Makerfox

Welcome to the project home of Makerfox, where we collaboratively develop and test this new tool. (You may still know it by its preliminary name Economy App.)

“Your moneyless marketplace.”

Makerfox is a moneyless marketplace focusing on the maker / hacker / DIY / entrepreneurial economy. It uses a novel web-based software to run an economy on a modern, computerized form of barter, and is meant especially for areas where big numbers of people are economically excluded (“jobless”) even though they have skills, time and needs. Just that there are no jobs for them in the traditional, formal economy. The software needs users to have an Internet connection, though. Still, that makes it applicable for Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, several Northern African and Latin American countries.

How does it work? Makerfox wants to fix unemployment by enabling economic exchange without cash or credit money. For this, we developed a novel, computer-calculated multi-party form of barter which we call “network barter”. We don’t even try to hide this innovation since we believe it will be of much bigger use than we can find for it with our moneyless marketplace platform. So here’s how we do it, plus when the user community has matured we will release the actual core algorithm doing these calculations as free and open source software (AGPL v3 licenced).

For its potential to generate jobs in Europe’s current difficult economic situation, it was awarded the European Social Innovation Award 2013 and received funding from the European Commission.

We did much simulation over the last weeks; our biggest simulated barter trade had 100 participants and 10 000 EUR turnover. We then moved to letting the software do real-world deals, starting small again with a first trade from 2014-03-13, including 3 users,100 EUR turnover and a lot of bugs that we’re fixing now :stuck_out_tongue:

State of the Art: We are in public beta test now! Register at makerfox.com to become an early adopter and influence our development path with your feedback! All your offers and orders are live, so you might as well become part of the world’s first network barter deals :slight_smile:

yuhuu!! congratulations!

Wonderful news today!