From Hackathons to Juntos: Kernel's Enduring Quest to Feed the Better Parts of Ourselves
A brief history of a web3 salon that got its start within the Gitcoin community
On a warm Brooklyn afternoon last June, I walked to For All Things Good, a snug Mexican spot in Bed-Stuy that serves as both restaurant and ‘molino’ – a place that grounds corn to prepare fresh masa. Masa is the foundation of many Mexican dishes, the variety of which is determined by texture control. A coarse texture is suitable for tamales, for instance, while a finer one is ideal for tortillas.
Before moving to London, For All Things Good was a frequent haunt, just 10 minutes walk from my apartment. I was grateful, then, when Vivek Singh and Aliya Jypsy plucked it from Brooklyn’s epicurean infinity to be our meeting spot.
Singh and Jypsy are two of the stewards of Kernel, a cohort-based learning institution that was spun out of the public goods-focused crypto project Gitcoin. One of Kernel’s promises to its now 1800+ fellows is that, whenever three or more gather anywhere in the world, the meal’s on them. (Our Brooklyn lunch was my third such meal.)
That commitment to gathering is fundamental to Kernel – to take time and connect, especially over good food. When I went through the program’s seventh block in late 2022, communing was as central to the experience as the curriculum. Kernel strikes an intentional balance between structured learning and unfettered exploration – there are optional guilds to join, cerebral fireside chats, a robust Slack community and even meditation- and movement-focused wellness sessions. Think hacker milieu meets Socratic method, where fellows are steered by their ‘craft’ to choose a unique ‘adventure’ amidst many possible paths. Kernel is the masa to our many dishes.
From left to right Sachin Mittal, Aliya Jypsy, Andy Tudhope, Angela Gilhotra and Vivek Singh
Singh and Jypsy are now preparing Kernel’s ninth block, a continuation of an ever-evolving approach to learning and stewardship in web3. We caught up recently – remotely, this time – and explored the project’s origins, recent soul-searching and Kernel's enduring quest to feed the better parts of ourselves.
Jypsy grew up in Queens. Her path, she told me, was always aimed toward human rights advocacy. After earning a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Michigan, she pursued a Master’s in Social Work at Columbia, studying migratory flows and refugees in the European Union. She moved to Berlin in 2016 to pursue these themes. Social work, though, was generally limited to German speakers, so she landed in tech, working in digital recruitment before discovering a UN program that used the blockchain to identify refugees and disperse food stipends.
Already aware of the city’s burgeoning crypto scene, the program opened her eyes to the blockchain’s applications beyond finance. And when a content manager gig at a DeFi startup popped up, she thought she’d found her entrée to that world.
Alas, crypto’s volatility made it a quick stint. Jypsy eventually moved back to New York in 2019 to pursue philanthropy. There, mutual friends connected her with Singh. She started joining his Sunday night “juntos,” salon-like gatherings where a shared piece of media acted as springboard to conversation.
Those juntos were an extension of Titans, a selective capstone program at Texas A&M, from which Singh graduated in 2015 with a finance degree. The club was founded – and is still operated by – another A&M finance graduate: former Bridgewater CEO Britt Harris.
The financier modeled Titans after Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Junto Club’ (also known as the Leather Apron Club). Franklin started it in 1727, regularly gathering a talented band of interdisciplinary thinkers. For 38 years, their purpose was improvement, for themselves and the society around them.
Harris carried that spirit into the 21st century. Amidst the cutthroat world of traditional finance, he sought a more conscientious substrate. Harris left Bridgewater, Singh told me, because he didn’t like “how the funds act to help the rich get richer.” From 2006 to 2017, he served as the Chief Investment Officer of Texas Teachers Retirement System, the 17th biggest pension fund in the world (as of 2022) with nearly $200 billion under management. “I think it mattered to him that the funds were going to the state employees of Texas,” Singh said, “that that was the fund that he was managing.”
When Singh applied to Titans, he was invited to a dinner and seated next to a few other applicants. Seventeen people were accepted, including Singh.
In Titans, too, Singh found, community and curriculum are equal partners. Half the classes are taught by Harris at his house while the others are conducted “junto style,” where the semester’s Titans gather at Harris’s home (he gives them the key) to discuss readings and, even more importantly, just hang out.
Nothing matters more to Harris, Singh said, than for Titans to build friendships that last “at least 10 years.” And as with Kernel after it, those relationships were often cultivated through meals. Harris hosted regular barbecues that featured speakers from his network. They varied from his wife Julia – “a motherly figure” for “pretty much everyone in Titans,” Singh said – to the Army General and one-time Director of the CIA, David Petraeus.
Each year, Harris still invites all 500+ Titans back to his home for a three-day gathering called Lobster Fest. Hundreds show up, now long-time friends, still seeking wisdom from someone who taught them that even finance could be conducted with kindness.
“I had never seen anyone gracefully navigate that [intersection] before I saw Britt do it,” Singh told me.
