In every corner of the world where formal banking never fully arrived, communities invented their own financial protocol. They called it different names — daret in Algeria and Morocco, tontine in West Africa, hui or hwei in China and Vietnam, chit fund in India, susus in the Caribbean, paluwagan in the Philippines. But the mechanics are identical everywhere, as if human beings independently discovered the same solution to the same problem across five continents over five centuries.
A group of people who trust each other agree to each contribute a fixed sum on a fixed schedule. Every cycle, one member takes the entire pool. The rotation continues until everyone has had their turn. No interest. No collateral. No credit score. No bank. Just trust, repetition, and a shared stake in the group's integrity.
"The mechanics are identical everywhere — as if human beings independently discovered the same solution to the same problem across five continents."— N. Bouteraa
I have been thinking about this for a decade. I grew up watching my mother's daret in Algiers: eight women, every month, one envelope. I watched the woman who received first use her pool to open a small shop. I watched another use hers to pay school fees. I watched my mother use hers to repair our roof. No bank was involved. No application. No rejection. No interest rate.
What I didn't understand then — what took me years of architecture school and startup-building to fully articulate — is that what I was watching was not an informal workaround. It was the most elegant financial primitive ever designed.
The problem with how we talk about financial inclusion
The global conversation about financial inclusion is dominated by one idea: bring the unbanked into the formal system. Give them accounts. Give them credit scores. Give them cards. The implicit assumption is that the formal system is the destination and everything else is the waiting room.
This is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in a way that misses the most interesting opportunity.
The rotating credit circle is not a primitive version of a bank. It is a different kind of thing entirely. A bank intermediates between savers and borrowers, extracting a spread. A rotating circle eliminates the intermediary. Every member is simultaneously a saver, a lender, and a borrower. The system has no rent-seeker. Its operating cost is social capital.
The reason this matters now — in 2026 — is not nostalgia. It is that we finally have the infrastructure to do something new with it. Blockchain and smart contracts can replace the social enforcement mechanisms that made rotating circles fragile at scale. Identity infrastructure can extend trust beyond the immediate social graph. Mobile money can make the mechanics frictionless across distance.
What software actually needs to add
The rotating credit circle already works. What software needs to add is not the mechanism — that is solved. What it needs to add is scale, reach, and resilience.
Traditional rotating circles have three failure modes: default risk (a member stops contributing after receiving their pool), geographic constraint (you can only be in a circle with people you know personally), and opacity (there is no record, no recourse). A good protocol solves all three without adding cost or complexity.
This is what I am building with Sanad — سند. The name means: support, collateral, document, and trust — all four meanings simultaneously. It is not a coincidence that one Arabic word carries all four. In the context of collective capital, they are the same thing.
Sanad is a trust protocol. It allows people who may not share the same physical neighborhood to form financial circles based on verified social graphs, reputation scores, and on-chain commitment mechanisms. The circle administrator sets the terms. The protocol enforces them. The community builds the trust that makes it real.
"We are not disrupting the daret. We are extending it. There is a profound difference — one implies the old thing was broken. It was not."— N. Bouteraa, Sanad founding thesis
Why Algeria, and why now
Algeria has one of the lowest formal banking penetration rates in the Mediterranean — and one of the highest rates of informal financial activity. This is not a contradiction. It is a data point about where trust lives.
In a society where the formal banking system spent decades as an instrument of the state rather than a service for citizens, people built parallel infrastructure. The daret is not a failure of financial development. It is evidence of a society that solved its own problems with the tools it had.
The opportunity is not to replace that. The opportunity is to honor it — to build on top of a foundation of demonstrated trust rather than trying to build trust from scratch the way Western fintech companies must.
We are not starting from zero. We are starting from five hundred years of working code.
I don't know yet how large Sanad will become. I know the mechanism works because it has always worked. I know the technology is ready because it has been ready for years. What I am learning — what every infrastructure builder eventually learns — is that the hardest part is not the product. It is the trust. It is always the trust.
The rotating credit circle taught me that trust is not something you build with a good UX or a well-designed onboarding flow. Trust is built by showing up, every cycle, without fail. By making a promise and keeping it. By being the kind of counterparty that other people want to be in a circle with.
That is the product I am trying to build. The software is just the envelope.