About Chrono Bank
What is Chrono Bank?
Chrono Bank is an experiment in translucent, demurrage-paced banking. The unit is time: everyone earns the same income each day, and the system is designed so money keeps moving rather than pooling.
How it works
Universal income
Every personal account earns 1,440 Chronos a day — one for every minute — paid automatically. There's nothing to claim and no tiers; the income is the same for everyone.
Demurrage
Demurrage isn't a fee charged against you — it's a property of the currency itself: value held far above a one-week threshold gradually flows back into circulation, while ordinary savings stay effectively untouched until a balance grows to represent centuries of income.
Escrow and reversals
Funds in transit are held in escrow until the reversal window closes. During that window either party can reverse the transfer; once it closes, the funds settle to the recipient.
Translucency
Account balances and account identifiers are public, so the distribution of the currency is open to anyone. The details of individual transactions stay private to the parties involved.
Build on Chrono Bank
Chrono Bank has built-in tools for online business. Through the Chrono Bank API, a website, game, or app can charge Chronos for purchases, accept one-off payments, run recurring subscriptions, and receive signed webhooks when something happens — all against a business account you control.
See how the Chrono Bank API works to get started.
What to use Chrono Bank for
Chrono Bank was launched in late May 2026. The currency is early. There is no exchange rate to fiat, no external price, no structural way to convert Chronos to dollars. That is not a bug — it is the current stage of the experiment.
At this early stage, the most productive thing a member can do is start transacting in Chronos for things that were already free.
Here is why that works: because everyone earns 1,440 Chronos a day, asking someone to pay you in Chronos is not really extracting anything from them. They have Chronos, and they get more tomorrow. What you are doing is something different — you are starting to denominate value in the currency. You are creating the habit of exchange.
If you write something, draw something, answer questions, teach something, offer a service, give advice — charge a small number of Chronos for it. Not because the Chronos are worth a dollar amount yet, but because attaching a price signals that the thing has value, and paying it signals that the buyer agrees. Every transaction like this is the currency learning what it is worth.
Some examples of how members are already starting to use it:
- Charging Chronos for digital goods that were previously free (wallpapers, documents, templates)
- Pricing small creative commissions in Chronos
- Asking for Chronos as a token exchange for favors or consultations
- Running informal markets among friends where everything is priced in Chronos
The early network is small. That is exactly when the choices made about what the currency means have the most weight. A Chrono's value will be defined by what people decide to accept it for — and that process starts now, with small transactions between people who understand what they are building.
The longer idea
Most currencies derive their value from scarcity and state authority. Chrono Bank is testing a different basis: a currency backed by time, distributed equally, with a structural property that prevents its capture by any single holder. If such a currency can be adopted and endure — a currency intended to serve circulation rather than accumulation — that is the question the Chrono Bank experiment seeks to answer.