TL;DR
We introduce Global Income Coin (GLO), a cryptocurrency that generates universal basic income through seigniorage. GLO is conceived, managed, and distributed by the Global Income Coin Foundation, a nonprofit in Zug, Switzerland. We’re pursuing this project because we think that UBI is good and because its scope is huge: potentially $2860 billion/year (basically $1/person/day). Our ambition is for the EA community to embrace Global Income Coin as a project worth pursuing.
What questions and concerns would you need answered to consider GLO a good and viable idea? We’re going to write The Effective Altruist Case for Global Income Coin and will use your feedback as input.
1 The GLO model
GLO is a cryptocurrency that uses seigniorage—the revenue generated from the creation of new money—to pay for a universal basic income (UBI). GLO is intended to be used as normal money (i.e. for payments, savings) and has a target rate of $1.
We aim to debut GLO later this year. At that point, everyone in the world will be able to verify their identity to claim a small weekly UBI of GLO. We’ll encourage humans and companies to adopt GLO as a payment method. The more they do this, the more UBI we can generate.
1.1 Seigniorage: the value that arises from growth in the money supply
In general, governments grow the global money supply steadily over time to keep pace with inflation targets and economic growth.
The entity creating the new money can decide what to do with it, so this can be considered an income stream. That income stream is called seigniorage. Usually, money from seigniorage enters economies top-down, from the central banks to commercial banks and into the broader economy. The goal of Global Income Coin is to do a bottom-up distribution of new money instead.
Seigniorage is a normal thing, but it’s relatively unknown and often sounds like black magic to people who first hear about it. How can money be created out of thin air? But in any modern economy, this happens continuously. Our ballpark estimate (going by 1994-2019 historicals) is that government-created money grows by about 8% a year. By 2024, this means governments will be printing approximately $2,860 billion per year.
1.2 How GLO uses seigniorage to generate UBI
GLO uses seigniorage to keep its value at about $1/GLO coin and generate UBI at the same time. Here’s how this works:
- GLO, like the dollar, has a theoretically unlimited supply. More coins can be printed at any time.
- GLO has a target exchange rate of $1. When demand for the currency rises (e.g. because more people want to use it for payments) the price of GLO will drift upwards.
- The Foundation then creates more GLO to accommodate the growth in demand. This has two effects:
- It lowers the market-clearing price back to our target of $1/GLO token;
- It generates proceeds for the Global Income Coin Foundation, which can then be distributed directly to verified humans as UBI.
That way, the printing of new money facilitates the growth in the money supply required to meet rising demand.
1.3 GLO is permissionless monetary policy change
GLO is a currency that can be used instead of existing everyday currencies. Every time someone uses GLO rather than USD, EUR, JPY, etc, they shift a fraction of top-down money creation towards the Global Income Coin model. The same ~8% monetary expansion would still happen, but the value would be used for a global UBI rather than flow into (mostly) already wealthy economies through their financial industries. It’s a wealth transfer set in motion through people switching to a different currency for (a part of) their savings and spending.
1.4 Potential impact on poverty
The goal of Global Income Coin is to alleviate (extreme) poverty, and its mechanism is direct cash transfers. Direct cash transfers require two things:
- Money to distribute
- Infrastructure to distribute it with
If Global Income Coin succeeds, it offers a solution to both. Seigniorage is the ‘business model’ by which Global Income Coin generates UBI. For distribution, we’re connecting all humans to a global payment network, verifying their identity such that everyone can only claim UBI once.
Since the UBI does not depend on donations, the value unlocked by Global Income Coin comes on top of existing poverty alleviation initiatives. At global adoption, we’d unlock an estimated $2,860 billion per year. Distributed among ~8 billion people, this makes for a daily UBI of $1 per person.
But note that Global Income Coin doesn’t need to reach full-scale adoption to be of philanthropic value. Any level of sustained GLO adoption unlocks some amount of UBI. Quantifying the impact of various non-maximal success scenarios is one of our open research questions.
