Origins

The Kula project is grounded in over 20+ years of watching failed commercial and philanthropic endeavours in Africa, Asia and the Middle East where local communities (or tribes) are often excluded and disempowered.

Kula is working to correct the misaligned interests and priorities that sit beneath such outcomes by providing incentivization to all stakeholders through tokenization.

These tokens reflect financial return potential along the opportunity to decide, direct and partake in profit sharing of their RegionalDAO’s asset development.

This project is inspired by a belief that the distance between an investor and project outcomes need not be layered behind opaque decision making hierarchies that control governance and financial management choices.

Kula is a project that dares to dream that the traditional ways in which investment opportunities currently operate can be reimagined, creating an alternative that enables genuine transparency and participation.

Kula as a concept is drawn from the anthropological studies of Marcel Maus in Oceana - the human proclivity for barter and exchange and the accompanying social framework as a structure in which community and generosity is expressed through economic discourse.

 

History

Kula (or the Kula ring) is the ceremonial backbone of customary barter exchange in the Massim archipelago of the Trobriand Islands in the East Pacific Ocean. Across 18 islands, red-shell necklaces are traded in a clockwise direction and white-shell armbands circulate in an anti-clockwise direction. Kula shells are symbols that define prestige, position, and reciprocated relationship.

Kula ‘ring’ trips traverse hundreds of miles of ocean often still by canoe. The sophisticated rules that accompany this set of fascinating cultural and social traditions provides the foundation for economic commodity exchange.

Kula is the customary framework and governance structure that enables commodity trading between the island communities. As an anthropologically studied phenomenon that speaks to the first principles of exchange in human social behaviour, KulaDAO is the cryptographic mirror of the Kula ring.