Beyond Money: A Contribution Economy for GrowGood

Part 3: Tokens, Mutual Credit, and the Art of Building Something Together

In Part 2, we laid out how GrowGood plans to stay financially viable without selling out to venture capital: direct community support, professional services, a non-profit foundation, and cooperative feature development. It’s a solid, well-tested model—slow finance for a project that is deliberately refusing to chase explosive growth.

But money is not the only way to build something worth building.

Ask anyone who has been part of a working bee at a community garden, a barn raising on a neighbouring property, or an open-source project that ran on goodwill and late nights. Some of the most significant contributions people make to shared endeavours can’t be neatly priced. Feedback that shapes a product. A well-written piece of documentation that onboards a hundred users. A farmer who stress-tests a new module and reports six bugs in a weekend. A community organiser who bridges two groups who might otherwise never have found each other.

These contributions have real value. But our current economic grammar—fiat money, invoices, hourly rates—often can’t express them.

So what if we built a second layer?

Not to replace money, but to sit alongside it: a parallel system that accounts for contribution, recognises reciprocity, and keeps the community alive in all the ways that fiat simply cannot.

This Is Not Crypto

Before we go any further, let’s clear the air.

When many people hear “tokens,” their mind goes immediately to speculation: ICOs, pump-and-dump schemes, meme coins, the promise of getting rich by being early. The last decade of crypto has generated extraordinary noise, and a great deal of harm—particularly for communities who could least afford to lose.

That is not what we are talking about.

The tokens we are imagining for GrowGood would not be tradeable on any exchange. They would not be convertible to fiat. They would not be designed for accumulation or speculation. There would be no “whitepaper” promising a path to wealth.

What we are describing is closer, in spirit and in mechanics, to something much older.

The Original Decentralised Economies

Long before blockchain, communities around the world had already figured out how to account for contribution and reciprocity without relying on cash.

LETS—Local Exchange Trading Systems—pioneered in Canada in the 1980s and widely adopted across Australia during the 1990s recession, allowed members of a community to trade goods and services in a community-issued currency. You might earn “green dollars” by helping a neighbour with their garden, and spend them on someone else’s carpentry skills. No bank involved. No interest. Just a shared ledger of mutual contribution.

Time banks formalise a simpler idea: an hour of anyone’s time is worth the same as an hour of anyone else’s. You teach someone to preserve fruit; they teach someone else to repair a bicycle. The bank records the exchanges.

Credit unions took a different angle but the same philosophy: pool resources, share governance, serve members rather than shareholders. Many of Australia’s most trusted financial institutions started as small, community-owned credit cooperatives.

None of these are perfect models. LETS schemes have struggled with managing token supply and preventing accumulation. Time banks sometimes undervalue specialised expertise. But the underlying principle—that communities can create their own accounting systems for value that falls outside the cash economy—is sound, proven, and deeply aligned with how agricultural communities already work.

GrowGood’s token model draws from this tradition, updated for a software platform and a community that spans geography.

A Sketch, Not a Blueprint

What follows is not a finished design. It’s a framework for conversation—an invitation to the economists, developers, community organisers, and growers who might help us build something genuinely useful and genuinely fair.

The fiat funding pathways we described in Part 2 each have a corresponding non-monetary expression. The same four pillars—direct support, professional services, foundation governance, cooperative development—can be mirrored in a contribution accounting layer.

a. Tokens for Participation and Use

The most basic loop: contribute, earn, use.

Members might earn tokens by contributing labour, expertise, testing, documentation, onboarding support, peer mentoring, governance participation, data validation, or community facilitation. These contributions would be logged transparently, reviewed by the community, and recognised as real economic input into the platform.

Those same tokens could then be used to access GrowGood services, tools, priority support, or shared infrastructure. Instead of paying money, members could pay with prior contribution—or a commitment to future contribution.

This creates a living mutual-credit circuit:

• contribute → earn tokens
• use tools → spend tokens
• tools improve → community capacity grows

Value circulates within the community rather than leaking out to external shareholders. The model recognises that the people who make GrowGood better are also the people who should have the most access to what it becomes.

b. Tokens for Work Exchange

Professional services don’t disappear in a token system—they are just expressed differently.

Developers, designers, agronomists, facilitators, and integrators could choose to accept tokens for part or all of their work. Those tokens would then grant access to GrowGood services, priority support, infrastructure, training, or future development capacity.

For contributors already embedded in the community—the developer who uses GrowGood on their own market garden, the agronomist who runs training workshops—this could significantly reduce their dependency on fiat while keeping their work visible, valued, and coordinated. It would allow contributors to reinvest their labour directly back into the platform they are helping to build.

This is emphatically not volunteering. It is non-monetary compensation within a bounded, purpose-driven economy. The distinction matters enormously. Volunteer labour is invisible in the formal economy and frequently leads to burnout. Contribution-based labour is recorded, recognised, and reciprocated. The difference is the ledger.

c. Tokens as Voice, Not Power

In the fiat model, a non-profit foundation would hold governance responsibility for the open-source code. In the token layer, that same governance function could be expressed through contribution-weighted participation rather than financial contribution alone.

Tokens might be used to participate in governance processes, working groups, prioritisation decisions, and stewardship roles—but not on a one-token-one-vote basis. Influence would be weighted by contribution, experience, and the community’s trust, expressed through credentialed participation.

