Credits

The Problem: Traditional Crowdfunding Is Broken Kickstarter’s Missing Piece You back a project: $50, $100, maybe $500 You get: A product (if it ships) You don’t get: Any ongoing relationship with what you helped create The creator: Keeps all the upside Result: You funded someone else’s dream, but you don’t share in the success The Choice Nobody Should Have To Make Traditional crowdfunding forces you to choose: product without participation, or participation without product. ...

{{< pudding-progress >}} The Revolution That Isn’t {{< pudding-sticky-quote attribution=“Denken, Founder” >}} “I propose an economic revolution, simply by doing what we already do, with a slightly different structure. Namely, YOU being in charge of YOU.” {{< /pudding-sticky-quote >}} You Already Do This {{< pudding-reveal direction=“left” >}} You work. You buy groceries. You eat dinner. You help your neighbors move a couch. You tip a waitress. You hire someone to fix a leaky faucet. ...

The Problem: Currencies as Gatekeepers Here’s what nobody talks about when they build a global platform: Bob lives in Greece. His currency is weak — worth about 80 cents on the dollar. Mary lives in Switzerland. Her currency is strong — worth about $1.40 on the dollar. On every other platform in existence, Bob pays more (relative to his economic reality) and Mary pays less (relative to hers). The platform pretends this is fair because “everyone pays the same price in USD.” ...

{{< pudding-progress >}} The Problem: Not Everyone Starts Equal The Currency Penalty {{< pudding-reveal direction=“left” >}} Imagine two people want to use the same platform. Bob lives in Greece. Mary lives in Switzerland. Both pay $10 to join. But Bob’s $10 cost him the equivalent of $12.50 in local purchasing power. Mary’s $10 only cost her the equivalent of $7.14. Same platform. Same access. But Bob paid 75% more in real terms — just because of where he was born. {{< /pudding-reveal >}} ...

Most platforms have one currency: dollars. You pay, you get something, the platform takes its cut. Liana Banyan has three currencies. Each one does something different, and together they create an economy where doing more for your community literally makes everything cheaper. Credits — The Simple One Credits are the easiest to understand. One dollar equals one Credit. You buy them, you spend them. They work like money inside the platform. ...

The LB Card is a prepaid card that lives inside the cooperative. You load it with Credits, and you spend it at any participating business on the platform. Simple as that. But what makes it different from any other prepaid card is what happens around it. How It Works Your LB Card is a Stripe-powered prepaid card tied to your membership. You load Credits onto it (remember: $1 = 1 Credit, one-way — Credits never convert back to dollars). Then you use those Credits at participating restaurants, shops, and service providers. ...

Liana Banyan membership costs $5 per year. But if you are an active participant, you may never pay that $5 again. Marks Payback automatically renews your membership using Credits you have already earned — at zero out-of-pocket cost. How It Works If you have earned 100 or more Marks during your membership year AND you have at least 5 Credits in your account, the platform automatically renews your membership for you. ...

When you back a project on Liana Banyan — whether it is a Kickstarter campaign, a bounty sponsorship, or a community initiative — you make a choice about what your contribution means. That choice is permanent, clear, and yours. Three Options When you fund a project, you select one of three options: Option A — Gift Receipt. Your contribution is a gift. You expect nothing in return. Simple, clean, no strings. ...

The Pudding Imagine you mow a lawn. The grass is cut. The homeowner is satisfied. The work is done. Now imagine someone tells you that because of market conditions, the lawn you mowed last Tuesday is only half-mowed now. That the effort you put in has been retroactively reduced. That the sweat on your shirt counts for less today than it did when you earned it. You would call that absurd. Work that has been completed does not un-complete itself. A meal you cooked was still cooked. A shed you built is still standing. A child you tutored still learned the lesson. Completed work is permanent. It exists in the world as a fact. ...

Not Everyone Works the Same Way Traditional job boards give you one option: apply, interview, get hired, clock in. That model works for some people. It fails spectacularly for everyone else — the single parent who can only commit twelve hours a week, the retired machinist who wants to consult on one project at a time, the college student looking for tasks she can knock out between classes. Liana Banyan was built around a simple premise: if people work in fundamentally different ways, the platform should support fundamentally different hiring models. We landed on seven. ...