Grassroots Bonds as a Foundation for Market Liquidity

TL;DR

This paper introduces grassroots bonds, a new financial instrument backed by goods and services, enabling local digital economies to develop liquidity without external capital through digital social contracts.

Contribution

It extends grassroots cryptocurrencies with maturity dates, allowing interest-bearing lending and diverse financial instruments expressed via digital social contracts.

Findings

Grassroots bonds enable local economies to form without external capital.

Digital social contracts can express a wide range of financial instruments.

Classical liquidity ratios apply to grassroots bonds.

Abstract

Global cryptocurrencies are unbacked and have high transaction cost incurred by global consensus. In contrast, grassroots cryptocurrencies are backed by the goods and services of their issuers -- any person, natural or legal -- and have no transaction cost beyond operating a smartphone. Liquidity in grassroots cryptocurrencies arises from mutual credit via coin exchange among issuers. However, as grassroots coins are redeemable 1-for-1 against any other grassroots coin, the credit-forming exchange must also be 1-for-1, lest prompt redemption after exchange would leave the parties with undue profit or loss. Thus, grassroots coins are incongruent with liquidity through interest-bearing credit. Here we introduce grassroots bonds, which extend grassroots coins with a maturity date, reframing grassroots coins -- cash -- as mature grassroots bonds. Bond redemption generalises coin redemption, allowing the lending of liquid coins in exchange for interest-bearing future-maturity bonds. We show that digital social contracts -- voluntary agreements among persons, specified, fulfilled, and enforced digitally -- can express the full gamut of financial instruments as the voluntary swap of grassroots bonds, including loans, sale of debt, forward contracts, options, and escrow-based instruments, and that classical liquidity ratios are applicable just as well to grassroots bonds. Grassroots bonds may thus allow local digital economies to form and grow without initial capital or external credit, harnessing mutual trust within communities into liquidity. The formal specification presented here was implemented in GLP, a concurrent logic programming language running on Dart for smartphone deployment. The implementation is illustrated by a running multiagent village market scenario in GLP.