Circles: basic income without giving up your face

Written by the Crypto Gratis editorial team · Last reviewed 2026-08-22

Circles takes the opposite approach to everything else here. Instead of proving you are a unique human to a central verifier, other members vouch for you — and every member mints their own personal currency.

The idea

Every Circles account mints its own token continuously, at the same rate as everyone else's. Your tokens are not the same as mine. They become interchangeable only through trust: if I trust you, I accept your tokens, and payments route through chains of trust the way a payment routes through a network.

This is a genuinely different design, and it dissolves the identity problem rather than solving it. There is no central check because there is no shared token to defend. Someone running a hundred fake accounts mints a hundred worthless currencies that nobody trusts, and the attack costs the network nothing.

How it works in practice

1. Create an account. Your currency starts minting automatically.
2. Get trusted by existing members. This is the step that matters and the step that is hard.
3. Pay other members. The protocol finds a path through the trust graph, hopping through intermediate currencies where it needs to.

Circles runs on Gnosis Chain, chosen for low fees — necessary when the payments are small. A second-generation version of the protocol has been built since the original 2020 launch; check the project's own documentation for the current state rather than older write-ups, including this one.

The bootstrapping problem

Trust-based systems have an obvious cold-start difficulty: you cannot join usefully if you know nobody, and knowing nobody is the normal condition of somebody who just heard about it.

In practice Circles has worked best where a community already exists — a neighbourhood, a co-operative, a group of people who already transact. Where such a group exists the model is elegant. Where it does not, a new account mints a currency nobody will accept, and the experience is of standing outside a room you can see into.

That is less a criticism than a description of what it is for. Circles is closer to a local complementary currency than to a global handout.

What it does and does not ask of you

No face scan. No documents. No phone number handed to a verification vendor. That is a real advantage, and if biometric verification is the reason you stopped reading the GoodDollar page, this is the project for you.

What it asks instead is social: you need to find people, and they need a reason to trust you. That is a higher bar in some ways and a much lower one in others.

Who this suits

People already part of a group that might use it; people interested in mutual credit and complementary currencies as ideas; and anyone who wants to see what basic income looks like when it is built without surveillance. Not people looking to accumulate a tradeable asset — that is not what this is, and it does not pretend to be.