Two lanes into the proposed pilot
For stores & cities
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
For stores
Participating is easy if a Paper Penny program operates in your town.
You'd accept cards the way you accept a coupon: scan the secure code on the back of the card at the till, or type in its printed code if the scan fails. The ledger confirms the code in the moment, so there's no guesswork and no stack of paper to reconcile later. Settlement follows the program's rules, set locally before launch.
Stores could also help issue cards, purchasing them outright or sharing the cost with the city and with each other, so the incentive that brings a customer through your door is one you helped create, at a price measured in pennies per card.
Your downside is capped by design. A card is worth a dollar at most, a code redeems once, and everything expires. That's the entire risk table.
Nothing is live yet. If you run a business in Owen Sound and want to be part of shaping the proposed pilot, we'd like to hear from you.
For cities
To clarify: no city has yet adopted the Paper Penny. We want to start in Owen Sound, and this page contains the proposal.
Here's the case. Cities already spend money moving small value around: coin handling, cash logistics, promotional programs that arrive as glossy brochures and leave as recycling. A Paper Penny is a dollar that stays on the main street: city-supplied or cost-shared with local stores, printed for pennies, tracked to the individual card, and fully expired on a schedule the city sets.
A ledger provides a city more than money can: it gives an exact count of cards that are issued, redeemed, or expired. The city knows its total exposure to the dollar at any time. This happens without collecting any personal information from residents, as the cards carry no such data.
We believe the savings against coin and polymer handling could fund the incentives themselves, including rewarding debit use with a Paper Penny at the till; a pilot would put real figures on that. The program's worst case is a dollar per card; its best case is a small, honest tool that keeps local dollars local.
We are ready to talk if you work for a municipality and want to discuss a pilot.
The contact path runs through mikeseiler.ca.
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
Paper Penny is a proposed community project by Mike Seiler (mikeseiler.ca), built on the map.ca stack. It is not legal tender, not a Royal Canadian Mint product, and not yet live in any city. The network map lives at PennyMap.ca.