🌍 This Week in Web3forGood
This Week in Web3forGood: Kernel Edition
Editors’ note: Web3ForGood is welcoming thought leaders in Web3 to share on our platform as guest posters for the month of December. This week’s newsletter was authored by Aliya and Vivek from Kernel. We hope you enjoy as much as we did! Interested in contributing a future guest post? Let us know.
Hello to All the Web3ForGood Readers,
Warm greetings and good risings from Vivek and Aliya at Kernel.
🔍 TLDR: Kernel on Web3 🌿
Kernel is a fellowship and peer-learning environment dedicated to building a better web. Each fellow is asked to bring their full self into Kernel, both via 1) working on a craft and 2) in dialogue with others.
We’ve been lucky to have both Sam and Abeera with us in Kernel blocks. We’re appreciative of the opportunity they’ve afforded us to share what we’re learning by building Kernel, the microcosms we’re observing in crypto and around the web, and our favorite links of 2024.
With Gratitude,
Vivek & Aliya, Kernel Stewards
Kernel Block X (KBX) runs January – April 2025, bringing together ~75-100 unique humans. KBX Fellows will engage with a curated syllabus and develop their projects in a collaborative environment rooted in decentralized principles.
Here is a unique link to apply for Web3ForGood readers.
What’s Inside
🦠 Reflection: Resistant Microcosms (by Aliya)
🔗 Kernel’s Hits: Our Favorite Links in 2024
🛡️ Dialogue, Craft, & Augmented Locality (by Vivek)
🧱 Projects By Kernel Fellows: 2024 Updates
✨ Your Invitation to Apply to KBX
🦠 Reflection: Resistant Microcosms (by Aliya)
On Values
The most significant story of crypto is still unfolding and it lies in the microcosms: the new customs and culture we are actively resisting, incubating, testing and living.
The potential of people, places, and projects steeped in values such as decentralization, distribution, peer-to-peer, permissionlessness, transparency, censorship resistance, and credible neutrality is too great to put into words when it is still being written. (More on these terms below).
All we have are our stories.
At a mystical-sounding place, Edge Esmeralda, Vivek and I collided with others drawn to “an IRL lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing.”
It was here we attended a health unconference in which each workshop was created emergently by participants. I made friends in the sauna who moved me–shifting how I view impact and recalibrating my perspective from a macro lens to a micro lens.
It was here Vivek and I piloted a workshop, “Augmented Locality,” exploring overlaps between digital and physical spaces. We participated in Esmeralda by bringing digital ideas into local contexts. We explored “Archives” at the Healdsburg Library and “Bulletins” at the Healdsburg Town Square, both ideas that have skeuomorphic lives technically but ultimately begin locally.
This IRL experience at Edge Esmeralda, and in the work we aspire to do at Kernel, help to make my sense concrete: that a movement energized by founding values in crypto and other emergent technologies signal a significant shift in what we understand to be possible.
The groundswell is manifest in the people, places, and projects aspiring to innovate, invariably transforming our culture with it.
Many latch onto blockchain technology because of its capacity to redefine wealth and the values it enshrines in its code–indelibly laced with traces of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. It began with Bitcoin, continued with Ethereum, and now lives in a variety of crypto projects beyond these initial two.
Founding Blockchain Values
In 2009, Bitcoin became the first currency powered by cryptography with no central locus that did not require a client-server architecture, but allowed each computer (node) to participate in and co-create the network. We call this decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer (p2p).
It is a currency anybody can participate in so long as they have the interest, an internet connection, and an on-chain wallet. We call this permissionless.
It is both a currency and distributed ledger that executes according to immutable computer code. We call this transparent, censorship resistant, and cryptographically secure.
It does not favor any user, any transaction, or any one outcome, functioning agnostically for whomever uses it. We call this credibly neutral.
Note: It is worth testing how any living crypto project holds up against founding values.
On Customs and Culture
And so what do you get when people, places, and projects inspired by the values of an emergent technology re-imagine the world by considering the implications of attaching incentives to computer code that is immutable, incorruptible, physically unattainable, legally undefinable (for now), decentralized, and distributed?
I argue that you get microcosms that maybe we cannot wholly and simplistically call good but that we may call resistant.
Microcosms full of unique souls–each who resists in part the corrupt centralized and extractive practices defining corporations and legacy systems; opaque governments, democratic processes, and legislative policies; and the second order consequences that produce skewed levels of disparity and inequity, food insecurity, environmental destruction, social malaise and loneliness, inaccessible healthcare, commodified education, and perhaps the most depraved of them all—the poverty of the imagination: a sense that we have no agency to transgress the inertia anesthetizing us.
