The Rules — How BeanPool Works

BeanPool is a community exchange where everyone starts at zero. You earn beans by helping others and spend them when others help you. No money changes hands, and there are no corporate middlemen — just these simple rules.

1.Beans & your balance

Beans measure the value you've given and received (roughly, time). Zero is the goal — it means you've given about as much as you've taken.

• Positive balance — you've given more than you've taken. The community owes you.
• Negative balance — the community has extended you credit. You owe it back by giving.
• On most communities the deepest anyone can go is −2000 beans. A community that confirms its members by real name can set its own limit, up to −5000, and give confirmed members a starting line.

2.Getting started

You join by invitation. From day one you can browse and receive beans. Once you hold beans (by earning them or receiving a gift), you can spend them. To spend on credit, you must post at least one Offer (see §4 and §5). New members start with no credit line — you can only spend beans you actually have until your line is activated by your first completed trade (or if a voucher or an admin gives you a starting line — see §3 and §9).

3.Your credit line is earned by trading

Your credit line lets you go a little negative — spending before you've earned it back. It's earned, not given:

• Trust comes from completed marketplace trades — never from gifts. It grows slowly at first: a 100-Bean trade earns about 37 Beans of credit line. An admin or an appointed voucher can also give someone a starting line; an admin's grant shows as their badge.
• Trading with many different people builds trust far faster than repeat trades with one person.
• Your trust sets your credit limit — how deep your floor could go, from 0 down to −2000 on most communities (see §1).
• Your floor opens after your first real trade, and grows with every trade after it (or a community voucher can give you a starter floor — see §9). No vouch is required.

4.Reciprocity: To use credit, you must keep active offers

Earning trust sets your credit limit (how deep you can potentially go). But to actually draw on that credit, you must keep active Offers posted. This ensures that anyone carrying debt is actively showing the community how they plan to contribute.

The number of active offers you keep posted determines how much credit is unlocked:

Your actual spending limit is the smaller of what you've earned and what your active offers unlock.

For example: If you have earned a −600 limit through trades, keeping 2 active offers unlocks −500 of it. Keeping a 3rd offer unlocks your full −600 limit (you never need a 4th or 5th offer because your earned limit is already reached).

5.Offers (your listings)

• Keep as many offers as you like — including recurring ones — and switch each one Active or Paused whenever you want. Only Active offers count toward your credit line.
• Give before you take: in a community with Beans, you must have listed at least one offer before you can post a Need or buy from others. Where there are no Beans, as on the global community, your first post can be a Need.
• Positive balance? Pause everything if you like — offers are only required to go negative.

6.Fees & the community pool

Two small charges, and both flow into the Community Commons — a shared pool your community votes to spend on local projects. Nothing is lost to a corporation.

a) Marketplace fee — 1.5% on completed trades. When a marketplace sale settles, the seller nets 1.5% less than the price and the difference goes to the commons. Gifts (direct sends between members) are free — as are refunds and system moves.

b) Circulation fee on positive balances — monthly, and only on the part above 200. Like progressive brackets, each band is charged only on the slice of your balance inside it:

This gently encourages beans to circulate rather than pile up. Negative balances never incur a circulation fee — you're already carrying credit for the community. Note the +200 free zone mirrors the first −200 credit band, so the system is symmetric around zero.

7.Gifts (sending beans)

• You can only gift beans you actually hold — a gift never goes negative and never uses your credit line.
• You can send once you've completed at least one real trade (this stops brand-new accounts instantly forwarding beans and vanishing).
• Gifts build no trust for the receiver, and are free — no fee (you can only gift beans you already hold).

8.How trades settle

Marketplace trades are held safely in escrow (held in trust by the system) until the deal is done, then released to the seller (minus the 1.5% fee). If a deal is cancelled, the buyer is refunded in full.

9.Vouching (an optional head start)

A trusted, community-appointed voucher can give a newcomer a starter floor of 25, 50, or 100 beans so they can begin using credit before they've earned it. These are typically awarded — entirely at the voucher's discretion — to people whose posts and contributions the voucher finds genuinely engaging and inspiring. It's optional either way: no one needs a vouch to take part, since you also open your credit line simply by trading (§3).

