What a community currency looks like from inside it: NYOTA, Mburahati, Tanzania
I’m Alinagwe Mwaselela, Managing Director of Jukumu. I’m posting on behalf of the NYOTA community in Mburahati, Dar es Salaam. Some of you will have seen brenzi’s post about the donation dapp. That post explained the rails. This is what’s at the other end of them, written by the people standing there.
For nearly two years, 30 to 60 of us have met every ten days to attest each other as unique humans. That’s the protocol part. The rest we built ourselves.
We buy from each other first
Our members deliberately source from other members before looking outside the community. Every entrepreneur here is also somebody’s customer. NYOTA (NYT) is used for real local payments, which keeps value circulating in Mburahati instead of leaving it.
The effect we didn’t anticipate is on credit. Because trading history among us is constant and visible, a member who hits a rough patch can borrow from fellow members or our savings fund on the strength of proven productive capacity. Creditworthiness from participation, not paperwork.
Kusama Mchezo
Attendees who complete attestations receive 0.1 KSM from a faucet. We could have sold it. Instead we built the Kusama Mchezo: a rotating savings and solidarity fund, modelled on the ROSCAs many of us already knew, where participants voluntarily pool their KSM into a shared treasury. Members draw on it for business expansion, school fees, family emergencies.
No developer designed this and no NGO proposed it. We took a social technology that already worked here and gave it a digital asset to hold. It is the part of this project we are proudest of.
Nobody sat through a blockchain course
Because the currency came first, the learning came with it. Members now handle self-custodial wallets, digital identity through attestations, key security, transfers across wallets, and increasingly swapping NYT for USDT on Kusama Asset Hub. For most of us, first contact with crypto was a payment, not a price chart.
What we’re asking for
The Encointer Association stopped subsidising communities after its treasury referenda failed. There is no reserve behind our faucets or our treasury now. Both are what the dapp feeds:
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KSM → attestation faucets. Drips directly to proven-unique attendees. No KYC, no ID, no bank account needed. This is what fills the Mchezo.
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USDC → community treasury. A runtime-derived keyless account, governed by us on KAH. No foundation account in the path, and none of it routes through Jukumu.
Daily income here runs in the single dollars for many of our members. Small amounts are not symbolic.
For Donation :(Since this is my first topic, I’m limited to sharing only two links. For more about the donation process and code, please check Brenzi’s donation topic.)
Happy to answer anything about how this works on the ground.
— Alinagwe Mwaselela, Jukumu, on behalf of the NYOTA community