In March 2000, when the dot-com bubble began to burst, the Frenchman Stéphane Laborde was working as a producer at one of the first companies dedicated to internet video. He had witnessed the meteoric rise of tech companies and then saw their stock prices plummet sharply. That crisis sparked his interest in money and led him to wonder why only a few institutions could create it.
In search of a solution, he imagined a system in which each network member would receive a new amount of currency daily. They could then spend it, save it, or earn more by selling goods and services. The most obvious cheat had to be avoided: someone opening a hundred accounts and receiving a hundred times more. To join the network, other members had to certify that behind each account there was a real person and that they were not already registered under another name.
In 2010, Laborde gathered his ideas into his Relative Theory of Money. His followers would eventually present it with an ambitious claim: “The first free currency in human history”; a “community, supportive… and perhaps subversive!” experiment. Then a program was developed capable of adding new units daily to the accounts of certified members and recording payments between them.
And on March 8, 2017, 59 French people activated the system. Each had a digital account on the 1 blockchain — a ledger where transactions are recorded — which they could consult and manage from an app called Cesium. That first day, ten 1s automatically appeared in each wallet: 590 in total. From that moment, new junas were added to their balance daily, even if the owner had not worked or sold anything. Those who joined later also began to receive the same daily amount as the rest.
At first, those gifted balances were useless because there was no one on the other side willing to give something in exchange. So the decisive step was convincing someone to price a sack of beets, a repair, a night’s lodging, or a language class in junas.
The newcomer documentation explains it with much less solemnity than monetary theory: “Empty your closets of things you don’t use,” it recommends. Then it suggests selling “handmade or culinary creations” or offering services.
Thus the first markets appeared. A member brought vegetables and returned with junas; then used some of them to pay another who repaired bicycles. That mechanic could spend them on bread, used clothes, or a massage session. The same units began to pass from one account to another and ceased to be free balances to become, within that community, a means of payment.
The currency left France thanks to word of mouth. Some Spaniards learned about 1 at French meetings, opened their first wallets, and began organizing talks and markets on the other side of the Pyrenees. Here the name “juna“ prevailed, a phonetic adaptation of 1; it is also heard as yuna, since there is not even a single official pronunciation.
And that alternative economy also grew in Spain through in-person markets, territorial Telegram groups and classified ad pages like Gchange or Girala, where each seller decides what to offer and how many junas to ask for.
Nine years later, the network has just over 7,000 certified members worldwide, mostly concentrated in France and Spain. The number has decreased from over 8,500 reached in 2024 because the co-creator status must be renewed and inactive identities eventually disappear from the network. In Spain, the last detailed public count we found, from April 2024, recorded 466 certified members and 2,170 accounts if simple wallets were included.
The fact is that the map of events and local groups created by the Spanish community itself reveals activity in much of the country. In 2026, markets or meetings were announced in Asturias, Euskadi, Navarra, Aragón, Catalonia, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Valencia, Balearic Islands, and Andalusia...
These meetings have sometimes been described as a kind of rural Wallapop. In Pamplona, a cook and macrobiotic consultant prepares menus, birthday cakes, and weight loss diets entirely in junas. In Santander, a catering service accepts half the payment in the “subversive” currency; a photographer from Donostia, only 25 percent. Logos are also designed, rooms rented, and land offered for caravans.
‘Junas’ aim to reinvent money; the problem starts when you have to buy gasoline, cement, or pay for a coffee at Pepe’s bar
There is also a large annual gathering of this community called 1ntada. The sixth edition is scheduled from August 27 to 30, 2026, in Río de las Peñas, near Tudela. The meetup allows observing the experiment in its most ambitious form but also shows its main limitation.
To carry out that meeting, its organizers seek to prepare the place as a permanent space and request wood, pallets, cement, sand, paint, tools, and labor to build, among other things, dry toilets. But for the juna to pay for a sack of cement, there must first be someone willing to buy it in euros and part with it in exchange for a currency that cannot be used to pay the electricity bill.
And that is its pretense. The juna has not created a parallel economy capable of producing housing, energy, transport, machinery, or medicines. It has placed a digital unit between people who, to a large extent, exchange used objects, household surpluses, and hours of work. On paper, it is a monetary theory intended to correct a historical injustice. On the ground, it often consists of going to a meadow with a jar of jam, a used shirt, and some food to share or barter. No one would sell their new car even for a trillion junas.
