The FairCoop team is pleased to announce that the FairMarket has now officially entered its beta phase, which means that it is fully functional as a market, and we invite interested individuals and organisations to come and test it out, either as sellers or buyers or both.

To give some background on the project for those who have not been following its development, and with apologies for repetition for those who have, FairMarket is only one piece in a much larger jigsaw, that of the FairCoop ecosystem, which is a global open cooperative designed to ‘build a new system in the shell of the old’. The full details are at the website, but in summary we aim to create a network of services which allow anyone to break with the current capitalist hegemony either partially or entirely, should they choose to: a self-managed network of mutual support where commons takes precedence over profit and there are no barriers to entry other than being in harmony with the FairCoop principles of Integral Revolution, P2P Organisation, and Hacker Ethics.

One of the keys to this proposed emancipation is getting out of the monopoly of State-imposed fiat currency, to ‘hack the foreign exchange market by inserting the cooperation virus as a tool for global economic justice’; to this end we are using the cryptocurrency Faircoin as the official currency of FairCoop, although it will soon be joined by FairCredit once Faircoin has achieved sufficient growth to function as a store of value for the cooperative. FairCredit will only be available to members of the cooperative, whereas Faircoin is an openly-traded crytpocurrency in the mould of Bitcoin. FairCredit is intended as a mutual credit system and will be the primary means of exchange for coop members once it has been rolled out.

FairCoop can seem a dauntingly complex project and in fact for those who want to get into the theory of it, it does go very deep, especially if we consider those parts which are as yet only on the roadmap as conceptual waypoints, however for the present it is enough to think of it as a cooperative open to all who share its principles and which can facilitate an alternative economic system of exchange between its members. In fact we think people will be surprised at how easy it is to use the services that FairCoop offers.

This brings us to FairMarket, which of course is the central marketplace for FairCoop members to buy and sell; in fact one does not have to have had any dealings with FairCoop before to interact with the market; to buy it is sufficient only to have some Faircoins (which can be bought at www.getfaircoin.net) and to sell one only has to apply for an account and have a Faircoin wallet address in which to receive funds.

These low barriers to entry, plus the fact that almost any good or service, including non-physical informational or downloadable goods, can be bought and sold using the platform, mean that people who are excluded by the current system, such as refugees, economic migrants or stateless people who are unable to open bank accounts (and thus unable to participate in online commerce) can, as long as they have a means of accessing the internet, start taking advantage of this worldwide platform to participate in an alternative economy which could potentially be both a lifeline, and a way out of the the trap in which the incumbent system has placed them.

We have come a long way in the alternative system we are building, and FairMarket is an important step, but really this is just the start. Join us now and participate in the revolution!Photo by _SoFie