Policy Briefs
Clear policy briefs connect the product and protocol model to older minting and treasury functions, public-sector digital-cash experiments, and institutional questions about authority, custody, privacy, and recognition.
They are written for leaders, operators, policy makers, and partners who need to understand what Clear is trying to make possible before going deep into deployment details or protocol mechanics.
Community First, Circulating Credits
Communities can choose portable service entitlements without automatically adding speculation, currency pegs, or exchange infrastructure. This brief explores holder privacy and agency, accountable acceptance networks, and the case for safeguards proportionate to the program's actual activities.
Old Function, New Tools
Clear applies modern cryptography to an organizational treasury function that is thousands of years old. This brief places Mint Notes beside ancient administrative records, corporate treasury, community vouchers, and the distinction between governance and operation.
Embracing an Older Pattern
For centuries and millennia, mints have turned authority, standards, marks, and public recognition into portable bearer instruments. This brief explains why Clear should be read as a continuation of that older pattern, using Mint Notes, keyset-bound Clear Mint Units (CMUs), and explicit issuer policy.
Credit, Coinage and Clear
Includes distinct Haudenosaunee longhouse and Northwest Coast potlatch examples, with Indigenous-authored sources and limits on the analogy to Clear.
Drawing on David Graeber's account of the long oscillation between credit systems and coinage systems, this brief starts from the oscillation itself and then explains why Clear sits in the middle: credit-like in meaning, coin-like in circulation, cryptographic in form, and redeemable by treasury policy.
Goldsmiths and Clear
London goldsmith-bankers are often remembered through a misleading story about warehouse receipts and hidden lending. Drawing on George Selgin's historical analysis, this brief explains why the distinction between custody, debt, authority, and transferable claims matters for Clear's treasurer model.
MintChip and Clear
The Royal Canadian Mint's MintChip project explored secure, cash-like digital payments before today's central bank digital currency (CBDC) debates became mainstream. This brief compares MintChip's national-currency stored-value model with Clear's minting model: private bearer notes for issuer-defined treasury units.
Cashu, Decoupled
Clear preserves Cashu's blind signatures, bearer proofs, swaps, and double-spend protection while decoupling them from the usual Bitcoin and Lightning settlement loop. This brief explains the resulting model shift: issuer policy and delegated treasury authority define issuance and redemption, while payment rails become optional integrations.
Clear Is Not a Stablecoin
Stablecoins usually move account balances through blockchain smart contracts. Clear uses Chaumian Mint Notes: private bearer proofs issued for a specific CMU, transferred between holders, and checked against the issuing mint's spent-proof state. This brief explains why that mechanism is different from stablecoin payment rails and token contracts.
Where Is the Holding?
Bitcoin outputs, Ethereum token contracts, and Cashu bearer proofs place holding evidence and spending authority in different places. This brief compares their implications for privacy, control, resilience, recovery, auditability, and redemption, and explains the resulting priorities for Clear.
Inference Credits and User Agency
Organizations could turn purchased or self-hosted inference capacity into private, transferable service credits. This brief explores where Clear offers users more discretion than account-bound allocations, along with the privacy, metering, redemption, and governance conditions needed to make that useful.
Hidden Complexity and Clear
Research from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) shows that public blockchain data can be technically transparent while remaining economically ambiguous. This brief explains why Clear should make issuer policy, exact CMU identity, treasurer authority, and redemption meaning explicit before Mint Notes circulate.
The Unit Before the Rail
The Great Rail Shift anticipates convergence among stablecoins, tokenized deposits, banks, liquidity providers, and clearing mechanisms. This brief explains Clear's place in that hybrid future: payment rails can fund, exchange, or settle a Clear Mint Unit, but treasury authority and issuer policy define the unit itself.
Clearing Is More Than Minting
The London Metal Exchange rulebook shows that market clearing encompasses contract acceptance, netting, margin, payment arrangements, delivery, and default management. This brief locates Clear within that wider scheme: a Clear mint can provide a private bearer settlement instrument without pretending to be the clearing house, depository, or market authority.
Clear Warehouse Units
A Clear Warehouse Unit (CWU) could represent a policy-defined entitlement to standardized goods held in a recognized warehouse or custody system. This brief explains how separate Clear Mint Units can distinguish commodity, class, grade, crop year, location, and redemption terms while allowing private bearer circulation between controlled issuance and redemption boundaries.
QxVault and Clear
QxVault packages OpenBao-compatible secrets management with an integrated Hardware Security Module (HSM). This brief explains why that matters for Clear: per-CMU keyset secrets, mint service keys, operator credentials, and future signing boundaries need production custody without replacing Clear's treasury authority model.