Solidarity Primitives: How to fund your commons with an aligned community - Bangkok 2024

[Music] hi everyone um my name is Joshua Davila um yeah I am H doing this presentation on how to fund your Commons I think you know uh considering the name of the conference is funding the commons I think one of the kind of pertinent things we should be talking about is how to do it so that we can do a lot of the make reality I think a lot of the ideas and Concepts that were spoken about previously by Michelle bow who I was like uh very inspired by on a lot of my thinking around this um but yeah so how to fund your Commons solidarity Primitives are at the core of building for the onchain commons so yeah a little bit about me I'm going to be talking about um the project I co-founded called bread chain Cooperative but you may know me uh on the internet without Avatar um I have a Blog in a podcast called the blockchain Socialist I have two interviews with Michelle Bowens you can listen to him talk more if you want um um and yeah I started that about five plus years ago and kind of in the process of making an online community around these very very Niche ideas of uh kind of progressive politics and crypto together um a bunch of people came up to me and said we should actually do something about it and not just talk about it and so Brad chain Cooperative is kind of like our attempt at trying to answer that question wh I think you're going a bit ahead um and so yeah just to say that and I also have copies of my book blockchain radicals that I wanted to show but so last night I finished this presentation at like 4:30 in the morning um and like at around uh midnight I got this email from PayPal uh that kind of like reinvigorated my uh desire to keep working in crypto after uh all this time um apparently they charge you 8 if you don't use your PayPal account for a year um but I think part of this is kind of a bit of um it's it was like a little bit of the like cherry on top to I think the collective feeling that maybe many of us are feeling at the moment that we don't necessarily want to talk about that I think is very easily kind of uh summarized in this meme that my Idols are dead and my enemies are in power so I think this is kind of um yeah a bit of a feeling that is permeating throughout the current uh political situation that we're in now um and I think what Michelle bounds was saying earlier is kind of right on the money that often times what is leading us to um our attraction to crypto is that an acknowledgement that institutions are failing us um and so neoliberal institutions are failing us our heroes are dead they're not coming to save us and we need to save ourselves and I think we can see this in the background uh if you look at productivity versus hourly rage is a very nice manifestation of that's that's uh oif of neoliberal Institutions however we stand on the shoulders of giants so this is not the first time in human history that uh it's looked a little bit Bleak um we've done this before and history is on our side we can always acknowledge and grow the commons that always exist between us and like our ancestors did in the past you know let's bring forth the in institutions for what I would term post capitalism and so I wanted to say that I imagine a post capitalist world with all of you so what I'm trying to do is nerd snipe you a bit and do a little bit of World building um to kind of take you along this journey with me and a bunch of others uh so that we can collectively co-create this this story and this future that I think a lot of us would would agree with um and so quickly in case you haven't heard this term before um what is post capitalism and so I would Define post capitalism in a couple different ways um it is basically the political economy that is meant to come after capitalism so it's this admission that you know history has not ended it will progress and something is going to come afterwards right um if we look at this from a a positive angle what do do this what does this likely mean um I think it's a couple of things one is a redu reduced Reliance on Capital as a relationship for how we allocate our resources and so essentially what that means is more and more Collective ownership is something that we should strive for uh multi-dimensional measurements of value so maybe something like a plurality of different types of money systems and decentralized coordination for the common good of humanity so taking putting the social back into the center rather than just uh Financial capital and the accumulation of capital so trying to create new feedback loops that are not about accumulation of capital and extraction from The Commons and so these past several decades of neoliberal Institutions um we are sort of at the uh uh the end side of the um these institutions having power and so what this ultimately means is regenerating the commons um from the destruction that has been wrought by these institutions that have uh deregulated financial markets at the expense of our social cohesion and so um when we're talking about the commons of course just a quick refresher I'm sure a lot of people know about this eight principles of uh Ostrum on the commons clearly defined boundaries around it um graduated sanctions governing uh its use according to local needs and conditions allowing people to participate in the writing of those rules making those who monitor the rules accountable uh low cost of conflict res resolution the right to self-organize within them and nested