Credit union / member-governed deposit
Established Alternative Game position: Modify
Prototype: VanCity (Canada), Caja Laboral (Mondragón)
Pools member deposits and share capital into a member-owned lender, where governance is one-member-one-vote at the AGM regardless of the size of any member’s balance — financial stake and control are deliberately decoupled.
Structural profile
Topology view
Architecture
- Game position
- Modifies the game; pools member deposits into member-owned credit instead of shareholder-owned banking.
- Value-signal richness
- Single conventional unit of account; the departure is in who owns and governs the institution, not in the unit.
- Accumulation regime
- Enables accumulation but bounds it — cooperative and credit-union law typically caps the dividend payable on member share capital.
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Deposits and member shares are finely denominated, like any conventional bank balance.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Fungible — a member share is an interchangeable financial unit; the one-member-one-vote right riding on it is not, but this axis tracks the unit.
- Durability
- Durable — member share capital and deposits persist for as long as the credit union operates, and are typically covered by the same deposit-guarantee insurance as bank accounts.
- Portability
- Low — share capital is redeemed with the credit union rather than transferred, and membership is bound to a defined common bond (a community, an employer, or an association).
- Acceptability
- Narrow — a deposit is a store of value and a claim on the institution, not a medium accepted in trade outside it.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Deliberative member governance — one member, one vote at the AGM, regardless of the amount any member has deposited.
- Governance & issuance
- Account-holding members are the owners and elect a volunteer board one-member-one-vote regardless of capital contributed — the load-bearing difference from capped-return, which instead splits financial and governance rights into separate share classes.
- Scale & federation
- Bound to a defined common bond — a locality, a workplace, or an association; scales through leagues and central bodies (national credit-union leagues, WOCCU) rather than by growing a single institution without limit.
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Smithian-Rousseauian; assumes members can hold capital in common and govern it fairly without control being proportional to the capital each contributes.
- Accumulative drive
- Drive accepted but bounded — the member’s return comes as a capped dividend and better loan terms, not uncapped equity upside.
- Status / recognition
- Partially separated — a member’s economic stake and their governance voice are deliberately decoupled, so more capital never buys more votes.
- Time preference
- Long — credit unions build a durable institutional balance sheet held for the membership over time.
In Practice
- Track record
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One of the most established mechanisms in this catalog — credit unions and cooperative banks have operated at scale for over a century across dozens of countries, under mature cooperative and mutual law . The model is deliberately small-institution: in the United States the sector holds over a trillion dollars across more than 100 million members, yet the average credit union is a small fraction of the size of the average bank. - Governance requirements
- Requires incorporation as a credit union, cooperative bank, or comparable mutual under the relevant jurisdiction’s cooperative or credit-union law, with bylaws fixing one-member-one-vote governance, a defined common bond for membership, and an elected board accountable to members at an AGM.
- Resource requirements
- A pooled membership large enough to fund lending from member deposits and share capital, plus the regulatory, audit, and deposit-guarantee compliance any deposit-taking institution carries.