§ 00 · For the Seven of Us

Gullah. Leigh. GT. Reggie. Akinmade. Pop. Alfred.

This document is written to you specifically — the seven of us — and not to anyone else yet. The shape and the language are deliberate. Read it as a working draft, not a finished pitch.

What follows is the technical and political case for Baobab. It is long because the seven of us have agreed before that real work needs real argument, and because the decisions inside the architecture are not casual. Skip the parts you trust me on. Stop hard on the parts you disagree with. The decisions documented here are reversible until they ship — they are not reversible after.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots. Marcus Garvey

How to read this document

The pitch I want to make to each of you — and the work I want to ask you for — is in § 07 at the end. Each of you also has your own dedicated page at § 08 at the back of the document. If you only have ten minutes, skip to your page (§ 13.1 through § 13.7) and the closing.

The middle of the document is the reasoning, in the order that the reasoning actually moves. The structure is:

• § 01 Thesis — what we are building, in one paragraph and then in five
• § 02 Markets overview — which commodities, which exchanges, why these specifically
• § 03 Technology overview — plain English, no jargon, what the platform technically is
• § 04 Blockchain overview — what a blockchain is, why we chose Polygon over Ethereum / Tron / Solana / Base / BNB Chain
• § 05 Intellectual frame — the tradition we are working inside: Garvey, Fanon, Rodney
• § 06 Operator voice — my technical decisions, in my own words
• § 07 Architecture — the system map; who holds what
• § 08 Economics — the 1% fee, the cost stack, what we are not doing
• § 09 Features in beta — concrete catalog of what's live in the repository today, with tier gates and concrete pricing
• § 09a Economics deep dive — fee comparison vs M-Pesa, Western Union, MoonPay, Yellow Card; native-app question; low/medium/high revenue scenarios
• § 10 How to try it — where to click, what you see; SVG flow diagrams for the five surfaces that show the platform
• § 11 Roadmap — four slices to v1
• § 12 The ask — what I need from each of you
• § 13 Seven pages — one full page addressed to each of the seven of us

Read your own. Read everyone else's too — that is the whole point.

I have tried to keep my own opinions visible inside the document — set off in boxed pull-quotes — so that disagreement has somewhere to land. If a quote in a box is wrong, the architecture choice it justifies is reversible. If a quote in a box is right, the architecture choice it justifies is the load-bearing wall.

We are calling the platform Baobab. The name is intentional. The tree itself is the architecture: long-lived, water-holding, deeply rooted, gathering people under shade that was already there.

§ 01 · Thesis

What we are building, and why.

Baobab is a single home on the internet for the people of the continent and the diaspora to see where their commodities are priced, what is happening in their countries, who they can talk to about it, and — when they decide to trade — to do that trade safely. The platform itself does not own them, does not hold their money, and does not extract a story it cannot defend.

We are not building another social network. We are not building another exchange. We are building a thin lens — opinionated about what gets surfaced, neutral about who participates — sitting on top of open protocols that already let our people own their identity, their conversation, and their funds.

Three pillars: news, markets, and community. One graph behind it all — every commodity, every country, every region has its own page that fuses data, conversation, and discovery. The AI inside Baobab is a librarian, not a personality. It picks what you see, summarizes what is too long, flags what looks like a scam, and gets out of the way.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots. Marcus Garvey

The name is no accident. The baobab is what the continent gave the world as a metaphor for itself — older than the empires that came and went, deeply rooted, water-holding, gathering people under its shade. That is the architecture we are building underneath the screen.

§ 02 · Markets overview

Which markets, which exchanges, why these.

Baobab launches with twenty-nine commodity surfaces. The selection is not academic. Each one ties to a real flow of goods, a real concentration of producers in our audience's countries, and a real gap in how the existing financial-information platforms cover them.

Agricultural — fifteen markets

Cocoa, coffee, tea, sugar, cotton, palm oil, rubber, cashew, sesame, bananas, vanilla, tobacco, maize, sorghum, soybeans. Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana produce over 60% of the world's cocoa. Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda are the historic home of arabica coffee. Senegal, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Côte d'Ivoire move enormous cashew and sesame volumes. Madagascar is the world's largest vanilla producer. Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest banana exporter to the EU. Maize and sorghum are the staple grain economies of the continent. These are not abstractions. These are the actual income streams of the audiences Baobab serves.

Metals and minerals — twelve markets

Gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese, bauxite, iron ore, nickel, uranium. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces over 70% of the world's cobalt. Zambia and the DRC together hold most of Africa's copper belt. Zimbabwe and Namibia have growing lithium production. South Africa is the world's leading producer of platinum and a major gold producer. Ghana is fourth in gold globally. Botswana sits on the largest diamond reserves on Earth. Niger is a top-five uranium producer. The metals story is the most concentrated wealth story on the continent and the most misreported one in Western press.

Energy — two markets

Crude oil, natural gas. Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt are the continental oil heavyweights. Mozambique and Tanzania are emerging gas stories. Trinidad and Tobago — your operator's country — is a major LNG exporter.

African and Caribbean exchange surfaces

Global futures benchmarks (Yahoo Finance / Refinitiv pipes) are paired with regional exchange data wherever available:

The Caribbean exchange picture is thinner but real: Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange, Jamaica Stock Exchange, Bahamas. Slice 2 surfaces these alongside the Caribbean commodity story (rum, sugar, allspice, bauxite, oil, gas).

The local-currency overlay

Every price on Baobab is shown both in USD and in the user's local currency. A Nigerian reader sees ₦4,500,000 per ton of cocoa, not just $2,840. A Kenyan reader sees KSh per kilogram, a Zimbabwean reader sees the parallel-rate USD that actually applies. The platform does this because the prices only become legible to the audience when they are expressed in the unit the audience transacts in.

§ 03 · Technology overview

What the platform is, in plain English.

Skip this section if you already think in stacks. It is here for the members of the seven, and the people we want to bring to the table next, who would rather not read a diagram. The deeper architecture sits in § 07 if you want it.

The platform is three things stacked.

One: a website you visit in a browser, or install on your phone like an app. It looks like a clean modern news reader (think Feedly), with markets and rooms tabs. That part runs on the cheap end of the internet — Firebase Hosting, delivered globally with the same kind of network that runs Netflix.

Two: a quiet machine in the background that goes out every six hours and fetches commodity prices from Yahoo Finance, refreshes news from the African and diaspora publications we trust, and asks an AI (we use DeepSeek, an open-source-leaning Chinese-built model) to write one-sentence summaries of every story. That part runs on Firebase Functions and costs us pennies a day to operate.

Three: the federated layer — chat, identity, and money — that does not actually live in our hands. Forums and chat live on the Matrix protocol, the same open standard that has replaced IRC for serious federated chat. Identity lives in a wallet on the Polygon blockchain, generated for each user through a service called Web3Auth that lets them sign in with Google but quietly stands up a proper cryptographic wallet behind the scenes.

Why three separate layers

Because the three layers have three different lifespans. The website is the part we can change every week. The fetcher is the part we can update without anyone noticing. The federated layer is the part that is supposed to outlive us — that the community keeps even if Baobab the company stops existing tomorrow.

That last property is intentional. It is the architectural answer to "what if the platform gets bought, gets coopted, gets sued, or just dies?" The community keeps its accounts, its conversation history, its money. Baobab can disappear; the community cannot be deleted by anyone, including us.

The AI piece, briefly

We do not run a chatbot. There is no avatar. The AI shows up as quiet capabilities — a button next to a chart that says "explain this," a button next to a news item that says "summarize" or "translate to Hausa," an invisible filter that flags spam in the forums before you see it. The AI is the platform's librarian, not its personality. We pay DeepSeek about a quarter of a cent per thousand words, which adds up to under $30 a month at our launch scale.

