Building Chi Coin: A Community Currency for Neighborhoods Disinvested by Redlining

A few years ago, we started asking a question that felt simple but kept getting more complicated the longer we sat with it: what would it look like if a neighborhood could build its own economic infrastructure?

Not a nonprofit. Not a grant program. Actual infrastructure — a payment rail, a local marketplace, a community-governed treasury — built with and for the people who live there.

That question is where Chi Coin started.

What Is Chi Coin?

Chi Coin (CHI) is a community currency built on Base L2, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2. It is designed to rebuild the circulation of wealth in Chicago neighborhoods that were systematically excluded from economic opportunity by federal redlining policy.

The core idea is a parallel economy model: services are priced in USD + CHI. A haircut might cost $20 and 15 CHI. A DJ set might cost $100 and 50 CHI. Workers are not being asked to accept only cryptocurrency — they receive real USD they can use right now, alongside CHI that stays in the local economy and grows in value as the community uses it.

This is not DeFi speculation. It is a local economy with real transactions, real service providers, and real community governance.

Why Redlining?

Redlining was a federal policy, not just a Chicago problem. Between 1935 and 1940, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded neighborhoods across 239 American cities — and in every city with a significant Black population, the Black neighborhoods were graded "D" and colored red. Those neighborhoods were denied mortgages, insurance, and investment for decades. The compounding effect of that denial is still visible today: missing generational wealth, persistent disinvestment, and local economies where money flows out to outside chains and platforms instead of circulating among neighbors.

Chi Coin is a technical response to that. We are not claiming to reverse 90 years of damage with a token. We are building infrastructure to help communities trade with each other, govern a local treasury, and fund neighborhood initiatives — without relying on institutions that have historically excluded them.

What We Built at EngineerChi

We designed and developed the full technology stack: the ERC-20 smart contract on Base L2, the React Native mobile application, and the DAO governance layer. The contract includes a 1% auto-burn on every transfer, wallet caps to prevent manipulation, and a fee architecture that routes CHI fees to a community treasury and USD fees to a liquidity reserve.

The mobile app allows users to book services, pay with USD + CHI, manage their wallet, and participate in DAO governance. It is bilingual (English and Spanish) and designed for communities that may be new to blockchain — the experience is meant to feel like booking a neighborhood service, not trading on an exchange.

The DAO is real. Community members submit proposals, vote on treasury deployment, and make decisions about cross-neighborhood initiatives on-chain. This is not theater. The governance layer is functional.

Eastside Coin Came First

Before Chi Coin, we built Eastside Coin (ESC) as a hyperlocal pilot on Chicago's South and East Sides. Eastside Coin was the proof of concept — same architecture, smaller scale. It demonstrated that the parallel economy model works in practice, that providers engage when they are protected by USD payments, and that community members participate in governance when they have real ownership.

Chi Coin is Eastside Coin at Chicago scale.

The Long Game

The long-term mission is not to keep Chi Coin a Chicago-only project forever. Once the model is proven here, the goal is to package it — smart contract templates, tokenomics frameworks, governance playbooks, app codebases — and make those tools available to other cities that want to build their own community-owned local economies.

Detroit. Atlanta. Baltimore. New Orleans. Every American city has a redlining map. Every one of them has communities that could use this infrastructure.

We are building in Chicago first. Chicago proves the model. Then other cities can build their own.

Where We Are Now

Chi Coin is in active development and pilot phase. The contracts are written and tested. The app works. The governance layer is operational. We are in the fundraising stage, targeting at least $50,000 USDC to seed the initial CHI/USDC liquidity pool on Base L2.

If you are working in community economic development, civic finance, or neighborhood infrastructure — or if you are just interested in what it looks like when a technical team tries to build something that actually matters — we would love to talk.

— Chuy Medina, EngineerChi