What is money?

Less than 250 years ago indigenous communities in Central America like the Mayans used seeds as a medium of exchange. 

Why? Because they captured the most value.  

A seed can produce a plant that can produce food, shelter and all of our most valuable resources. If you don’t plant them, they die. This form of exchange discourages people from keeping large stockpiles of seeds to themselves. The result is a culture of generosity where seeds that are not needed are shared with those who do need them. This shared value among the members circulating seeds brings cohesion among the community. 

Gold & Fiat

The opposite appears when a system is based on something like gold. This system is based on the fact that something must be scarce in order to have value. Wars have been waged and environmental landscapes destroyed in order to accumulate this scarce product. The result is competition, hoarding and wealth concentration. 

After gold, we created money, which was later decoupled from gold. This is fiat currency, which is based simply on trust in the governments that issue them. When there is no trust in the issuing body, the currency loses all its value. 

The Arrival of Cryptocurrency

Then we created cryptographic currencies (cryptocurrencies), for which Bitcoin was the pioneer. This proved that algorithmically backed currencies can actually exceed the values that are attributed to government backed currencies. It means that money backed by nothing more than code can be just as accepted on a global scale as those backed by politicians and central banks. 

Not all cryptocurrencies are created equal. It’s the algorithms behind them that differentiate one from another. SEEDS was born from the inspirations of the Mayan’s seeds of currency. The SEEDS ecosystem takes advantage of both the ancient and the modern: the technology offered to us by cryptocurrencies, and knowledge learned from the flaws of fiat currencies.  

The Seeds currency uses the algorithms of cryptocurrency to assign the same importance to the values and behaviours the Mayan seeds did. These algorithms place importance on collaboration, distribution of wealth and the health of the whole system by removing the element of scarcity and rewarding efforts that benefit the whole.