F A Q

FLO (short for Flowers) is Bloom Network’s community currency. It's how Bloom recognizes and rewards the community care work that usually goes uncompensated.

It's built on cryptocurrency, which we know sounds alarming. Two things: FLO is not sold for money or speculation, and we use Ethereum, which is a low-energy blockchain. The best way to understand it is to try it out - read on to see how.

Members earn Flowers for participating in local commons care actions. (For example, planting a community food forest, organizing a restorative justice training, or setting up a neighborhood compost bin.) Your local Bloom treasury also receives FLO for each action. How it works.

You can also earn FLO by adding an offer to the FLO Exchange, such as babysitting, or Spanish lessons.

Bloom uses FLO to record commons care labor, so grants and our media cooperative profits can be allocated in a transparent, proportional way. Let us break it down:

If you've ever been a member of a grocery cooperative, this will feel familiar. At the end of the year, the co-op distributes profits back to members - and each member's share is based on how much they shopped there. The more business you did with the co-op, the larger your check.

Bloom works the same way, except your "business" is local community care - planting a food forest, running a skill share, documenting a watershed restoration. FLO is how Bloom tracks that activity. Your FLO balance is your contribution record, and it determines your share when grant funds or cooperative profits are distributed.

You don't exchange FLO for money directly. Grants are distributed quarterly, and profit dividends annually - each time, your share is proportional to your FLO earned. Payouts arrive as USDC - a digital dollar, stable at $1 USD, that is cheaper and faster to send internationally compared to traditional banking.

Your Wallet shows both your FLO balance and any USDC you've received.

Summary: FLO represents your labor contribution to local community care. USDC is the grants and profits distribution currency. To go deeper on how the cooperative works, see the Bloom Cooperative Guide.

1) We reward members for commons care that they're usually doing unpaid and underrecognized.

2) Members can use it to exchange value with each other to build local power and relationships.

3) As the cooperative becomes profitable and as we attract major grants, normal money flows back to the members doing the work.

The goal is to build local and networked economies that value the well-being of people and the places we live.

• Why does Bloom use Cryptocurrency?
• Learn more about the Local Action Rewards
• Can I exchange my FLO for money?
• History of previous distributions, and our current treasury balances
• Wait, WTF is cryptocurrency? Wallet

magentaceiba is the creator of Bloom's economic system, based on the social currency used in the Rio de Janiero chapter, co-created by flaviagoma, Baltimore’s B-Note (a paper community currency) that robin helped create, Long Beach’s Time Exchange, and the broader community of “commons” focused Ethereum initiatives around the world.