A currency of cooperation is a money system that rewards sharing, conservation, and community rather than competition, consumption, and accumulation. The term comes from 📝The Ascent of Humanity, where 📝Charles Eisenstein imagines money remade so that the best business decision is also the best ecological one.
In Eisenstein's vision, such money becomes an agent for developing social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital rather than consuming them — a mechanism for sharing wealth rather than concentrating it. When wealth is understood as a richness of relationships rather than a hoard, each person's wealth makes everyone wealthier, and business becomes the search for ways to bestow wealth on others rather than extract it from them.
📝One Inc took the idea up directly during its years as a worker cooperative, building 📝One Ledger and 📝One Economy as a working attempt at a currency of cooperation. Eisenstein's own examples point at the same target: the 📝Demurrage-Based Money System that compels circulation, the 📝Local Exchange Trading System in which money is born of the transaction itself, and the 📝Potlatch, where status comes from how much one gives.