The collapse of the Redes de Trueque in the second half of 2002 and the first half of 2003 was like a big-bang, to the point that some observers announced the Trueque was dead. However, it was far from dead. The CT just became much smaller, of a scale comparable to other experiences of CCS around the world. They also changed in various ways.

In the years of exponential growth, CT had mostly lost the connection to their local communities and participants could come from quite far. After its decline in 2002–3, the coordinators and the most committed participants in each CT got to make critical choices again. The most pressing decision was whether to keep the node open and, in that case, under what conditions. That is, whether to operate independently or articulate to a network with other nearby CT. In 2004 the surviving nodes inaugurated a new stage in their development, one of empowerment of the coordinator and reconnection to the local level. With a smaller scale, the local context and the non-economic motivations for continuing with the Trueque regained significance.

CCS are an institution that localizes economic activity, while at the same transforming the quality of the exchanges. In the last two decades, a few hundred regions, localities and communities in both the developed and the developing world have created community currency systems in an attempt to increase the control over their resources. Their purpose is not to disconnect from the national economy, but to complement and adjust to it.

This chapter discusses four rationales for the creation of CCS to study the motivations of CT to continue after 2004. The first discussion is to what extent seigniorage constitutes an attractive income for the leaders of the Trueque. The second one is that Trueque changed the qualitative characteristics of exchange, embedding transactions in social relations which go beyond income generation. The third one is that it protects the local economy and stabilizes it through the national business cycle. The last one is that it provides households an extra opportunity to diversify their sources of income. Monetary networks and complementary currency systems are used as synonyms in this chapter.