Case study
Bread Cooperative
Open-source financial tools for communities the banks never served, governed by the people who use them.
The problem
Money moves through the places I come from. It just does not stay. Remittances arrive, tourism arrives, and then both leave again. What is left is a community with no savings buffer, no credit history, and no say in where the money goes next.
Bread Cooperative started from a different question. What if the people using a financial system also governed it?
What I did
- Led community and partnerships, connecting Bread's open-source tools, the Solidarity Fund, Stacks savings circles and BreadKit, with frontline communities.
- Served on the Strategic Directive Committee, the body guiding cooperative direction.
- Represented Bread in public: at Dappcon Berlin on decentralised cooperative financial tools and the Solidarity Fund, and as organiser and host of the Bread Cooperative Zone at Neocypherpunk Summit 2026.
- Supported pilots with cooperative partners, including Chain Coop in Nigeria.
What changed
The money is real, and it is governed. $400K of BREAD is in circulation. More than $50K has gone to public goods through votes rather than a committee. Over 200 people hold BREAD and have a say in what gets funded.
The infrastructure runs on Gnosis Chain, Optimism and Stellar. Pilots with Chain Coop in Nigeria are testing what this looks like when a cooperative, not a bank, holds the keys.
The number I care about is not the total. It is that the total was decided democratically.
What it taught me
Financial inclusion fails when it is something done to people. Opening an account is not the same as having a say in how the money is used.
On an island you learn quickly that the system has to work for everyone, or it does not work for long. Bread is the first financial system I have worked on where that idea is in the architecture, not in the mission statement.
Working on something like this?
I take on a small number of advisory engagements at a time, so I can do them properly.