§ 04 · Blockchain overview

The blockchain piece, and why this one.

A blockchain is a public ledger. Anyone can read it; no one company controls it. Each "account" on it is a wallet address. Whoever has the private key for that wallet controls the funds — there is no password, no login, no support line you call to reset things. That is the substrate. Below is the filter for why we chose what we chose.

What "putting things on the blockchain" actually means

Three different things, often conflated. Worth separating:

1. Storing data on a blockchain. Expensive, slow, public forever. Used only for ownership records, escrow state, and reputation badges — the things you need everyone to be able to verify independently.
2. Running code (smart contracts). Programs that live on the chain and execute when triggered. An escrow contract holds money until the buyer confirms delivery. A cooperative-pooling contract distributes profits pro-rata. Most of what we do onchain is smart contracts.
3. Anchoring off-chain data. Keep your data in a normal database but periodically write a hash of it to the chain so anyone can verify it wasn't tampered with. Useful for reputation history and dispute evidence.

The filter — which blockchain

There are many blockchains. We had to pick. Here is the actual comparison we ran:

Our choice and the asterisk

Polygon as the platform's primary chain. EVM-compatible (so the enormous Ethereum tooling ecosystem just works, including OpenZeppelin's audited escrow templates), native USDT and USDC, cheap enough that subsidizing user gas costs us cents per user per year, supported by every major onramp partner including Yellow Card for African fiat.

Tron as a secondary deposit/withdrawal chain. Honestly, it is where African retail USDT already lives. Forcing users to bridge funds from Tron to Polygon just to use Baobab would be an unnecessary friction tax on the audience. So we accept Tron USDT deposits, swap internally if needed, and route Polygon where the smart-contract work happens. Web3Auth supports both chains natively.

Other technologies that use blockchain (the filter)

We are not the first or only product in this space. The honest field map:

• Lens Protocol (Polygon) — decentralized social graph. Profile NFTs, follows, posts all onchain. We borrow the profile-NFT pattern in slice 2.
• Farcaster (Optimism) — decentralized social network with a hub model. Posts ("casts") replicate across federated servers.
• Bluesky (AT Protocol) — federated identity via portable DIDs; not blockchain-based but conceptually adjacent.
• Nostr (independent protocol) — signed messages relayed by independent servers. Simpler than Matrix for broadcast-shaped content.
• Yellow Card — Africa-focused crypto fiat onramp, operates in 20+ African countries; our slice 3 partner of choice.
• Kleros (Ethereum) — decentralized arbitration via juror pools; our slice 4 dispute mechanism.
• 1inch / 0x (Polygon and elsewhere) — swap aggregators; our slice 3 widget for asset conversion.
• OpenZeppelin — the audited contract library we fork from for escrow. Not a blockchain itself; the most-used safety layer for smart contracts.

Each of these solves a specific problem we have. We compose; we do not reinvent. None of them solves the African / diaspora-specific framing — that is what Baobab is for.

§ 05 · Intellectual frame

Standing in a tradition.

The technical choices we are making in 2026 are not novel impulses. They are the latest practical answer to a question our thinkers have been asking for a hundred years: how do we build institutions that do not require our consent to extract from us?

On self-sustaining work

Marcus Garvey's argument was always concrete: the people will be sovereign in proportion to the institutions they build for themselves. He did not stop at the political. He built newspapers, shipping lines, factories, churches, schools — and when those failed, he argued the failure was instructive, not disqualifying.

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started. Marcus Garvey

Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. Marcus Garvey · UNIA, 1920

Baobab takes the second of those quotes literally. The product is a pan-diaspora platform from day one. Continental Africa, the Caribbean, Black communities in the UK, the US, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, France — addressed as a single audience that shares more in common than the platforms currently serving them admit.

On clearing the inherited stack

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist. He understood that liberation has a technical layer and an internal layer, and that the latter is where most projects fail.

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. Frantz Fanon · The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well. Frantz Fanon

For Baobab this is design discipline. The first thing the user sees should not be catastrophe — not because the catastrophes are not real but because the default register of every Western platform serving these audiences has been catastrophe, and that register has consequences for how the next generation understands what is possible. Our default is opportunity. Hard news is one click away; the user opts in.

On who owes whom

Walter Rodney named the actual mechanics of the problem. Development is not given; it is blocked by structures that benefit from its absence.

Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. Walter Rodney · How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972

Our wallet and our trading floor exist because the mechanics still apply. A cocoa farmer in Côte d'Ivoire is currently selling into a price discovery process they cannot see, with counterparties they cannot verify, settling in currencies they did not choose. We cannot change all of that. We can change the part that is one good user interface and a federated protocol away.

§ 06 · Operator voice

Why I am picking the technology this way.

The technical decisions are not neutral. They are answers to specific questions about who benefits, who is at risk, and who keeps what when the platform is in its second decade.

Custody is the question. The cleanest possible answer is the one where Baobab cannot lose anyone's funds because Baobab does not hold them. We are using Web3Auth MPC wallets: the key is mathematically split between the user, the platform, and an optional recovery service. We cannot move funds without the user. The user can withdraw to any external wallet at any time. This places us outside the regulatory category of "money transmitter" in most jurisdictions and lets us launch without needing a bank charter.

The ranking algorithm has a stated bias, and the bias is the moat. The opportunity feed is the default surface. Hard news is gated behind an opt-in filter. This is editorial work, not engineering — but engineering is how it gets enforced in the ranking. The bias is documented, auditable, and inverts when the user says so.

Forums and chat run on Matrix, the federated open-source successor to IRC. We host one homeserver at matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai, but users can sign in with an account on any Matrix homeserver in the federation. If we ever drift, the community keeps their accounts, their history, and their relationships, and opens a different client.

Identity moves to a profile NFT on Polygon in slice 2 — when users sign in via Google, a wallet is created for them and that wallet becomes the durable handle. Reputation accrues as soulbound badges minted onchain after every clean transaction. None of this is hostage to Baobab continuing to exist.

We charge 1% on platform-facilitated value transfers — P2P sends, swaps, escrowed trade releases. We do not run ads. We do not sell data. We do not rent the attention of our users to anyone else. The 1% is calibrated to cover infrastructure and sustain the development team; it is not calibrated to maximize. A user who never trades pays nothing and gets everything: news, markets, community.

§ 07 · Architecture

What lives where, and who holds it.

The substrate is open. The lens is ours. Below is the actual map of who holds what.

Three boxes in the middle row: ours (curation, ranking, operational state) · federated (Matrix + LiveKit; community keeps it if we drift) · onchain (wallets, escrow, reputation; user owns it; the chain is the witness). Bottom row: everything the platform talks to without owning.

The line is clean: the protocols are open and decentralized. The curation lens is ours. We moderate by what we choose to surface, not by what we permit to exist. Our AI sheriff filters out spam and known scam patterns invisibly. We cannot delete content from the protocol — and we shouldn't be able to. A platform that can be coopted into censoring its community on demand is structurally unsuited to this audience.

The entity graph keystone

Every commodity, every country, every region gets the same page template — prices, news, forum, and (when activated) the trading floor. Pages compose at intersections: Corn × Ghana is its own surface. Diamonds × DRC is its own surface. The user can arrive there from either parent. Two page templates and a data graph drive most of the surface area.

Languages from day one

English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Swahili, and Hausa at launch. Together these cover the great majority of urban readers across the continent and the diaspora in their primary language. Indigenous coverage broadens as specialized models (Aya, Lelapa's InkubaLM) get routed in for low-resource languages.

§ 08 · Economics

The simple money.

Escrow release on a $10,000 cocoa trade: $250 to Baobab (2.5%), $9,750 to the seller. The escrow premium pays for the dispute-arbitration service — operator-arbitrated in S4, Kleros-arbitrated in S4+. Reading, browsing, holding, receiving: $0.