The crux has been hiding in plain sight, and one we discuss often in Kernel á la kindred soul, David Graeber:
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Being part of a non-speculative, techno-optimistic corner in crypto is the most hopeful I have felt in my 33 years on earth. Hopeful because of the growth in spaces that embody emergence and participatory learning. Hopeful because such spaces stoke our imaginations and remind us of our agency–that we don’t have to accept systems as they are when we are the ones who create them.
This is the change I find most compelling–the cosmically cultural shift: that we practice new customs and weave a new culture greater than the one we have been given.
The changes are stirring technically, as well. Cryptography allowed for cryptocurrencies, and advances in the field have only grown more compelling: with more programmable cryptography, the field shifts from defensive to offensive, and beyond to serendipitous. Stablecoins, recently coined “room-temperature superconductors for financial services”, have reached global adoption rates that rival Visa. Our data infrastructure is vastly improved by the cypherpunk ideals entrenched in crypto, just in time to balance the strength of private LLMs and artificial intelligence.
It is our vision at Kernel to co-create peer-learning environments that outlast ourselves. To create environments with foundational architectures of participation: structures and customs that allow us to share in playing the most valuable games we can with one another.
Kernel believes in ‘tools that help us help each other,' and we frame crypto tech, and tech more broadly, in such a light. We attempt to give back the evil of the web–notably the tendencies to over-consume and extract.
This leaves us with questions to begin again: in which environments do we aspire to participate, and what am I doing to co-create them?
🔗 Kernel’s Hits: Our Favorite Links in 2024
Every week, someone posts an interesting link in Kernel. Here are some rabbit holes we fell down in 2024.
What if money expired? — by Jacob Baynam. Minchi Park (KB8) posted this in Kernel Slack on January 16th this year, and on March 22nd, Andy posted a github link attempting an implementation, called Gesells.
We Need to Rewild the Internet — by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon. Learning the best we can from ecologists and economists, most notably Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, writer of, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.”
Building cryptographic apps for human connection — Vivek Bhupatiraju (KB4) & Andrew Lu. This talk opened our eyes to a new era of cryptography: where cryptography helps create new experiences, not just ‘defensive’ technology.
Making sense of Tether on Tron — Liam Horne. Stablecoins are a hot topic and source of web3 for good. This post relays the story of an Ethereum builder going on the ground and finding out why, in fact, Tron was being used in countries around the world.
Rind Posh Maal Orchestral Fusion. The #jam-music channel in Kernel is a constant source of new sounds outside the algorithm. This Kashmiri folk sound mixed with western tunes was posted by Farraz Mir (KB9) in July.
From Hackathons to Juntos: Kernel's Enduring Quest to Feed the Better Parts of Ourselves by MacEagon Voyce (KB7) at Decential Media. Spending time with Keagon on Kernel was a treat!
The Augmented Locality Arena — by Aaron Lewis & Josh Morin. A link of references from our summer field study, from which many references continue to sprout.
The Kernel Reading List – by Andy Tudhope. The Kernel Book is 9 chapters long, one for each week in Kernel. It references at least 51 books, and many more hyperlinks.
🛡️ Dialogue, Craft, & Augmented Locality (by Vivek)
Kernel has always been about dialogue. A Kernel Block creates a ‘stone soup,’ (h/t Jasmine Wang, KB4), mixing ~150 fellows, ~60 project ideas, a book of ~18 questions, and a trust that the environment can help each participant. We ask Kernel Fellows to bring 1) their full selves, 2) their active projects or practices, 3) a spirit of service.
This stone soup starts with real conversation, which has unfolded across 9 blocks in surprising ways:
On trusted systems allowing greater trust in people, on local financial systems with Rebecca Mqamelo (KB2), on poetic resonances with Kelsey Chen (KB4), on augmenting our ability to think for ourselves, on community-owned libraries, on scaling Ethereum (and trust spaces) with Vitalik Buterin, on onchain music and copyright with MacEagon Voyce (KB7). On identity, zero-knowledge proofs, privacy, and artificial intelligence. On fashion, regenerative farming, on storytelling and listening, on biomimicry. On DeFi, on indigenous conversation, in Figma design files, on weird money, in HackMD files. On trust, freedom, giving. On life, on struggle, on dancing, and indeed, on realising love.
