Hello Party People! I have not written to you in some time. Obviously, the holidays, and then I was taken by the hormonal feminine mystery that zaps my energy and gave me a migraine for an entire day.

I also woke up today missing the crypto world. The industry is exciting, to say the least, and I know too much. I’m longing for some parts of my old life, but only the ones that saw the future and wanted something more.

Sheep, baby

Anyway…my boyfriend and I are about to get sheep.

Yes, you read that right. We’re buying some sheep and taking care of them through the winter. We are building towards a dream that we just have to get going on. Sheep are the entry point, and it’s good to have a purpose through this Montana winter. It’s already bone-chilling cold and not the kind of cold that Colorado has.

Montanans don’t believe me, but it’s not that dry here. The air is more moist like the East Coast, and the snow is wet. That’s the kind of cold that gets in your bones (ask anyone from New England). The Colorado cold is light and fluffy, and it’s easy to get warm even outside because it’s so dry you don’t sweat. Here, you sweat, and my lovely boyfriend says if you sweat, you die (or get hypothermia).

I will be reporting frequently on how this sheep wrangling goes. I’m excited just to be up and out every day to take care of them.

Timelines

It’s always funny when a dream you’ve been circling for years suddenly becomes real.

Since high school, I wanted to start a full, self-sustaining intentional community. I wanted us off-grid, well water, build all the homes ourselves, farm it, ranch it, live together in the hippy commune of my dreams.

I tried to employ my friends in this dream for years, but I really couldn’t make it happen. You can’t drag people into a dream they aren’t ready to live. 

That’s part of why I ended up in the spiritual world. Those were the people actually willing to take risks and change our lives. And before that, people in crypto were playing with the idea too.

When I went into crypto, I was trying to explore this new financial model on top of this design for sovereignty. Hoping it would enable its development in a better or easier way. Because to do what I wanted to, and still do, takes a lot of capital. DAS KAPITAL!

Crypto, at the time, served as a public funding mechanism for what could be seen as “public goods” or simply as open-market fundraising. People create a token around the thing they WANT to build, sell that token to the market at a price, and use those funds to build the thing they said they would. This is what a TON of projects did for years.

As you can imagine, some of those projects were legitimate, and some of them weren’t.

Ethereum itself funded development that way — though the Foundation famously struggled with having too much money and not enough wisdom about how to deploy it. Turns out resource abundance can be just as mismanaged as scarcity.

Where does $100 million in spending a year go?

But broadly speaking, there was a moment for a movement:
Buy land. Build community. Create your own parallel system.
Let crypto be the economic engine.

At this point, I think a lot of us who wanted this dream have dispersed. A lot of what wanted to happen, didn’t. And in its place was a lot of corruption and greed (or just failed projects).

I only know one intentional community that got off the ground. This one in Portugal. As well as some progress on Esmerelda in Sonoma County.

But more often than not, there were just a lot of shared houses with crypto millionaires. People tried to make it work, but the things that affect all communities affect these homes equally, if not more. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. You’re still stepping over each other’s crumbs.

It’s not that we needed crypto to make these projects work. It’s actually all the other stuff: communication, leadership, shared values, conflict management, budget and asset management, who makes the final decisions, how to live with resentment, how to clean up after yourself, and how to be profitable as a community.

It turns out crypto can fund a dream.
But it can’t govern one.

Dishes, so many dishes

The problem crypto came into, and that most places do, is that community isn’t built on funding. It’s built on how decisions get made.

Most intentional communities bounce between a few governance models:

Consensus

• Everyone must agree. Sounds utopian. Usually, it rewards the most stubborn person and creates decision paralysis.

Sociocracy

• Permission-based, distributed authority. Clear roles. Circles that can actually make decisions. This model scales better than anything else.

Benevolent Authority / Hierarchy (what we have in most places)

• One or two trusted leaders have final say. Like farms. Like businesses. Works because clarity prevents resentment, but it has to have a strong leader whom people trust.

Crypto tried to design away human nature with incentives and game theory. You see it too often in DeFi. The most successful projects are successful because they don’t try to rewrite the wheel of operations and management. When things are strictly numbers and dollars, I do think it works, but that wasn’t what “community” is about.

Because real life asks questions that incentives can’t answer:

• Who owns what?

• Who handles the dishes?

• How do we deal with conflict?

• What happens when someone stops pulling their weight?

• How do we stay profitable enough to survive?

These things are politics.

And they follow you everywhere — blockchain or not.

Network States

At one point, I joined a project called Network State Connect, which was part of this larger movement called The Network State.

Networked states are the idea that comes from Balaji. It’s still the thing that interests me the most about crypto.

It’s the idea that, through crypto, we can have these sovereign quasi-states. They may own land, they may build their own infrastructure, and they come from around the world, with international, highly skilled individuals who operate on a global network independent of nation-states, location, and time zones.

They create small communities in the places they settle, and they support national state economies by investing in those places. They may easily move between the places they establish. Acting as global citizens, or citizens of the network state they build rather than any one country.

Through this, they essentially create a state of their own. They may, eventually, seek to be recognized as an independent nation of states (existing globally).

It still fascinates me. A lot.

It’s still the most compelling part of crypto. Because it applies the tech to something real. It’s not just financial extraction; it’s technology improving our lives and opportunities.

And it comes back to the same core longing:

A life with agency.

A community with purpose.

A system we actually believe in. That we can create anew.

The dream

I thought the funding mechanism would be the thing to help the dream become a reality, and in some ways it is, but I’m no longer waiting for the funding mechanism to catch up to the vision.

The dream is still alive for that utopia on earth. I’m building my dream, now, starting with the sheep. With land (if we can find it in Montana). With one person I trust and love dearly. With actual shovels in real dirt, not just Discord channels and tokenomics whitepapers.

The dream didn’t die. It just got some texture.

There’s a point where all the future-facing ideas have to come crashing into the present moment. Where you stop asking how will this unfold? and start saying we’re doing it anyway. Where sovereignty isn’t a governance model, it’s waking up in sub-zero temperatures because animals rely on you to survive.

And where even just one step closer to it is enough. I wish I could just have a big pot of $2M to make this dream come to reality in just a couple of years. 600+ acres, a main house, animal homes, and smaller cabins for others to live or rent, the farm is already working and yielding without issue

I think a lot of us in crypto — the real builders and dreamers, not the grifters — were always motivated by the same thing:
a longing for a future that was different. With community, resilience, meaning, and a life that doesn’t feel like sleepwalking in someone else’s broken system.

So, why am I writing this today?

Because sometimes the timeline you thought was “someday” suddenly becomes this winter.

Because I want you to see that the first step toward building a network state — a sovereign community — might look a lot less like corporate development
and a lot more like feeding sheep in negative-10 degrees while your breath clouds up the air.

Because I woke up missing the world where people believed we could reinvent everything — finance, housing, governance, belonging — and I realized…

I never stopped believing it.

I just realized that the revolution might not come from the tech down.
It comes from the land up.

It’s not design the new system and then apply it. It’s just start with sheep.

This winter, we’re becoming shepherds.
We’re starting with what we can steward.
We’re building the miniature version of the big vision.

And I’ll keep you posted.
Because if you’ve also been holding a dream like this — quietly, patiently — you might recognize that this is how it begins.

One fence.
One partner.
A few sheep.
And a future worth getting out of bed for.

Love,
Val

I’m writing almost every day right now. If you missed one or want to see what’s been written before, click below.