Participative Cryptoeconomics — The Future Of Universal Income

re:publica 18 - Politics & Society

With the need to relocate entire districts away from Mexico City urbanised lakebed and towards newly printed hillside colonias came another: to invent a fair, sustainable and incorruptible way to compensate relocatees for their loss. Rajesh Laghari's intervention presents the development of La Renta—a universal income built on a dynamic ecosystem of three private and a collective account, and granted in a dedicated cryptocurrency—and discusses results from the pilot project.

• Rajesh Laghari

Take a state of emergency calling for immediate and radical change. Add a local population whose roots are deeply anchored within the very soil that threatens it. Top with a corrupt political system whose only interest is immediate gain and grandiose. Cook the time of one deadly air pollution crisis. Here's Mexico City left without a choice, constrained to relocate part of its population on the hillsides in order to recover its original lakebed, long forgotten under a layer of concrete.

Developed as a cooperation between LabCDMX and N O R M A L S, the CDRMX relocation project prints new anti-seismic hillside districts and makes housing available for free to relocatees. But a financial compensation is needed, which takes shape as a unique form of local cryptocurrency-based universal income: La Renta. The project makes use of a dynamic ecosystem of accounts with different properties to incentivise participative economy, and introduces a novel way to collect taxes through self-devaluation.

Universal income is not just a necessity for post-work societies, Rajesh Laghari explains, it is an opportunity to reinvent economy as a whole. La Renta is a social experiment we strongly believe in, and even though everything is working fine so far we do expect to find weaknesses in the pilot project. We are closely monitoring the way locals appropriate the income, how they embrace its participative aspects, and which new behaviours emerge.