Through blockchain communities and grassroots economics, societies can escape 'addiction to money', says former high-energy physicist Will Ruddick. His ideas are at work in some 20 countries.
From the Trump family’s forays into crypto currencies you might think it’s all about getting investors to put money into a new idea in order to cash out big before anyone else does. That’s not how researcher and activist Will Ruddick sees it, and his ideas are at work in Kenyan villages, Jackson (Missisippi), Ukraine, South America — some 20 countries — in what you might label as blockchain communities. Peter Hulm explores some of the oldest and newest ideas in development.
Will Ruddick and his projects
Will Ruddick, a former high-energy physicist and U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, doesn’t claim to have invented what he calls grassroots economics. It’s so named because he found the processes at work in ecosystem dynamics at the lowest level as well as in the newest economic theory, using the latest technology in putting it to work.
For promoting his ideas in an “informal urban settlement”, the largest slum in the Kenyan city of Mombasa, Ruddick and 5 friends were jailed in 2012 on allegations of masterminding a secessionist plot and forgery for issuing circulating commitment vouchers to cash-poor businesses. The prosecution was later dropped after a petition from The Hague and intervention by the attorney general: “Everyone saw it as unacceptable for the government to forbid a mother from trading her commitments to provide tomatoes to pay for her daughter’s school fees,” he writes (LINK).
Today, Ruddick reports, grassroots economics enables nearly 35,000 Kenyans to provide each other basic necessities without the need for national currency, and involving over $1.5m worth of trade on the network this year.
In February 2025 Ruddick published a free 140-page PDF guide to his theory/action programme in English and French (LINK), and on 20 September 2025 he discussed his ideas with ProSocial World president David Sloan Wilson on the Internet (LINK).
David Sloan Wilson and his idol Charles Darwin
ProSocial World is committed to practising Darwin’s evolutionary ideas in tackling social problems and showing how Elinor Ostrom (the first woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize) was right in the community-sharing ideas she found in rural Switzerland (LINK).
Lin Ostrom at the 2009 Nobel Prize awards
Holger Motzkau at wikipedia
Ruddick’s guide, Grassroots : Reflection and Practice, has 8 pages of laudatory forewords from people who have used the ideas he explains, from an ecosystem restoration specialist to a monetary theorist.
Along with a Kenyan woman activist Ruddick helped establish the Grassroots Economics Foundation (LINK) as a non-profit in Kenya in 2010. It has collaborated with “hundreds of previously marginalized communities to rediscover, harness, and share their collective abundance”, he notes.
The Spring Prize NGO says Grassroots has restored over 1,200 farms and supported regenerative agroforestry across thousands of acres, improving food security and benefiting over 14,000 people (LINK).He has worked with the World Food Programme as well as the Red Cross.
Ruddick’s answer for local development is “commitment pooling”. It means what it says: people pool their commitments to help each other. So why blockchain communities?
Grassroots worked with the local Red Cross on using a blockchain currency system to help local communities in Kenya.
Commitment pooling
Adam Bornstein of the Danish Red Cross records: Grassroots “helped over 100 communities establish CICs (local currencies that allow communities to continue trading even when national currency is scarce), facilitating more than 1 million peer-to-peer transactions. This has reduced poverty and encouraged local trade without relying on national currencies.”
He adds: “Grassroots has managed to introduce and scale-up the Community Inclusion Currencies (CIC) programme within the Red Cross. […] Before the CIC concept was introduced, the Red Cross had a ban on blockchain development. Now CIC is not only synonymous with blockchain but also has become a new modality within our toolkit. The challenge of introducing a radically different approach to programming and M&E [Monitoring and Evaluation] has been expertly navigated by Grassroots. There were zero margins for error and Grassroots executed immaculately.”
OCTOPI
French monetary theorist Aude Péronne says of Waddick: “His “groundbreaking work in the field of complementary currencies set new standards, with his early adoption of mobile phone and blockchain technologies, and his unparalleled ability to scale community-based systems into polycentric networks of tens of thousands, demonstrates his visionary leadership in this field. His team at Grassroots Economics has empowered marginalized communities in urban slums, refugee camps, and poor rural areas across Kenya and beyond.”
