IDCC’s New Initiative — Decentralized Development Finance Framework (DDFF)
IDCC is proud to announce being awarded a technology grant from the Interchain Foundation (ICF) to kickstart our initiative to begin supporting the development finance and social finance demands of Hong Kong. Through this grant, we aim to put decentralized social finance tools into the hands of impoverished communities in Hong Kong, helping them to achieve self-determinism and economic resilience through programmable results-based-finance & collateralized community currencies, to grow alternative sustainable forms of local economy.
Digitized Timebank System Development
With the ICF grant, IDCC works on a pilot project with a network of SPOs to build and test the digitized timebank system. Timebanks are a system that revolves around the concept of bartering — exchanging one’s time for someone else’s time as either a service or a product. In such system, time-based currency is used for transactions; timebank members can earn credits through work and these credits can be used to procure services or products. In Hong Kong, the timebank approach has been implemented by various social purpose organizations (SPOs) in Hong Kong for over two decades where they use their own timebanking system and currently serve 10+ districts/communities with 20,000+ grassroots users.
Our approach
Under the DDFF framework, IDCC aims to improve Hong Kong’s timebanking systems by establishing a bottom-up digital collaborative economy platform. With the support from ICF, IDCC aims to establish a unified and digitized timebanking system integrated with blockchain technologies. This will allow their beneficiaries to safely and efficiently issue their own time-based currencies as well as trade their unique timebank tokens between more markets.
Way forward
For our next steps, IDCC will work with our SPO partners and their beneficiary stakeholders to further understand their real needs and challenges. Ultimately it is our goal to create innovative technological solutions that fit SPOs’ risk-management requirements and enhance user experience for beneficiaries. At the same time, we also aim to help build digital and financial literacy as well as trust within communities and the social sector we are all a part of. Nonetheless we also look forward to providing you further updates on our progress here on Medium and our other social media channels:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/idcchk/