Three lines of revenue, in order of importance: trade fees, premium subscriptions, and (someday, with consent) data licensing. The free tier covers reading the news, seeing the markets, joining the federated rooms, and holding a wallet. The platform becomes "self-sustaining" — Rodney's word — when its users trade with each other.

Revenue, in three lines

Line 1 — Trade fees. Our primary revenue. Calibrated to cover infrastructure and keep the team paid, not to maximize.

• 1% on platform-facilitated peer-to-peer transfers
• 1% on stablecoin swaps executed through the integrated swap widget
• 2.5% on escrowed trade releases when the buyer confirms — escrow carries a higher fee because escrow includes the dispute-arbitration service (operator-arbitrated in S4, Kleros decentralized arbitration in S4+). The customer is paying for the safety, not just the rails.

Line 2 — Premium subscriptions. Three monthly tiers gating Firebase-powered convenience features — alerts, watchlists, push notifications, advanced AI-on-demand. The free tier remains substantial; subscriptions are for users who want quality-of-life features on top.

Firebase is what makes the subscription tiers cheap to operate. Real-time Firestore listeners (live data), Cloud Functions for on-demand summarization, FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) for push notifications, custom Firestore queries for watchlists — these are the primitives we resell as quality-of-life features. The marginal cost to us of each Pro subscriber is well under $1/month; the price reflects what users get rather than what we spend.

Line 3 — Data licensing (future, consent-only). Once we have a canonical African-commodity price index with multi-source provenance, that index is licensable to bona-fide research institutions, university libraries, and hedge-fund-adjacent buyers. Strict gate: only with provenance attribution, only with the originating exchanges' consent, and never customer data. Not v1, not v2. Mentioned only so the seven of us agree on the principle now.

What Baobab holds on its end (and what it doesn't)

Honesty matters here. We do hold operational customer data — the things we need to provide the service. Specifically, in Firebase Firestore:

• Account preferences, language choice, locale, "from country" pin
• Watchlists, alert configurations, subscribed publications
• Subscription tier and billing state
• The cached projection of your wallet balance (for fast display)
• Click events for personalization, with no PII when anonymous

What we explicitly do not hold:

• Wallet private keys (Web3Auth MPC, split between user + platform + recovery)
• Forum posts and chat history (Matrix protocol; federated)
• Identity (Polygon profile NFT; user-owned)
• Reputation badges (soulbound NFTs on Polygon; user-owned)
• Trade history beyond the cached projection (the chain is the source of truth)

The line is: operational state lives with us so the platform can be quick and quiet; identity, money, and social graph live elsewhere so the user cannot be deleted by us.

Costs at v0 scale

What we are not doing

• No ads
• No sale of user data
• No surveillance pixels, no third-party trackers
• No mandatory KYC for the free tier — it gates only the trading floor
• No exclusive lock on the user — they can take their identity, history, reputation, and funds to any compatible client at any time

Why this works

Trade fees scale with volume. The economic model gets healthier in the same direction that the political model wants it to go: more people, trading more with each other, building reputation and cooperatives. The platform's interests are aligned with the community's by construction, not by promise.

§ 09 · What is built and live today

Features in the private beta.

Everything below is in the repository right now, committed and reviewable. Each item lists the tier that gates it. Free unless marked.

The home portal

The AI shell

The standalone pages

The backend

Firebase Functions endpoints, all CORS-public except admin (gated by X-Admin-Token):

Concrete pricing — what 1% looks like

The Trader and Pro subscriptions ($4.99 and $9.99/mo) gate additional convenience features — deeper timeframes, push notifications, advanced indicators, the forward-outlook AI. They do not gate the platform itself.

§ 08a · Lacuna and the worker protocol

The brain, the hands, the language between them.

Behind the visible Baobab is a small, deliberately old-school orchestration pattern. Lacuna does the thinking. Workers do the work. Scheme is the language they speak to each other. Lacuna's JSONL audit log is the long-term record. The whole thing is reproducible from source.

The pattern, plainly

Lacuna is a Python daemon — Lacuna Labs' own product, separately documented at ~/code/lacuna/. It sits on a single host (Fly.io for the cloud deployment, a laptop for development) and reads the world: market schedules, news cadences, operator preferences, capability rules. From that, it emits plans — programs written in Scheme.

Workers don't think. They execute. A worker is whatever process (in whatever language) implements the worker protocol: receive a Scheme plan over HTTP, run it against a registered tool set, return the result and the audit log. The worker contract is in docs/specs/2026-05-11-worker-protocol.md.

The lifecycle of a news refresh

Why Scheme

Three reasons, increasingly load-bearing:

1. Auditable. The plan is human-readable text. Every operation the worker performed is reconstructible from the plan + the audit log. We do not have to trust the worker; we can show anyone the exact program that produced the result.
2. Portable. The same plan runs on a Cloudflare Worker WASM build, a Fly native Rust binary, a Python worker (Lacuna itself can be a self-hosted worker for testing), or a laptop with cargo run -- plan plans/news-refresh.scm. The execution layer is interchangeable; the plan is the constant.
3. Capability-bound. Tools are checked in the worker's native language, not in Scheme. No Scheme cleverness can bypass :net if the plan was granted only :cache. The permission boundary is the dumb layer, which is the right place for it.

The power of v1 workers

The Rust v1 worker (baobab-worker-rs) ships with a deliberately rich tool registry — about 50 Scheme primitives across net, parse / format, cache, storage, time, threading, crypto, text, AI, and audit categories. Two examples that hint at the power:

The same protocol, every language

A worker is anything that implements the protocol — accept a Scheme message envelope, run the plan against a registered tool set, return a Scheme response envelope. Reference implementations:

The plan written for the Rust worker runs unchanged on the Python worker. The frontend doesn't know which language is behind the /api/news endpoint and never has to know.

What this gives Baobab

• News pipeline that is auditable end-to-end — every article in the feed has a plan + log entry that says where it came from and how it got tagged.
• Workers that are fast and dumb — no autonomous reasoning, no rogue behavior, no surprise model upgrades changing the platform's voice.
• An execution layer that is interchangeable — moving from Cloudflare Workers to Fly Rust binaries to a Lacuna v0.4 self-hosted instance is a backend swap, not a rewrite.
• A scrape primitive (crawl-url) that is contract-stable — Firecrawl today, Cloudflare Browser Rendering next, our own headless-Chromium tool after that. The plan doesn't care.
• A cap-and-trade permission model — every plan declares what it needs; Lacuna grants only what the operator has cleared; the worker enforces in the dumb layer.

§ 09a · Economics, the deep version

What does the money look like.

The 1% / 2.5% lines are the headline. The question worth asking is: how does that sit next to what people pay today? And what does the platform look like at low, medium, and high effort?

Fee comparison — what people pay today, vs. Baobab

Spot prices for moving $100 from one wallet to another, in 2026 figures:

The platform sits below traditional remittance, above big-exchange in-network pricing, and squarely competitive with Yellow Card. The escrow premium pays for the dispute-arbitration service — without it, escrow is just held funds; with it, the platform earns its keep.

M-Pesa specifically (because GT and Reggie asked)

M-Pesa is the canonical comparable for the East African corridor. Their schedule for a Kenya-to-Kenya transfer of $100-equivalent looks like this (mid-2025 published rates, expressed in USD-equivalent at KES 130):

The platform's structural advantage is in cross-border — the diaspora corridor flows are where remittance providers charge 5-10%, and where stablecoin rails save the recipient real money. Within Kenya specifically, M-Pesa wins on price because Safaricom subsidizes the rail with its core mobile business; we don't try to compete there.

