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Why Clear?

Credit-Liability Ecash

Clear means Credit-Liability Ecash: Authorized and Redeemable. Each word names part of the operating model:

  • Credit is what the holder can present or transfer.
  • Liability is the issuer's corresponding obligation under its policy.
  • Ecash is the private bearer mechanism used to issue and circulate Mint Notes without maintaining a named mint balance for every holder.
  • Authorized means supply enters circulation only through a recognized operator or treasurer action.
  • Redeemable means the issuer accepts its Mint Notes according to published terms and records their redemption or retirement.

Redeemable does not automatically mean convertible to money, bitcoin, or another Clear Mint Unit. A meal credit may be redeemable for a meal, a service unit for an hour of work, and a member credit for a benefit recognized by its issuing organization. The liability is only as broad as the policy and participating network that define it.

Organizations often need to allocate value before they need a payment rail. A community may distribute food credits, a program may allocate service units, an event may issue participant credits, a co-working facility may allocate desk or room credits, a resort may issue guest and staff allowances, a public-purpose program may issue a state-recognized benefit unit, or an AI operator may fund agents with metered compute credits.

Conventional account systems can do this, but they place every transfer inside one application and its central account database. Clear explores a different model: the organization issues private bearer Mint Notes that people can hold and transfer, while the mint prevents double spending.

Digital minting before payment routing

Most digital-money projects begin with payment routing: move dollars, sats, stablecoin balances, or tokenized assets across a network. That work matters, but it is not the same as minting.

Minting asks a prior institutional question: who has authority to create a circulating unit, what does that unit represent, where is it recognized, and how is it redeemed or retired?

Clear is built for that prior question. It lets a mint instance support multiple treasury units, each with its own CMU, policy, treasurer authority, ledger, and risk boundary. The result is closer to electronic coinage than to a generic payment rail.

One wallet, two kinds of balance

Clear is intended to work seamlessly alongside Bitcoin- and Lightning-backed Cashu mints. A wallet can describe sat-denominated funds from those mints as one Cash Balance. These funds are general-purpose and broadly transferable: any holder can send them to another compatible wallet, and the mint connects their issuance and redemption to the Bitcoin and Lightning networks.

The same wallet can hold several Clear Balances. Each is a separate, issuer-defined credit for a particular policy domain. Clear balances are more like credits for products and in-kind services than cash: food credits may be recognized by participating grocers, service units by participating providers, or member credits by a club. The Mint Notes remain transferable bearer instruments, but acceptance and redemption depend on the issuer's published policy and participating network.

Transferability also depends on service availability. At the network layer, that includes whether suitable recipient and mint routes are reachable. A wallet may describe a CMU as available Within this instance, On the local network between participating instances, or Across networks when eligible routes cross that boundary. None of these labels says whether the recipient accepts or trusts the CMU. Read Transferability and Acceptance for the complete distinction.

This distinction is intentional. Cash is presented as one broadly useful sat-denominated balance; Clear balances stay plural because credits from different issuers or programs must not be added together or presented as universally interchangeable.

One mint, many treasury units

A Clear deployment can support more than one treasury unit. A single operating mint may serve separate CMUs for a food-credit program, a member-benefit program, a state-recognized voucher, and an agent compute-credit pool. Those units can share infrastructure while remaining separate in authority, policy, ledger, redemption, and holder risk.

That is why Clear treats the complete cmu-<keyset-id> as identity rather than the display name. Friendly labels help humans. Keyset-bound CMUs keep separate minted units from collapsing into one balance.

Settlement follows policy

A Lightning-backed Cashu mint issues Mint Notes after receiving bitcoin and redeems notes to pay a Lightning invoice. Clear intentionally removes that coupling.

Clear provides the issuance, circulation and redemption machinery. The issuer's policy determines what enters the treasury, what the resulting units represent, who may use them, and what redemption accomplishes.

The organization defines:

  • who may authorize issuance;
  • why Mint Notes are issued;
  • what goods, services, obligations, or recognition they represent;
  • when redeemed Mint Notes may be retired; and
  • whether any conversion or expiry policy exists.

The software enforces Mint Note validity, double-spend protection, and supply accounting. It does not invent the policy or guarantee the issuer's promise.

Clear also separates the people who establish that policy from those who run the mint and those who authorize routine transactions. See How Clear Is Governed for the intended responsibility and key model.

