Payments as we know them are changing--ebarts the social ecurrency: Tomorrow’s cash

Abstract

Ebarts is a mutual exchange digital currency, which enables people to buy and sell without money. It has been created with a strong social purpose to unlock idle skills and resources within communities, and to encourage the growth of a social economy. ebarts are used in a secure, mobile-based marketplace for trading goods and services, and generate value from exchange. In this paper, we discuss the user-centred design process we have employed to build an ebarts marketplace platform, focusing on people’s expectations for creating and using ebarts. Our design reflects our findings that people are geared by a want to reduce waste and generate value from possessions, skills and time that would otherwise be wasted. Correlating people’s responses from focus groups indicates that social entrepreneurship can be nurtured by such marketplaces, and that there is need for a space to be created in society for individuals to engage their entrepreneurial creativity for their own benefit as well as directly affecting their communities. Finally, based on our development of ebarts we present a framework with which to understand the varieties of outcomes an ebarts-based marketplace can achieve and how it can strategically exploit the changes such marketplaces may bring.