Taxonomy for Understanding Digital Community Currencies: Digital Payment Platforms and Virtual Community Feelings

Abstract

Community currencies are known for decades and observed in developing and developed countries. They are, usually, created to fight financial and social exclusion and promote local development. Although there are several community currency projects around the world, very little studies have covered the particular case of those that circulating in digital format. Regarded as a way to improve management of community currency systems, new implementations based on plastic cards cell phones, or blockchain technologies, are becoming more common, as technology is becoming more accessible and financial crisis creates opportunities for the emergence of alternatives to the traditional financial system. If technology is expected to collaborate in transparency, costs and speed of transactions, it also imposes challenges to communities that implement them. In this scenario, the objective of this article is to explore conflict and benefits of the community currency that circulates in a digital format, investigating this phenomenon as a particular case of digital payment platform. Analyzing 22 digital community currencies, we propose a taxonomy that divided them in four groups, and then explore emergent conflicts and benefits for each of them