Each topic above brings a specific Kernel Fellow to mind, and as a learning environment, there are infinite topics to cover. There are currently 2,211 fellows who can help bring us into dialogue when the time is most right. When that time comes it is not always up to us, but the stone soup mixes every year, twice a year, leaving us just enough structure to trust in our environment.
Kernel is also about building.
In 2025, we feel excited to re-focus on balancing roots: building. We want KBX to be in service of works-in-progress, projects, and creating new artifacts together.
We are lucky to have a plethora of companies, projects, and stories to draw upon from 9 blocks. Here are some stories we loved seeing evolve this year.
🧱 Projects By Kernel Fellows: 2024 Updates
When Francesco Agosti participated in KB2, he was working on Split Finance and a side project called Phantom (a Solana wallet). We spent more time with Francesco on Split Finance, but thankfully, he spent more time on Phantom — one of the most used wallets in crypto.
Chaos Labs was just an idea when Omer Goldberg (KB3) joined Kernel. He helped develop it into the leading DeFi risk solution, recently announcing Edge Risk Oracles supporting real-time parameter adjustments in Aave’s core lending protocol. They recently raised a $55MM funding round to continue innovating on DeFi, and increasingly, all types of oracles.
Sherlock by Jack Sanford (KB2) has consistently, for years, worked on improving the crypto security space. First on audits (via audit contests), then with insurance, and most recently, with a new security firm called Blackthorn, Jack has led Sherlock into a important position in the crypto security space.
Future Primitive has had the single largest presence in Kernel from any given team, with 8 team members participating across two Kernel blocks. Benny, Jayden, and Alanah(all KB7), introduced us to the cultural experience it is to know their team. Their recent funding round, led by a16z crypto, focused on the PERMA primitive, making photos more permanent than ever.
Annaliese Milano Merfield (KB2) joined us as an Anthropology PhD student, joining an early junto on Debt: The First 5,000 years by David Graeber, a famous book in crypto circles. It turns out Graeber was her current PhD advisor! Four years later, she completed her PhD thesis on “The Social Layer: An Ethnography of Two Cryptocurrency Communities in the United States”, with help from a variety of Kernel Fellows.
There are 120+ other active, ongoing projects by Kernel Fellows which have raised a total of $120MM including LiFi, Coinshift, Spectral, Coinvise, Bonfire, and Jokerace. They continue to make Kernel a vibrant place for builders.
Kernel emphasizes locality.
“Distributed systems lend themselves well to local culture and genuinely civic spaces, both online and offline. Brewster (Kahle) often speaks of a globe of villages, not a global village: we want everyone to be able to connect to whom they please; we do not want to cultivate monocultures because we recognise that diversity is the natural response to adversity. Fostering plurality is the most viable evolutionary strategy.” — Andy Tudhope (Lock The Web Open, Module 3)
The Augmented Locality pilot, which we ran alongside See What’s Under and was funded by the Ethereum Foundation and Other Internet, deserves our last message of 2024.
The program invited ~30 technologists to explore the overlaps between digital and local spaces. We learned through five pilot field trips to physical places that also serve as common digital metaphors: Memorials, Archives, Bulletins, Byways, and Sanctuaries.
These field trips were intended to increase our understanding of digital metaphors. If Twitter is the “Town Square”, and Instagram houses our memories, what can we learn from our physical predecessors to improve future social technologies? How can we improve these digital tools by better remembering their physical counterparts?
Across the globe, we took “field trips” to our local libraries, memorials, serendipity spaces, and archives. We recorded field logs, and went on walks with peers to discuss our findings. This sense of place on the internet is something we will continue to explore in Kernel and in projects with fellows.
And so, Kernel ends with two balancing hopes for all Kernel Fellows and ourselves. May we all continue to cultivate:
1) A life of craft: making what you build, create, and consume matter. Where dialogue and creation meet well.
2) An augmented sense of locality: deep awareness of our place in the world, at this moment in time.
We wish you all the best as the new year approaches, and a reminder from a long conversation in Kernel: “Balance always has to come from where there is more.”
✨ Your Invitation to Apply to KBX
Kernel Block X (KBX) runs January – April 2025, bringing together ~75-100 unique humans. KBX Fellows will engage with a curated syllabus and develop their projects in a collaborative environment rooted in decentralized principles.
Here is a unique link to apply for Web3ForGood readers.
(A note from Sam & Abeera: We are both past Kernel fellows and hope you will join us, along with Aliya, Vivek, and all the other Kernel fellows and stewards in conversation in this amazing space. We’re available to answer any questions and share our experiences 🤍🤍)