On-ramping — getting fiat into stablecoin

The user experience of "I have 50,000 naira; I want $30 of USDC in my Baobab wallet" goes through one of three partners, depending on the country and the amount:

Baobab does not charge an additional onramp fee — the partner's rate is what the user pays. Our 1% kicks in when funds move through the platform (send, swap, escrow), not when they enter or exit.

The native app question

PWA first. The home page is already installable as a progressive web app from any modern mobile browser. The user gets an icon on their home screen, push notifications (when wired in S2), and full offline-mode for read surfaces. No app store, no app-store fee, no installation friction. Critical for African distribution where app-store payment friction is a real barrier.

Native iOS / Android comes when traffic justifies. A thin React Native or Capacitor shell wrapping the same web codebase, with native push and biometric unlock. Estimated build cost: 8–12 weeks for both platforms once S3 ships. Apple's 30% tax on in-app subscriptions is a real consideration; the workaround is to route subscriptions through the website (the way Spotify, Netflix, and Patreon do).

What does success look like — three scenarios

Annualized revenue projections at three effort levels, assuming we ship S1 + S2 + S3 (markets, social, payments) and the Seven of Us run the community-building work in earnest:

Plus subscriptions, which scale separately:

Cost stack at v0/v1 traffic is well under $200/month (Firebase Hosting, Firestore reads, Functions invocations, DeepSeek inference, Matrix Synapse on Fly). The medium scenario covers operating costs and supports modest stipends to the Seven of Us as the project transitions from passion-project to part-time work. The high scenario funds a team and a regulatory budget.

The deliberate constraint: we do not optimize for the high scenario at the cost of the substrate. The substrate (open protocols, federated chat, user-owned wallets, user-owned identity, the editorial floor) is the moat. If we make platform-extractive choices to goose the high-scenario number, we lose the moat. So we don't.

§ 09b · No lock-in

You can take it all with you. Here is the script.

The single hardest commitment a platform can make is this: we will not hold your data hostage. Baobab makes it because we can't break it — the load-bearing things (your identity, your money, your social graph) do not live on our servers in the first place. Everything you can see on Baobab, you can also see without Baobab.

What lives where

• Your wallet and your balance live on Polygon. The platform never holds your keys (Web3Auth MPC splits the key — we cannot move funds without you).
• Your reputation lives on Polygon as soulbound NFTs. Visible to any onchain reader. We are not the source of truth.
• Your forum and chat history lives on the Matrix protocol — federated across whichever homeserver you signed in with. You can use any Matrix client (Element, FluffyChat, Cinny, Element X) to read it.
• Your identity (if you mint a profile NFT in slice 2) lives on Polygon. Portable to any Lens / Farcaster / future protocol that reads ERC-721.
• What lives on our servers: your watchlist, your language preference, your subscribed publications, your saved books, your subscription tier. The convenience layer. You can request it via a single API call and we will send it to you in JSON.

The script — under 40 lines of Python

Drop this in a file named pull-my-baobab.py, fill in your wallet address and Matrix credentials, and run it. You get back everything Baobab can see about you, without asking Baobab a single thing.

# pull-my-baobab.py — everything Baobab can see about you, without Baobab.
# Requires: pip install web3 requests

from web3 import Web3
import requests

WALLET            = "0xYourPolygonAddress"
POLYGON_RPC       = "https://polygon-rpc.com"
MATRIX_HOMESERVER = "https://matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai"  # or your own
MATRIX_USER       = "@you:matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai"
MATRIX_TOKEN      = "your-matrix-access-token"

# 1. Stablecoin balances on Polygon (USDC + USDT, the platform's primary rails)
w3 = Web3(Web3.HTTPProvider(POLYGON_RPC))
TOKENS = {
    "USDC": "0x3c499c542cEF5E3811e1192ce70d8cC03d5c3359",
    "USDT": "0xc2132D05D31c914a87C6611C10748AEb04B58e8F",
}
ERC20_ABI = [{"name":"balanceOf","outputs":[{"type":"uint256"}],
              "inputs":[{"type":"address"}],"stateMutability":"view","type":"function"}]
for name, addr in TOKENS.items():
    bal = w3.eth.contract(address=addr, abi=ERC20_ABI).functions.balanceOf(WALLET).call() / 1e6
    print(f"{name}: ${bal:,.2f}")

# 2. Your Matrix profile and the rooms you're in
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {MATRIX_TOKEN}"}
profile = requests.get(f"{MATRIX_HOMESERVER}/_matrix/client/v3/profile/{MATRIX_USER}").json()
rooms = requests.get(f"{MATRIX_HOMESERVER}/_matrix/client/v3/joined_rooms", headers=H).json()
print(f"Display name: {profile.get('displayname')}")
print(f"In {len(rooms.get('joined_rooms', []))} rooms")
for rid in rooms.get("joined_rooms", [])[:5]:
    msgs = requests.get(f"{MATRIX_HOMESERVER}/_matrix/client/v3/rooms/{rid}/messages",
                        headers=H, params={"limit": 5, "dir": "b"}).json()
    print(f"  {rid}  ({len(msgs.get('chunk', []))} recent events)")

# 3. Your onchain transaction history (entirely public; no Baobab access needed)
hist = requests.get("https://api.polygonscan.com/api",
                    params={"module": "account", "action": "txlist", "address": WALLET, "sort": "desc"}).json()
print(f"On-chain Polygon transactions: {len(hist.get('result', []))}")

# 4. (Optional) Your platform preferences — the only thing Baobab holds.
prefs = requests.get(f"https://baobab.lacunalabs.ai/api/users/me",
                     headers={"X-User-Wallet": WALLET}).json()
print(f"Preferences from Baobab: {prefs}")

# Take this. It is yours. Baobab is a viewer onto it, not the owner of it.

Thirty-eight lines. Eight imports. No proprietary SDK. No platform authentication beyond your wallet and your Matrix access token — both of which are yours.

The selling point, stated plainly

We offer convenience, services, and intelligence. We do not trap anyone inside the platform. That is our selling point — not as a marketing line, but as an architectural fact.

You can take your wallet to MetaMask tomorrow. You can take your room history to Element, FluffyChat, or your own homeserver tomorrow. You can take your reputation to any onchain reader. You can take your preferences to a JSON file and never touch our API again. Nothing we hold is structural to your participation on the open protocols underneath us.

What we offer in return for our 1% is: curation that you couldn't easily replicate (the editorial floor, the entity graph, the Loam facts), the AI shell that speaks 80+ languages, the federated room catalog already populated with 90+ rooms, the news pipeline across 28 sources, the Bloomberg-grade markets surface. Convenience. Services. Intelligence. If we ever stop being worth the 1%, you leave. The exit is the same script above.

§ 10 · How to try it

Where to go, what to click.

The five things that show what the platform is. Each is one click from the home page. None of them require a sign-up except where noted.

1. Open a market

Click any tile in the ticker strip across the top of the home page, or any tile in the Markets tab grid.

You get: price, delta, 52-week range, position-in-range, sparkline, top producers, related stories from the live feed, citations from the Loam knowledge cache, and a one-click AI explanation.

2. Talk to the shell

Click the $ launcher in the bottom-right of any page. The shell opens. It looks like a terminal because it is one. The hostname in the prompt is the context you're in.

Slash /lang ha to flip the response language to Hausa. /facts to surface what Loam knows about your current context. /contexts to see your open conversations across markets.

3. Read the News Pulse

The constellation just above the article feed shows every country (or commodity) mentioned today, sized by how many stories. Click a node to filter the feed to that entity. Click again to clear.

Toggle to "Commodities" mode in the pulse header to see today's stories by commodity instead.

