The web3 learning institution Kernel has a syllabus that’s broadly influenced by the anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber. Kernel’s second learning module – a deconstruction of the global financial system – spotlights a 2012 talk Graeber gave to Google, focused on his then-new book, Debt: The First 5000 years.

“Debt means something totally different depending on who it is between,” Graeber said. “The philosophy of debt as something which cannot be forgiven only ever crops up in situations of structural coercion and extreme inequality."

People tend to think of anarchy as an agent of chaos, but it’s an egalitarian philosophy that shares many common values with web3 – autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid and direct democracy. Both movements are guided by people trying to re-make the world.

Elizabeth “Liz” Kukka, a Kernel alum, is one such person. “I’ve been protesting for, I don't know, the last 20 years over human rights and sustainability,” she said, speaking from a well-lit porch in southern California, trees visible through the windows. 

Kukka’s activism spans myriad initiatives, from anti-GMO campaigns to pro-trans rights movements to attending the historic 2017 Women’s Rights march – a mass rebuke to Trump’s first (and, god help us, only) inauguration. She contributes regularly to causes like American Palestine Relief Association, The Nature Conservancy and Homeless Prenatal.

Kukka’s background is in environmental science, but “by complete accident,” she became a public school teacher for inner city youth in San Francisco. “Being in the classroom just further solidified how broken our systems are,” she said, “and how we can be distributing resources and capital in more meaningful ways.”

The brokenness she's observed is a microcosm of our divided world: two extremes unwilling to communicate with one another. On one side there’s for-profit folks. On the other, non-profit people. And between, a bitter impasse flanked by greed and idealism. “How do I help bring money from this one side of the world to the other?” she wondered. 

Seeking that answer, she went back to school, earning an impact MBA from the California College of the Arts. From there she went to Plug and Play Tech Center – a venture capital firm – in Sunnyvale, where she started hosting events on data, privacy and the blockchain. In 2018, intrigued by web3, she went to Digital Finance Group to launch Ethereum Classic Labs.

She found the tech fascinating, but innovation does not guarantee impact. “We launched a hedge fund exchange, and even though I think everything we were doing was important, I was also helping make really wealthy people wealthier. I did nothing that I was intending to do,” she said. “How do I help people? How do I bridge this gap?” 

Read more: From Hackathons to Juntos: Kernel's Enduring Quest to Feed the Better Parts of Ourselves

She made her way to the blockchain-focused R&D firm ChainSafe, where she operated as the vice president of business operations. “It was a really good group of people – a bunch of anarchists, essentially,” she said. “But again, no one really wanted to do sustainability or direct human impact. It was more helping the upper middle class.”

Just prior to joining ChainSafe, her uncle – Michael Ward, a general partner at Impact Partners VC – had introduced her to Clarence Wooten.“ He's like 'Liz, you're my impact blockchain girl and Clarence is doing this thing. You gotta meet him.'"

When they met, Wooten had just begun to serve as director and entrepreneur in residence at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory (formerly known as Google X, and not to be confused with the cesspool formerly known as Twitter).

“When I joined Google [X],” Wooten wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, “I set out with a vision to create a moonshot project that would merge profit with purpose. I believed there was an opportunity to harness the power of web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) to address one of society’s most pressing challenges – the shortage of affordable housing.”

In the US, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there’s a shortfall of seven million affordable housing units. Addressing that deficit will require an estimated $300 billion. It’s a herculean imbalance, and the catalyst behind Purpose for Profit.

Last week, the Purpose for Profit team announced “the world's first on-chain Endowment Fund and tokenized credit fund providing below market-rate loans to businesses building affordable housing.”

The Women’s Rights March in 2017

In practice, here’s what that looks like: Purpose for Profit offers short-term bridge loans to help affordable housing contractors, who often face project delays because banks only pay them after achieving certain milestones. As a non-profit, they can offer these loans at a lower interest rate and fund them through two investment options: a lending pool with a five percent return, or a riskier token investment targeting eighteen percent returns. With no shareholders taking profits, everything goes back into making the loans cheaper and more accessible.

The lending is powered by the Purpose token, which represents the underlying assets of the platform. Moving loans on-chain – or, more accurately, wrapping a digital representation of the loan in a non-fungible token (NFT) – offers advantages not found in traditional finance. “From faster settlement times to secure reporting,” Kukka wrote, “[the blockchain] enables us to provide real-time updates on where funds are being deployed and the impact they are creating.”

As a non-profit, there’s no owner and there are no shareholders. “The core team gets paid, subscribers get yield, token holders get yield (stake) and we bring down the cost of building affordable housing,” Kukka said. 

Kukka, who became the project’s chief executive officer last October, stressed the importance of incremental change – to find that fertile middle ground, a model that strips debt of its coercive power by embedding it within a system of mutual benefit. For the idealists, the heat death of capitalism may be a more clarion call to arms. But incremental change is likely the only route to lasting equitability, and toward a philosophy where ‘debt’ means the same thing to everyone.

Purpose for Profit aims to be fully decentralized in five years. If, in that time, they can prove this model of mutual benefit, Kukka said, they intend to “rinse and repeat” to other resource-starved sectors like sustainability, education and food insecurity. The goal is to “enable people to collectively govern the change they want to see.”

Kukka’s words evoke the old adage, “be the change you wish to see in the world.” In truth, that phrase is a summation of a longer Gandhi quote (one that’s been conveniently diluted to bumper sticker-size), but the sentiment itself is shared and seeded across numerous belief systems – including anarchism. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world,” Graeber wrote in his book The Utopia of Rules, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

lead image: Elizabeth Kukka