My life looks pretty different than even just a year ago. I’m sitting with how truly happy I am right now. I’m stressed about money, but I’ve been stressed about it forever. It’s a program in me that comes from years of generational poverty. Money mindsets are magic when you get them right. I usually think mine is pretty good, but if I have stress in one place in my life, it’s usually about that.

I spent the weekend with my boyfriend. I am so in love, I can’t even express it here. I burst with joy with this man around and I long for us to be together in forever.

Crypto

Crypto still finds its way into my life sometimes. Conversations, headlines, friends starting new projects. It’s quieter in my life now, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. It feels like something underground, composting, turning into whatever’s next.

Last November, I was still working remotely in crypto PR (public relations). I went into crypto in the oddest way I can think of (newsflash: there’s only odd ways into crypto). I was actually an AmeriCorps Service Member making less than minimum wage as a basically federally funded volunteer with the title of Blockchain Researcher. It was for a small firm in Denver, CO. I saw it online and was bewildered that it even existed. I thought, a year to just learn deeply about this technology? Sign me up.

And, I don’t regret that decision. I got a YEAR to just learn. You can’t do that in a lot of jobs. No one is going to pay you to learn. And I didn’t really get paid, but I did get time in the crypto market, and that paid me later.

Looking back, I realize how rare it was to have that kind of unstructured time to learn. Most people in crypto were sprinting to build. I was just watching, and that gave me a kind of long view. I could see that the tech was rough, the people were weird, but the intention underneath it felt evolutionary. Something that wanted to keep unfolding even after the hype faded.

AmeriCorps funds volunteers for one-year service terms at nonprofit organizations. Most of these nonprofits apply because they’ve got big ideas but not the budget to experiment. AmeriCorps fills that gap. It lets them test something new without taking a huge financial risk. That’s what I did.

I also like to call AmeriCorps an ‘experiment in poverty’. If you’ve never lived on SNAP, used every federal and state service you can, made below the poverty line wage for your area, and generally wanted to feel the stress of living like that, go sign up to be an AmeriCorps Volunteer.

When I started as a Blockchain Researcher, my whole year revolved around one question: what is this and can it make or save us money? The first part was easier to answer. The “what” of blockchain is mostly understood, but it needs translation. I’m good at that, turning the technical into the everyday. Abstraction is my gift. But the second question, can it make us money?, was harder. And in the end, we couldn’t. Not without a massive investment or, honestly, just gambling.

And really, this is still the answer for crypto. Either you invest in a huge blockchain solution that costs millions of dollars to create (and probably returns millions), or you gamble.

At the same time, I took a small role with what was called the Smart Contract Research Forum within the crypto (and what was later called decentralized science) community. We helped published authors make their research more accessible to practitioners in the crypto ecosystem. Because the problem in crypto is: they’re trying to solve incredibly technical and ethical problems at breakneck pace. They don’t have time to do or sometimes even read research, so we attempted to make that easier. That project was funded by Chainlink and, like most crypto projects, has since been disbanded.

But why did I get into crypto

Because crypto at the time was fucking interesting and I’m a sucker for what’s pushing us to evolve (and what could potentially pay me well too). Even at Freddie Mac, they were talking about blockchain because there were entrepreneurs talking about putting mortgages on chain. They wanted to do lending in crypto; they wanted to modernize the systems that create huge third parties in the lending process (the ones that take 10% when you close, or the title companies that take higher and higher fees year over year, etc). That could drastically change the industry and maybe bring the cost of homeownership down.

I still think we’ll get there. Maybe not with mortgages on-chain exactly, but with some version of transparent financial rails that cut out middlemen. It just takes time. Tech doesn’t disrupt without human nature first learning to cooperate.

And I know it takes more time than we think because when I went to some of these talks about putting mortgages on chain, I would ask the speaker or the builder how they saw Fannie and Freddie folding into a new system. They would respond with, Who’s Fannie and Freddie? MY GUY, if you don’t know who the biggest players in mortgages are in this country, you have no chance at building what you’re attempting.

And even more than that, there was this whole movement about decentralized forms of governance, of a new economic system, of wealth redistribution, supply chain transparency, and building circular economies that use their own currency. Of potentially even new voting systems with digital, secure provenance, for online elections. That’s fucking interesting. Even if we don’t know what’s going to happen, or if we even can, that felt worth a try.

Some players were taking big chances too. They had big hypotheses and they were spending money. One of those projects was Helium (for whom I did work). Another was KlimaDAO, tokenizing carbon credits, which would help bring efficiencies to the carbon market. Another was Impact Market, which attempted to develop a UBI. That was incredible. It’s since then looks like it’s moved into a new foundation. Unsure if they’re still supporting the UBI work.

As I look back on this, I used to think crypto’s biggest problem was the tech: scalability, user experience, regulation. Now I think its biggest challenge is time. Time for people to grow into what it actually asks of us: responsibility, transparency, and coordination without a referee. That’s a tall order.

Ahead of its time

But that’s sort of the general story about what happened in crypto. A lot of people came in looking to use blockchain technology to do things like UBI, or carbon credits, or ecovillages, and it was a place you could experiment with a technology that seemed really powerful, but that no one really knew how to use.

And I’ve talked to big-brain people about that. That crypto and blockchain, this technology that literally dropped down on us one day (that’s the story of the Bitcoin Whitepaper), seems like something that’s 50 years ahead of its time, and we’re still trying to figure out how to use it. 

If you like stuff like that, check out the Bitcoin Mysteries. 

I think about crypto now the same way I think about myself. It’s not that it failed. It’s not that I failed. It’s that it’s still becoming. The people who rushed in wanted revolutions in a year. But transformation, technological or personal, has never happened that way.

Crypto wasn’t just an economic experiment. It was a consciousness experiment. It drew in people who were willing to imagine new systems, to question the foundations of trust, value, and ownership. And it exposed how immature we still are when it comes to wielding freedom, collaboration, and power.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s a sign of growth. Every new layer of technology mirrors the layer of human consciousness that built it. Blockchain is, in a sense, our collective nervous system externalized: a transparent, immutable mirror that reflects what we value and where we cheat. We keep saying we want decentralization, but most of us are still learning how to decentralize within ourselves. How to move from fear to trust, control to collaboration, scarcity to stewardship.

Crypto will evolve when we do. And we are evolving. Slowly, messily, imperfectly, but still forward.

So when I look back, and forward, on my time in crypto, more than anything, I learned to see potential where others saw confusion. That’s the same kind of faith I’m using in more than one part of my life.

It’s the same kind of faith we need to live full, good lives, in all parts of us. Because this next era will require not blind hope, but steady curiosity, grounded in reality, willing to grow up.

And I’m pretty confident that when we do that, we’ll find the technology will grow up with us. And rather than abandoning it, we learned to understand it in the same way we finally learned to understand ourselves.

Love,
Val

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