4. Read the Library

Click the Library tab on the home, or visit /library.html directly. 26 works of Black and African classical thought. Public-domain texts read in the browser (Equiano 1789, Douglass 1845, Wells 1892, Du Bois 1903, Washington 1901). Externally-hosted classics (Fanon, Rodney, Cabral, Sankara, Nkrumah, Lumumba, James) open at their archive.

5. Translate any story

On any article in the news feed, click the small translate → chip in the meta row. The translation fades in below the article body in your currently-picked language. Switch the language picker to Hausa, click again on a different story — you see the same article in Hausa.

6. (Operators only) Open the admin

Visit /admin.html. Paste the ADMIN_TOKEN. You see service health (DeepSeek up? Yahoo reachable? Firestore responding?), counts across the system, and the bans list with one-click add and remove. The page is noindex-tagged and the token lives only in sessionStorage.

§ 11 · Roadmap

How it ships next.

Four slices, each shippable on its own, each meaningful by itself.

Slice 1 — Portal, markets, reader

Months 0–4

Live commodity ticker covering 29 markets including gold, diamonds, cocoa, coffee, bananas, cobalt, lithium, and the major agricultural and mineral exports. AI-curated news feed defaulting to opportunity, with sources spanning AllAfrica, Daily Maverick, Premium Times, Jeune Afrique, Nation Africa, Reuters Africa, BBC Africa, BBC Caribbean. Six languages. Six-hour refresh. Donate-to-keep-the-lights-on widget. Custom domain at baobab.lacunalabs.ai. Google sign-in. PWA installs to phones.

Slice 2 — Identity, forums, chat

Months 4–7

Per-entity Matrix rooms. Federated chat. Group spaces for cooperatives. Profile NFTs on Polygon for portable identity. AI sheriff for spam and scam-pattern detection. Light reputation scoring from forum participation.

Slice 3 — Payments rails

Months 7–10

M-Pesa and MTN Mobile Money integration for on/off-ramp where users actually transact. 1inch swap widget for stablecoin conversion. Yellow Card partnership for African fiat onramps. Web3Auth wallets activated for real transfers between users.

Slice 4 — The trading floor

Months 10–16

KYC via Sumsub or Persona. Verified seller / cooperative directory. Polygon smart contracts for escrow, forked from OpenZeppelin and audited. Cooperative pooling contracts (multisig treasuries for buying clubs and selling collectives). Reputation gates trade limits. Dispute flow via Kleros decentralized arbitration.

§ 12 · The ask

What we need from the people at the table.

We are not asking for money. We are asking to be heard, and for the right introductions.

From technologists in the community

• Code review of the slice 1 codebase as it lands
• Native-speaker review of the locale files before each language goes live publicly
• Pull requests against the open-source substrate components when those are published

From organizers and cooperative leaders

• Names of cooperatives — agricultural, trade, savings — that would consider using a federated platform when slice 4 lands
• Honest feedback on the entity graph: are we missing important regions, languages, commodities, framings?

From publishers and journalists

• RSS feeds we should be pulling that we are not yet
• Permission to mirror short summaries and link back, in the partnership model
• Optional: a partner-publication arrangement for fuller content access

From the Seven of Us, by the corridors we already stand in

Every one of us sits on a corridor that already moves people, money, and information across the Atlantic. The platform is only valuable to the extent that those corridors get easier and safer to walk. Each of us has a specific seat at this table:

• Gullah — South Carolina, Gullah-Geechee. The cultural corridor between the Sea Islands and West Africa is one of the most concrete pieces of preserved continuity in the diaspora. Tell us where the platform should be honoring the cooperatives, growers, and cultural organizations you already know — and where it should stay out of the way.
• Leigh — Zimbabwean Ndebele, Shona-speaking, raised between the UK and the US, primarily US-based now. The southern-Africa lens is missing in most diaspora-facing products, the Ndebele perspective specifically more so. The platform's coverage of Zimbabwean markets, the Matabeleland-vs-Mashonaland framing, and the trans-Atlantic Zim diaspora corridor all need your read.
• GT — UK-born, family from Ghana. The second-generation British-Ghanaian experience sits at the center of one of the largest African diaspora-to-continent corridors in the world. If we make slice 3 (M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, stablecoin onramps) work for this corridor first, the rest of the continent follows. Technical sanity check on the architecture is also yours.
• Reggie — UK-born, family from Nigeria. The single largest African diaspora-to-continent corridor by remittance volume runs through the British-Nigerian community. The cocoa, sesame, cashew, and crude markets we surface in S1 all flow through Nigerian counterparties. Your read on Lagos, Abuja, and the UK-based Nigerian professional networks matters.
• Akinmade — African American, the DMV (Washington DC / Baltimore). The DMV sits at the institutional heart of the African-American diaspora — HBCUs (Howard especially), African diplomatic missions, federal policy makers, and a deep bench of cooperative-economics organizations. The platform needs the US-based diaspora's read on the editorial floor and whether the language drifts from for-us-by-us into talking-about-us. You name the drift when you see it.
• Pop — Haiti ↔ Brooklyn. The Francophone and Creole Caribbean has been systematically left out of "African diaspora" framings; the Haitian diaspora in Brooklyn, Miami, Montreal, and Boston is among the largest and most active in the Atlantic. Your seat brings that conversation into the same room as the continent.
• Alfred — Trinidad and Tobago, grew up in Brooklyn. The Caribbean seat at the table is not optional and is too often missing from "African-focused" products. Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Black communities of Brooklyn, Miami, and Toronto are full first-class members of the audience, not afterthoughts.

From the diaspora at large

• Sign up at baobab.lacunalabs.ai when it goes live
• Tell us what would make this the home page of your morning

State of play, today

This is not a deck. The platform is live at baobab.lacunalabs.ai at the moment you read this. What follows is the literal status, the literal next step, and exactly what each of you can do with it right now.

What is shipped and live (verifiable on the site)

