From Local Currencies to Collaborative Finance

There is a question that has accompanied us for years: why is so much of the value created daily in local economies never made visible — and why does it flow away so quickly?

A precision engineer in Schaan who spends months passing on technical knowledge to a younger startup. A restaurant in Vaduz that consistently sources from regional suppliers. A municipal employee who coordinates across departments and saves dozens of hours of rework. All of this creates real value — economic, social, ecological. And none of it appears in any balance sheet, is rewarded by any existing financial system, or circulates back into the community.

Collaborative finance instruments — local currencies, company tokens, tokenised governance — are not a solution to this problem. They are a tool that can help address it. Whether they do depends on design, context, and people.

Over the past year, as part of Activity T2.8 of the EDIH programme of digihub.li, we investigated exactly that: which of these instruments could work for Liechtenstein? Under what conditions? And what does it take to turn concept into practice?

What we did

We worked through four consecutive steps.

First, we researched. Seven regional examples — from the WIR-Franc in Switzerland, which has functioned as a counter-cyclical B2B currency since 1934, to the Sardinian Sardex network with over 3,000 participating businesses, to the Vorarlbergstaler circulating immediately next door to Liechtenstein in the Rhine Valley — demonstrate that this works. Not everywhere, not automatically. But it works when the conditions are right.

Then we developed four concrete use cases for Liechtenstein: from the internal company token as the lowest-barrier entry point to the LI-Coin community currency as the most ambitious long-term goal. Not as a wish list, but as a sequential path — each step building on the previous one.

After that, we listened. 24 qualitative individual interviews with FL SMEs and public sector organisations across nine sectors. We deliberately chose not to convene a traditional working group — in a country where everyone knows each other and reputation matters, group formats create social pressures that make honest answers harder. In individual conversations, we heard things we would not have heard in any panel discussion.

Finally, we documented what already exists: four initiatives and partnerships demonstrating that the technical building blocks for collaborative finance in Liechtenstein are already in place — from AERIC, our InnoSuisse research project for verifiable ESG data, to the digihub.li Digital Ecosystem, to the investhub.io partnership for TVTG-compliant tokenised finance.

What we learned

The biggest surprise was how consistent the frustration was. Across all 24 conversations, all sectors, all company sizes: the most frequently mentioned pain point was not bureaucracy, not taxes, not the shortage of skilled workers. It was the invisibility of collaboration. Value that is created but never recorded anywhere.

The second finding: approximately 60% of those interviewed show genuine interest. That is significantly higher than the European average for blockchain adoption. Liechtenstein has with the TVTG a regulatory foundation that other regions do not yet have — and many of our conversation partners know it. One person from the financial sector put it plainly: "We have the best blockchain law in the world and nothing concrete to show for it yet."

The third finding is the most important for implementation: nobody wants to be first. "I will be the fifth. If two or three companies I trust are already in, I will join." We heard this logic, in almost identical form, from more than a dozen participants. Institutional anchoring is not a nice-to-have — it is the precondition.

What comes next

The foundational work is done. Now it is about activation.

AERIC, our InnoSuisse project in collaboration with digihub.li and FH Graubünden (2026–2028), is currently recruiting its first cohort of FL and CH SMEs for the pilot — verifiable ESG data as the basis for token-based incentives. The investhub.io partnership with digihub.li gives Liechtenstein SMEs for the first time an accessible pathway to mobilise capital locally through TVTG-compliant token offerings. And the LVC design sprint — in which the Liechtenstein Venture Cooperative transforms its membership into a token-based governance system — can start within four to eight weeks.

We are not building from scratch. We are assembling proven components — and adapting them to the context that makes Liechtenstein uniquely positioned to lead.

If you are curious about taking one of these steps with us: reach out.

Lisa Allmayer, lisa@integrity.earth