The currency’s own users have even created a verb for this whole pretense: junear. In La Vecilla de Curueño, they invited people to live “the fun experience of appreciating each other.” “Appreciating” is the euphemism they use to refer to payment in junas.
Not everything is New Age smoke, but the catalog of products and services exchangeable through the perroflauta currency has a hard-to-ignore inclination toward activities often described with terms like “connection,” “regeneration,” “vital movement,” “harmony,” “here and now”: the more vaporous the noun, the fewer euros are needed.
The activity channels sometimes resemble the program of a popular university conceived during an ayahuasca retreat: Esperanto courses — “it’s beautiful, fun… and also free like the juna” —, free software, self-sufficiency, solar ovens, edible wild plants, dry toilets, Russian stoves, “syntropy,” and “family lineage channeling.” The latter is promoted with a phrase that captures like few others the childish and self-satisfied language of part of the ecosystem: “If it vibes with you, you can message me privately.”
In France, where 1 was born nine years before its Spanish version reached some density, the degeneration has been so visible that the junistas themselves ended up arguing in their forums whether the currency was becoming a “ghetto for cheap spirituality merchants.” Reiki, bioresonance, dowsing, and even exorcisms proliferated on change.
In Spain, this is equally or more noticeable, and around 1 the recognizable Iberian community of believers in invisible energies, anti-vaccine activists, miracle remedy sellers, spiritual instructors, and professionals of disciplines whose main battle is convincing the client that the absence of evidence is part of the evidence has gathered. Community good vibes provide the setting; distrust of medicine, the State, and institutions provides the ideological glue for this archaic bazaar frequented by magical thinking addicts.
—I appreciate your interest, but you will have to contact another member. I don’t trust your means —responds Josepeuta from his Telegram account when we ask him to tell us what he found in the junas and why he decided to join that community.
He himself has explained on several occasions that he arrived at the free currency forum in January 2021, declared his intention to “actively participate” in the new model, and tried to introduce it into several community projects in the Seville area. Two years later, the organizers of the first 1 market in Bollullos Par del Condado entrusted him with the main talk on the currency’s philosophy, which he explained through an analogy with the Tao. His trajectory makes him a documented example — not of all juneros, but of how easily the currency has connected with charlatanism.
When presenting himself to the community, he stated that his “profession” was medicine and described his training as Heilpraktiker and traditional Chinese medicine.
Josepeuta is also a well-known member of the anti-vaccine movement. He himself claimed to have collaborated in 2020 in the creation of Doctors for Truth and Citizens for Truth Spain, two platforms that during the pandemic fought health measures and spread false claims about COVID.
Along the same lines, Josepeuta uses Girala to offer MMS — a sodium chlorite solution used as a bleach and disinfectant that, when activated with an acid, releases chlorine dioxide —, CDS — chlorine dioxide already dissolved in water —, DMSO, and peroxide. He provides it “even for intravenous use.” In the same listing, he enumerates stroke, multiple sclerosis, ALS, lupus, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, or COPD among the ailments he claims to specialize in. He does not claim to cure all of them, but he places them in the commercial showcase of those treatments.
“There is no proven efficacy to treat any disease with MMS and its consumption can cause serious poisoning,” confirms Crónica Joan Carles March, a Public Health specialist and professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health. “It is not recommended for therapeutic purposes, much less as a medicine.”
The interesting thing for our purposes is that Josepeuta offers the possibility to “appreciate” one hundred percent of the service in junas, with a very striking exception: “Travel expenses excluded.” The alternative currency serves to face serious or fatal diseases with a dangerous disinfectant, but the gasoline to bring it to the patient must be “appreciated” in euros.
No one within the community ignores that junas are not useful for having a coffee at Manolo’s bar. Laborde’s monetary revolution will not be televised because it ends exactly where the world that does not let itself be organized like a summer camp for believers begins. They have invented the anti-system Monopoly: while the game lasts, everyone is a revolutionary banker; when it ends, they put away the junas and take out their wallet to fill the van’s tank.