Using mutual credit to draw a map of financial inter-dependence at a global scale
Published in
1 min readMar 5, 2016
Mutual credit systems, like Ryan Fugger’s Ripple (2003), is an economic protocol that enables person-to-person trade at a global scale, through keeping track of each individuals credit or debit balance.
The Resilience protocol (Nygren, 2012) describes how to map growth within mutual credit systems like Ripple. Mutual credit traces financial inter-dependence with high accuracy, and if visualized over time (Y axis), it reveals an interesting pattern, where individual nodes grow into more complex webs of financial inter-connectedness.