2 Current status
- We’re very early: Global Income Coin started this year and is now a team of six
- GLO came out of stealth mode in late April with a press release and a Show HN thread
- We’ve secured $2M in initial funding from Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, to pay our bills
- We plan to launch the coin later this year
- We’re hiring across the board
- We’re looking to partner with crypto exchanges who are excited about crypto for good
- We’ve got a public draft white paper containing our latest thinking (comments and contributions welcome)
3 Outstanding challenges
This is an ambitious, long-term project—think decades—but there are some short to medium term problems that we’ve got to solve if we’re going to get off the ground. To not make this forum post too in-depth, we’ll just list the issues here. If you’re interested in learning about our solution directions, please see our EA case draft.
3.1 The demand for GLO needs to grow
Our ability to generate sufficient demand for the GLO token is make-or-break; if everyone immediately sells their GLO for other currencies, its value collapses. Kickstarting demand is especially difficult early on.
3.2 Identity verification that’s fraud-resistant and privacy-preserving
We need to verify that everyone claiming UBI is an actual, unique human so we’re sybil-resistant while also maintaining privacy.
3.3 Reaching people without internet and/or functional national ID systems
The people who need the UBI the most often live in places with little internet access or countries that have no reliable national identity system.
3.4 Blockchain scalability
We’re building towards billions of transactions per day, which, as Sam Bankman-Fried could tell you, is way beyond the current capacities of most extant networks.
4. How we use resources: employing people and deploying funds
As a non-profit organization, Global Income Coin can grow to deploy funds at megaproject scale and employ people in domains like software development, economics/econometrics, trading, data science, policy research, security, marketing, partnerships, community management.
While the UBI generated by GLO is eventually donation-independent, the Global Income Coin Foundation does use donations in two ways:
1. Operational costs
The Global Income Coin Foundation wants to be a ‘slim organization’. Our aim is to incentivize for-profits to build infrastructure and provide services rather than becoming a full-blown tech company ourselves. Still, we expect to eventually employ hundreds of employees.
2. USD reserve
During times with low natural demand for GLO, the Foundation will use its existing supply of USD to purchase GLO and artificially support the value of the UBI. This should only be necessary in the early phase; eventually GLO should sustain its own value. The USD reserve buys us time to get to that point. It can theoretically deploy an arbitrarily large amount of funding.
5. Request for feedback + how you can help
We’re soliciting ideas and participation on a few fronts:
A. The Effective Altruist Case for Global Income Coin
That’s the title of an upcoming document (see draft) that should explain why GLO is worth pursuing from an EA point of view.
What would it take to persuade you? More fully-fleshed out intermediate plans? Some early successes? Strong, Ulysses-tying-his-hands-to-the-mast commitments to Do No Harm? Endorsements or oversight from certain people?
- Let us know your biggest reservations in the comments and we’ll use them as input for what to write about.
- Additionally, we’re looking for volunteer reviewers from within the EA community as well as volunteer writers/researchers.
If you’re excited about Global Income Coin, have relevant expertise, and want to help us answer some of the subquestions, please reach out!
B. Spread the word
C. Labor/Partnerships
This is an interesting idea. A few thoughts from a student of international financial macroeconomics.
Seignorage is essentially the profits that come from devaluing money holdings. That means your basic mechanism is to transfer value from holders of GLO to people who claim your UBI. This could work with the early enthusiasts, or with there being transactional value in holding GLO (e.g. if sellers accept GLO then buyers will keep some of it on hand). Since enthusiasts will be attracted if there is a strong prospect for transactional value, I'll give a few comments on the prospect of GLO becoming a global currency. My comments are mostly issues, problems, and questions that you may have to answer to convince people that the GLO ambition has potential. But that shouldn't detract from the value of the project.
Any currency needs to have its value continually supported in some way. Your summary contains a misconception: that, to maintain the $1 value, USD reserves won't be required after some point. In fact, entire countries can fail to defend their national currencies' pegs despite having billions of USD reserves. It's similar to a bank run, and it can happen to stablecoins not backed 1 for 1.
Generating demand for GLO may be difficult. Since seignorage is a devaluation of money holdings, it would create a disincentive to hold GLO. For example, cryptocurrencies often constrain supply or burn tokens in a bid to get people to buy and hold. You're proposing to do the opposite. That is why getting people to use GLO for transactions, or some other utility such as altruistic appeal, is vital. So generating demand is not impossible, but challenging.
