There are no reliable statistics, but since the financial system transitioned into the realm of fiction in 2008, the present author has witnessed a noticeable growth in complementary currency activities. The LETS have been declining since at least the turn of the century. Time banking has benefitted from institutional support and more favourable legal rulings, and there are several projects which fit neither family. I judge that the success rate of currency projects remains very low. This is because most complementary currencies are started by an isolated enthusiast, but they can only succeed when many people actively participate. Awareness that money itself may not be a neutral commodity is certainly growing, but that understanding is a long way from making a conscious decision to invest effort in the local economy, and to do so outside of legal tender money.
It will be argued therefore, that the very notion of a local economy is so eroded in a global society, and money itself so aspatial, and local money systems so lacklustre that there is nothing to federate.
But it can also be argued that a credit commons would strengthen all the local systems, giving them new uses and wider relevance. Local currencies would undoubtedly be more useful if they could be spent in other localities. In addition, the process of making local systems interoperable will increase awareness about how money systems could be run, and what is possible once we learn to cooperate.
Finally, human architectures of exchange may be better positioned to serve as an organ of planetary ecology, fostering global conditions conducive to biological life, if their patterns of development are consistent with the bottom-up pattern of systems innovation in the natural world. The consistency of design principles can allow human and natural systems to flow more seamlessly together so that “the city can no longer be distinguished from the forest” from a systems design perspective.
Enough open source software already exists (some created by the author of this document) for local communities to design and own local exchanges.
What is needed, I surmise, is a blockchain protocol, which allows people to organise their promises in the ways described above, and some requirements and explorations will be in the next paper; and crucially, to raise awareness of actionable solutions to the monetary paradox and how to implement them for growing numbers of local solidarity groups.