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 rises to around 85% of all employment^[2]. In Ghana, only 9% of young workers hold a formal job^[3]. Together, the informal and shadow economies generate an estimated $12.5 trillion in annual economic activity^[4] — a parallel economy roughly the size of China's.

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. A bad week — a sick child, a stolen phone, a market day rained out — can undo months of careful work, because there is no buffer designed for them and no line of credit they can reach. Their reputations — painstakingly built over years of honouring obligations to neighbours, customers, and savings groups — are invisible to any bank, anywhere, so the credit they could repay is credit they can't access.

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 consecutive growth — and sub-Saharan Africa is projected to face a further 16–28% decline in bilateral aid in 2025^[5]. The promise that someone else will eventually solve this is no longer a promise we can build a future on.

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 each other — are the infrastructure. Our job is to give them tools that match what they already do, so the income they earn goes further, the shocks they face hurt less, and the trust they have built can finally open doors that have been closed to them.

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 intermediaries. Cooperatives, mutual aid societies, rotating savings clubs, and the broader social and solidarity economy movement have been doing this for two centuries — and at a scale most people don't realise.

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 generating at least $96 billion in annual revenue — equivalent to the GDP of a mid-size African economy. One in three are led by people under 35^[6]. In 2024 the African Union formally adopted a 10-Year Strategy on the Social and Solidarity Economy, making Africa only the second continental bloc, after Europe, to commit to institutionalising community-embedded economic models at this scale^[7].

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. Ghana is one of the few countries in the world where susu collectors are formally recognised and supervised under banking law^[8]. The trust is real. The track records are real. They have simply never been written down in a form that capital markets can read.

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, move value without a wire transfer, and earn yield on their savings the same way large institutions do. We are not the first to see this. We are trying to be careful about how it's done.

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 see in a cross-section was made there. It is the engine of the tree.

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 fused to its roots that exchanges nutrients across the whole forest floor and connects every tree to every other. Without mycelium, the cambium starves. With it, a tree becomes part of something much larger than itself.

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, and Cirali is responsible for it.

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 and will outlive us. It belongs to the communities, not to Cirali.

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 to build durable trust. Communities that partner with Cirali do so by choice, and they retain the right to walk away. That promise has to be backed by architecture, not just by good intentions.

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 it.

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. Market associations already know who keeps their word. Neighbours already know who shows up. None of this travels. None of it earns a worker a better interest rate at any institution that doesn't already know them personally.

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 record the worker actually owns. Every loan repaid on time becomes evidence. Every cycle of saving and borrowing thickens the record. Over time, that record is what unlocks larger credit, longer terms, and eventually the kinds of capital that have never reached this layer of the economy on fair terms.

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 saving and repayment behaviour. Susu leaders and community coordinators build reputations through how well they serve the workers in their care. The institutions in the network — including Cirali itself — are evaluated by the communities they work with, not just the other way around.

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 the watching never stops, and where it runs in every direction at once.

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 change how intermediaries behave, or is it cosmetic? And does the cooperative governance model we have designed — communities as partners with real exit rights, not as users of someone else's product — hold up under the pressures of real money, real disputes, and real time?

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 is the test of whether the architecture survives contact with the world.

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 shared resources at scale — are not questions that get resolved in a funding cycle. We think of the work in three horizons:

• 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 sharpest and the existing networks are strongest. The aim of this decade is not territorial expansion. It is organic adoption: the kind of growth that happens because the people already doing this work want the tools, ask for them, and bring them home.
• 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 one country can transact, save, and build credit alongside a craftsperson in another, on infrastructure they collectively own.
• 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 natively on a leading decentralised stablecoin protocol, and the team is in active conversation with cooperative federations, social enterprise networks, and impact-aligned capital partners.

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.