The Foundation Council is happy to announce that the Trustlines Foundation was established as a charitable organisation on the 20th of October in Vaduz, Liechtenstein to execute on the vision of bringing decentralized p2p currency networks to the world and to ensure continued development and maintenance of the Trustlines Protocol.

The Foundation is a new entity which has joined the broader Trustlines Network ecosystem. It is separate and operates independently from past efforts relating to the Trustlines Network.

Motivation

Whereas technology has been providing middle and upper classes around the world with a plethora of means for payment and credit, a large part of the world still remains un- or underbanked.
Research shows that societies and their level of financial inclusion can, depending on the state of their financial system and economy, benefit greatly from community currencies. However, inadequate usability of traditional community currency systems is hindering their widespread adoption.
Technological innovations such as blockchain-based p2p currency networks promise to improve complementary currency design properties such as their tamper proneness, scalability, accessibility, governance etc. and could lead to a broader utilization of these types of complementary currency systems.

Foundation Purpose

The Foundation was founded in Vaduz, Liechtenstein on 20/10/2018 with the following purpose:

Die Trustlines Stiftung hat sich dem gemeinwohlorientierten Ziel verschrieben, mithilfe von dezentralen peer-to-peer Netzwerkprotokollen, die der gemeinschaftlichen Buchführung dienen, die finanzielle, wirtschaftliche Inklusion aller Menschen zu fördern. Der ausschliessliche und unwiderrufliche gemeinnützige Hauptzweck der Trustlines Stiftung ist es deshalb, die Entwicklung und Verbreitung des quelloffenen, dezentralen peer-to-peer Netzwerkprotokolls, welches öffentlich als Trustlines Network bekannt ist, innerhalb des geltenden Rechtsrahmens direkt oder indirekt zu fördern, zu unterstützen und zu finanzieren. Er zielt ferner darauf ab, die Schaffung und Umsetzung ethischer und effizienter Governance-Systeme für dieses Netzwerk zu fördern.

A rough English translation which is non-binding would read as follows: The Trustlines Foundation is dedicated to the charitable goal of promoting the financial and economic inclusion of all people through decentralized peer-to-peer network protocols, especially via software development, education and the alignment around governance systems for the Trustlines Network.

The Role of the Foundation

The Trustlines Foundation is supporting research, development, deployment, governance and adoption of complementary currency systems, with a focus on open source protocols designed to be utilized by decentralized p2p currency network designs. It will be less concerned with providing end user access to the Trustlines Protocol, but intends to collaborate with projects and efforts which are aiming to do so all around the world.

Currency network adoption will rely heavily on network effects. A non-profit foundation setup ensures that the core of the protocol won’t evolve into an indefinitely rent-seeking business, which, in our view, would hinder long-term adoption and would be a concern in a traditional for-profit platform model.

We are excited to join the efforts for permissionless, people-empowered currency networks and are looking forward to jointly pushing the implementation of the Trustlines vision to the next level. Stay tuned for more updates to come!

The Trustlines Foundation


You can stay up to date with the Trustlines Foundation by following us:

🖥️ Website: https://trustlines.foundation/
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrustlinesFound
⌨️ Github: https://github.com/trustlines-protocol