10.Federated Inter-Community Clearing

Communities do not need to exist in isolation. Through Federated Trade Connectors (inspired by Keynes’ clearing union), independent community nodes can clear trades with a neighbouring node peer-to-peer, without fiat currency or banking reserves. Beans never leave their home community — each pair of nodes keeps a bridge ledger of what they owe one another in work, and each side sets its own cap on how far that can run. Clearing is between pairs of communities, each operator turns it on deliberately, and it is still early: it is built, with its screens in the web app, and has been tried only between two of our own test communities, never between live ones.

11.Cryptographic Identity & Key Custody

Your account is protected by an Ed25519 cryptographic keypair generated on your device. BeanPool offers flexible custody to fit your needs:

• Full Self-Sovereignty: On the phone apps, your private key is held in the device's secure storage (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore); in the web app it is held in the browser's own storage. It leaves the device only as a locked copy for sign-in recovery, or when you copy your account to another device of yours. Keep your 12-word seed backup offline.
• Recovery: Your 12-word phrase restores your account on any device. You can also link a Google, Apple or Facebook sign-in. A locked copy of your key is then kept for it: phone apps that use BeanPool's key vault keep it there, on a small server in Iceland; older versions of the phone app keep it on your community's node; the web app on the global community keeps it on that community's server, which we run. Whoever keeps the copy can open it. A restore from the vault waits 24 hours unless one of your own devices approves it. If you lose your device, your 12 words and your sign-in, an admin of your community can move your account to a new phone with a one-time code, in front of you; your history stays. So write the words down.

12.Limits & safety

• Floor cap −2000 on most communities (see §1). There is no daily limit on how many beans you spend — your floor is the bound. There is a limit on how often: 100 payments, 30 people you have never paid before and 100 market requests in any 24 hours.
• Trust with any single partner is capped, so no one can inflate their standing by trading back and forth with one accomplice.
• Holiday mode hides your offers and pauses incoming requests while you're away.
• Members can report and flag bad actors; community admins can remove them.

13.Community Enterprises & Governance

Community enterprises (such as a community tool library, an egg flock, or a firewood depot) and bounded projects are shared initiatives under collective stewardship. They operate under clear, code-enforced rules (the Commons governance model):

• One object, two lifecycles (§2.1): An ongoing enterprise persists and trades; a bounded enterprise (a project) has a goal and end date, winding up its account and returning what is left to the Commons when finished.
• Earned floors & keeper pledges (Rules 1–3): A new enterprise starts with no unearned overdraft: its credit floor is backed by explicit pledges from its keepers' earned trade standing (straight sum, no synthetic multiplier). Pledging backing never touches or reduces a keeper's personal household credit floor. Older enterprises keep the starting floor they had before pledges.
• Limited liability (Rule 4): The enterprise fails, not the keeper's household. If an enterprise defaults, its spending freezes, but its keepers' personal floors are protected.
• Credit buys inputs, profit pays people (Rule 5): An enterprise may draw on credit down to its usable floor to buy supplies or services from outside neighbours. It may never draw on credit to pay its own keepers — keepers are paid only while balance − amount ≥ 0.
• Keeper pay capped by earned surplus (Rule 6): Payouts to keepers are strictly capped by genuine trading surplus (sales income minus keeper payments). Grants, pledges, and gifts can never be converted into keeper wages.
• Automatic working-capital sweeps (Rule 7): An enterprise can set a working-capital ceiling. Earned surplus above it sweeps automatically back to the Community Commons pool to prevent hoarding. Grants and gifts are never swept.
• Two-person approval rule: Keepers cannot approve their own payments or personal bids on enterprise needs — another keeper must approve.
• Polls vs Decisions (§3): Informal questions are Polls in the market feed: one vote each, counted, binding nothing. Binding governance (pool grants, debt write-offs, role changes, and suspending, freezing or removing a member) runs via Decisions in the Commons tab, with a 7-day voting window. A Decision passes with 60% of the votes (66% to remove a member; more than half to lift a suspension or a freeze, or to bring a member back) once enough members have voted: 30% of those active in the last 30 days, at least 3 (25% for removing a member). Then it carries itself out. Pool grants use quadratic voting on earned trade standing — liquid beans cannot buy votes.
• Settled vocabulary (§9): Four levels, four distinct words: node → owner / admin · enterprise → lead keeper / keeper · group → convenor · trust tier → Steward.