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One billion co-owners. 10% of all jobs on the planet. Banks, factories, dairy farms and football clubs owned not by Wall Street shareholders but by ordinary people. Why we hear almost nothing about them — and why MILAGPT chose exactly this form.
Ask an Uzbek entrepreneur which companies run the world and they'll name Apple, Google, Aramco, the Chinese banks. They'll name joint-stock giants where the profit flows to investors. And they almost certainly won't recall that, running parallel to the capitalist world for 180 years, there is another economy — one where the owner is the customer, the worker or the farmer. Not "quasi-social," but entirely market-driven, profitable, and sometimes bigger than the multinationals. It just doesn't shout about itself, because it has no shareholders to sell a growth story to.
Let's take a trip around the world and look at these companies. The numbers are real, with sources. They're more impressive than any manifesto.
It all started in the English town of Rochdale. The weavers in the local mills lived in poverty: miserable wages, while the price of flour, sugar and butter was sky-high. In 1844, 28 weavers decided to pool their money — one pound each, 28 pounds of capital in all — and open their own shop, where they'd sell themselves quality goods at a fair price. On December 21, 1844, they opened a store stocked with butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal and a few candles.
It sounds like a rural anecdote. But these 28 people wrote down the principles of cooperation that cooperatives across the planet still live by today: voluntary and open membership; democratic control (one member, one vote, regardless of capital invested); members' economic participation; autonomy; education; cooperation among cooperatives; concern for community. The International Cooperative Alliance enshrined these principles in 1937 and updated them in 1995 — but the DNA stayed Rochdale's.
The core Rochdale idea: a vote comes from membership, not from the size of your wallet. One person, one vote. That's both the strength and the historical weakness of cooperatives — we'll come back to it at the end.
The most underrated fact: some of the largest banks in Europe and North America are cooperatives. They're owned not by market speculators but by millions of customer-members.
One of the largest banks in Europe, historically grown out of farmers' mutual-aid funds. The Crédit Agricole group's 2024 revenue was €38.1 billion, up 4.3%. At its base sit regional funds owned by local customers.
France's third-largest banking group, fully cooperative. Net banking income for 2024 was €19.3 billion, with net profit above €4.5 billion. Every customer of a local fund is a co-owner of it.
A cooperative bank with roots in the Raiffeisen rural credit funds. Record net profit for 2024 of €5.16 billion (+18% on 2023), with a loan book of €447 billion.
The largest financial cooperative group in North America. Net revenue for 2024 was CA$14.66 billion (+16.6%); pre-member-distribution profit was 3.36 billion. Owned by millions of Canadian members.
The Austro-German Raiffeisen model (19th-century rural credit cooperatives) and Britain's Nationwide (the world's largest building society, owned by its savers) continue the same logic: a bank that serves its members rather than outside investors.
Retail has been the cooperatives' home turf since Rochdale.
Add Switzerland's Coop (the country's second retailer) and Britain's The Co-op, with its network of stores, funeral services, insurance and legal services owned by millions of Britons — and it becomes clear: in Europe, cooperative retail isn't niche, it's systemic.
The most powerful story is India's Amul. It isn't a company in the usual sense but a federation of dairy cooperatives in Gujarat (GCMMF). Its owners are 3.6 million smallholder farmers from 18,600 villages. Not a corporation, not the state — millions of peasants, many of them keeping two or three cows. The Amul brand's turnover for 2023–24 reached about $10 billion, and the brand itself has been ranked the strongest dairy brand in the world. Amul literally transformed a poor agricultural province — the cooperative became a tool for lifting millions out of poverty.
Amul proves something hard to believe: 3.6 million poor farmers, by joining forces, built a ten-billion-dollar company — and each of them stayed a co-owner of it.
In the USA there's Land O'Lakes (dairy and farm supply) and Ocean Spray — a cooperative of cranberry farmers whose juice is known the world over. In Japan there's Zen-Noh, a vast federation of agricultural cooperatives and one of the largest farm operators on the planet. Everywhere the same pattern: scattered farmers on their own are the weak side of any negotiation; united in a cooperative, they're a world player.
Spain's Mondragon in the Basque Country is the world's largest federation of worker cooperatives. Here the workers themselves are co-owners — from the operator at the machine to the top manager. In 2024: 70,085 employees and sales of €11.2 billion with net profit of €632 million. It's Spain's fifth-largest private employer — finance, industry, retail (the Eroski chain), education. The pay gap between the lowest and highest positions is capped by its internal charter — something corporations only talk about.
And now — the direction this article is essentially being written for. What if you combined the Rochdale idea with a digital platform? You get a platform cooperative: an online service owned by the people who work on it.
A stock-photo agency owned by the photographers themselves. By 2023: 1,800+ contributor-members from 80+ countries. The key part: the cooperative pays contributors around half of royalty revenue — against the pennies the usual stock sites pay.
Drivers' answer to Uber and Lyft. The service is owned by the drivers themselves; the cooperative takes 15% per ride versus 25–40% at Uber/Lyft, and the profit comes back to drivers as dividends. The first 2,500 drivers received owner certificates at the 2021 launch.
In the same vein: the German marketplace Fairmondo, the American cleaning platform Up & Go (all the revenue goes to the cleaner-owners, the platform takes ~5% to keep the lights on) and the Canadian ride-share Eva. One idea: a digital platform doesn't have to extract rent for distant investors — it can be owned by the people who create the value.
And finally — the forms that hit you emotionally. The Green Bay Packers are the only NFL club owned by their fans: 538,967 shareholders own the team, and no one receives dividends — it's about love, not profit. Spain's FC Barcelona (more than 140,000 socios) and Real Madrid (around 98,000 members) are owned by their member-fans, who elect the club's president. One socio, one vote. Pure Rochdale — just on a stadium.
Let's put it all together. According to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA):
One billion co-owners. A tenth of all jobs on the planet. The turnover of the top three hundred leaders — almost three trillion dollars. This is not a marginal alternative to capitalism — it's the world's second-largest economy by scale, one that simply works quietly.
Cooperatives have always had one historical weakness — the very one born in Rochdale. "One member, one vote" and honest accounting of shares meant slow governance, paper registers, costly recalculation of stakes, and meetings you can't possibly gather a million people for. That's exactly why the form stayed powerful for centuries but "heavy to lift." Today that weakness is gone: the TON blockchain makes the register of shares transparent and instant, and AI takes over the accounting, the voting and the operations. The old form has finally got a digital skeleton.
And there's one more thing Rochdale didn't have. At MILAGPT, a share can be not only bought with money — it can be earned through contribution and work: whoever builds, writes, sells, brings people in, grows their share in the cooperative. At the same time, those who put in capital are valuable too and get their due. The combination — labor and capital in a single register, on a blockchain, managed by AI — is the whole point of MILAGPT. We're not inventing a new ideology. We're taking a 180-year-old form owned by a billion people, and removing the one thing that always held it back.
Vertical launches, the release of the MILA token, new articles and invitations to take part — on the founder's channel.
This is the first article in MILAGPT's "Blog" section. Here we unpack the ideas we build the cooperative on — and once in a while share news. · ← All articles · Home