Are you an LLM? Read llms.txt for a summary of the docs, or llms-full.txt for the full context.
Skip to content

Executive Summary

Modern financial systems excel at trading volatile assets but struggle to finance real production, community resilience, and long-term commitments. The Commitment Pooling Protocol (CPP) offers an alternative: a simple, extensible protocol for issuing, routing, and settling redeemable commitments (claims on future goods, services, and labor) within and across communities. Issuers guarantee their vouchers; pools may add disclosed guarantees; the CLC DAO is not a universal guarantor unless explicitly stated in DAO policy and pool terms.

CPP is already live in pilot on Sarafu.Network, coordinating community vouchers, savings groups, mutual aid systems, and production commitments.

Current Traction (Sarafu.Network, since Jul 5 2023 on Celo; as of Jul 20 2025):

Via Dune Analytics: https://dune.com/grassrootseconomics/sarafu-network

  • 26,367 users
  • 285,197 peer-to-peer exchanges
  • 188 unique active commitment pools
  • 745 unique active vouchers
  • $320,692 pool swap volume
  • 899 impact reports published (https://sarafu.network/reports )

What the existing CPP systems on Sarafu Network currently lack is a liquidity and governance layer that can:

  1. Inject liquidity across pools,
  2. Decentralize decision-making as the network scales,
  3. Underwrite settlement risk via shared insurance policies and incident runbooks,
  4. Provide bounded, policy-gated fee-credit (ex-post swap access to a defined portion of pooled fees) for those who underwrite risk and coordination.

The Cosmo-Local Credit (CLC) DAO is proposed to fulfill this role.

CLC is designed as a win-win routing layer across curated commitment markets:

  1. Pool stewards curate voucher listings and publish guarantees; their reputation becomes discoverable and comparable.
  2. Lenders and liquidity providers can finance real production while holding collateral that is redeemable (vouchers) and can be routed across trusted pools.
  3. Producers/borrowers get working capital now and can repay in-kind by fulfilling their vouchers - broadening their market instead of shrinking it.
  4. Consumers can browse curated markets they trust and choose purchases that directly reduce someone’s outstanding obligations.
  5. CLC stakers govern where liquidity is injected to increase settlement velocity and receive swap access to protocol fees as defined by on-chain policy.

CLC introduces a network governance and liquidity token (CLC) that aligns liquidity providers, pool creators, communities, and stewards around one shared goal:

**Increase the velocity of settlement of real-world commitments while preserving care, fairness, and resilience.**

A worst-case governance scenario: A hostile actor accumulates CLC voting power (e.g., via public markets) and attempts to redirect fee flows, weaken curation standards, or force liquidity mandates that harm communities.

This DAO therefore treats anti-capture and credible exit (forkability) as first-class safety properties: (i) time-locked and multi-threshold governance for critical parameters, (ii) voting power that requires lockups (no instant governance via spot purchases), (iii) transparent delegation and conflict-of-interest rules, and (iv) a documented fork-and-migrate process so pools and communities can exit if governance is captured (see §11.X).