The People Turning Time Into a Currency

The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'."Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins. "We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person." TimeRepublik is today based in both Lugano, Switzerland and New York, and says it has more than 100,000 users around the world. It makes money by selling the service to companies who then offer it to their staff via their internal websites. The concept of time banking has been around since the 19th Century. Mr Donati says that he wanted to bring it to a younger, and more digitally-savvy audience. The first version of TimeRepublik launched in Switzerland in 2012, according to the BBC, though the site expanded internationally "in the past couple of years." One user told the BBC that with monetary expectations out of the way, "you really get to the core of things and you discover something, I think, that's greater and sort of priceless."

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