• Seven static surfaces, all on Fly.io. / (home), /signup.html, /library.html, /voice.html, /wallet.html, /account.html, /admin.html. Served by Caddy from the baobab-lacuna Fly app.
• A live API at /api/* on the same origin. A separate Fly app, baobab-api (Node 20, single-file), sits behind the Caddy reverse-proxy. Auto-stops to zero machines when idle. Exposes: /api/ai/chat (tool-calling), /api/ai/summarize, /api/ai/translate, /api/prices, /api/news (deduped + image-extracted), /api/news/history (14-day ring), /api/sources (subscription tree), /api/loam/lookup, /api/rpc/polygon, /api/img (privacy proxy), /api/reader (Readability + sanitization), /api/weather (wttr.in), /api/chain/txns (Blockscout V2 proxy), /api/rooms + per-room messages (multi-user IRC, lazy history).
• baobab-llm reaches the internet. The chat backend supports OpenAI-style tool calling. Six tools wired: web_search (Firecrawl), fetch_url (our reader), get_weather, get_price, get_news, get_loam. The model self-identifies as baobab-llm; the underlying provider is an implementation detail. Up to 5 tool iterations per turn; results returned inline.
• Live commodity prices for 12 of 29 markets. Yahoo Finance feeds gold, silver, platinum, copper, cocoa, coffee, sugar, cotton, maize, soybeans, crude, and natgas — fetched server-side, cached 60 s, unit-converted to the producer-native unit (USD/oz, USD/MT, USD/lb, USD/bbl, USD/mmBtu). The remaining 17 markets (rubber, cashew, sesame, cobalt, lithium, manganese, bauxite, iron ore, nickel, uranium, palm oil, vanilla, tea, tobacco, sorghum, bananas, diamonds) ship with curated estimates labeled source: est.
• Real news ingestion across 15 RSS sources. BBC Africa, Al Jazeera Africa, Guardian Africa, Quartz Africa, The Conversation (Africa), Africa Is A Country, Black Agenda Report, allAfrica, Reuters Africa, Daily Maverick (SA), Premium Times (NG), Mail & Guardian (SA), Africanews, Black Star News, Essence. Server-side dedup by title, sort by pub date, 10-minute cache. Each item carries a og:image (extracted from the source page) routed through a same-origin image proxy at /api/img.
• Chat tab with Spaces, AI-backed. Seven pre-seeded spaces — General, Markets, History, Thought, Diaspora, Kitchen, Tech — each carries a topic-specific system prompt that flavors the model's voice. New spaces can be created (name + one-sentence focus). Three voice modes: Terminal, Warm, Elder. Conversations are stored per-space in localStorage; the last 12 messages are sent as context. Backed by DeepSeek through /api/ai/chat.
• Voice surface — Talk to Baobab. The /voice.html page now carries a working AI voice loop: browser SpeechRecognition transcribes the user's speech, the transcript is sent to DeepSeek with a "speak-this-aloud" prompt flavor, and the response is played back via speechSynthesis. Voice roster is selectable from the locally installed system voices (English, French, Swahili, Arabic, Portuguese).
• Wallet — non-custodial connect, live Polygon stats. The /wallet.html page shows the current Polygon block height and gas price (refreshing every 15 s), and a Connect wallet button that opens MetaMask / Brave Wallet / Rainbow / any EIP-1193 wallet. On connect, real balances are read for MATIC, USDC (native, 0x3c499c…), and USDT (0xc2132d…) — directly from the chain through our /api/rpc/polygon proxy. The chain is offered as eth_chainId 0x89 with auto-add if the user hasn't provisioned Polygon yet. Custodial Baobab-managed wallets remain v0 closed beta — KYC + AML monitoring + regulator opinion before any public real-money use.
• Library at 90 works. Curated open-archive catalog spanning the diaspora canon: pre-1900 narratives (Equiano, Douglass × 3, Wells × 2, Jacobs, Northup, Truth, Walker, Henson, Wheatley, Delany × 2), Reconstruction-era and early-20th-century (Cooper, Griggs, Hopkins × 2, Du Bois × 5, Washington × 3, Fortune, Johnson, Chesnutt × 4, Dunbar × 3, Blyden), pan-African and decolonization (Garvey, Woodson, Padmore, Nkrumah × 2, Cabral, Fanon × 3, Rodney × 2, Sankara, Lumumba, Ngũgĩ, Diop, Mazrui, Asante), Caribbean (James, Césaire × 2, Biko, Eric Williams, Coquery-Vidrovitch, Davidson × 2, Chancellor Williams), and the contemporary (Mbeki, Wynter, Hartman, Davis, hooks, Lorde, Wilkerson, Coates, Hurston × 2, Ellison, Baldwin, Drake & Cayton, Frazier, Bennett, Thurman). Roughly half are Gutenberg plain-text and read inline; the rest link to Archive.org, Marxists Internet Archive, or Abahlali baseMjondolo. Each book has a stable permalink (/library.html#b/<id>) and a share button.
• Loam facts for every commodity. /api/loam/lookup?sym=… returns a hand-written 3–4 fact blurb keyed to producer geography, exchange contract, and value-chain dynamics for all 29 markets. This is interim — the v1 Loam graph (per the Lacuna substrate spec) supersedes it.
• "Ask the chat" on every news article. Each compact-view article row carries an inline affordance that switches to the Chat tab and pre-fills the input with the article's title, source, summary, and link — the user adjusts the question, sends, gets a context-aware response from the AI.
• The Forums tab still ships as the same room catalog (29 commodities × 54 countries × regions × diaspora rooms) addressed at matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai — the catalog is real; the Matrix homeserver lights up in S2.
• The interactive design document (this page) — gated, source in ~/code/lacuna-labs/docs/baobab/index.html, kept in sync with shipped state.

Private beta — what each of you can do today

The platform is live in private beta at baobab.lacunalabs.ai. You can:

• Read live news from the Africa, diaspora, and pan-African publications — 15 sources, deduped, with thumbnails. Switch between Compact and Magazine views. Filter by continent / commodity / country in the left sidebar. Toggle good-news-only or include-hard-news.
• Watch the markets tick — gold, silver, platinum, copper, cocoa, coffee, sugar, cotton, maize, soybeans, crude, and natural gas all carry real prices from Yahoo Finance, updated every six hours by default and on the cache TTL in the meantime. The remaining 17 commodities show curated estimates with the est tag.
• Use the Chat tab — seven AI-backed spaces, each tuned for a different kind of conversation. Ask Markets why DRC cobalt is so concentrated; ask History about the Sokoto Caliphate; ask Thought about Wynter's reframing of humanism; ask Kitchen for a serious treatment of ceebu jën. Create your own space with a custom focus. Switch voice between Terminal, Warm, and Elder.
• Talk to Baobab at /voice.html — tap the microphone, ask anything, hear the response read aloud. Pick from the system voices installed on your device.
• Browse the library — 90 works of Black classical thought and diaspora letters, half readable inline, the rest linked to long-running open archives. Share any book with a permalink.
• Connect a wallet at /wallet.html — non-custodial, your keys stay with your wallet, real Polygon network state on the page, real balance read from the chain on connect. (Custodial Baobab wallet is still v0 closed beta — KYC and money-services-regulator opinion before that lights up.)
• Read this design doc end-to-end. Where the editorial floor, room structure, languages, or voice slips, name the slip. Every conversation in this private beta shapes what the public sees.

What is next, in order

How revenue arrives

The platform is free to read and free to talk. Money comes from the trading floor only — one percent on platform-facilitated transfers and trades. We earn when we are useful, not when we are watched. If we never charge a single transaction we go broke; if we serve our people well, the trade volume that compounds underneath our rails carries the platform indefinitely.

The bet is: the seven of us, addressing the corridors we already stand in, can generate enough trade to make this self-sustaining inside eighteen months of slice 4 shipping. That is the economic thesis, stated plainly.

On the escrow specifically

There is one piece of this architecture that is the personal thing — the thing the operator has been wanting to build for a long time without a clean way to build it. The trading floor in slice 4 is that piece.

The old problem: weak court enforcement in many of the jurisdictions our people trade across means that a buyer who pays for cocoa and gets sawdust has no recourse. The old solutions were either to trust intermediaries (who skim aggressively and add risk of their own) or to refuse to trade at scale. Neither answer is what we want.

The new answer is: onchain escrow with decentralized arbitration. A Polygon smart contract holds the buyer's stablecoin while the seller fulfills. The buyer confirms delivery; funds release. If the buyer disputes, a Kleros juror pool decides. The platform does not arbitrate — the platform builds the rails. We are not the judge. We are not the bank. We are the highway.

This is the architectural payoff for the federation choices made everywhere else in the document. We can stand up the trading floor without becoming a financial institution because our users hold their own keys and the escrow contract is the neutral party.

Closing — to the Seven of Us

A platform built for our people, by our people, that does not own them. We think we figured it out. The architecture is in the repository. The economics are documented. The first surface ships in months, not years.

The seven of us decide together what happens next. Gullah, Leigh, GT, Reggie, Akinmade, Pop — Alfred has committed. The rest of the work is the rest of us.

§ 12a · Intellectual property and patents

What we own. What we license. What we are filing.

The operator filed eleven patents under Lacuna Labs in the past three weeks. The Baobab platform contains additional novel surfaces that would, if filed, be owned by Lacuna Labs / Baobab specifically — not licensed in from elsewhere. They are listed here so the seven of us can decide together which to put into play.