boundaries within the whole um and so these are kind of like some of the principles that uh we should keep in mind when we're thinking about uh funding the commons from the like ashes of the death of neoliberal Institutions I hope um and so uh For Better or For Worse chabani the yogurt company made a a really nice commercial that visualized comments really well somehow a capitalist organization was able to visualize it better than any of we were um for a long time but I kind of wanted to like just you know ER give this visual of what is the world that we are like wanting to build if we want to stay true to the principles of the commons it is like diversity in types of people and thoughts coming together and providing for one another in a way that isn't you know uh about extraction from one another um and so I highly recommend taking a look at this commercial there are definitely some problematic things about it but I won't go about it it's really nice as a visual and aesthetically um so in case you needed something to to help you think about the commons oh was that me it's different than my computer um and so some of the existing institutions for building Commons right so our aners have done it before this is not new the commons was something that existed and was normalized in people's lives um and many of these institutions have evolved into into basically what we are existing through today and these are things that they can look like things like cooperatives including workers uh worker cooperatives consumer cooperatives housing cooperatives I really like the example of the meets Houser syndicat um which owns some 200 properties throughout Germany in which they all hold as a housing Cooperative um Credit Unions Community Curr IES the solidarity economy and Civil Society broadly so types of groups and organizations that don't have the logic of maximization of profits at the core of their existence um and basically what I think a lot of these types of social organizations do is that or what they're aiming to do is basically decomod is to decomod decommodify parts of life through Collective ownership and governance so I think one interesting way to think about capital is in itself a form of governance it is the choice to be governed by the markets and to be like a um I don't a leaf that is like bounced back and forth in a tornado by the market and therefore not having choosing to not have like any real proper say in how resources are used except through the use of capital and so if you don't have Capital you don't have power um and what that means in a world where capital accumulation is at the core that means uh very few people actually are able to accumulate that capital and able to exert that power and that has been like at the core of what these ne ne liberal institutions have uh put upon us um and so we have these kind of like islands of Commons and in of kind of alternative institutions that we can draw from that we can then use to uh use the technology that we're all nerding out about uh in cryptocurrency and blockchain to scale it at the same level um that these other other institutions that are already trans local uh or trans Global and so the kind of software that we've developed at bran Cooperative or the the concept that we've used to describe this software uh is what we call solidarity Primitives so in crypto often it's the case that um people build Primitives for finance right they build Primitives software blocks of software that you can combine together like Lego blocks in order to um create a system for speculation a system for trading your tokens um in a kind of like PVP match in which you're trying to extract uh out of the market before anyone else is able to um instead what we want to be doing is be creating software that is facilitating relationships of solidarity rather than relationships of capital um and that's what we're trying to build and this is how we're doing uh how we're funding our Commons um there's also a really nice paper by other internets that expanded on our concept of solidarity Primitives um on improving labor conditions in in web 3 but uh so Bren Cooperative what is it it is a network of post capitalist uh projects um that are somewhat involved in crypto many of them we share labor power resources decision-making and mentorship and um we are providing alternative structures of funding in order to make that a reality so we don't take Venture Capital because venture capital is kind of antithetical to the commons um and we are looking to create Alternative forms of funding in order to make this happen um and so kind of core objectives of what we do is you know Apes together strong um we scale solidarity through the technology that we have available to us um as an alternative to competition we sustain these projects that we believe will would build those institutions that will um replace the ones that are aify today um and help them endure through the the market dynamics that we're still living through and build this coalition for advancing uh each other so creating a network effect of these projects that that align with one another um and so right now we have four four different projects that are inside uh the network that are external to the core team and the way that it works is we have a uh Community currency called bread uh which is based on xti which is a dollar stable coin so one bread is $1 and the way you create bread is by giving X which is the native cryptocurrency of nosis chain you give it to the smart contract whatever