Cirali Protocol

The world has a two-billion-person blind spot.

Roughly 2 billion workers — about 61% of the global workforce — earn their living in the informal economy^[1]. In Sub-Saharan Africa that figure is 89%^[2]. In South Asia, 78%^[3]. Across the Global South, the informal economy is not a small corner of economic life. It is the economy.

These workers are productive, resourceful, and trusted within their own communities. What they lack is infrastructure that respects what they already do. Their savings sit in cash and lose value to inflation. The record of their creditworthiness — their track record of keeping promises, of managing resources, of being trustworthy — exists only in the memory of people who know them. When they need to borrow, they borrow on terrible terms from people with predatory incentives. When they need to save, they have no tool that lets them save with confidence that their money will still be worth something when they come back to it.

Meanwhile, the systems that were supposed to bridge the gap are pulling back. Official development assistance from OECD donors fell 7.1% in 2024 — the first drop after five years of increases^[5]. The institutions designed to work in these spaces are constrained by geography, regulation, and a business model that struggles to find product-market fit.

Cirali starts from a different premise: the people already doing the work of community finance — the susu collectors, the savings group leaders, the market traders who vouch for their neighbours — are not an underserved market. They are the market. They have been doing this for generations. We are here to build infrastructure that makes their work easier, more reliable, and better rewarded.

A tried and tested tradition meets a new generation of tools.

Cirali sits inside one of the oldest and most resilient ideas in economics: that people can organise capital, risk, and trust with each other rather than through extractive institutions. Across Africa, South Asia, Latin America and everywhere else, people have built — and sustained over decades — savings circles, lending groups, cooperative unions, and trust networks that move money without banks.

A 2026 study by the Schwab Foundation and the World Economic Forum, the first continent-wide empirical look at the sector, counted an estimated 2.18 million social enterprises across Africa alone^[6] — most of them operating informally, trusted within their communities, but invisible to formal systems.

In West Africa specifically, the susu — small, member-led savings circles of 10 to 50 people — has been the trusted money-management institution for generations. Individual susu groups still manage savings equal to the annual budgets of mid-sized countries^[7]. The susu collector — a role that sits somewhere between trusted friend, accountant, and community banker — is one of the most important financial infrastructure nodes in West African economic life. They get paid a small percentage to hold the circle's collective wealth, to remember the promises, and to hold everyone accountable.

What's new is what we can now build on top of that foundation: a generation of decentralised stablecoin infrastructure that lets people hold stable, inflation-resistant savings without a bank account. A way to record credit history that can travel. A reputation system that lives on the blockchain — transparent, immutable, and owned by the workers themselves instead of by yet another company trying to monetize their data.

Why a tree needs a forest.

The name of our product ecosystem, Cambium, comes from biology. A tree's cambium is the thin layer of living tissue just under the bark that produces all of its new growth — every ring you can count in the trunk is cambium at work. It is the engine of vertical growth.

But a tree's cambium, on its own, produces a tree that grows slowly and stands alone. What turns a tree into a forest is the mycelium — the vast underground fungal network that connects the roots of neighbouring trees, that shares nutrients, that distributes stress, that turns individuals into a system. The mycelium is why a forest is more resilient than a tree.

This shaped how Cirali is built. There are two sides to what we're doing, and we are deliberately keeping them separate.

The Cambium is the platform infrastructure Cirali builds — the savings tools, the identity layer, the lending models. It has to be excellent, secure, and constantly improving. It is the product.

The Mycelium is the community trust layer that makes the platform work — the susu groups, the savings circles, the leaders who vouch for their neighbours. It existed long before us. It will exist long after us. Our job is not to replace it or absorb it. Our job is to amplify it and get out of its way.

Most institutions that have tried to "serve" informal workers have made the same mistake: they absorbed the community into their own structure. We think that is the root of why so many of those efforts have failed. The community members became staff. The trust became a product feature. The moment the funder stopped watching, the whole thing became extractive again.

Starting small. Starting honest.

Our first pilot will launch in West Africa, working with informal workers and the savings groups they already belong to. It is deliberately small. Two ideas sit at the centre of what we are testing.

Credit that's priced on what you've actually done.

The single biggest thing standing between an informal worker and a fair loan is not risk — it is the absence of a record a lender can read. Susu groups already know who repays and who doesn't. They know who is trustworthy and who is reckless. They hold this information in collective memory, or in notebooks, or in the implicit understanding of who shows up and who disappears. They have been making credit decisions this way for generations. And they have been right more often than most of the formal financial system.

The pilot tests a different model: small, peer-vouched loans, originated through the savings groups workers already trust, with repayment history captured in a way that builds — for the first time — a portable credit history. If a worker repays on time, the system records it. That record stays with them. The next time they need to borrow, the lender will have actual evidence of creditworthiness instead of a guess.

A reputation that holds everyone accountable — in both directions.

Most credit-scoring systems are built to hold borrowers accountable to lenders. Ours is built to hold everyone accountable to everyone. Workers build a reputation through their repayment history — but so do lenders, and savings groups, and any institution that uses the platform. If a lender charges exploitative rates, the workers will see it, and that lender's reputation will suffer. If a savings group leader misuses collective funds, there's a record of it.

This bidirectional design is deliberate. The history of community finance is full of well-intentioned programmes that became extractive the moment the funder stopped watching. We are trying to build a system where extractive behaviour becomes not just unethical but economically visible. Where it costs you something to be unfair.

What we are actually testing.

The pilot is the test of three questions. Does peer-vouched, reputation-anchored credit perform — meaning, do workers repay, and do their lives measurably improve? Does the bidirectional reputation system actually prevent predatory lending and incentivise fairness? Can we build infrastructure that amplifies community power instead of replacing it?

We are not trying to scale fast. We are trying to scale honestly — to learn what works in one place with one community before we replicate anything anywhere else. The pilot runs for at least two years before we even think about the next phase.

A fifty-year project, not a fifty-month one.

Cirali is built around a long view. The infrastructure questions we are trying to answer — how communities of informal workers build collective wealth, hold institutional memory, and govern their own economies at scale — these are not questions that have fast answers.

• The Foundation Decade — now → 2035 Prove the model where it begins, then let it grow the way trust actually grows — community by community, partnership by partnership, across the regions of the Global South where the need is highest. Build the core infrastructure stack once, well. Let others build on it.
• The Ecosystem Decade — 2036 → 2045 Scale to wherever density is highest and barriers are lowest. Build productive community networks that connect workers, savings groups, and cooperatives across borders — so that a market trader in Lagos can easily send money to a family member in Accra, and can do it with full confidence that the money will arrive, and will be worth what they expect it to be worth.
• The Sovereignty Era — 2046 → 2075 A global infrastructure layer for the informal, shared, and gig economies — owned and governed by the workers and communities who use it, interoperating with formal systems on equal terms.

We know how that sounds. It sounds like the kind of thing people say at conferences. We are trying to earn the right to say it by being very careful about what we do in year one.

The people building it.

Cirali was founded by Toby Thompkins and Jeremy Hollister, working with collaborators across West Africa, Europe, and the broader DeFi and impact ecosystems. The Protocol is being built in the open.

Inspired? Curious? Have feedback or advice?

We are at the stage where the conversations matter as much as the code. If something here resonated — or didn't, and you want to tell us why — we'd like to hear from you.