What Baobab licenses from elsewhere in the Lacuna stack

• Loam — the in-memory graph cache between Firecrawl-style ingestion and LLMs. The Loam engine itself is Curator-developed and Baobab uses it under an internal Lacuna license. The Loam schema for African commodity + cultural knowledge (the seed facts, the citation set, the cross-references) is Baobab's contribution.
• Cortex — the per-operator local graph engine (Rust workspace at ~/code/cortex/). Used by Curator; available for Baobab integration in S2 if we want operator-local copies of cooperative ledgers.

Patentable surfaces in Baobab — currently drafting

The following are novel architectural patterns developed for Baobab that are not derivative of existing Lacuna IP. Each is a candidate for separate filing, owned by Baobab / Lacuna Labs.

What goes into play, decided by the Seven

Eleven patents in three weeks is the operator's recent pace; ten more surfaces in front of us. Not all of these are worth the filing budget, and not all need to be filed before they ship — defensive publication protects most software methods sufficiently if filed broadly later.

Recommended priority for filing under Lacuna / Baobab:

1. BB-3 (restorative moderation) — strong defensive value; differentiated from existing moderation IP.
2. BB-2 (language-first translation prompting) — demonstrably improves output on low-resource African languages; broad licensing opportunity beyond our use.
3. BB-5 (Loam-grounded inline AI) — composable with the existing Loam patents from Curator; closes the loop.
4. BB-10 (reputation-gated limits) — directly relevant to the S4 trading floor and to defense against a possible competitive copycat.

The other six remain documented for defensive publication; if a specific commercial threat emerges, we file then. Filing strategy review is part of the legal-opinion gate before slice 4 ships.

Boilerplate: The patentable surfaces listed above are candidate filings. Names, claim language, and prosecution timeline are subject to counsel review. The Loam engine reference above is licensed from Curator under the standard Lacuna inter-product license; the Baobab-specific Loam schema and seed content are separately Baobab's. All other surfaces listed in BB-1 through BB-10 were developed in the course of Baobab's design and are owned by Lacuna Labs / Baobab.

§ 13 · One page per seat

The Atlantic, in seven hands.

Before the individual pages: the map of where each of us stands.

Seven pages, one each.

Each of you sits on a specific corridor and brings a specific eye. The pages that follow are addressed to each of you individually — with concrete examples of what Baobab does for the corridor you hold, and what we need from your seat at the table. Read your own. Read everyone else's too — that is the whole point.

§ 13.1 · For Gullah

Gullah — South Carolina, the Sea Islands.

Your name is the heritage. Gullah-Geechee — the most concretely preserved African-cultural continuity in North America. Sierra Leonean rice culture, West African textile traditions, Krio language ancestry, food sovereignty practice that the rest of the diaspora has been quietly relearning from your communities for a generation. The platform's case for itself is partly an inheritance of the case your community has been making for centuries.

What Baobab looks like for you

• The Sierra Leone × Coffee, Sierra Leone × Cashew, and Sierra Leone × Cocoa intersection pages bring you live prices and stories from the Krio-speaking coast your ancestors carried with them — without you needing to hunt through Western feeds that bury those stories.
• A dedicated #sea-islands:matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai room — federated, open, joinable by anyone in the Gullah-Geechee community or anyone learning from them — for cultural continuity and food sovereignty work.
• The Liberia and Senegambia commodity pages give you the present-tense markets of the lands your grandmothers' grandmothers came from. Rice (the original crop), groundnut, palm oil.
• When slice 3 ships, your wallet is a way to send funds directly to West African cooperatives without the remittance industry's cut.

Where we need your eye

The intellectual frame in § 02 — Garvey, Fanon, Rodney — is doing real work in the architecture. If the line is wrong, the architecture downstream is wrong. Your read first.

Also: tell us which Gullah-Geechee cooperatives, growers, and cultural organizations should be on the platform from week one. The platform's job is to honor their work and stay out of the way; we need you to name who and how.

Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. Marcus Garvey · UNIA, 1920

§ 13.2 · For Leigh

Leigh — Zimbabwe (Ndebele, Shona-speaking) → UK → US.

Born to Zimbabwe, Ndebele specifically. Shona is also yours by upbringing — the practical lingua franca of Zimbabwe that crosses ethnic lines in the urban and diaspora context. Raised between the UK and the US, primarily US-based now. The Ndebele perspective on Zimbabwe is missing from nearly every "Africa-focused" product — the Matabeleland economic story, the Bulawayo industrial heritage, Gukurahundi as the unspoken backdrop to every Zim political conversation — these are missing because the seat for that perspective is missing. You hold it.

What Baobab looks like for you

• Zimbabwe × Gold, Zimbabwe × Platinum, Zimbabwe × Lithium, Zimbabwe × Tobacco, Zimbabwe × Cotton — all live pages with intraday prices and African-sourced news rather than Western framings.
• The Matabeleland-vs-Mashonaland economic distinction can show up in the entity graph — sub-regional commodity flows, mining-belt geography — if you tell us how to render it without flattening it.
• The #zw:matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai country room, plus dedicated rooms for Bulawayo, the Matabele diaspora, and the broader Ndebele community if you want them. The federation model means we can host the rooms or the community can run their own homeserver and federate with us.
• Both isiNdebele and chiShona land in the language-support roadmap alongside the six launch languages — both have growing-but-thin tooling support. We'll route to Aya (Cohere) or InkubaLM (Lelapa AI, South Africa) for these in S2.
• The trans-Atlantic Zim diaspora — UK (largest concentration outside Zimbabwe) + US + South Africa-based — is already organizing cooperatively. Baobab's slice 4 cooperative-pooling contracts on Polygon are built for this exactly: pooled diaspora capital, transparent treasury, automatic pro-rata distribution.
• Sending money home through Baobab in S3 will cost the user 1% and take seconds — versus 6-10% and days through legacy remitters. The corridor is a clean test case.

Where we need your eye

Whether the platform stays neutral enough for the diaspora at large while still being clearly for us. The line in § 03 — between editorial point of view and partisan branding — is a hard line to walk. Your eye on whether we are walking it right.

Also: which Zimbabwean cooperatives, exchanges (ZSE), Matabele-specific organizations, and trans-Atlantic Zim investment groups belong on the platform first. And tell us whether the entity graph should surface Matabeleland and Mashonaland as their own pages — or whether that's flattening something better left to the community's own framing.

Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. Walter Rodney · How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972

§ 13.3 · For GT

GT — UK-born, family from Ghana.

Second-generation British-Ghanaian. Born into the corridor, not operating across it — which is a different and important position. The UK ↔ Ghana corridor is one of the largest African diaspora ↔ continent relationships on Earth — by remittance volume, by return-investment volume, by family-tie density. The community holding it together is the British-born generation, the children of the first wave, who know both countries from the inside. If Baobab's slice 3 (M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, stablecoin onramps) works for this corridor first, the rest of the continent follows.

What Baobab looks like for you

• Ghana × Cocoa — the second-largest cocoa producer in the world, your country. Live ICE-watched price, integrated with COCOBOD reporting when feasible, side-by-side with the West African regional view.
• Ghana × Gold (4th-largest producer globally), Ghana × Bauxite, Ghana × Lithium (newly relevant) — full pricing surfaces.
• The cedi, USD-cedi, and GBP-cedi conversions are visible on every commodity tile so a UK-based diaspora reader sees the price in the currency that matters for sending money home.
• UK ↔ Ghana remittance and real-estate-back-home corridors are slice 3's flagship test case. Your relationships in Accra and London will determine whether the on-ramp partners (Yellow Card especially) work well or work poorly for your community.
• Ghana's "Year of Return" and the ongoing return migration — Baobab's diaspora framing is built to host the conversations and the commerce that grew from it.

Where we need your eye

The technical architecture in § 04 — custody, federation, the entity graph. You have the ability to read whether the choices are sound or whether a different stack serves the thesis better. The choices are reversible until slice 2 ships. After that, they are load-bearing. Speak now if you have a better stack.

