Digital Money for Sustainable Communities: The Sardex Case

Sardex is an interest-free digital money created in Sardinia (IT) in 2010 that grew rapidly and created a new community. Sardex money is imbued with a utopian view of society as cooperation and local exchanges. It has technical characteristics and rules of functioning that trigger specific social mechanisms (selection, monitoring and sanctioning, signaling, and belief formation), and influences social interaction with a high level of trust, a sense of familiarity, and social support. Sardex can be considered a form of transformative experimentalism toward sustainability. Digital monies risk becoming a techno-leviathan, but they can also influence social dynamics by balancing competition and cooperation, decreasing inequalities, and forging the boundaries and the goals of new communities. Creating money is a terraforming operation that requires a new sociological agenda for investigating money as social ties.