Our second meetup (18 Apr 2019) was all about pop-up economies. In a matter of minutes, our special guest Andras Kristoof (founder of Akomba) onboarded about 15 people to the xDai.io sidechain with ether.cards, and had us buying and selling food and drinks, all while considering the larger implications of decentralised economies. (Find our slides from the meetup at

Recap/update from Meeting #1

We posted a few of our ideas from the first meetup (28 Feb 2019), on the RxC forum https://forum.radicalxchange.org/t/rxc-labs-project-ideas/119. Since then, we’ve progressed on a few projects:

  • agent-based modelling of COST: Swarnima has implemented an ABM model for intellectual property, and discovered several similarities to a subscription model. More details to come soon.
  • quadratic opinion polling on public policies: we’re excited about the recent Colorado Democratic caucus implementing quadratic voting to prioritise funding for bills. We’ve explored several repositories for quadratic voting (e.g. https://github.com/RadxChangeSG/quadratic-voting-dapp) and hope to move on with implementation on a testnet.
  • scarcity and licensing for digital art: Jef/Chemistry is moving ahead with this project in terms of raising funds; we’ll be hearing more about this as it progresses.
  • smart contracts for liquidity and licensing in bone marrow donor registries: a spec for this has been written, but we’re waiting for feedback from partners in the industry.

Pop-up economies

  • a “pop-up economy” is a payment system that can be set up in minutes, allowing peers to transact without trusting a central third party. we used the xDai.io sidechain, which is vastly simpler than traditional payment system back-ends. a caveat, though, is the xDai derives its instant finality from a Proof of Authority consensus, meaning there is still significant centralisation on the sidechain itself.
  • ease of onboarding and UX is core to pop-up economies. We used ether.cards as paper wallets, where users could access accounts just by scanning a QR code. Of course, this is not a secure way to store a private key, and so should only be used as a “burner wallet”, with assets being swept to cold storage after transactions are completed.
  • huge thanks to Austin Griffith and inspiring examples like ETHDenver and Cypherpunk Speakeasy! (see https://medium.com/gitcoin/how-to-host-a-burner-wallet-event-53a429035a24 for more details)

Decentralised economies

  • we entered a more general discussion of decentralised economies; a wide-ranging topic that deserves a few sessions of its own.
  • Andras shared his thoughts on deplatforming and reducing the advantages of monopolies. An example use case is replacing the Uber platform with a smart contract that cannot play favourites; however, this requires privacy and identity to work at scale.
  • Distribution of maintenance and resources was another feature of decentralised economies we discussed. Running validator nodes, routing nodes, mining nodes, hosting someone’s files on a distributed file storage network; all can represent sources of automated passive income. Projects such as ethernode.io and Halo are some examples of consumer products which provide a gateway into this economy.

Join the conversation

Get notifications of further meetups at https://www.meetup.com/RadicalxChange-Singapore/.

Join our Telegram group t.me/rxcsg for shortform communications and questions; join the wider conversation at forum.radicalxchange.org for longform collaborative discussions on projects and chapter resources.

We’ll be posting minutes for all our meetups on our open Github repository, https://github.com/RadxChangeSG/RadxChangeSG/tree/master/meetup-minutes.

Do you know of other communities and people we should get in touch with? Do you want to find out more or get involved? Let us know at radxchangesg@gmail.com.

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