That same grace drew Singh to web3. In 2017, he joined the first EthGlobal Hackathon, drawn to the space’s open source approach to funding. Within a year he’d join Gitcoin in a community role, traveling the world on the crypto conference circuit.
At Toronto’s EdCon in 2018, he met future Kernel steward Andy Tudhope – then a technical evangelist for Status, an open source, crypto-based communication app. Months later, at Prague’s DevCon, he saw Tudhope host both a philosopher’s salon and a hackathon inside a Czech castle. Singh saw a kindred – and familiar – spirit. “I've met a few people in my life like Britt Harris and in my book Andy is one of them,” he said, “especially in the mix of deep technical understanding and the broader ways of how to live a good life.”
Mark Beylin (l) and Singh
When Singh moved to New York in 2019, he was balancing that mix in his own life. He started hosting juntos – where he met Jypsy – with his roommate Mark Beylin, the founder of Bounties Network (like Gitcoin, Bounties was then part of Ethereum’s commercial arm, ConsenSys.) And at Gitcoin – now as the Chief Operating Officer – Singh was helping guide the company’s early grants rounds, which were based on a liberal radicalism paper that Vitalik Buterin wrote with Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl. (Buterin, a primary technical mind behind Ethereum, is a frequent speaker during Kernel blocks).
The paper applied ideas from Quadratic Voting – a nuanced system that accounts for the intensity of voter conviction – to funding. It became the basis of Gitcoin’s work: to fund open source software in a way that fosters collective organization. Naturally, hackathons were a regular fixture, and prizes – paid in DAI, a stablecoin used in the Ethereum network – attracted some of the blockchain’s brightest young developers. And one in particular kept winning them all. “We were like ‘who's this kid who's winning all the hackathons?’” Singh said.
That ‘kid’ was Sachin Mittal, another Kernel steward-to-be. Mittal didn’t just want to win, though. He wanted to gather all the best hackers in the Gitcoin community and build things together. Said Singh, “that really was the fire that sparks off Kernel.”
When I joined Kernel, I was jaded. Time and time again, I’d watched web3’s ideals get co-opted by capitalist tendencies. But Kernel felt different. When I landed in the ‘Intros’ channel of Kernel’s Slack, I didn’t find the typical copy pasta of bio and resumé. It was nearly diaristic, laden with curiosity, self-awareness and inquiry. I was moved by the openness and care with which people shared themselves and then were received.
And while there were crypto-rooted DeFi and Tokenomics guilds, the learning modules themselves were focused on fundamental questions: what is money? What is trust? The curriculum forced us to reconsider our long-held notions of basic societal building blocks – even with the words themselves. ‘Transact’ became ‘trans-act,’ ‘careful’ became ‘care-full.’ Those minor shifts left cracks in the foundation of how we imagine the world can be. And through them, the light that shines suggests that, perhaps, we need not give up on our ideals after all.
Tudhope wrote the curriculum’s syllabus during Kernel’s genesis block, and in expanded form, it remains the bulwark of the program. When Tudhope first wrote it, Singh remembers wondering whether it was appropriate to pay him for the work, but he never asked for payment. It was a gift.
Open source software comes from a lineage of gift economics, Singh told me, and ‘The Gift’ became Kernel’s final module. In it, Tudhope writes of gift-giving as an ancient practice. “This module is not about how to give more efficiently and transparently,” he writes. “It is about how to live well with one another in continuous circles of reciprocity, giving and receiving in each moment in the same way in which we breathe in and out.”
He lists various gift-giving experiments, from Bitcoin to Burning Man, before asking the reader to consider why they’ve come to Kernel. “Are you here to give a gift to the world, or to take what you believe yourself to be owed; be it acknowledgement, status, wealth, or power?” he writes. “What if web3 is not about status at all, but about service? Would you still be interested in pursuing this particular avenue?”
After five blocks, Kernel spun out of Gitcoin, creating space to become their own public goods experiment and focus on healthy peer-to-peer learning. As time passed, stewardship evolved. Mittal and Tudhope took steps back, with a rotating cast of Kernel founders and fellows stepping up to steward the project forward. Other things have changed, too: the application process shifted and guilds receded. There’s also talk of making Kernel more continuous and less block-based.
But much is still the same. There are still juntos, and fellows still choose their own adventure, focusing on a craft and some quest for improvement – for the self and for the society that surrounds it. Usually, those are one and the same.
“As I figure out how to tend to [Kernel], I invariably figure out how to tend to myself,” Jypsy said when I asked her about Kernel’s ongoing evolution.
In many ways, Kernel is the molino for our curiosity and self-determination. The more we give it, the more it gives us. It’s part of the lineage of the gift-givers, traced back to Benjamin Franklin and beyond, where humans willingly roil amidst life’s larger questions. In time, texture emerges and we begin to understand how we can be of service in this grand adventure. And when we look back, assuredly, the best part will be the friends we made along the way.
lead image: Vivek Singh (l) and Andy Tudhope