Ruddick acknowledges: “The term Grassroots originates as a metaphor for fundamental, foundational movements arising from ordinary people, akin to roots of grass; a single blade of grass is quite weak, but together the roots of grass can hold whole mountainsides together.”
“When maize requires more potassium and nitrogen, it sends signals through the fungal network. In response, the beans release their excess nitrogen and the squash their abundant potassium into the network, where the maize absorbs them. In return, when maize has surplus phosphorus, it can send it back through the network to the beans and squash. This constant exchange of resources, facilitated by the fungi, forms a grassroots economy that functions continuously below the surface.
“A plant could pull on the network’s nutrients their entire life. It could then be eaten by a deer, and that deer could feed on the abundance of such plants for their entire life, only returning nutrients through defecation and death, and the system continues chugging along just fine. In a healthy ecosystem each organism IS part of the common-pooled resources.”
Ruddick’s further point is that if reciprocity is ignored, the system breaks down. “After learning from the Kamba people of Kitui, Kenya, […] I found similar resilient communities in rural villages where I settled and lived along the coast of Kenya.”
But this was all before colonization changed the relationships, and imposed a national currency, starting an “addiction to money”.
But reciprocity needs rules. “If you are offering someone something valuable like your time and services—since giving someone your time is not something you will ever get back—you may want to be explicit as to what kinds of goods or services you expect in return, over what time period, and so on. Should you want continued exchange over time, this curation of your valuable goods or services—and those you desire—is the beginning of an economic commons and can be seen as a fledgling intangible living system,” Ruddick argues.
He uses the example of an agreed exchange carrots and apples. “This type of agreement can break easily. What happens if no one wants the apples? What happens if there are not enough carrots or apples for the next time? Bilateral pools can continue to thrive when there is a huge abundance of both items, but they can also stagnate if those two items are not being exchanged for each other. It would be a coincidence if someone with excess carrots wanted to exchange them for apples.”
He points out that our social arrangements usually involve more than an agreement between two people, so that one person’s production can meet several people’s demands for apples or carrots. And instead of carrots or apples, we can use bananas as an intermediary. Whether the issue not a single physical good but, for example, services, nutrients or seeds, they in fact involve commitments.
“In the communities I live among, each family is part of many [commitment] groups. This means that one family may have commitments as well as a reputation that transcends many different groups of neighbours. These commitments connect across families and clans for many purposes: childcare, education, farming, house construction, emotional support, weddings, funerals, and so on. In order for commitments to be shared across clans, a single pool isn’t enough.”
He observes: “Digital operating systems, virtual machines, and digital decentralized ledger environments can enable pooling to happen across agents, space and time in ways that differ from both biological and ancient human networks.”
In his discussion with David Sloan Wilson, Ruddick says cellphone SMS messages and QR codes on laminated cards have been used in his network to keep track of commitments and entitlements.
He agrees that pools should not depend on one organizer or “currency”: “One would not want a telecom top-up credit to become the only medium of exchange for everyone, as the simple failure of that company (a single point of failure) would be at risk of crashing the entire system.” That’s one reason for his suspicion of government-controlled currency.
He writes: “Those who control the majority of global capital […[,instead of fostering relationships of care and reciprocity with workers and communities, see [workers] as resources to exploit, replace, or discard. This centralization of power and control enables extraction and undermines the [sharing] functions inherent in living systems. [… ] Modern examples, like the criminalization of seed exchange in Kenya partly as a result of corporate lobbying, highlight how these centralized powers restrict the natural human capacity to exchange directly, pool resources, and build commons.”
He offers 3 common pooling examples in the Kenyan communities he knows:
1) agriculture—farmers may take turns helping each other with planting, harvesting, or other labour-intensive tasks;
2) domestic care—parents may rotate childcare responsibilities, allowing each parent time for other activities while ensuring that their children receive adequate care (also common with livestock management);
3) community projects—members of a community may take turns contributing their time and skills to complete projects like building a community center, maintaining shared spaces, or organizing events.
These require 4 communal decisions: curation (what is involved), relative valuation, limitation to prevent oversupply and overburdening of individuals, and exchange (how does it take place).
