The idea to reenact and formalize the (asynchronous) direct exchange of labor or favor as a parallel system to a market economy found its modern implementation in a so-called “time banking”. Time banking initiative initially started in Japan around the 1960s to address the demand for 'more human and more social' alternatives to the free-market exchange that was initially realised in more elderly Japan communities in the context of their aging population.

Currently time banking initiatives mostly serve local communities. However, human labor is valued more unequally among people around the world than locally. A hypothetical situation when one's honest labor earns more in one year than the others would earn in a lifetime is unfortunately quite close to the reality we live in (e.g., consider a software developer in Amsterdam and a farmer in rural India). This inequality leads to numerous social issues such as international exploitation and unfair exchange because both individuals in this example would be able to transact directly in a free market. To exaggerate this example even more, translate it to "I will work for you one year and you, in exchange, will work for me all your life". Of course, the real market economy is not that simple but this illustrates and gives some sense of the underlying unfairness. At the same time if you look at the human labor as an individual asset (think of your work life expectancy) it would be distributed much more evenly among us compared to the distribution of the capital where just 1% of the rich holds the 46% of all resources in the world (Credit Suisse Research Institute, Global wealth report 2021, p. 17).

Arguably one of the main causes of high inequality in how we value human labor around the world is that the labor is exchanged in a free market economy by being immediately, i.e., synchronously, assigned value via money. However, historically humans exchanged their labor asynchronously in a so-called favor economy that is based on the principles of reciprocity and fairness rather than just on cold and disembodied principles of price signals. The favor economy assumes that the labor, or simply the amount of time one works, is exchanged with others directly (and asynchronously) without intermediary value capturing its value with tools such as money. For example, we agree that I will be fixing your website for an hour and you will be helping with my garden also for one hour or so. Numerous experiments conducted by economists since the 1980s demonstrated that assumptions about rational maximizing economic actor are often wrong and they show that in the direct exchange economy (favor economy) people would rather give up some of their benefits than support the exchange that is perceived as unfair (Fehr, E., & Schmidt, K. M., 2001).

The main differences between existing implementations of direct favor exchange (mostly in the form of time banks) is that it will be a decentralized peer-to-peer-first client network (i.e., not only for the local communities that time banks serve) with possibilities to (optionally) use federated discovery and announcement servers for network performance. Indeed, most of the time banks that we reviewed were implemented with a rather old mindset. Similar to regular money banks, time banking relies on a centralized intermediary that usually charges monthly fees for their services. The common concerns about centralized systems such as privacy, reliability, trust, sustainability also apply to existing implementations of time banks. We also found some proposals (e.g., Zhai 2021) for block-chain based on implementation of time banking. Though block-chain solutions offer a fully distributed system it also has its known issues related to common full-consensus ledger (privacy concerns) and costly validation process (e.g., proof of work).

The Chron Conferre project aims to develop and implement distributed peer-to-peer protocol for securely logging and saving the favor exchanges among people both in the local communities and globally. It will be based on the network of individual ledges rather than one common ledged where only records of directly signed transactions would be copied between ledgers.