For the seven of us

What Baobab Is

The shared picture above everyone's section — what this is, what we're doing, our edge, and why this stack.

Living draft · honest · meant to be argued with

This is not a design doc and not a spec. Each of you already knows your own section and your role; this is the part that sits above everyone's section and explains why it all hangs together. By the end, each of us should be able to answer four things in our own words:

1. What is this?
2. What are we doing?
3. What advantages do we have over the others?
4. Why is this technology stack better — and where it honestly isn't (yet), we say so.

It's meant to be argued with. If a claim in here doesn't hold up, that's a finding, not a failure.

01What this is

Baobab is a commons — the diaspora's own public ground, where people gather to trade and to do things together.

A commons is shared, stewarded, and owned by no one in particular — which is exactly the point. It is not social media. Social media is its own thing: it gathers people's attention in order to sell it. A commons gathers people in order to serve them. The difference is structural, not a slogan — it shows up in what we hold, what we send, and what we track.

Spoiler: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Concretely, the commons is three public utilities in one place — decentralized banking, decentralized messaging, and decentralized news. Money, conversation, and information, none of them owned by a company that can switch them off.

Why it's built this way comes down to three things: portability — your identity, your money, and your words travel with you; security — you hold the keys, so no one can quietly take what's yours; and an ethic — this is built for people the existing systems have too often mistreated, so it is their own system, not one more landlord over them. We govern it for now; at some point we may not have to. And it should be good for everyone — when a commons like this works, it sparks things for the people in it and for us alike.

02How it works at a glance — the shim

Baobab is a shim, not a vault.

A vault holds your things: your identity, your money, your messages — and because it holds them, it can lose them, leak them, be subpoenaed for them, or be ordered to hand them over. A shim holds nothing. It sits over the rails people already own and lets them use those rails together, in the open.

So on Baobab:

• You hold your identity. We never had it.
• You hold your money. We never sent it, never custodied it.
• Your activity is public. We never kept a private dossier — there isn't one to keep.

The only thing Baobab ever does is make these rails usable together, in one calm place, for people who have mostly been an afterthought to everyone else.

03The technology — the matrix, and why each choice

Every technical choice serves three intentions, and the "why" matters as much as the "what":

1. Let a person own their own identity.
2. Refuse the activities we won't do — tracking, following people around, harvesting attention, holding what isn't ours.
3. Be reachable by anyone, anywhere — tied to no gatekeeper's permission, no western bank, no app store. Not out of rebellion. Out of freedom.

The stack at a glance

This is the "matrix" — not magic, just a set of choices that each remove a way for the platform to own, track, or control the person.

A word on RSS, since the news layer rests on it: it is one of the sturdiest technologies on the web because it's unglamorous. An open standard, stable for over two decades, emitted by every serious publisher, that no gatekeeper can revoke or put behind a login. We read it server-side and cache it, so the news keeps flowing even when any one source has a bad day. Building on boring, durable standards is itself the strategy — it is how a commons outlives the companies around it.

Why the sign-in works the way it does

You sign in with a passphrase — not an email, a phone number, a Google account, or a bank-verified identity. The intention is simple: your identity should depend on nothing and no one but you. A passphrase you hold can't be closed by a provider, demanded from us (we never stored it), or denied to someone who lacks a western email or a government ID. The trade-off is real and we say it plainly: if you lose your passphrase, no one — including us — can recover it for you. That is the cost of truly owning the keys, and we design around it (optional encrypted backups, social recovery later) instead of pretending it away.

Why it's not in the App Store

Baobab is a web app, opened in a browser and installable to your home screen. That is a deliberate choice, and the advantages are concrete:

• No gatekeeper. No company can review, reject, or remove us — and a crypto-and-community app is exactly the kind a store can decide it doesn't like.
• No 15–30% tax. App stores take a large cut of digital transactions; skipping them is part of how our fees can stay at 1% and 2.5%.
• Instant updates. Fixes and features ship the moment they're ready, with no review queue between us and the people using it.
• One link, everywhere. Distribution is a URL. Anyone can reach it, share it, and open it — no account with a store, and no western credit card just to install.

Why this works everywhere — and isn't tied to western systems

Put those choices together and the real point appears. To use Baobab, a person does not need: a bank the western system recognizes, a credit card to enter an app store, a government ID to prove who they are, or permission from any platform to be let in. Identity is a passphrase. Money is on open crypto rails, not a western bank. Distribution is the open web, not a store. News is RSS, not a licensing deal.

