The proposal

Income and wealth distribution have become more unequal in both the advanced and developing worlds over the past two decades. With automation poised to ...

Current payment-service providers, such as credit-card networks and banks, will be significantly affected if most of the economy’s transaction activities are to be switched to a single transaction network. As digital transaction networks such as public blockchains and CBDC networks grow to become part of the core financial infrastructure in the global economy, they can be the ideal tool for implementing UBI programmes efficiently on a national scale. As a back-of-envelope calculation, if we assume that the network covers 100 per cent of economic transactions in a country and 2 per cent fees are levied on every transaction, the UBI programme can provide each citizen with, on average, 11.5 per cent of the country’s median income across 158 countries. For instance, adding a staking feature on the network can serve to encourage savings and wealth accumulation, as follows: In countries with high degrees of income inequality, median income is typically low relative to the country’s GDP. [gaining interest](https://cbdctracker.org/) from policymakers and the public alike as a more secure and regulated alternative to public blockchains that can provide the key transactional infrastructure for a modern digital economy. With tokenisation, web3 projects and companies can incentivise users and contributors to drive growth without impacting present-day cashflow, while users can financially benefit from the growth of the projects that they contribute to. The openness of public blockchains can lead to faster innovations and efficiency gains, while giving users more economic ownership and ensuring sovereignty of their data. Despite having a long history in economic thought, the idea of UBI has never been widely implemented. These policies are less likely to be successful in lower-income countries where the execution capacity of the public sector is typically lower, corruption is higher and the poorest are typically less empowered to challenge the status quo. Between 2011 and 2018, the number of protests and riots roughly doubled, while the number of general strikes quadrupled. Universal basic income (UBI) – a type of social-economic programme where all citizens of a jurisdiction regularly receive a monetary transfer, usually from the government, without discrimination – may provide an elegant solution to help address the issue.