Festival of Value: Event Retrospective
The festival is done! Thanks to Anoma foundation for enabling us to build this event and draw this community together. Below are some basic takeaways from the series.
Note: All talks were recording; the publishing process for the videos is fairly time consuming but we should be finished by next week!
Stats:
~80 unique attendees (75 registrants and 5–10 drop-ins from direct link)
14 talks plus a closing session
Overview of Talks
(find bios and talk abstracts in “Summary” - a few of the talks are missing abstracts)
DAY 1 — THURSDAY OCT 23
Theme: Civic / Local
(Localism, mutual credit, commons economies, and plural infrastructures of care)
10:00 – Christopher Goes — “Scale-Free Money”
Summary
Cofounder and lead architect of Anoma. Formerly core developer at Tendermint (Cosmos) and designer of the IBC protocol; led the Wyvern Protocol used by OpenSea.
10:50 – Pablo Somonte Ruano — “POCAs and Intents”
Summary
Pablo Somonte Ruano works with ambiguous software, generative systems, transmedia narratives, collaborative tactics and odd music. Pablo’s practice explores prefigurative politics, alternative economies, structural violence, decentralized technologies and the commons, while engaging with the politics of computation, language, value, time and games. Pablo is a core contributor to the Economic Space Agency (ECSA) an economic technology and imagination network for distributed economic agency and a member of the Crypto Commons Association (CCA).
Synopsis:
Pocas (pocas.store) is a research project at the intersection of distributed computing and alternative economies. It is inspired by centuries of self-governance, mutual aid and self-organization, as well as decades of free software, p2p networks, cryptography & distributed ledgers. Pocas investigates how recent advancements in distributed computing make old and new mutualist economic practices viable, efficient and convenient. In the process, it maps the existing organizations, practices and technologies that could make this a reality today.
For this talk, we’ll revise a first version of a couple of speculative implementations of anoma’s intent architecture for different use-cases within the pocas pluriverse. These fictitious systems explore the use of intents as mutualist membranes that allow for the interaction between plural economies. We’ll revise a syndication protocol for Bulk-buying and an architecture for Voluntary Common Funds.
11:40 – Ola Kohut — “Gardens of Value, Spaces of Care: Plural Economies for Collective Wellbeing”
Summary
Ola is a Berlin-based founder of JOY Collective e.V., a healing arts & collective wellbeing focused non-profit, researcher in grassroots collective organising & decentralised utopian futures.
Synopsis:
How do we imagine value beyond extraction and exchange? This talk brings together two experiments in cultivating plural economies: Nebula Magazine, a living archive of dialogues on post-capitalist futures, and JOY Collective e.V., a Berlin-based nonprofit and healing space rooted in community wellbeing. Drawing from practices of storytelling, care, and collective healing, the session explores how value can be articulated as relationship, presence, and reciprocity - both online and in physical space. By weaving together cultural, economic, and spiritual dimensions of value, we will ask: what might an intent-centric architecture like Anoma enable when value is felt as joy, care, and interconnection rather than scarcity and control?
DAY 2 — FRIDAY OCT 24
Theme: Cybernetics of Value
(Feedback, self-regulation, living currencies, systemic coherence)
10:00 – Howard Silverman — “Cybernetics of Currencies”
Summary
Howard Silverman blends theory and practice in the pursuit of a more just and life-affirming world. At Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit Ecotrust from 1999 to 2012, Howard worked on numerous projects to foster the regional resilience of social-ecological systems. He has since taught in graduate programs at Pacific Northwest College of Art and New York University. Howard is a trustee of the American Society for Cybernetics, a past board member of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a founding member of the Systemic Design Association, and an editorial board member of the journal Technoetic Arts.
Synopsis:
Cybernetics offers a repertoire for delineating the coordinative patterns latent in currency design. I begin by zooming in and out on cybersystemic traditions, developing a narrative of and through cognitive gestures for making the implicit explicit. With these gestures in hand, I then explore a coordinative cybersystemics.
10:50 – Jeff Emmett — “Psilocybernetic Intents and the Emergence of Institutional Neuroplasticity”
Summary
Jeff Emmett is a self-professed mycopunk and explorer of mycelial patterns to embed in new economic, democratic, and computational substrates. His work on MycoFi design patterns aims to increase the adaptive flows in collective resource allocation, delegated authority, and collaborative information processing for purpose-driven cooperatives.
Synopsis:
Join Jeff Emmett in exploring ‘intents’ through a mycelial lens, and how signalling needs (and associated incentives) in a network induces a stigmergic response via intent solvers, enabling the emergence of diverse opportunities to address them.
