We care about this project because we’ve spent years watching local governments and nonprofits do heroic work with tools that were never designed for the complexity they’re now expected to manage. We’ve seen how quickly trust erodes when basic coordination breaks down, and when the same problems persist over decades, the same meetings repeat, and people who want to help can’t find a clear way in.

At the same time, our team has spent the last several years in the blockchain governance world, where we witnessed the power of shared rules and mechanisms to coordinate people at scale.

What we see now is an immediate problem, where cities are operating with limited budgets and limited workforce capacity, while social complexity rises and AI reshapes work and time. Many residents want to contribute, but engagement pathways are thin and episodic, and public institutions struggle to translate civic energy into execution. The result is a public sector that’s overstretched and communities that feel powerless to coordinate themselves.

City/Sync is about providing communities the tools to incentivize local coordination around collective goals utilizing Civic Credits that can be redeemed for local value. This protocol will bring communities to coordinate around shared goals in a more transparent and cost effective manner, and gives local businesses and organizations a pathway to reward those who step up for their communities.

Our approach is to build a shared coordination layer for civic life, starting with a simple pilot that pioneers this civic-credit system. In the next 6 months, we will deploy the core mechanism, onboard a small set of issuer and redeemer partners, and publish open documentation on what works. Within a year, we aim to prove repeatable coordination patterns through Mass Coordination Events and begin formalizing the strongest patterns into modular public administration applications that cities can reuse for a wide range of uses-cases.

This work is built with community partners in mind and the residents who want a practical way to participate in the betterment of their communities. It is designed to be replicable, and adoptable by other cities that are ready to try a genuinely new operating model for collective action.