Fab Chain

By Tomas Diez, Primavera de Filippi. Contributions by James Tooze, Liz Corbin, Mara Balestrini, and others. Extract from the Fab Chain Whitepaper draft

The development of new open source hardware and software tools during the last decades have been fostering new modes of learning, designing, manufacturing and collaborating. Maker communities have been building new technologies, tools, and communication channels to increase the impact of these new forms of innovation through the rise of a new creative class in both urban and rural environments. Millions of people connected to the Internet are using open source software and digital fabrication tools (including 3d printing) to build the largest distributed design and manufacturing ecosystem in the world. However, the various parts of that ecosystem are not closely tied with one another, and currently lack the tools to exchange value and resources between them, and to connect with complementary communities.

During the last decade Fab Labs and Makerspaces have widespread around the world, offering a new type of third space that it is using digital tools to enable new forms of innovation, learning and production mainly in cities, but also in rural areas. The maker movement has been growing exponentially, reaching to mainstream media and political agendas, being inserted into major educational programs in elementary and high schools, and in higher education, as well in the world of industry and corporations. We focus our work in the Fab Lab Network as a key part of the maker movement, which is a curated and consolidated network of digital fabrication laboratories that is implementing projects and programs such as the Fab Academy and Academany (distributed education) or Fab City (new urban model for sustainable cities). Our goal is to support the growth of the maker movement as a community and scale its impact in society, by enabling a blockchain technology layer, the Fab Chain, that would create incentives for contribution between peers through the platform ecosystem proposed by Distributed Design, with reputation tools for designs, labs, machine and people, certification of skills to build professional profiles and support the economic sustainability of the organisations running Fab Labs around the world.

Given the distributed nature of the Fab Lab global network, and the emergence of new productive models promoted by it, there is a need to create a new mechanism of value exchange between Fab Labs/makerspaces and businesses, industries and communities around them, using existing platforms such as Fablabs.io (~1,800 Fab Labs, ~15,000 users), projects like Fab City (34 official members: 14 cities, 2 regions, 2 countries) and educational programs offered by the Academany (1200 students graduated in 10 editions so far). Blockchain-enabled smart contracts, distributed ledgers and immutable cryptographic records are poised to enable communities of designers and makers to reduce cities carbon footprint by optimising production costs, drive greater operational efficiencies, and unleash new business opportunities for manufacturers worldwide.

Enabling local processes of production to reduce the impact of the current industrial globalisation is crucial, but enabling mechanisms to incentivise, accelerate and scale this process is fundamental and urgent. This is where we propose the use of a local blockchain, that could be articulated between stakeholders in cities that are already contributing to a paradigm shift in terms of recycling, reuse, relocalisation of supply chains, and other practices that reduce the impact of the linear economy. This local approach will be globally synchronized and confederated with other cities that are part of Fab City project, and other follower cities.

Under the Fab Chain model, the makerspace or fab lab could make the machines that are not being used available under specific conditions dictated by a smart contract. The maker space could decide, for instance, to exchange machine use for space use, or to trade the use of its own machines with the use of other machines or services provided by other players within the ecosystem; it could exchange the use of the machines with access to a particular set of expertise, or perhaps simply exchange it for a particular amount of meals in the restaurant. When the two parties agree, they can code the terms in a smart contract to establish a public, anonymous and protected execution of a commercial relationship. The smart contract can establish the conditions of the commercial agreement in the blockchain, to ensure the automatic execution of the terms without the need for any third party enforcement authority.

Apart from the automation and guarantees provided by the blockchain, such a system would remain, however, similar to a traditional barter system: it requires the actors to foresee, in advance, what they need at a particular point in time; plus it creates a system of direct exchange and competition where each party tries to increase the value of its own service over that of the other. By introducing blockchain-based tokens that can be used interchangeably for different products and services within the ecosystem, we create a positive feedback loop, a form of “coopetition” whereby everyone has an incentive to promote and contribute to the ecosystem, because the higher the value of the products or services it provides, the higher the value of these tokens will be.

Fab Chain proposes to explore the use of blockchain technology to promote collaboration between multiple fablabs at the local and global level. The goal is to facilitate the transfer of skills and knowledge between multiple centers, and test circular economy models for tangible outcomes and local material flows, and enable better and more transparent supply chains in order to support the transition from PITO (Product in - Trash Out) to DIDO (Data in - Data Out).

The Fab Chain model will come with two different tokens:

• a non-transferable reputation token (FabRep)

• and a transferable token (FabCoin).

In addition, the system will implement a series of ad-hoc certification tokens, that will be used to describes (a) people’s competences and personal skills, (b) Fab Lab’s certifications, with regard to quality and security, as well as concerning their services as learning centers, (c) designs quality and certifications, which can be issued by specific institutions, as well as (d) machines and other tools or apparatus. The blockchain will also be used to provide proper attribution to the designers and their creations.

