Three engines, starting at different moments and never stopping. People invite people they trust. Anyone can start a community from a pack they download. Organizations arrive with everyone they already hold. The middle one is new in this edition, and it is the reason the horizon moved a year closer.
A person invites the people they would lend money to. The Spread Current makes it economic: inviting a member, stewarding a block, or seeding a community that reaches circulation all issue Unity — to the inviter and their community. Issued on circulation, not signup, so the reward tracks real economy rather than farmed accounts.
Slow to start, compounds relentlessly, highest retention.
Everything needed to start a community, downloadable: the local node image, the open agent code, the activation playbook from four city pilots, governance templates, member terms in plain language, and the training curriculum that certifies local stewards. A neighborhood, a coop, a parish, a valley — anyone can begin on a Saturday without a conversation with us.
This is the line item that removes our headcount from the growth equation.
An organization joins and brings its people: a coop with 40,000 members, an NGO with 200,000 beneficiaries, a municipality, an employer with its suppliers. The Sardex motion — human, relational, unavoidably slow per deal, and arriving in tens of thousands at a time. It is also the supply side: wages, goods, procurement, services.
Lumpy, capital-intensive, economically decisive.
The engines need each other. Invitation alone builds warm networks with nothing to buy. Starter packs alone produce many small communities that never reach density. Institutions alone build supply nobody loves. Together: an economy where people who trust each other can actually get what they need.
A complementary currency lives or dies on one property: can you spend what you earn? That requires density — enough people offering enough different things within reach of each other. Two thousand people spread across a bioregion is a beautiful test of the model and a thin test of the economy. Five thousand in one city is where the matching actually has to work, where the NI has enough signal to learn from, and where a skeptic can walk around and see it.
Twenty thousand per city in year two is the number that changes the conversation with everyone else. A municipality, a national coop federation, a development funder — none of them move on a 2,000-person pilot. They move on three cities on three continents running an economy at 20,000 people each, with published measurement and an independent validation study. That is the asset the round is really buying.
| Year | Communities | Members | Avg size | What is doing the work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | 1 | 5,000 | 5,000 | Us — the city pilot, hand-stewarded, deeply instrumented |
| 2028 | 5 | 66,000 | 13,200 | Us — three city teams in parallel + indigenous co-design; Starter Pack ships Q2 |
| 2029 | ~2,000 | 2M | 1,000 | Self-serve starts. Neighborhoods, coops, parishes, campuses — mostly small, mostly without us |
| 2030 | ~20,000 | 20M | 1,000 | Starter Pack at scale + first institutional wave; early communities thicken |
| 2031 | ~60,000 | 100M | 1,666 | Institutions dominant; existing communities deepen faster than new ones form |
Log axis — the flat-looking first two years are proof, not stagnation. The vertical line is the only date on this page that the founding round controls; everything to the right of it is what the pack makes possible.
It is roughly 1.2% of humanity, reached three years after proof — and it is slower than several systems built in the last twenty years for exactly the same reason: people needed a way to transact that the existing system wasn’t giving them.
| System | Reach | Time | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pix (Brazil) | 150M+ users | ~3 years | When a rail is free, instant and socially normal, a country adopts it in three years — in Lorrana’s home market |
| M-Pesa (Kenya) | 50M+ users | ~10 years | Human agent networks did the onboarding. Our certified local stewards are the same function — paid by their own communities |
| Sarafu (Kenya) | 55k users, 74 villages | ~5 years | Community currency spreads by word of mouth with almost no budget — and has RCT evidence behind it |
| Sardex (Italy) | ~4k businesses, €40–50M/yr | ~10 years | The institutional motion works and is labor-intensive — which is why it is a company, not a feature |
| Bliive | 10k+ waiting list in month one | immediate | Demand was never the constraint. Activation capacity was — and the Starter Pack is the answer to exactly that |
None of these had an intelligence that measures contribution, a protocol that pays for its own spread, or open code any neighborhood can run. That combination is what the round funds — and the reason the number is stated in hundreds of millions rather than tens of thousands.
| Break | When | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| Thin supply — Unity earned but unspendable | Immediately, in any community under ~1,000 | City-scale pilots by design; Starter Pack ships with a density checklist and refuses to launch circulation below a viable founding circle; institutions sequenced into each region before saturation |
| Steward capacity | The moment self-serve starts, 2028 | Stewards are employed by their communities, not by us. We publish the curriculum and certify; the Spread Current and local budgets pay them. This is the structural change that makes city scale affordable |
| Quality collapse in self-serve communities | 2029, at thousands of communities | Certification, published health metrics (velocity, match rate, activation), and a visible “thriving / forming / dormant” status — no gatekeeping, full transparency |
| Trust dilution — invitation farming | The moment invitation pays | Spread Unity issues on circulation, never signup |
| Support load at 65,000 members | Year 2 of the round | Funded: support tooling and 3 FTE inside the $8.4M; community-led forums as the first line, our team as escalation |
| Regulatory arrival | Between 1M and 10M members — now 2029, a year earlier | Phase 2 counsel pulled forward into the round; closed-loop defaults; per-jurisdiction memos precede every current |
Nothing past 2028 is promised by it. What it delivers is an economy working at city scale in four countries, a published Framework, an independent validation study, and a Starter Pack good enough that strangers succeed with it. If those land, the curve above is a question of years. If they don’t, no growth strategy would have rescued them — which is why the money goes into proof first, at a scale where proof means something.