The Credit Commons Society (CCS) was formed during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK to support, promote, and educate about the Credit Commons—a globally connected network of decentralised, moneyless trading groups. Several members of the Growing the Commons (GtC) collaboration are involved in the CCS, notably Sue Bell who is organising its regular online meetings.
Once a month, the CCS hosts an online gathering where practitioners, researchers, and organisers explore different aspects of commons-oriented monetary and financial systems. The format is intentionally simple: a short reflection or guest presentation to open the space, followed by questions, shared contributions, and an open, interactive conversation. Rather than polished lectures, these sessions are chances to think together, compare experiences, and make sense of emerging practices across the wider ecosystem of credit clearing, mutual credit, and community exchange systems.
This is our second post in this series, after The Commons between markets and state. The conversation took place in June 2025. It has been slightly edited for better flow and understanding. You can find a transcript below this text.
Please note: The URL for the Credit Commons website shown in the video is not correct anymore, it will be restored at creditcommons.org.
In a nutshell
It was always a priority for Matthew to join community currencies together, from when he started developing software for them 15 years ago. That way they could create a decentralised, people-led payment system.
The Credit Commons Protocol takes the accounting functionality of a currency and separates it off.
This can make managing community currency software easier.
In a mutual credit setup, transactions happen on a ledger and account balances add up to zero. When mutual credit is nested, there’s an account on every ledger that points to the rest of the world. The balances of groups within a network add up to zero, just as the accounts within a group.
The Credit Commons offers a way of trading between groups where each group
retains absolute sovereignty; they get to determine their own monetary policy and privacy.
When a group is struggling with its trade balance (when it’s either very high or very low), it will work out political solutions to balance the trade within its network.
Matthew has done three implementations so far: the Community Exchange System (CES), Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks (HUMANs) and Svensk Barter in Sweden. A fourth one, for Community Forge which uses software written by Matthew, is on the Roadmap.
After the presentation, it was time for a few rounds of questions and comments. Matthew disappeared for a while after the first question due to internet problems, but this did not harm the conversation at all, thanks to Sue’s brilliant hosting skills.
Some of the topics that came up:
UX, and practical implementation of the protocol
How is sovereignty of a node ensured? Do people deciding how the software is run and what the algorithms look like have an unfair share of power?
How to handle trade imbalances? Do they appear less in a commons world?
Mutual credit as a route to relative independence
What are potential routes to market for mutual credit?
Limited scaling within a group (above 120 difficult to maintain trust), but potentially vast scaling through nested structure
Collaborations and integrations with other software (e.g. Holons)
Our culture and what we have or haven’t learned can be an impediment; you have to start from people
Fractal nature of the protocol, analogy with Sociocracy
Roadmap for further developments
Trade imbalances and how to deal with them emerged as a recurring and important theme. That’s why to conclude this text, I’ll leave you with some relevant quotes from Matthew.
Trade imbalances are natural and they occur almost everywhere. If there is no trade imbalance, then you’re lucky. What you need to do with trade imbalances is try to balance them. There is no other solution. Everything else is unsustainable. And what we see in modern economics is a lot of ways of trying to get around trade imbalances by depreciating/appreciating currencies and by other means, but they all do nothing to address the inequality.
I think that by using mutual credit accounting, where you emphasise the zero and the importance of getting back to zero, you bring trade imbalances – a perennial problem – right to the front of the queue, and you don’t try to solve the problem by manipulating statistics in units of account; you address it through politics.
There are three ways of doing that. First of all, the surplus area invests in the deficit area to help the deficit area increase production.Second, the surplus area can lend to the deficit area, maybe just temporarily.
And thirdly, if there’s no other way to do it, they just give the money back. Because trade debt should always be short term, and once it starts to get to long term, then it indicates a structural imbalance which you have to fix through structural solutions.
How would you get unsound parties to comply, why would they anyway?
Because it’s in everyone’s interest to balance trade. If money isn’t worth anything, then nobody really wants to have a surplus. And if you’re building up greater and greater surpluses and deficits, then you hit the limits and you stop being able to trade. So it’s in both parties’ interests to stay within range.
Under the gold standard, balancing trade was very important as well. Countries managed, and it also led to greater equity, because it meant that no country was developing much faster than other countries. It sort of kept them all within limits. There are prices to pay for the local economy, though. I’ve seen that criticised by some economists. So, there are always compromises, but to me it seems that for social justice, you need to have trade balance.
Further resources
Entry in the P2P Foundation wiki
Entry in our knowledge base
Read about the Credit Commons Protocol on the Mutual Credit Services website
Credit Commons whitepaper
