Chi Coin

Chi Coin is a community currency built on Base L2 (Ethereum Layer 2) designed to rebuild economic circulation in Chicago neighborhoods historically devastated by federal redlining. EngineerChi led the design and development of the platform — including the smart contract architecture, mobile application, DAO governance layer, and investor-facing web presence.

The Problem

Redlining was a federally backed extraction machine. Between 1935 and 1940, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation mapped and graded neighborhoods in 239 American cities — systematically denying investment, homeownership, and economic opportunity to Black and brown communities. Chicago was one of the most heavily redlined cities in the country. The damage is still visible today: stripped generational wealth, disinvestment, and broken local circulation of money.

Chi Coin is infrastructure to reverse that. Not charity. Not protest. A functioning local digital economy.

What We Built

EngineerChi designed and developed the full Chi Coin technology stack across three layers:

1. Smart Contract (Base L2)
The CHI token is an ERC-20 contract deployed on Base L2 (Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2). The contract includes a 1% auto-burn on every on-chain transfer, wallet and transaction caps to prevent manipulation, DAO-governed minting controls, and a clean fee architecture that routes CHI fees to a community treasury and USD fees to a liquidity reserve.

2. Mobile Application (React Native)
The Chi Coin mobile app enables users to book services, pay using the parallel economy model (USD + CHI), manage their CHI wallet, view treasury proposals, and vote in DAO governance. Providers list their services, receive USD and CHI payments, and accumulate CHI in the local economy. The app supports bilingual access (English and Spanish) and is designed for communities that may be new to blockchain technology.

3. DAO Governance Layer
Chi Coin is not controlled by a company. It is governed by its users through a community DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Proposal creation, voting, treasury deployment decisions, and community initiatives are all managed on-chain through the governance layer we built into the platform.

The Parallel Economy Model

Services on Chi Coin are priced as USD + CHI — for example, a haircut = $20 + 15 CHI. This protects workers from having to accept only cryptocurrency. Providers receive real cash they can use immediately, alongside CHI that accumulates in the local economy. As users spend down their CHI balances, they refill through the AMM (automated market maker), creating real buy pressure tied to actual service activity — not speculation.

Eastside Coin: The Hyperlocal Proof of Concept

Before Chi Coin, we built Eastside Coin (ESC) as a hyperlocal pilot — a test of the same framework at the neighborhood level on Chicago's South and East Sides. Eastside Coin proved the concept: the parallel economy model works, the DAO governance functions, and communities engage with local currency when it is built for and with them.

Chi Coin scales the model to all of Chicago. The long-term mission is to document the framework and publish open-source starter kits so other cities can build their own community-owned local economies too.

Technology Stack

- Smart Contract: Solidity, Base L2 (Ethereum Layer 2), Uniswap v3 (CHI/USDC liquidity pool)
- Mobile App: React Native, Expo
- Backend: Django, PostgreSQL
- Blockchain Tooling: Brownie, Hardhat, Web3.py
- Infrastructure: Heroku, AWS S3

Current Stage

Chi Coin is an active R&D project in pilot phase. The smart contracts are written and tested. The mobile app is functional. The DAO governance layer is operational. We are currently in the fundraising and community onboarding stage, targeting a minimum $50,000 USDC raise to seed the initial CHI/USDC liquidity pool on Base L2.

This is not a startup pitch. It is a community infrastructure project — built in Chicago, for Chicago, with the goal of proving a model that other cities can replicate.