Useful without becoming universal

Clear is not trying to create one universal CMU. Its value comes from making each issuer, keyset-bound Clear Mint Unit, and organizational policy explicit.

A community fund and an employee benefit program may both display CMU, but their complete cmu-<keyset-id> identifiers and issuing mints differ. They are different obligations under different rules. Keeping them separate makes the system more honest and leaves future exchange policies as explicit agreements rather than accidental arithmetic.

Community voucher networks

Clear can support a closed-loop voucher system for churches, food banks, mutual-aid groups, and networks of participating service providers. A treasurer issues voucher Mint Notes under the organization's policy, people present them to providers that recognize that specific CMU, and providers eventually redeem the notes for retirement and the reimbursement or accounting treatment promised by the program.

The vouchers are useful precisely because recognition is bounded. They do not need to be accepted everywhere, and unrelated voucher programs do not become one balance merely because both display CMU. Clear supplies the private transfer and note-accounting mechanism; the participating organizations define eligibility, acceptance, and settlement.

Clear aims to give these vouchers cash-like flexibility: people hold them locally, present or transfer them directly, and do not need a named balance at the mint. Blind signatures provide transaction privacy, although wallets, networks, and redemption locations can still reveal metadata. This is a privacy design, not a promise of perfect anonymity.

Clear vouchers are not intended to function as legal tender. They are voluntarily recognized instruments within a limited network. Ordinary money may fund the program and reimburse participating providers; Clear coordinates the purpose-specific allocation between issuance and redemption.

Read Old Function, New Tools for the broader connection between community vouchers, corporate treasury, and longstanding institutional governance.

Membership, hospitality, and service credits

A membership-based club can use Clear to issue credits that members redeem for services inside a defined community. A co-working club, for example, might issue Mint Notes for booking a desk by the day, reserving a boardroom by the hour, using printing services, renting a locker, or attending a paid event.

The club operates the mint and publishes what its CMU represents. Credits may be allocated through a membership plan, purchased separately, awarded through a promotion, or returned as a refund. A visible schedule can express prices such as 10 CMU for a desk-hour or 50 CMU for a boardroom-hour. Redeemed Mint Notes are retired by the issuing mint, providing bounded supply and redemption accounting without requiring every member to have a named balance at the mint.

Clear does not become the club's membership, booking, or facilities-management system. Those systems continue to determine membership eligibility, availability, reservations, pricing, expiry, and delivery of the service. Clear supplies the private bearer instrument, transfer mechanism, and double-spend protection. This is good boundaries, not barriers: the credit can integrate with existing club operations without turning the mint into the club's system of record.

Each club and keyset has a distinct cmu-<keyset-id>. Credits from two clubs—or from two keysets operated by the same club—remain separate unless an explicit issuer policy provides a conversion or migration.

The same pattern fits a small resort or cruise ship. The operator can issue guest credits, staff allowances, activity vouchers, meal credits, or service reimbursements that are recognized only within that property or vessel. Guests might redeem them for excursions, equipment rental, dining, laundry, printing, meeting rooms, or other onboard services. The operator's reservation and point-of-sale systems still determine prices and deliver services; Clear provides the bounded bearer credit and its clearing state.

This is especially useful where a community or facility wants local service coordination with clear accounting. A locally operated Clear mint can keep its own issuance, swap, redemption, and double-spend checks close to the community it serves, including during limited-connectivity periods. The CMU remains an operator-defined credit—not legal tender and not automatically interchangeable with another resort's, vessel's, or keyset's notes.

Compute credits and funded agents

Clear can also model compute credits. An organization may want to fund agents with a bounded allowance for model calls, storage, retrieval, inference, or other metered services. Instead of giving every agent an open-ended account or payment credential, the issuer can mint a specific amount of compute-credit Mint Notes under a policy.

Those notes can be held, delegated, presented, redeemed, or retired according to the issuer's rules. Clear does not decide the metering or deliver the compute service. It supplies the bearer unit, treasury authorization, double-spend protection, and retirement evidence around that service economy.

Local-first continuity

A Clear mint can run on organization-controlled infrastructure and does not need a Lightning node to issue or retire Mint Notes. Once notes have been issued, people can transfer them directly. They still need the mint to swap or redeem notes, detect double spending, or obtain final confirmation, but temporary mint unavailability does not erase the notes already in their possession.