The Floor / A share of every settlement, returned as income
A fixed share of every fee the exchange earns goes into a pot. The pot is split evenly and paid out daily, unconditionally, to people sleeping rough. No extra cost to the merchant. No extra cost to the buyer. It comes out of our side.
I / The fear is reasonable
We are building infrastructure whose entire purpose is to remove human effort from transactions. It would be dishonest to describe that as anything other than what it is. Work that people are paid to do today — sourcing, ordering, chasing, reconciling — is work an agent will do tomorrow for a fraction of a cent.
The usual answer is that new jobs will appear. Perhaps they will. But that answer asks people to wait, and the people with the least margin are the ones asked to wait longest.
We would rather not make a promise about the future. We would rather move money now.
II / How it works
The exchange takes a percentage when an agent completes a purchase. A fixed share of that fee — set publicly and not adjusted quietly — is diverted at settlement into the Floor pot.
Every day the pot closes, divides by the number of enrolled recipients, and pays out. Equal shares. No application, no assessment, no conditions on how it's spent. If the exchange has a busy day, everyone's share is larger. If it's quiet, everyone's is smaller. Nobody is means-tested against anybody else.
Illustrative structure — not live figures
Because settlement already happens onchain, the pot is not something you have to take our word for. The share diverted, the balance held and every payout made are publicly verifiable. A pledge you can audit is a different kind of pledge.
III / Why cash
Giving money directly to people experiencing homelessness, with no conditions attached, is one of the better-evidenced interventions in the field. In Vancouver, recipients of a single unconditional payment spent 99 fewer days unhoused over the following year and used shelter services less. In Denver, the largest study of its kind in the United States found that 45% of participants had secured housing by the ten-month mark, alongside roughly $589,000 in avoided public service costs.
The recurring objection — that people will spend it badly — is the part the research keeps failing to find.
Cash is the only form of help that doesn't require us to guess what someone needs.
Our amounts are smaller and more frequent than those studies by design. A daily payment is not a route out of homelessness on its own. It is a floor — something predictable underneath a person on the days when nothing else is.
IV / The rules we're binding ourselves to
V / What we haven't solved
We would rather be public about these than pretend the plan is finished. If you have worked on any of them, we want to hear from you.
Most people sleeping rough have no account, and often no ID to open one. Daily payment is only meaningful if collecting it doesn't cost a two-hour walk.
In several jurisdictions an unearned payment can reduce someone's existing entitlements. Getting this wrong makes recipients worse off. It has to be structured before it starts.
Any list creates a boundary, and boundaries create the assessment we said we wouldn't do. We expect to work through frontline partners rather than run intake ourselves.
We are looking for outreach organisations, local authorities and researchers to build the first cohort with — and for people who have been through the system to tell us where this design is naive.
Work on this with usVI / Why a commerce company is doing this
Every fee we earn is a small tax on the ordinary business of living — a filter replaced, a part fitted, a gift bought in time. That flow doesn't belong to us. We're renting a position in the middle of it.
Paying a share of that back to the people the economy has stopped reaching is not charity, and we would rather not have it described that way. It's the cost of standing where we're standing.