Credit Commons Protocol
Open protocol (white paper 2016, Matthew Slater & Tim Jenkin) for recursive mutual credit accounting: independent community ledgers nest into federations so trading groups of any scale can clear exchanges with each other in any agreed unit (fiat-denominated units, hours, kWh) with no central issuer and no money reserves. The GPL reference implementation serves roughly 20,000 users today through Community Exchange System (CES), CES Australia and Community Forge, with a shared inter-network ledger at Clearing Central operational since 2011; a hardened rewrite is being fund-raised, stewarded by the Credit Commons Society with Mutual Credit Services building commercial deployments on it. Evidence: official site creditcommons.org live with deployment roster (checked 2026-07-18); docs and code public on GitLab; independently corroborated by resilience.org (March 2026 article), Lowimpact.org's Credit Commons section, and the P2P Foundation wiki.
The interoperability layer the mutual-credit world has been missing: nested ledgers that let LETS, timebanks and business barter networks clear with each other without money, banks or reserves — already carrying ~20K users via CES and Community Forge on a ledger lineage dating to 2011. Issuance is tied to real trade by construction and there is no fiat in the system at all; the honest weaknesses are proof-of-concept software, founder concentration, and unfunded maintenance. Weighted M69 score ≈ 3.3: substantially aligned — one of the most M69-native pieces of infrastructure in the map.
M69 Score
Scored against the Money2069 Manifesto — see methodology. Higher = more aligned.
Detailed Rating Breakdown
Issuance Model3x4.0
Mutual credit at protocol level: supply is created and destroyed symmetrically at the moment of real trade (IM-03/IM-04/IM-05 5) with no interest-bearing debt mechanism (IM-02 4) and any group free to open a ledger (IM-01 4). Held back from 5 because the protocol itself delegates credit-limit enforcement to member groups — discipline is deployment-dependent.
Spending Power Stability2x2.0
No stability mechanism in the protocol: each network picks its own unit of account (national-currency units, hours, kWh) and inherits that unit's stability (SPS-01 2, SPS-02 2-3). Mutual credit's zero-interest structure avoids monetary inflation from issuance, but purchasing power is not measured or targeted (SPS-05 2).
Fiat Independence & Interoperability2x4.0
Zero fiat reserves — there is nothing to back because balances net to zero (FI-02 5) — and no banking dependency whatsoever (FI-03 5). Local-currency composability and open interoperability are the protocol's entire purpose: federated settlement between independent monetary communities (FI-07 5, FI-08 5). Docked because member units are still usually fiat-denominated in practice (FI-01 3).
Traction2x3.0
Roughly 20,000 users across CES, CES Australia and Community Forge deployments; the Clearing Central inter-network ledger has run since 2011 (TR-01 4, TR-02 4). Within member networks the community unit genuinely is the unit of account (TR-05 4) and adoption is fully organic — zero incentives (TR-09 5). Recognition is niche (P2P Foundation, Lowimpact, resilience.org 2026) (TR-08 3); growth is slow and the active team is small (TR-06 3, TR-10 3).
Sovereignty3.0
GPL, self-hostable, and federated by design — no central node to shut down (SO-01 4, SO-02 5). But knowledge concentrates in two founders (SO-05 2), ledgers are administered by group stewards (SO-04 3), and the reference software is explicitly proof-of-concept grade, so technical enforcement of rules is weak today (SO-09 2-3).
Governance3.0
The white paper functions as a charter and the Credit Commons Society exists as a 'foundation-in-waiting' guardian (GO-07 3-4); process is open but informal (GO-01 3, GO-03 3). Each federated group governs itself — subsidiarity is structural, but nothing is constitutionally locked (GO-08 3).
Resilience3.0
Radically simple, technology-agnostic mechanism — re-implementable on any stack, already implemented in PHP and Node (RE-04 5, RE-05 5) — with a 15-year operational lineage at Clearing Central (RE-01 3) and federation as built-in redundancy (RE-02 4). The binding constraint is funding: volunteer/grant-dependent, with the security rewrite still unfunded (RE-07 1-2).
Inclusivity4.0
Anyone can join or start a member group at essentially zero cost (IN-01 4, IN-02 5); mutual credit explicitly serves communities where national money is scarce (IN-03 4); there is no seigniorage to extract and no protocol-level identity requirement (IN-04 5, IN-06 4); balance limits naturally cap accumulation (IN-07 4).