Community staking is the most interesting UBI experiment I've seen

by Ethan Brooks

I've backed 30+ startups as an angel. What grabbed me about MeWeBe is the inversion: instead of a few rich people backing founders, a whole community stakes together and shares the upside. If even a fraction of backed startups succeed, returns flow back to ordinary members — a UBI funded by collective ownership rather than taxation. It's early and unproven, but it's a genuinely novel funding model for the thing Tom keeps writing about. I'm in.

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Comments

Mateo Garcia 3 weeks ago

This is why I'm here. The upside being shared, not hoarded, is the whole point.

Tom Becker 3 weeks ago

It's the closest real-world test of the community-equity idea I've seen. Watching closely.

Aisha Khan 1 hour ago

What sold me on the model here: the ledger is gamified today, but the muscle being built (identity, contribution history, payout logic) is exactly the plumbing a real distribution system needs. Practice like you play.

James Carter 1 hour ago

Content angle: the most persuasive thing about this experiment isn't the mechanism, it's that every member becomes a stakeholder-storyteller. Nobody shares their bank's blog posts. People WILL share a league table they're climbing. Distribution is built into the incentive design.

Tom Becker 1 hour ago

What I tell fellow economists about this model: it inverts the usual sequence. Instead of "tax, then distribute", it's "build shared assets, then distribute the yield". That's closer to a commons than a welfare program, and commons have a much longer track record than critics assume.