Happy new year! Another year has passed, full of achievements, changes, collaborations, progress, and new visions, working towards a community-organized basic income. We would like to share with you a summary of what we were up to in 2022 and we would like to invite you to keep growing and co-creating in 2023 as the Circles worldwide community. In this article, you will find our progress and achievements in terms of product, the Berlin Pilot Program, Circles Marketplace, international events we collaborated on, and our ambassadorship programs.

In 2022, we had extensive updates in our product and system, adapting it to the user's needs. We have re-launched Circles, resetting an issuance rate of 1 CRC/hour. We have improved our wallet by making profile information customizable, adding smoother guidance in wallet creation, and updating to a friendlier interface. While making these changes, our Product team followed a decolonized design approach to make Circles even more inclusive to communities around the world. Our new website and FAQs were launched by making all the information on Circles available for our users, assisting the coming worldwide hubs and users. To make the user experience much easier, we have also launched our ChatBot, Robin, supporting the users in a chat format, making the information more accessible to a wider community. Our communication materials have also been translated into several languages to reach a wider audience.

Last year, we had progress for our Berlin Pilot program, with 19 onboarded businesses, including diverse categories of foods/drinks, care, health, co-working spaces, arts, bikes, services, logistics, and clothing. Here, you can find more details on our businesses and their testaments on working with Circles. We had monthly assemblies and local Circles markets at various collaborative spaces which shared our vision. We have also organized online onboarding sessions to support the users technically while making opportunities for creating a network. One of the most important aspects of a sustainable economy is to create circular local exchange loops. We were actively working with our business partners and community to close these loops to create a strong sustainable economy with Circles. Here, you can find a video on how these loops work in our Berlin Pilot program from the perspective of our business partners. We have also participated in Zero Waste Berlin Festival, finding circular economy solutions for sustainability, where our partners and users could attend the festival by using their CRC. Towards the end of the year, we had a chance to create a collaboration with Klein Aber Fein pop-up store to offer special gifts and goods available for CRC as well, making a basic income twist to the holiday season.

Another big achievement of last year was to launch of our online marketplace. In our community in Berlin, both businesses and individuals started to use it actively for offering and purchasing goods/services in diverse categories. As of the end of 2022, we had 10 major categories and 23 sub-categories on the marketplace, with 412 private users listing 176 articles, and 182 business users listing 972 articles. So far, 1.456 articles were sold, with approximately 40.000 page views per month by 1.000 unique users. We have been receiving a lot of user feedback on how the platform supports the use of CRC and helps people to be able to earn and use their CRC.