La Caisse is an open source digital cashbox for communities that need to move money without becoming a bank. Euros come in by bank transfer or card and are issued as tokens. Tokens are spent at the fund’s partner shops with a tap of an NFC card. Shops are paid out from the fund for the tokens they received. The token is the books: euros in the account equal tokens in circulation plus reserve, so the fund always knows where its money is. Legally the token is a limited-network accounting unit, not e-money, so no payment licence is needed.
The software is AGPL-3.0 (github.com/lacaisse/webapp), co-financed by Citizen Pay and La CLASS ASBL, and offered to other funds as a digital public good. Citizen Pay builds the terminals and cards and runs the platform. The funds govern.
Two funds run on it today: La CLASS, a food social security fund in Schaerbeek (Brussels), and Pay for Brussels, a don suspendu fund run by Brussels Pay ASBL, which holds the Bread Solidarity Fund membership and accepts $BREAD.
Give groups of people the tools to decide who gets what, at which shops, without a card network taking a cut or excluding people who have no account.
Merchants in Brussels are pushed to accept digital payments and pay for it in fees. People without a bank account or a smartphone get shut out at the same time. Communities that want to run a solidarity scheme, a food allowance, a suspended coffee, a local currency, have two bad options: run it on paper and spreadsheets, or become a regulated payment institution. Neither scales, and both put the burden on the smallest actors.
A token layer on top of existing rails. The community funds the allowance, the merchant gets paid in full, the cardholder taps a card like anyone else. No app, no login, no new till. One ledger does the accounting. The same infrastructure serves a food social security fund with 230 members and 12 shops, and a suspended coffee fund with 10 cards at one bar, at no cost to the merchant on the token side. Because the code is copyleft, every fund that joins strengthens the commons rather than a vendor.
Europe
