What is Dayra?
Dayra is a medium that uses blockchain technology for circulating communal economic value, by helping the community to measure, and exchange the value of their local resources in the absence of money.
It is an Arabic word meaning circle and circulating, it is a noun and a verb, where the act of sharing, and moving local resources helps the community to maintain its wealth.
Why Dayra?
In line with our ever-evolving questions and to better harness the vast resources that are continually stifled by the harsh economic and political realities in Palestine, our growing collective is building an economic model called Dayra, which materializes existing trust circles within specific communities . The model starts with the premise that individuals but also local organizations, cooperatives, and associations who have no funds to sustain their operations but they have (and are) an abundance of resources and knowledge of varying types, whether they are material, physical, and intellectual. The currency thus aims to generate and store value through the act of exchanging and putting to use resources for the common good.
How ?
It is a funding system that inverts the existing funding processes, it puts the system upside down, it begins from zero budget and builds up a community capital through the circulation of resources, this capital becomes a local asset that stores value within the community.
Who can benfit from it?
Dayra will allow individuals, small businesses and organizations who are experiencing times of financial crises to make use of existing and future resources through trust systems based on blockchain technologies. This model expands on a community-governed economic system that will facilitate and connect local production from small cultural institutions, small businesses and creative industries, household economy, and freelancers to foster social development and unity. This model not only aims to bypass the traditional and restrictive funding models – we call it “liberating the money” – that we have depended on so far but also aims to enlarge the trust circles to ensure a resilient and supplementary economy through which different communities in crisis are able to nurture on their own terms.
In the last forty years, much of the world has been dominated by a neoliberal financial apparatus. One of the manifestations of that apparatus is that money has become the main measure of wealth in any given society, it has also become the main medium of exchanging resources.
Financial crises are part of neolibral economic cycles, they always put vulnerable communities in danger. When money becomes scarce it becomes harder for communities to fulfill their needs and exchange their existing local resources. But the absence of money doesn’t equate to the absence of resources, which are part of our communal wealth. These are human, material, natural and intellectual resources that exist despite their monetary values.
Palestine isn’t different from the rest of the world, it has gone through financial and political engineering processes that make it severely dependent on international funding. Communities find themselves in perpetual economic and financial crises, namely caused by the substantial reliance on external funding to operate and survive. Sustainability and resilience has always been a dominant concern among local grassroot organizations because the financial systems in which they are working inevitably lead to precarity and uncertainty, therefore, engaging with economic questions and finding local models is essential for their own practice.
Thats why Dayra was created, to create a funding economy beyond neolibral models, by learning from local economic mechanisms that rely on community efforts and collective resources.
Dayra's system is based on circles and circulating.
These circles are trust circles within communities, where the economic model facilitates exchange within and between trust circles. The model expands on a community-governed economic system involving diverse sectors from symbiotic economies.
It starts with zero value and focuses on the abundance of resources and knowledge within a community.
Dayra model aims to ensure a resistant economy that societies are able to nurture by themselves.
Let's imagine this scenario
Dayra as a living artwork
Dayra is an online ecosystem presented for the first time as an artwork by the Question of Funding at Documenta Fifteen in Kassel, Germany.
The artwork keeps developing during the 100 days of Dcoumenta Fifteen while showcasing the process of how the mobile app and website are being designed and how the concept is evolving during this time. This gives access to the visitor to watch the digital artist live on Figma and follow the development of the platform day by day.
