What Makes Bread Real?

The Story of a Crypto Cooperative

A few weeks ago, I received an invitation from Professor Trebor Scholz to present on Bread Cooperative in his seminar Eco Radicals. In a follow-up email, Trebor generously outlined his thoughts on Bread Cooperative to help frame my presentation. “What I find especially interesting about Bread,” Trebor suggested, “is that it feels ‘real,’ in the Mondragon sense… while so much of the blockchain world lives in inflated promises about the future, Bread seems to be doing something concrete and demonstrable already”. That stayed with me. Why does Bread Cooperative feel real, viable, operational?  And perhaps more importantly, is it so?

Bread Cooperative emerged in 2020. Today, it operates at the unconventional intersection of blockchain technologies and left-leaning politics. Its main objective is pretty simple: to build blockchain-based applications for financial systems designed to serve collective goals rather than optimize for investor returns. By doing so, they believe that, despite its tainted reputation, blockchain can still be harnessed to support democratic, non-extractive, and collectively governed social and economic aims. In doing so, Bread challenges the long-dominant Number Go Up ethos that has long predominated conventional wisdom about blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Still, the feeling that Bread is “real,” is not the same as proving that it is. How can I show that a  blockchain-leveraged, worker-owned tech cooperative is “‘real”?

To be sure, in this context, a comparison to Mondragon with its billions in revenue may seem a tad too ambitious. But after six months of interviewing Bread co-op members, sitting in on their weekly meetings, reading internal documents and communications, and lurking in the digital spaces where its community interacts, I find myself rather intuitively registering what Trebor meant.

 Bread Cooperative feels real to me as well, at least in the sense that it does not appear to be one of the usual blockchain schemes dressed up to swindle people with promises of easy riches. Bread appears to practice what it preaches: working as a cooperative to build blockchain for solidarity finance. Blockchain, Bread & Roses.

Nevertheless, underlying such feeling is not only a set of technologies for solidarity. What makes Bread feel real also involves, on one hand, its day-to-day operations and narrative framing, and on the other, the interconnected and mutually reinforcing collaboration within and beyond the cooperative.

In this essay, I start to show how Bread Cooperative’s social and technical layers work together to make it feel real. 

Bread and Blockchain
Let us first remind ourselves what blockchain is. Beneath all the hype and technical fussiness, blockchain is a distributed ledger– a shared record-keeping system spread across many computers. Think of it like a notebook where you can record whatever data you want. Each page holding a limited amount of information is called a “block”. Every “block” links to the next, forming a long “chain”.

Instead of relying on a single authority to verify information and ensure its trustworthiness, blockchain allows many computers in a network to take part in the validation process, creating a more decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant system for recording data. It also uses strong digital encryption, mathematical methods for protecting information, to keep the system secure, and it includes “smart contracts,” which are built-in instructions that automatically run when certain conditions are met.

Various kinds of information can be shared across a blockchain network.When people talk about cryptocurrencies, they are usually referring to only one of blockchain’s many possible uses: the recording of financial transactions.

Like any technology, blockchain is better suited to some purposes than others. It has certain “affordances.”Yet nowhere within its underlying logic does it say that it has to be solely about trading, gambling, or profit-hunting.

Elsewhere, I suggest that the concept of “affordance” still holds analytical value in thinking with technologies since it unpacks its technocultural underpinnings, guards against techno-determinism, and sheds light on the politics of possibilities. Specifically, blockchain may support monetary exchange, but it need not carry forward the logic of greed.

The friction between what blockchain could be and what it has become prompted me to start my doctoral research on the “Crypto Leftist” communities, a social layer, or socio-cultural fabric, of what has become the Bread Cooperative. It is also from this very friction that leftist-inspired technological interventions of the Bread Cooperative have taken shape.

To understand why Bread Cooperative feels real, we must first understand what builds Bread, and then what Bread builds.

Social Layer, or What Builds Bread
At the social layer, Bread Cooperative feels real because of two reasons. First, it grows out of the trust, relationships, shared norms, and collaborative technical practices already built within Crypto Leftist communities.  Second, it takes seriously democratic governance and interpersonal relationship among members, whereby voice is not simply tokenized (reduced to tradable digital votes) and trust is not naively outsourced to technology.

Bread Cooperative originally emerged as a collaboration among the Crypto Leftists, a loose network of blockchain developers, organizers, and activists committed to egalitarian and anti-capitalist politics. On the surface, “Crypto Leftists” is a strange label, partly because it juxtaposes two words that, for many, seem to be an oxymoron. For authors like David Golumbia, for example, cryptocurrency is a reactionary project, rooted in libertarian fantasies, and anti-state politics. Yet the term “Crypto Leftists” struck most community members I spoke with as anything but strange. They saw a connection between Crypto and Leftist Politics, though not always with a shared understanding of what “leftists” means.

More generally, Crypto Leftists have clustered around digital platforms such as Reddit, Discord, X, Farcaster and also the Blockchain Socialistpodcast, hosted by Joshua Dávila, an American author and co-founder of Bread Cooperative.

Although these communities were organized by Josh himself with support from his podcast listeners — and although Josh admits to having coined the term “Crypto Leftists” independently — many members reported the term articulated something they had already sensed long before joining. Some even argued that they could recognize crypto leftists predating the Crypto Leftist communities.

In spite of ideological differences, the crypto leftists share common trajectories. Most of them are technologists, engaging with digital technologies either professionally, educationally, or aspirationally. Their communal conversations rarely track market fluctuations. Rather, they offer a social critique on the present politico-economic condition. They value a broad range of left-leaning values, including autonomy, agency, collectivism, mutualism, and solidarity.

