ReSource

The mutual credit thesis came out of years of watching alternative economies try and fail to sustain themselves. The barter experiments at NuMundo, the room night credits in Costa Rica, the token experiments — they all pointed toward the same idea: what if communities could extend credit to each other without needing external capital?

The People

I met Duke in 2017 at a blockchain community house in Oakland. [placeholder — what was the connection? What were you both working on at the time?] In January 2020, I met Ofir Avigad in Guatemala. Ofir brought the technical and financial architecture to what had been, for me, a more intuitive thesis. We co-founded ReSource.

Building the Protocol

ReSource Network was a mutual credit protocol built on blockchain — specifically, we built on Celo after going through Celo Camp, where we were Batch 2 winners. The idea was that businesses could extend trade credit to each other in a decentralized network, creating liquidity without debt in the traditional sense.

I’d previously helped scale a decentralized e-commerce ecosystem to eight-digit revenue, so I had some sense of what adoption looked like at scale. But ReSource was a different kind of challenge. Mutual credit requires trust, and trust requires relationships, and relationships don’t scale the way software does.

What I Learned

I was co-founder and CEO from January 2021 through August 2022, then transitioned to a contributor role. During that time I also advised Socialstack and Gane Mobile — projects working in adjacent spaces.

The honest version: ReSource was where I learned the distance between a good thesis and messy adoption. [placeholder — where specifically did it stall? Was it technical complexity, market timing, the challenge of onboarding businesses to a new credit system, funding?]

The StableCredit model was sound in theory. The question was always whether you could get enough participants in a network to make it work, and whether the tooling could be simple enough for non-crypto-native businesses to use. [placeholder — what’s your honest assessment now? What would you do differently?]

The Thread Forward

I’m still a contributor to ReSource. The protocol still exists. Whether it finds its moment depends on factors I can’t fully control — market conditions, regulatory clarity, the maturation of the broader crypto ecosystem.

What ReSource gave me, beyond the technical education, was a clearer picture of how public goods funding works — and doesn’t work. That understanding became the foundation for Funding the Commons.