This matters because money is too crude an instrument for governance. A wealthy investor who has never used GrowGood should not have more influence over its direction than a market gardener who has tested every release for three years. The traditional “one dollar, one vote” model is just plutocracy with extra steps.

Contribution-weighted voice is genuinely harder to game. It rewards those who do the work. It builds accountability into the architecture of the community itself.

d. Tokens for Shared Build Capacity

Just as groups of users might pool fiat to fund a specific feature—a specialised crop planning module, a new sensor integration, a reporting tool for organic certification—they could also pool tokens and labour.

A group of growers might collectively contribute field-testing time, data cleaning, UX feedback, or documentation effort in exchange for the development of a feature they need. Developers, in turn, could be compensated with tokens that grant access to services, tooling, or future build capacity from the community.

This creates something like barter—but with accounting clarity, shared standards, and collective coordination. Informal barter often struggles with the “double coincidence of wants” problem: I want what you have, but do you want what I have, right now? A token intermediary solves that. It allows contribution to happen asynchronously and still be matched to need.

e. Credentials, Badges, and Trust Signals

Tokens alone are not enough. Any system of exchange needs mechanisms to establish trust—particularly when contributors and users may never meet in person.

Credentials and badges could anchor the token system in real, verifiable experience. A developer who has successfully delivered three community-funded feature requests earns a verifiable credential. A facilitator who has run ten onboarding workshops earns a different one. An agronomist whose recommendations have been validated in the field earns another.

These credentials would:

• reduce friction and risk when community members collaborate for the first time
• signal competence and trustworthiness without requiring personal references
• help match contributors to tasks where their experience is most relevant
• deter gaming of the contribution system

A token economy without trust infrastructure collapses into a points game. Badges without genuine contribution are just digital vanity. Together—tokens, credentials, and transparent contribution records—they could form a social-economic grammar that makes cooperation scalable without requiring central control over every transaction.

The Supply Question

Here’s where it gets genuinely difficult—and where economic expertise matters as much as technical skill.

Any community currency lives or dies on supply management. Too many tokens in circulation relative to the value of services available, and the token becomes meaningless—inflation erodes the incentive to contribute. Too few tokens, and the system becomes illiquid, contribution goes unrecognised, and people disengage.

This is not a trivial problem. Many LETS schemes have struggled with it. The best-functioning community currencies have developed governance mechanisms for managing supply: issuance rules, expiry provisions, velocity targets, and periodic community reviews of the token’s purchasing power.

For GrowGood, this would need to be a collaborative design process—one that involves economists, community organisers, long-term contributors, and active users. It cannot be set and forgotten. It requires ongoing stewardship, transparency about the metrics, and the willingness to adjust.

Could Web3 Infrastructure Help?

This is a reasonable question, and an honest answer requires distinguishing between Web3 as a set of ideological promises and Web3 as a collection of technical tools.

The promises—decentralised autonomous organisations, permissionless finance, code-as-law governance—have, on the whole, delivered more harm than good to the communities they claimed to serve. We are not interested in that.

But some of the underlying technical tools are genuinely useful for what we are trying to build:

• Distributed ledgers can provide transparent, tamper-resistant contribution records without requiring a trusted central authority
• Verifiable credentials (a W3C open standard, not inherently “crypto”) allow credentials and badges to be issued, held, and verified without depending on any single platform
• Smart contract logic could automate token issuance when pre-agreed contribution criteria are met, reducing administrative overhead

The question we would ask of any Web3 tool is not “is it blockchain?” but “does it serve the community’s needs without creating new dependencies, speculation, or technical complexity that ordinary growers can’t navigate?” Open standards trump proprietary platforms. Transparency trumps novelty. Usefulness to a farmer in the Barossa Valley trumps elegance in a developer’s architecture diagram.

If Web3 tools pass that test, we would use them. If they don’t, we wouldn’t.

While Fiat Keeps the Lights On

The two models—fiat and token—are not competitors. They are complementary layers of a whole system.

Fiat funding provides the predictable, scalable revenue base that allows developers to work without burning out, infrastructure to stay online, and the project to respond to the real demands of running critical software. It connects GrowGood to the broader economy in which our users live.

The token layer does something different. It makes visible the contributions that fiat cannot capture. It creates reciprocity where money can’t reach. It builds community in the deepest sense: not just a user base, but a network of people who have given something of themselves to build something together, and who are recognised for it.

Together, they might allow GrowGood to be built not just for its users, but genuinely by them—in a way that is economically legible, socially honest, and aligned with the regenerative principles the project seeks to embody in every other dimension.

An Invitation to Co-Design

We are not presenting a finished system. We are starting a conversation.

If you are an economist with experience in community currencies, mutual credit, or cooperative finance, we would love your rigour applied to this design challenge.

If you are a developer who has built contribution accounting systems, or who has thought carefully about how to implement these ideas without creating new attack surfaces, come and help design the technical architecture.

If you are a community organiser who has run a LETS scheme, a time bank, or a cooperative, your practical experience is more valuable than any whitepaper.

If you are a grower who knows what it actually feels like to contribute to something and not be recognised for it—or who has experienced the real texture of rural reciprocal exchange—your perspective is the one we are most trying to serve.

The economics of the commons are not a solved problem. But they are a solvable one. And the people who will solve them are the ones who care enough to stay in the room.

Let’s keep building.