The Future of Economic Reform
The need for Universal Basic Income in a time of crisis and beyond
The following is Part 2 in a series of blog posts that will elaborate on existing opportunities for leveraging digital currencies and the potential impact they will have on people’s lives. You can find Part 1 here. The current article discusses how cryptocurrency can be leveraged to efficiently deploy and manage Universal Basic Income, or UBI.
Universal Basic Income: A Rationale & Use Case
Since we started Keyko a year ago, we’ve had an amazing opportunity to work on a diverse and incredibly challenging range of projects. Our curiosity is always stimulated, but lately it’s been a feast partnering with Celo and MoCaFi on a trial of a blockchain backed Universal Basic Income (UBI) pilot program.
Universal basic income, sometimes called citizen’s income or basic income, is a universal, recurrent cash payment provisioned unconditionally to individuals. It involves no labour or sanctions and is available to those in or out of work, voluntarily or not.
The concept of UBI is not a modern one. As early as the 16th century Thomas Moore proposed in his book, Utopia, a citizenry with a guaranteed income. Later versions were subsequently proposed by Thomas Paine (1797), and Belgian socialist Joseph Charlier (1848). In 1962’s Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman described another idea tangential to UBI — negative income tax — providing people below a certain income level with money back from the government. Shortly thereafter in his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr wrote:
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
In the early stages of the 2020 US presidential campaign, UBI entered the political debate with early candidate Andrew Yang reintroducing the idea to the mainstream political stage. Yang’s driver for the eventual necessity of some form of UBI is from increased automation and technology displacing existing workforces.
Although Yang eventually dropped out of the 2020 US Presidential campaign, engaging with UBI as a serious financial policy could not be more relevant than today as the world continues to struggle with both the human and economic fallout of a global pandemic. In May 2020, the US Labor Department released record figures: 20.5 million jobs lost in April with 14.7% unemployment — the highest level since the Great Depression.
The need for alternative methods of quickly disbursing guaranteed funds to those in need right now could not be higher. Perhaps most urgently in need are the minority communities who are currently disproportionately affected by COVID-19 across the United States.
Keyko is proud to collaborate with Mobility Capital Finance, Inc (MoCaFi), a Black-owned and led digital banking platform, and Celo Foundation, an organization aimed at providing open financial tools to the masses. Launched in 2016 by Wole Coaxum as a way to address social inequities by closing the racial wealth gap, MoCaFi targets the unbanked and underbanked people in the U.S., and has currently enrolled over 25,000 users. Together, our immediate goal is to bring a Celo Dollars (cUSD) backed UBI pilot to those in need in the Newark, New Jersey area.
MoCaFi provides a bank account which can be opened in minutes with the MoCaFi app for mobile devices, paired with a Mastercard debit card. Our UBI partnership will leverage the existing Mastercard network and MoCaFi digital assets for initial disbursement to UBI beneficiaries and allow authorization and spend at point-of-sale terminals not of USD, but of Celo Dollars (cUSD). Individual beneficiary balances and all settlements will be managed completely on-chain via an orchestration layer architected by Keyko that allows MoCaFi to treat cUSD as if it were part of normal bank-issued settlement processes.
The program is supported by the local municipality in New Jersey to encourage local spending and economic recovery and is a well aligned community grant from the Celo Foundation, aiming to create a new platform to connect people globally and bring financial stability to those who need it most.
At Keyko we hope to solve real-world problems with the Celo Protocol for MoCaFi’s customers today, and the rest of the world tomorrow.
Stay tuned for our next post on this project — a technical deep dive in the structure of the Celo UBI project.
Keyko is a Web 3.0 solutions provider building integrated decentralized solutions for enterprise and startups. We thrive on on-boarding organizations and individuals into the emerging digital world where capitalism and ownership are being profoundly rethought.
If you would like to know more about our services or are interested in having a chat, please reach out to us at info@keyko.io or visit our website here.
If you enjoyed this article let us know by clapping or leaving your comment below.