That is why it can work across Africa, Latin America, and anywhere the usual infrastructure is thin, restricted, or simply absent — the places that get treated as an afterthought. And the spirit matters: this is freedom, not rebellion. We stand apart from these systems not to spite them, but so that a person's ability to gather, speak, and trade never depends on someone else's permission. Being reachable by everyone is the whole point.

04The advantages — what falls out of holding nothing

Because of the shim, the advantages are not features we bolted on. They are consequences of the structure:

• They can't order us to stop telling people things — because we never kept anyone's anything to begin with.
• They can't order us to stop sending people money — because we never sent anyone any money. The person sends it, on rails they own.
• We never "did" the thing they'd come after. The only thing we ever did is put a thin shim over rails people already control so they can use them together.
• We don't own anyone. We don't make money by tracking people or following them around. We earn when people prosper, not when we surveil them.

That last line is the whole business model in one sentence — and it's why the product can afford to be calm.

05The LLM in the background — helper and guardian

There is a large language model on Baobab. It says plainly that it is a language model — it never claims to be a person. It lives in the background and it is there to help, working only from what is already public (there are no secret comments; it reads what anyone could read). It is not a surveillance layer.

What it's there for:

• Keeping a light watch over certain kinds of behavior (the public square's referee).
• Auto-translation, so people across languages can actually talk.
• Helping you understand market forces when you're trading.
• Helping you play chess, helping you have fun.
• Helping you hang out with your buddies every once in a while.
• Helping you find a soccer match to watch.
• Gauging — from your public comments and what you've said you care about — what you might find worth reading, and starting a conversation about it. Not tracking. Just a librarian who happened to read your open notes.

The open square vs. the private room

Two kinds of conversation live on Baobab, and we are honest about the difference:

• Open chats are public. Anyone can read them — including baobab-llm, which stands watch as a guardian, looking for malicious actors and bad-faith activity. Spotting that pattern is exactly what a language model trained on the open record is good at, and we are training it to be better at it. On the open square we have control, and we will use it to stop people from doing harm.
• Encrypted personal messages are private. A one-to-one DM is end-to-end encrypted — just you and the other person. We cannot read it and have no control over its contents, by design. Safety there doesn't come from us reading along; it comes from two things: every person has a real identity when they join, and people can report each other. Accountability without surveillance.

So: we guard the commons because it is ours to guard, and we protect the private room by making people accountable to each other rather than to us.

Encrypted personal messages

Beyond the open rooms, you can hold encrypted, personal conversations — pop open a small window from someone's face or their page, send a note or an emoji, and keep the thread in your own "My Chats." Each one is labeled encrypted · personal: just you and them, readable by no one else — not even us.

06Smart contracts — becoming a real business marketplace

The wallet is also where the marketplace gets teeth. We add smart contracts to it, starting with the simplest possible contract between two people — and we tell people, in plain terms, exactly what is being written in when it's written in. Disclosure is part of the product, not the fine print.

From that simplest seed, we expand into several types:

• Loans between people.
• Transactions — straightforward exchanges.
• Triggered ("fire") transactions — contracts that fire when a condition or event is met, so a deal can complete itself.
• Verification — including optional third-party verification in certain locations and for certain kinds of products, so a buyer can trust what they're buying.

The destination: Baobab becomes a genuinely good business marketplace — real trade between real people, on rails they own, with trust built in instead of extracted.

Trust and safety in trade

Commerce gets the same honest treatment as conversation:

• Badges. Earned, verifiable reputation shown plainly — so you can see who has done real business and who is brand new, before you deal with them.
• AI moderation. baobab-llm watches the open marketplace the way it watches the open square — flagging scams, bad-faith sellers, and malicious activity.
• Smart-contract security. Contracts state their terms in plain language and are disclosed before signing; the simplest forms ship first, audited before they carry real weight.
• Governance, at two levels. Each deal can have its own board of governors (the people in it set the terms and the oversight); above that, a governing body stewards the system itself so the rails stay open and fair.

And the quiet, radical part: because we hold nothing, people can conduct trade and move value even where someone else would rather they couldn't. This is not about helping anyone break a law — it is about not abandoning people to the gaps between systems. When a person's own government won't let them sell something as ordinary as food to eat, or when people are trapped, cut off, or mistreated and simply need to receive help and stay connected, those gaps are their own kind of harm. Being reachable and self-custodied is, sometimes, exactly what makes the difference. That is the point.