The FabRep represents the value of an entity’s contribution to a particular ecosystem. There can be as many FabRep’s as there are Fab Labs, Makerspace or other 3rd-spaces. Each will reward their contributors with a particular amount of reputation whenever they provide value to the local ecosystem. Each Fab Lab or Makerspace will itself act as an entity within a larger ecosystem, and will therefore we assigned reputation depending on the contribution the entity provides to that ecosystem. Reputation works transitively, so that if one individual has a lot of reputation within a local FabLab, and this FabLab has a high reputation within the global FabLab community, the individual’s reputation with regard to the global community will also be high. The model can be expanded indefinitely in a fractal fashion to outer circles, e.g. from the individual, to the FabLab, to the Fab City, to the Fab Region, up to the Global Ecosystem.

The assignment of FabRep is done according to the rules defined within each local community, who is free to establish its own system of rules to determine what constitutes a valuable contribution or not. Reputation within a local community can provide people with more decision-making power, as well as with a series of privileges (e.g. priority for accessing machines, access to specific training programmes, discounts for materials, etc.) which are themselves defined at the local level by the local community.

The FabCoin token is designed to be transferable from one entity to another, in order to enable and promote a circular economy within the global ecosystem of 3rd spaces.

In order to avoid excessive deflationary dynamics, the supply of FabCoins will not be fixed (as in Bitcoin) but will grow over time at a particular inflation rate (as in Ethereum). An initial amount of tokens (TBC) will be issued at the time of the ICO: the tokens not sold will be distributed to the strategic partners in the ecosystem (e.g. a variety of FabLabs, Makerspaces, etc). Over time, the smart contract will generate new tokens at a fixed rate over time. These tokens will be made available for purchase at a predefined price (TBC). This price will act as a lower ceiling price that will be such as to excessive speculation on the secondary market (i.e. if market price is higher than the smart contract price, people will purchase directly from the latter).

The utility of the FabCoin will depend on the number of actors that recognize this tokens as a valuable mechanism of reciprocity. Different actors might provide different products or services in exchange of fiat currency and/or FabCoins. The value of FabCoins will be the aggregate value that can be extracted from the use of these tokens within the local and global ecosystem. For instance, depending on the use-cases, FabCoins might be required in order to:

• Pay to register a design on the FabChain platform

• Pay to get a design certified/evaluated by others

• Pay to promote a design within the FabChain platform (possibly becoming a stakeholder in the design via a mechanism of tokenization/securitization)

• Pay to use resources (machines, raw materials) from a FabLab or Makerspace

• Pay to participate to a training or skill-share workshops

• Pay to manufacture a design in a particular FabLab (with different prices according to the “locality” of the manufacture)

• Invest in a particular design (and get a share of the payment when the design is being printed/produced in a local shop)

At the same time, each entity within the FabChain ecosystem will be able to use these tokens in order to incentivize certain behaviors. Different actors might decide to reward people for different activities and contributions, depending on what they need and/or what they consider to be the most valuable. As a general rule, the tokens represents a mechanism to overcome the problem of under-contribution in the context of common-pool resources, by retributing people for the work they are sharing into the commons. Specifically, within the FabChain ecosystem, FabCoins could be used as a reward to encourage people acting in a way that is supporting the commons (by contributing time, skills, raw materials, machines, tools, venues etc.), to promote localized production (as opposed to globalized one) and to encourage collaboration between different actors in the space, who all have an incentive to promote the value of the overall system.

For instance, depending on the use-cases, people might “earn” FabCoins:

• by contributing resources (e.g. machines, tools, infrastructures, materials, etc) to a local fablab/makerspace

• by creating open designs or contributing to collections of open / remixable designs

• by contributing a design that later gets “printed”/produced locally in a FabLab

• by evaluating/certifying the designs of others, according to their quality or integrity

• by teaching people how to make a design or use machines

• by “investing” into certain designs that later get produced (and receiving a shares of the profits for everytime they are being manufactured)

• by engaging in recycling and upcycling

While the FabCoin is generally distributed from a third-space to an individual or another third-space, individuals can also make use of FabCoin to encourage sharing and reciprocity on a peer-to-peer basis. E.g., people could engage in skill-sharing workshops, tool-sharing, or even neighbouring micro-payments and value exchange (smart grids) through the trading of FabCoins. In theory, people could even agree to provide their work in exchange of FabCoins, to the extent that they can later rely on these tokens to benefit from the services of the global FabChain community, or - if needed - sell them on the secondary market for fiat currency.

Fragmented ecosystems that are not connected between each other. We want them to interact in order to enable local production in cities, to reduce the environmental and social impact of industrialisation. Fab Chain is research project by the Fab City Foundation, in collaboration with its partners.