amount of XI you put in is the amount of bread that you get out and in the back end um so this is our application it's already live we have about 320,000 bred in tvl um and that X die when you give it is being converted into s die or the die savings rate which is earning yields from profits made from maker Dow um and that is being generated in the back end and uh it's being generated just so you believe me that there is a source of the yield it's from Liquidation of collateral in maker Dow um you're able to then fund all the projects that are part of the network and you're able to vote on how the yield gets distributed we do the distribution uh a half and half even split and half and half uh the other half by voting so by holding bread you accumulate voting power and then you can distribute how you want to vote um on the on on our application directly um and so in this way we're able to kind of like embed solidarity while also providing a democratic kind of like you can call it meritocracy or whatever you want kind of say from people and we can kind of blend those things together into what is uh computed in the end which is the distribution that each project gets um and so the kind of secret uh or not secret but the the key to how we're planning to scale is we're planning to take advantage and kind of uh glob on to the already being created and existing open Financial products that are out there already in which we can make um bread our cryptocurrency that is funding our Commons that is funding post capitalist projects as something that is actually spendable for your everyday purchase and so um basically what we're doing is we're creating a stable coin that is forming a membrane around so clearly defined boundaries like in a Commons a membrane around a group of people who are highly aligned so a highly aligned community in which we are funding ourselves and able to passively kind of allow for uh capital from the traditional World be pulled into our common so that we can build it in preparation for what's to come um and so this is kind of just the start of what I just uh explained as the larger Vision you know right now we have the fundamental Primitives in place we're kind of next in this stage of being able to grow so Build and Grow the movement evolve into Charmeleon accumulate a treasury in which we're able to um start to do start to collectively own real world assets and take over the world so this is using the kind of Cosmo technology so the the the global aspects of cryptocurrency so that we can begin to um fund and own together the more local aspects of everyday life and pull it out of the market um and so we've been doing this now for for a little bit we went live beginning of this year we've done about five different monthly Cycles we had a launch event in Berlin um and yeah I'm really excited about kind of the the things that we've been building and what we've been able to achieve so far with the kind of limited amount of resources we don't have access to venture capital we don't have access to the uh the millions of of of that you know that normal VC startups get so I'm quite proud of what being able to do and the reason we be able to do it is because we've been tra we've been staying true to our principles and therefore attracting kind of uh people who are very motivated and who are like wanting to make this a reality and that's kind of the the game that I'm playing here is I'm saying you know uh I can't offer you um a million I can't offer you that you're going to become really rich in the world that exists today but I can nerd snipe you a little bit into wanting to join us to um build the the next institutions of of tomorrow um and so what we're doing right now is we are starting a new campaign uh that we call Angel minters basically we are asking for those who either individuals who have the capacity to do so or those are part of organizations that have treasuries that are able to do so to Mint a minimum of 10,000 bread uh so a manageable amount of money for an organization that has a treasury um by the end of 2024 to help bootstrap the project so the way that since the funding is based on the uh tvl of bread um we need more bread to be created right we need people to uh create the token to hold it to create useful things out of it um and so if you check out this QR code we have a whole uh page in which we're describing the program um in which you can take you can check it out uh and you can become part of this first cohort if you are interested in it or think an organization that you're part of is interested in it then definitely come talk to me and let me know we can talk about any specifics or things that you would like to um have anything you know specific to your your situation um and so yeah I want to reiterate I imagine a post capitalist world with you this is an invite for all of you to kind of join and help us co-create what post capitalism actually looks like I've described a couple of broad principles tools of what that means but of course the specifics are going to be localized um and that is something that we will do together and solidarity with one another so that we can uh yeah build something that we are all happy with rather than the few at the top so yeah that's our app page app. bread chain. XYZ and yeah we have some goodies over there um some some T-shirts I think we have left and uh yeah a bunch of other stuff in the table down there uh but yeah thank you and then I have books as well if you want to then up [Applause] [Music]