Asia Reserve Currency Coin and Its Fight Against Corruption

A Southeast Asian stablecoin project aims to neuter corruption. It places an incentive on public reporting of problems. The International Blockchain Monetary Reserve calls the Asia Reserve Currency Coin (ARCC) a “macroeconomic stablecoin.” While it has a seemingly complicated structure, the premise is simple enough: as productivity and GDP increase as a result of its effects, the ARCC will increase in value.

The token’s economy will have two parts. One is a licensed hedge fund that will manage investments and holdings to increase and preserve the liquidity of ARCC. The other is the ARCC token economy itself, which will be potentially millions of people’s first introduction to cryptocurrency. People earn ARCC when they report and verify various statistics in general society. It will function as a regular application used to report things like corruption, traffic jams, barriers to commerce, power outages, and even utility bills.

Social Proof-of-Work

Through a Social Proof-of-Work protocol, [ARCC] acts as a decentralized information network that incentivizes users to report daily inefficiencies aggregating feedback on local infrastructural improvements (acting as a public mandate by the people).

Social Proof-of-Work is what it sounds like. People prove that they are working toward the common good by submitting and validating reports on the situation. The data can then be used by anyone from public policy specialists to activist groups. The goal is to create an environment where the free market has a chance to work, an environment that Jung says is far from existent at this time.

A side benefit of the ARCC is that it will introduce millions of people to cryptocurrency – without having to make a direct monetary investment. Instead, they will invest their time and energy into generating reliable data. Additionally, as people’s economic situation improves, they’ll be able to contribute to the investment side of IBMR, if they choose, in order to derive passive income from the fund’s efforts.

Jung says, “Part of it is a product for asset management as well. Services for asset management. Normally people at that level never have a chance to invest in any way.”

The token will be tradable on several exchanges that have already entered agreements with IBMR.

By having tokens that can be traded on crypto exchanges, many people will for the first time have access to the global economy. Everything from Bitcoin to stablecoins like TrueUSD becomes available to them.

The Reality of Living in Southeast Asia

Imagine living in a region where construction is so disregarded you can’t get down the street, or driving taxi only to have your day’s wages. For well over 2 billion people living in Southeast Asia, this isn’t something to imagine: it’s part of their reality, according to David Jung.

Jung, a former regional director of PokerStars, explains that while the GDP of the region has grown by over 66%, the average person hasn’t seen much of the growth. One of the leading contributors to the problems of the region is corruption. Infrastructure problems and bribes are a barrier to upward mobility.

Jung said a few areas could be improved for everyday people. Things like the cost of utilities, transportation/roads, and classical corruption (such as bribe-taking). The ARCC will provide an app that allows people to report and verify public data – data which Jung says is unavailable otherwise. He says an open secret is that utilities are extremely expensive in the region, but there’s no way to prove it because the data is simply unavailable.

One easy way to participate: simply report your utility bill every month. Jung says this would prevent the government from lying about the cost of living.

Transparency is the Name of the Game in Blockchain

People can use the data to hold their government responsible. Eventually, they can demand change that will lift the economic profile of the whole region. As the region becomes more affluent, the value of the tokens will rise through various mechanisms built into it.

We want people to create this data so they can make their own public mandate and refer back to it.

Up to 80% of Indonesians, for example, view their government as overwhelmingly corrupt. Jung says trying to do actually do business in the region without participating in some form of corruption is nearly impossible. This means that without massive resources to start, you’re going to have a hard time developing your business.

The Blockchainization of Public Policy

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have always talked about how useful the blockchain can be for the “unbanked” and underclasses of the world, but few projects actually address the issue. With notable exceptions, blockchain tokens remain an “exotic speculative investment vehicle,” as FIO Protocol’s David Gold puts it.

Jung told CCN:

We want to report on and reward people for reporting on these issues. Then we also want to invest in the infrastructure of the region. The goal is to promote infrastructure that helps businesses. The coin will be backed by a monetary reserve as well. One part of the system is the ARCC token, the other part is the fund that backs it.

Jung says the fund will play the same role in as a foreign currency reserve for the tokens. The hedge fund/services provider element will repurchase tokens to reduce inflation.

Jung doesn’t think the IBMR/ARCC solution will have an impact overnight. At a minimum, they’re looking at a 20-40 year strategy.