07The money — where we stand in crypto, and what's ours

The seven deserve an honest read of the crypto landscape, because money is where trust is won or lost.

Where we sit (honestly)

• Against the African players — the rails people already use across the continent and diaspora: M-Pesa and mobile money (the bar for "money on your phone"), Flutterwave / Paystack (payments infrastructure), Chipper Cash (cross-border transfers), Yellow Card (crypto on/off-ramp in many countries), Paxful / Noones (peer-to-peer crypto with large African user bases). Several of these are further along than we are today on cash-in/cash-out, agent networks, and licensing. Say so plainly. Our difference is not "more features" — it's that we custody nothing and the money moves on rails the person owns.
• Against the American players — Coinbase, Kraken (large, liquid, regulated — and custodial: they can freeze, close, or report an account), Cash App, Venmo, PayPal (polished payment apps, custodial). And the honest one: MetaMask is self-custody like us — it doesn't hold your money either. So non-custody isn't unique to us. What's unique is what we put around it.

What's ours that they don't have

1. Social transfers. Because Baobab knows who you follow, you can send money to the people in your circle by name — not by pasting a 42-character address and praying. The social graph makes a transfer human and safer: you pay people you actually know, and the resolved address is shown to you before you confirm. Pay-by-name is circle-only by design — it's an anti-spoofing feature, not a convenience hack.

2. Business trust, built on-chain. When someone new arrives to do business, we don't ask them to be trusted on day one — we let them earn it, in public:

• New traders start with low limits — the amount they can move is capped until they have a track record.
• Every completed deal is recorded on-chain — a real, verifiable history no one can fake or quietly erase.
• The AI sets the limit, not a loan officer. baobab-llm reads the on-chain record and raises or lowers a person's limit based on what they have actually done — transparent, earned, and adjusted as the record grows.
• That history becomes the edge: people seen and known to have done honest business get higher limits and a visible reputation, so others can trust them to do more. Trust is earned in the open and carried with you — not granted by us, not rented from a credit bureau.

3. Loans, with your own board of governors. People can lend each other money directly, through a contract — and the people in a deal set up their own board of governors for their own loans and their own arrangements. Governance is local: the participants set the terms and the oversight, not a distant institution.

What we take — the whole business model, in two numbers

That's it. No hidden spread, no data sold, no minimum extracted — small fees on real activity. We earn when people do business, not when we watch them. (The exact rates may flex a little as the system stretches out, but the principle — light, visible, tied to real value — does not.)

This is the part that makes Baobab a place you'd actually run a business: trust that's portable, verifiable, and yours.

08The landscape — what the others do, honestly

A clear-eyed list of the other platforms: what they actually do, and how they track people — so the "why" in sections 3 and 4 lands as a concrete contrast, not an abstract claim.

Two honesty rules for this section (and for the stack comparison in Section 3):

• Where they're better, say so — in both places. Some of these platforms are faster, deeper, more polished, or further along than we are today. We name that plainly, both here and in the technology section. We're not selling; we're orienting.
• Note who isn't focused on our own thing. There are projects that do things like this — decentralized identity, non-custodial wallets, open marketplaces, open social protocols. Good work, much of it. But almost none of them are built for our thing: the African continent and its diaspora, gathered in one calm place to know each other, trade, and prosper. That focus is the gap we fill.

09Where this goes — staying alive

The point of holding nothing is also that there is less to kill. The direction from here:

• Distribute the servers. Spread the infrastructure so no single machine, host, or jurisdiction is a single point of failure — the system keeps running even if any one piece goes down or is pressured.
• A governing body to keep it alive. A stewarding group whose job is to keep the system up and the rails open, so people can keep conducting trade regardless of any one company's fortunes. Not an owner of people — a caretaker of the commons.
• Phone applications for real commerce. Mobile apps built for buying, selling, and transactions — trade in your pocket, on rails you own.

This is the part that turns "a good product" into "a thing that outlives us."

Still to add / open questions

• Section 3: non-technical pass + honest "built vs. needs testing" status.
• Section 7: the actual comparison table.
• Section 8: how the governing body is actually constituted (later).
• Where this doc eventually lives (internal brief vs. a public "About" page).