Your ambition for GLO may not be consistent with a $1 peg, since your ambition is effectively for the dollar to become irrelevant. Of course, a $ peg would take you a long way at first. Nevertheless, a natural solution in the case of runaway GLO success may be to peg to a CPI-like weighted basket of prices. Perhaps CPI - x%, to generate some value to transfer to UBI claimants.
The amount of seignorage revenue in a given period will depend on the growth of demand for GLO in that period. Demand may fluctuate, and with it the UBI income amount. The income will be zero in periods in which reserves are used to prop up the value. That is not a deal breaker, but you will have to dip into reserves to produce a steady UBI income stream, or accept income fluctuation.
If GLO becomes a ubiquitous global currency, it will limit countries' ability to use domestic monetary policy to stabilise the business cycle and unemployment. That would open the question of global monetary policy in a GLO world, and whether the policy variables e.g. GLO supply should be used for macro stability as well as UBI, and who should make those decisions.
I hope my comments are constructive enough to be helpful. Best of luck!
Thanks for the close read and thoughtful comments, Michael. FWIW, if you’d like to discuss this more over email or a Zoom call, we’d be glad to connect.
To each point in turn (along with a paraphrase -- LMK if I got any of this wrong)
Yep, that’s right. For this model to work, in the short term, we need people to buy, hold, and use GLO for altruistic reasons and accept a (relatively modest) depreciation of the asset over time. (Cash also devalues.) If our group of enthusiasts is large and vocal enough, they create an incentive for vendors to accept GLO, and, best case, to prefer GLO for branding reasons. In the medium-term, we aim for parity in terms of ease of use with other means of exchange. In the long run, we aim for GLO to be the easiest, or among the easiest, ways of buying and selling stuff, which is something you’d pay a small price to deal with, just as sellers currently eat the costs of a fee to accept credit cards. Right now, we’re focused on the short-term problem of convincing folks to give it a try, with the basic calculus that if the project works, it could have transformational effects on global poverty. Even if you assign only a small probability to the project's eventual success, a small probability * a transformational impact is still a very large gain in expected utility.
Probably reserves of something are necessary for the long run but they don’t necessarily have to be in USD. Your point is well taken though, especially today. Our vision is that in the early phase, reserves will effectively subsidize the value of GLO, since there is no natural demand; later on, if/when GLO garners transactional, altruistic and branding demand, we’ll use the reserves to manage the float and dampen volatility. The action is the same (trading GLO for dollars) but during the ‘subsidy phase’ the reserves will on average only go down, and we hope to get to a point where natural demand growth allows us to grow the reserves as well. There’s a trading strategy section in the whitepaper that spells this out in more detail -- we'd be glad to have your feedback!
See above
First, we're not aiming for a peg. We'll let GLO be its own free-floating currency and only use $1 as a loose target. And yep, in the long run, we might aim for a new target. In the short- and medium-run, 1 GLO = $1 has a number of nice properties, e.g. simplicity & ease of understanding.
This is right in principle and we could deal with it in a few ways; 1) we might have a system where rich world users only accepted UBI sometimes, or never, or only when it was above a certain value threshold, and could opt instead to have it automatically distributed to users who truly need it (or to an unrelated charitable fund, e.g. GIveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund). 2) we might supplement from existing reserves, as you suggest. 3) Create a ‘friends of GLO’ foundation to which people can donate (tax-free) some amount of money that goes directly to recipients, for which we will already have the infrastructure set up. This could take the form of a close partnership with an NGO (e.g. GiveDirectly) or a mobile money transfer service (e.g. M-PESA).
1) if GLO becomes the single global currency, countries would indeed have to rely more on fiscal policy. This has downsides, clearly, but is not unprecedented, as we see within the Eurozone or countries that adopt the dollar. 2) Long-term, we don’t want to be solely responsible for running the world’s money supply, and global monetary policy will ultimately need to be handled by an org like a global central bank, a trusted NGO, or a democratically representative DAO. 3) The $2.86T number is useful as an optimistic case to get a sense of the potential scale, but our ethos is not “take over the world’s money supply or bust!!” A variety of intermediate outcomes would still also be very good, and those would still supply governments with latitude to, e.g. use OMOs.
Happy to keep discussing, we love this stuff 😃