The Inter-Ledger Clearing House is the mechanism that lets many local timebanks behave as one network. Each local community may run its own ledger for resilience, local autonomy, and offline-first operation. The clearing house provides settlement messages, pledge locking, and reputation summaries so that travellers can move between communities without losing accountability.
A simple architecture is hub-and-zone. Local ledgers handle day-to-day transactions, gigs, and disputes. A hub ledger routes cross-ledger transfers, tracks pledge reservations, and prevents double-use of the same pledge for multiple credit lines. This avoids requiring a global chain for everything while keeping the invariants that make mutual credit trustworthy.
Cross-ledger transfer is not a speculative bridge. It is accounting synchronisation. When Voz moves between ledgers, the system records corresponding debits and credits and attaches proofs that the movement was authorised by the towel identity and within credit policy. The same applies to pledges, which must be explicitly transferred or re-underwritten when a member changes community.
The clearing house is also a story device. It is the “customs desk” of the Hitchhiker Economy, but it is designed to be friendly, fast, and open. Its true enemy is not movement, but hidden debt and invisible power.