Unsurprisingly, many had experienced first-hand with decentralized applications, but later became skeptical of the hyper-speculative co-optation of blockchain technologies. A shared moment of epiphany usually centers around the rise of venture capital funding and the deflation of the hype around  Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), internet-based organizations where members vote on decisions and rules are carried out automatically. For these crypto leftists, a technological promise fades away when profits come first.

But rather than rejecting the blockchain altogether, the crypto leftists translate their dissatisfaction into various forms of collective action.

From text-based conversations and meme-sharing to community calls, book clubs, study groups, in-person events, technology building, and eventually the formation of a cooperative, the Crypto Leftist communities have created a kind of “digital oasis.” Within the otherwise barren landscape of the internet, they offer participants a fertile space for renewal, connection, and mutual support. 

The Crypto Leftist communities offer solace to individuals who share an emotional fatigue after years of overexposure to the hyper-financialized, often fraudulent, and sometimes unhinged crypto culture. They become a safe space that attracts not only those seeking non-extractive applications of blockchain, but also those sharing values but have yet to find a precise term to describe themselves, and those being curious and intrigued by its provocative calling.

Moreover, by providing a high-context environment where participatory practices become meaningful, Crypto Leftist spaces yield revitalizing power, enabling the most engaged participants to move beyond conversations. One of the expressions of such collective capacity is the Bread Cooperative.

Although blockchain native, what is unique about Bread is that it takes a traditional approach to human relationships, where human touch remains the main source of human trust.

For instance, even though cooperative members live across continents and many have rarely — if ever — met in person, in practice they were never complete strangers. They had either communicated with each other through Crypto Leftist communities or connected in person through collaborative work in hackathon or professional settings.

Social trust among members is also explicit in its governance mechanism. Unlike most blockchain-based DAOs, where those who hold more tokens have more voting power, Bread has no governance token. Its decision-making relies largely on regular conversations across platforms such as Google Docs, Google Meet, Telegram, Discord, and Signal.

Without a governance token, ownership of Bread cannot simply be acquired. To become a cooperative member, one must perform proof of work in the most traditional sense, contributing to the project and must be unanimously admitted by existing members. Once approved, new members gain equal rights to current members. They can participate in internal meetings, review documentation and budgeting, and access core team-only Discord channels.

More importantly, as a worker cooperative, Bread practices democratic self-management, where every member technically has one vote, a key feature preventing DAOs from being fully recognized as part of the solidarity economy.

Technological Layer, or What Bread Builds?
At the technological layer, Bread Cooperative feels real largely because it is a “mission-oriented” cooperative.

Contrary to typical tech cooperatives that usually arise within a professional and employment context, the formation of Bread, its raison d’être and its technological intervention are deeply tied to its original mission: to financially and sustainably support itself and a network of democratically governed, “post-capitalist” projects without relying on venture capital funding.

Bread has been transformed dramatically since its inception. However, what remains intact is a desire to connect and support “post-capitalist” initiatives.

For the cooperative members, “post-capitalism” doesn’t carry a fixed meaning. It functions more as a declaration of the quest for exit-from-capitalism. Bread’s member projects then blend two broader stands of anti-capitalist orientation: non-profit organizations and cooperatives.

The former resists capitalism in the most fundamental sense by rejecting the profit motive, while the latter resolves the internal contradiction of capitalism by making the interests of the owner and the worker inseparable.

As a practical extension of the Crypto Leftists, Bread believes that its mission — a financial solidarity empowerment of “post-capitalist” initiatives — could be meaningfully achieved by leveraging blockchain.

As such, Bread strives to build a solidarity-encoded financial infrastructure to offer its network of alignment an alternative source of funding. This manifests in its first tools: BREAD token and the Solidarity Fund.

These mechanisms allow users to pool together resources by depositing a DAI (1:1 USD peg) stablecoin and redirect generated yields to support its network. To date, the Fund has distributed $56,000 to member projects, with 219 BREAD holders.

This mission also materializes in two noteworthy ways. First, it guides how Bread organizes themselves since a non-profit, worker-owned cooperative essentially represents a form of “post-capitalist” organization.

Second, it steers the narrative of Bread towards a more practical orientation. Recently, the cooperative has begun expanding its mission to experimenting with mutualistic economic collaboration on the blockchain, drawing inspiration from existing alternatives, particularly those found across the Global South.

Bread’s ongoing projects, including Stacks, a blockchain-based reimagining of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), and Safety Net, a community-based insurance modelled after the Broodfonds, offer a down-to-earth pathway to mutually exit from capitalism. Together, they build on extant peer-to-peer lending, banking, and insurance practices, embodying the “third pillar” between market and government, “an essential part of how we took care of one another.”

Bread also turns toward “the return of the unbanked,” where people in the Majority World who have been almost forgotten by the crypto world are understood and presented as potential beneficiaries of its applications.

On Realness and Cooperative Success
Nowhere in this essay did I argue that Bread Cooperative is perfect or successful, let alone in the Mondragon sense. Much like other cooperatives, Bread has encountered and will continue to face challenges around leadership, governance, funding, and scaling.

However, a gut feeling that Bread Cooperative lives up to its mission is well-founded in its social and technological layers. Bread feels real because it is a mission-oriented, mutualistic organization that is embedded in the social or socio-technical capital of the Crypto Leftist communities, with a clear and coherent vision: building blockchain for solidarity.

The question that follows — how real is Bread Cooperative and what counts as a meaningful success for this mission-oriented cooperative — is my aim for the full ICDE report. In the meantime, any discussion around the definitions, frameworks, and success metrics of a cooperative of this kind is warmly welcomed.
*

Phakin Nimmannorrawong is a 2026/2027 ICDE Fellow and a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.