From Aspiration to Implementation: Three Years of Research for Circles UBI in Bali
What is Circles Bali?
Circles is a blockchain-based Universal Basic Income protocol originally developed by Gnosis, a Berlin-founded blockchain organisation whose team spent years building the underlying technology and monetary model behind it, long before it reached Indonesia.
Alam Santi's role was to take that existing protocol and answer a much more specific question: could it work for Balinese communities, and if so, how? Over three years, that question took Alam Santi from early research through to a nationally permitted pilot tested across three regencies, adapting the protocol for a genuinely different regulatory, cultural and economic context.
Have a watch of this video to see what Balinese communities thought about this initiative:
In Bali, lack of funds creates real barriers for many households: stimulating local economies, feeding a family, starting or running a business, securing housing, or simply improving day-to-day living conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of tourism income sharpened this further, leaving many Balinese households with far less job security and far fewer resources to meet basic needs.
The Circles protocol offered a possible answer: a digital, point-based form of Universal Basic Income that gives every participant regular, no-cost credit, letting people tap into underutilised local resources and better meet basic household needs while strengthening their local economy in the process. Circles Points encourage more frequent exchange of locally produced goods and services, and are built on trust links between users, strengthening community resilience and building value around localised production.
Alam Santi worked in close collaboration with the Circles Bali initiative to bring this existing protocol to Indonesia, leading the local research, adaptation and community engagement needed to test whether and how it could function for Balinese communities specifically.
As the ecosystem grows, the kinds of products and services that can be exchanged using Circles Points increases, within and around the community:
Grounding the adaptation in evidence
Bringing an established protocol into a new country, with different regulations, trust structures and community norms, required serious local research, not just a straightforward rollout. In 2021, Alam Santi and its local community outreach partners, Kalimajari, Lentera Talenta and Tegeh Sari Foundation, conducted extensive fieldwork across three distinct community types: urban, rural and tourism-centric.
That research surfaced a stark baseline:
on average, half of respondents across all three locations earned less than IDR 10 million a year, underlining how real the need for a system like Circles was likely to be locally.
You can download the research report here for further details.
From research to a national pilot
That evidence base became the foundation for securing a national research permit from BRIN (Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency), alongside MOUs with each of the villages across the regencies involved, clearing the path for a formal, government-recognised field test of the adapted system.
Between July and November 2023, the Circles UBI pilot ran a five-month field test across three regencies, Jembrana (rural), Tabanan (semi-urban) and Denpasar (urban), reaching 1,530 users who completed over 29,000 exchanges, moving 1.26 million Circles points through the system and building more than 9,500 trust links between participants. BRIN's own impact assessment recorded measurable shifts for participants, including decreased ceremonial expenses in Tabanan, an increased ability to eat out in Denpasar, and a perceived decrease in debt in Jembrana.
The pilot also generated its own momentum: seven community-designed proposals were funded through a micro-grant programme disbursing 34 million IDR, and 70% of engaged Local Champions said they'd volunteer again if the programme returned. The full findings, including BRIN's national impact assessment, are available in the Circles UBI Indonesia 2023 Field Test Report.
Three years, start to finish
What began as an established protocol with no track record in Indonesia became a locally adapted system with a national research permit, village-level government backing, and a fully documented pilot behind it, a shift that took three years of research, relationship-building and iterative fieldwork to achieve, built on technology and thinking that Gnosis had already spent years developing.
If your organisation is working on a novel or regulatory-sensitive initiative that needs the research, credibility and institutional relationships to move from concept to reality, contact us to talk through how Alam Santi could help.