2026-07-10 –, Idea Stage
Bread Cooperative builds financial tools that use blockchain primitives to serve community solidarity rather than individual wealth extraction. This talk covers the Solidarity Fund, which has disbursed over $55,000 in grants funded entirely by deposit yield with no donations, Stacks, a crypto implementation of rotating savings circles and the framework for how we build these tools.
Bread Cooperative makes financial tools grounded in solidarity finance. This talk covers two of them and the process of building them.
The Solidarity Fund has distributed over $55,000 in community grants without ever accepting a donation. Participants deposit funds into a pool; the interest that accumulates gets directed toward a community currency that funds solidarity projects. The deposited capital stays with its owners. Only the yield is redirected. It's a way of using DeFi yield mechanics toward redistribution rather than further accumulation.
Stacks is a crypto implementation of the rotating savings circle, a form of community finance practiced globally under many names: tandas, susus, chit funds. Participants contribute on a regular cycle and take turns receiving the full pool. Stacks makes these circles programmable, handling commitments and payouts on-chain and extending the model to participants who may not share geography or an existing social network.
We'll talk through how both tools were built, the principles we tried to hold, the tradeoffs we hit around programmability and accessibility, and what we learned from putting them in front of real communities.
Joshua Dávila is the writer and podcaster behind Blockchain Socialist and the author of Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It, published by Repeater Books in 2023. He is a co-founder of Bread Cooperative, where he builds crypto applications from a post-capitalist point of view.