenwallet, which is a Belgian non-profit and another provider of local currencies that uses crypto and NFC technology. It looks geared towards an urban environment, and is in fact behind a new local currency called Brussels Pay. Shops in the city are now obliged to accept digital payments, which means incurring fees from payment providers. If the stores join Brussels Pay, they are given terminals that can take either conventional payment or Brussels Pay and avoid the fees, which seems an elegant solution.

Circles, presented by Max, is another blockchain-based project, which was started in Berlin and lets members issue their own tokens as a basic income that can be used in participating shops. In the Berlin pilot, businesses could turn the Circles currency back into Euros through a subsidised programme.

Collaboration

Roberto Valenti and Simon Quarmby used their project Holons for a thought-provoking interactive demo, asking people to post continuations of these prompts in Telegram channels: “Can you believe we used to…”, “We did not have…” and “We only had to…” (the latter was combined with creating a task that others could join).

Cecilie Smith-Christensen talked about UNESCO World Heritage sites, and how many tourism-dependent communities suffer under economic leakage and are vulnerable to disruptions affecting the tourism sector. In the context of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention she founded World Heritage Catalysis through which she explores how collaborative finance can contribute towards circular and regenerative local economies and enhance communities’ economic resilience.

Clara Gromaches gave a talk on affordable housing projects in and around Barcelona that she is involved in. In response to her question “Who has been to Barcelona?” almost all hands shot up. In the last 10 years there has been a staggering growth of 50% in tourism, while 50% of locals have been displaced from the area. Co-operative housing projects provide secure and affordable lets that can also be passed on to children.

The power of accounting – from matrix to network

Hans-Florian Hoyer explained his concept of Twin Tokens, which could be implemented by a community in various ways, including just pen and paper. He demonstrated this on a flipchart by creating random transactions between two parties and recording amounts owed by whom to whom in a matrix. After a number of transactions, he showed how many of the debts could be fully or partially cancelled out.

Review of the collaborative finance gathering

Several people mentioned that what ultimately underlies all the issuance and debt-clearing mechanisms is a technology that has been around since the middle ages (and really started even before that): double-entry accounting.

Saying that, with today’s digital technologies you can go much further.

As Jorge Lopez would later say in a conversation with Arthur about the Economic Space Agency’s work: “The moment we move accounting into a computational network, things happen. Much more becomes possible.”

For this to happen, accounting needs to be translated into a network protocol. “The agents gain network responsibility.”

The ECSA (Economic Space Agency – I love that name) aims to encode different economic politics. “Capitalism utilises accounting practices in pursuit of profit and increase of capital. The financial architecture of capitalism can be coopted, composted, hacked.”

Tomaž Fleischman talked about Cycles, which is an “open, decentralized clearing, settlement, and issuance protocol” that can benefit existing business networks by clearing debts through multilateral obligation-setoff.

He explained the four ways to discharge a payment obligation, emphasizing how important it is to keep track of settlements. Settling debts with less money means using conventional money’s unit of account, but not using it as the exchange medium.

How the boundaries of a network are defined can have a big impact on how much clearing can be done within those groups.

Message-based settling is another computerised clearing method, which is used by Ledgerloops. It is triggered by a single transaction instead of being run at certain intervals. Michiel de Jong and Johan Nygren talked about solving a problem associated with this, involving multihop payments. Michiel began more generally by discussing how software creation can be organised (for example monoculture, commons, or public good), and how different ledgers can coexist if there is an interoperability layer. “But what about the interoperability layer? Everybody will want you to use theirs”, came a voice from the audience. Still, the crucial thing is that they exist.

Collaboration was a big theme at the heart of the conference. Many groups at the meeting have already worked with one or more others, and it is crucial that projects talk the same language and federate for the movement to grow.

Talking of collaboration, Gustavo Segovia gave a talk on Collabberry, a decentralised app that allows a team to evaluate and compensate members’ contributions in a transparent way.

Regeneration

After impressive talks about the Mycelium Learning Network in Costa Rica by Arturo Montanaro, and on Island Power based in the UK (with both managing projects around the world; see interviews with Marcus Saul and Chris Cook from Island Power on Lowimpact), the last two presentations were a fitting finale.

Jakub Lanc talked about his adventures in the Czech Republic, bringing new financial technologies to universities and other institutions. I enjoyed the slides on his methodologies which comprised ADHD, rabbit holes and a Trojan horse. ”You need someone to open the door for you”, he commented, although he admitted he would like “to find a less war-like analogy”. It was interesting to hear that universities, such as Cambridge, are now offering courses on Regenerative Economics.

Scott Morris, the “Token Jedi” who appeared wearing a Star Wars inspired outfit, talked about his experiences advocating for a revolutionary blockchain protocol called Bancor, named after the clearing solution that John Maynard Keynes had unsuccessfully proposed at the 1944 Bretton Woods meeting. As its namesake, Bancor allows (crypto) currencies to be converted into another, their values being automatically calculated by supply and demand. The new Bancor did not get much of a chance to become a force for good. Its founders made promises that they did not keep and compromised the project in other ways, which left Scott feeling burned.

On a more positive note, Scott has just written a book with Stephen DeMeulenaere called “Pathways to Regeneration”, which I can highly recommend. Their combined massive experience in the realm of new economies, and how to implement them, shines through on every page.

The last day also saw CoFi in action, as the Commons Hub found its first investors towards expanding the place. The interest on the loans will be paid in nights of accommodation.

Summing up, this was a mind-blowing and nourishing gathering and more than I could have imagined.

A key take-away for me is that if communities take issuing and settling credit into their own hands, the value lies in the relationships and cannot be as easily co-opted as conventional money. At the same time, they must guard against, or find ways to deal with, accumulation of credits and debt.

One of the main obstacles to creating networks like that might be in our own minds. I have not mentioned the sessions on shadow work and money trauma yet. I was not part of them, but from what I heard they were powerful.

In highly individualised Western societies, the necessary trust and connection can be hard to come by, with people tending to stick with what they are used to especially if it looks to be – kind of – working. Still, I believe that to trust and connect can be learned again, as it is in our human nature.