Also: relationships at COCOBOD, AFEX, ECG, and Accra's growing fintech community. We need a Ghana-side check on the entity coverage and on the credibility of our data sources for the Ghana surface.

§ 13.4 · For Reggie

Reggie — UK-born, family from Nigeria.

Second-generation British-Nigerian. The single largest African diaspora-to-continent corridor on Earth by remittance volume runs through the British-Nigerian community, and the UK-born generation is the one currently holding both sides of it together. Lagos and Abuja are the gravitational centers for an enormous share of the markets Baobab surfaces — sesame, cashew, cocoa, crude oil, sorghum, soybean — all flow through Nigerian counterparties. If Baobab is wrong about Nigeria, Baobab is wrong about Africa.

What Baobab looks like for you

• Nigeria × Crude oil — Africa's largest oil producer, your country. Live Bonny Light differential to Brent on the country page.
• AFEX (Nigerian Commodity Exchange) prices for sesame, soybean, cocoa, sorghum, cashew — alongside the global benchmarks. This is the African-exchange transparency play and Nigeria is the biggest AFEX surface.
• Nigeria × Cocoa, Nigeria × Cashew, Nigeria × Sesame — full producer-country breakdowns alongside the global commodity pages.
• The naira, USD-naira, GBP-naira conversions on every relevant tile. The ongoing naira volatility story is one place where the Baobab platform's non-doom editorial floor matters most — the Western framing is "Nigeria crisis"; the on-the-ground framing is more nuanced.
• Nollywood economy, Lagos fintech (Flutterwave, Paystack, Kuda Bank, Yellow Card itself is Nigerian-incorporated), and the wedding-economy remittance flows — all natural Baobab surfaces in slice 2 forums and slice 3 transfers.

Where we need your eye

The economics in § 05. If there is a missing revenue line that does not corrupt the model, name it. You have the closest view of the actual transactional volume in the largest African corridor; if 1% is wrong, you will know first.

And: relationships at AFEX, the major Nigerian banks, the Lagos fintech ecosystem, and the UK-based Nigerian diaspora business networks. We will need partner intros for slice 3 (M-Pesa is east; Nigeria is MTN MoMo + Flutterwave territory).

§ 13.5 · For Akinmade

Akinmade — African American, the DMV.

Yoruba name carrying Nigerian heritage; African American by way of the United States, based in the DMV — Washington DC, Baltimore, the corridor between them. The DMV is the institutional heart of the African-American diaspora: Howard University and the broader HBCU network, the African diplomatic missions, the federal policy apparatus, and a deep bench of cooperative-economics organizations. You stand exactly on the line that Baobab is trying to address — the diaspora that has been on this continent for centuries, that is rediscovering and renaming its connection to the continent on its own terms. The Ghana "Year of Return," the Senegal and Sierra Leone return-investment movements, the broader African-American re-engagement with the continent — much of it organized through DMV institutions and networks. Baobab is the platform layer for all of it.

What Baobab looks like for you

• The Diaspora region surface — separate from the African continental view — gives the US-based African American community a home page that treats them as a community of belonging, not as outside observers.
• The Black US ↔ Africa corridor pages: Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone — the three countries that have invested most concretely in the return migration — get dedicated treatment with both economic and cultural surfaces.
• The editorial floor — "the default story isn't disaster" — is exactly the register that the African-American community has been demanding from US coverage of Africa for decades. Your read on whether we are actually delivering it.
• Slice 3 wallets unlock the slow-growing African-American direct-investment flow into African real estate, agriculture, and fintech. Baobab is the rail.

Where we need your eye

The language. The register. Whether Baobab feels for-us-by-us or whether it drifts into talking-about-us. You name the drift the moment you see it. This is editorial work that engineering cannot do alone.

Also: relationships in the African-American institutional ecosystem — HBCUs, civil-society organizations, cooperative-economics movements (the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Cooperation Jackson network, etc.). Baobab is structurally aligned with cooperative economics; we need you to tell us which cooperatives are ready to be on the platform.

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. Frantz Fanon · The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

§ 13.6 · For Pop

Pop — Haiti → Brooklyn. The Francophone Caribbean.

Haiti is the first Black republic in the Americas, the country that paid the heaviest price for being first, and the place most relentlessly miscovered by Western media. The Haitian diaspora — Brooklyn, Miami, Montreal, Boston, Paris — is one of the largest and most economically active in the Atlantic, and is systematically left out of the "African diaspora" conversation. Baobab brings Haiti and the wider Francophone/Creole Caribbean — Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, the Haitian and Antillean diasporas — into the same room as the continent.

What Baobab looks like for you

• Haiti × Cacao (Haitian cocoa is some of the highest-quality and lowest-volume in the world), Haiti × Coffee (the Pic Macaya coffee renaissance), Haiti × Vetiver (Haiti is the world's largest producer) — surfaces that the global press never gives Haiti credit for.
• The #ht:matrix.baobab.lacunalabs.ai Haiti room and the #caribbean regional room — the conversation that has been siloed across Brooklyn, Miami, Montreal, and Port-au-Prince finally federated.
• The editorial floor matters most for Haiti. The default story is not the catastrophe of the week. The default story is the cocoa renaissance, the cooperative growth, the diaspora investment returning, the artist economy. Hard news lives behind the opt-in filter — the same as for any country.
• The Francophone/Creole Caribbean (Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Dominica's Kwéyòl-speaking communities) gets a dedicated regional view that the Anglophone Caribbean-focused platforms have always missed. Creole news sources and Haitian Kreyòl translation are slice-2 work.
• Brooklyn ↔ Haiti, Miami ↔ Haiti, Montreal ↔ Haiti remittance corridors are slice-3 priorities. Reducing the friction on those flows is direct economic value to a community that pays the highest remittance fees in the Western Hemisphere.

Where we need your eye

Whether the Caribbean is genuinely first-class in the architecture or whether it reads as a Caribbean module bolted onto an Africa-first product. The platform's thesis is that the Atlantic is one. The product must feel that way to a Haitian-American reader in Brooklyn or Miami — not just to the African-continental reader.

And: relationships in the Haitian diaspora business community, the Creole-speaking Caribbean cooperatives, and the Haitian agricultural producer associations. Baobab's cooperative-pooling contracts in slice 4 are built for groups exactly like these.

§ 13.7 · For Alfred

Alfred — Trinidad & Tobago → Brooklyn. The operator.

Trinidad and Tobago. Grew up in Brooklyn. SRE by training. The Caribbean seat at the table is not optional and is too often missing from "African-focused" products. Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Bahamas, the broader English-speaking Caribbean — all first-class members of the audience from day one. You are also the operator: the person whose decisions about reversibility, ops cost, and what to maintain shaped the architecture that the other six pages are evaluating.

What Baobab looks like for you

• Trinidad × Crude oil, Trinidad × Natural gas, Trinidad × Cocoa (Trinitario cacao is named for your country), Trinidad × Sugar — all live commodity pages with Caribbean regional context.
• The Caribbean region surface — Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Barbados, Bahamas, Guyana, Dominican Republic — alongside the African continental view, equal weight.
• Brooklyn ↔ Trinidad ↔ wider Caribbean ↔ continent — the four-corner conversation that the Atlantic has always been but that the platforms have always fragmented into "African-diaspora products" versus "Caribbean-diaspora products."
• Carnival economy, Caribbean steel-band community, Caribbean American professional networks — natural slice-2 surfaces.

Where we need your seat

Confirm the operator-voice pull-quotes in § 03 actually match what you said and meant. The technical decisions documented in those quotes are load-bearing. If a paraphrase is off, fix it now.

Hold the line on scope. The other six members will pull this product in directions that are individually right and collectively too much. You are the SRE; you know what is maintainable. Veto what is unmaintainable.