Ruddick’s major objection to national currencies is that in a commitment pool, “relative price can shift over time as new resources enter or as seasonal needs change. These relative values can be based on many things, like the energy and time or scarcity required to produce or deliver those resources, or the seasonal needs of the community. There’s no single yardstick (like the dollar) overriding every exchange; instead, the pool creates a flexible relative-value (a.k.a. price) index based on supply, demand, and consensus among participants.”
By contrast, through top-down controls using a single currency, “throughout history, we see various tactics that are aptly called colonial methods—such as outlawing indigenous practices, enforcing exclusive currency use for taxation, burdening communities with high-interest loans, privatizing common resources, imposing expensive licensing requirements, inflating costs through currency manipulation, favoring monopolies by shaping regulations, patenting life forms to monetize genetic resources, over-regulating communities in the name of safety or consumer protection, extracting fees through mandatory channels, promoting dependence by undermining local markets, and criminalizing resistance whenever communities attempt their own resource coordination systems.”
Illustrating a network of exchanges, closer means more intensive interaction
Ruddick also promotes what he calls a “knowledge commons” – shared valuable information, exemplified by his book and web network, as distinct from the majority of the world’s information and communication systems stored with restricted access in a few big companies’ databases.
He gives several examples of how blockchains, working in the same way as pool commitments, have provided security, transparency and immutability to build trust among local community members (see also Global-Geneva’s How UN Blockchains Revolutionize Humanitarian Aid for an explanation of how blockchains have been used in international organizations).
Ruddick points out that a “shared distributed ledger system ensures transparency and security by allowing all participants to verify and match their copies, making it nearly impossible to fake or lose information.”
In a 2019 Newsweek article about Grassroots Economics, banker Amber Bardet, who led blockchain initiatives at JPMorgan Chase, wrote: “Transactions in Grassroots currencies bear no resemblance to the speculative nature of cryptocurrency trading. Around 40 percent of the activity comes from people buying food—giving their families three meals a day, often for the first time. Because there are no fees and transaction costs, purchases can be as small as a single tomato. Schools accept community currencies as fees, in turn allowing them to enroll more children and pay teachers. Health clinics accept these currencies for all types of care.”
Working on a community vision
Kevin Owocki, Founder of Allo.capital & Gitcoin comments: “Will’s insights remind us to look beyond pure economic efficiency to consider how we can strengthen the social fabric that makes communities resilient. This book offers both practical guidance and inspiring examples of how to create systems that serve human flourishing.”
Economist Leanne Ussher, co-founder of Code A community decision-making, writes: “The commitment pool, like the clearing union [promoted by John Maynard Keynes], stands in stark contrast to a market-based system that relies on a national currency and competitive pricing. In such a system financial debts and credits set the stage for persistent trade imbalances, inequality, abuse of market power, and surplus extraction that creates cognitive dissonance and coordination failures.”
Practising exchange
Ussher declares: “Ruddick’s vision for a network of small decentralized commitment pools, scaling through a network of polycentric governance structures, offers a radical perspective: that commitment and reciprocity, rather than financial exchange, drive effective cooperation and collection action.”
Ruddick himself argues: “Imagine a world in which communities no longer depend on distant, extractive economic systems but instead thrive through networks of shared resources and commitments.”
“This vision isn’t just a dream—it’s happening today,” he reports. “I have witnessed it firsthand in Uganda and Kenya: networks of refugee camps, business in cities, and rural farmers who managed to coordinate the equivalent of billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services without a single currency transaction, relying instead on the pools of mutual commitments their ancestors used.”
Perhaps it’s an idea for all the U.N. organizations be exploring in depth.
Newsweek 2019 article on Grassroots Economics Foundation by Amber Baldet
Articles by Will Ruddick at Grassroots Economics
On Elinor Ostrom: The Swiss commune that transformed ecology
On related UN experiments: How UN blockchains revolutionize humanitarian aid
Achieving Gender Equality: Rupert Scofield and The Role of Social Entrepreneurs
Deputy editor Peter Hulm has a diploma in environment and development from the Open University and has been a consultant for many U.N. development bodies, except the World Food Programme.