11:40 – Pam Pascual — “Terra Twin: Planetary Symbiosis and Living Intents”
Summary
Pamela Pascual is an emergent strategist, designer, and founder of TerraTwin, a planetary infrastructure platform building the coordination layer for ecological regeneration. Her work bridges architecture, biodesign, and Web3, exploring how technology can serve as a medium for reciprocity between people, materials, and living systems.
Pam is also the founder of Amber Initiative, a non-profit that reimagines how we create and exchange value across cooperative communities and ecosystems. Past community-led projects have ranged from village rebuilds and architectural ecologies to floating citizen science labs, each exploring how design and distributed technologies can restore the commons.
Today, through Studio A, she cultivates the cultural and narrative layer of the agentic internet—working with Anoma’s intent-centric architecture to prototype new economies of care and living intelligence.
Her previous roles include UX researcher at ConsenSys, Artist in Residence at Autodesk Pier 9, and rapid prototyping technician at California College of the Arts, where she also earned her Bachelor’s in Architecture.
Pamela lives in Portland, Oregon, where she continues to design systems that entwine the digital and the ecological—toward a world where “the planet itself becomes the ledger.”
DAY 3 — MONDAY OCT 27
Theme: Ecological Intents
(Bioregionalism, grassroots currencies, environmental intelligence)
10:00 – Will Ruddick — “Grassroots Economics”
Summary
Will Ruddick, a grassroots economist, combines traditional practices and economic innovation. After graduate school in high-energy physics at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Economics at the University of Cape Town, his passion shifted to grassroots economics. Since 2008, based in East Africa, he’s implemented successful programs in resource coordination with local groups across Kenya and engaged in activities such as ecosystem restoration, food and water security, connecting communities with their abundance, skills and talents. Founder of Grassroots Economics Foundation, he’s a pioneer on commitment pooling, an economic protocol inspired by ancestral wisdom. Globally, he consults on economics and collaborates with organizations like the World Food Program, the Red Cross, and the University of Cape Town’s Environmental Economics Policy Research Unit as well as with several community leaders around the world. He’s an associate scholar with the University of Cumbria’s Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability.
10:50 – Will Szal — “Hyperbeings and Intents”
Summary
Will Szal is a co-founder of Regen Network, co-founder of Origins Co-op, and serves as Board President at Regen Foundation, as well as serving on the boards of Terra Genesis and r3.0. He lives in rural New England, and is passionate about the domains of regenerative agriculture, alternative and gift economics, phenomenology, animism, and myth. He is a citizen of the Connecticut River watershed, and his new endeavor, Hyperbeings, is an ontological framework to see bioregional-scale entities, such as watersheds, from an animist perspective.
Synopsis:
How do markets, states, and commons engage with non-human entities? One answer: the Ecological Institution, “ecological personhood” in shorthand. And what is the ontological framework contextualizing this legal entity? The Hyperbeing. And what is the method of interaction with the Hyperbeing EI with the outside world? One pathway is the intent.
11:40 – Cheryl Chen — “Bioregional Intents”
Summary
Cheryl Chen works at the forefront of regenerative finance, community sovereignty, and ecological resilience. She is a founding partner of Salmon Nation Trust, a public benefit company created to inspire, enable, and invest in regenerative development across the bioregion. Currently, she is CEO/CoFounder of Salmon Returns a bioregional fund designed to move investment into Indigenous- and community-led regenerative enterprises. Cheryl’s work is grounded in strategic insight and hands-on experience from decades of deep relationship-building and cross-sector collaboration with place-based communities. At Future of Fish, she helped catalyze global investment strategies to end overfishing through systems-based approaches for artisanal and multinational fisheries. During her 12 years at Ecotrust, she helped launch the geospatial technology firm Point 97, and led initiatives that supported data sovereignty, economic opportunity, and collaborative marine planning with Indigenous and coastal communities. Cheryl is a first generation Taiwanese American and holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Synopsis:
This talk introduces Salmon Returns as a bioregional regenerative finance initiative aligning capital with ecological and cultural renewal across salmon-bearing landscapes. It explores the emerging framework of biocultural credits—a next-generation approach to valuing stewardship, ceremony, and ecosystem health as core economic functions. Together, these innovations point toward a living financial system rooted in reciprocity, Indigenous governance, and the cyclical wisdom of salmon.
DAY 4 — TUESDAY OCT 28
Theme: Coordination Infrastructure
(Governance, semantics, and design for collective intent)
10:00 – Nathan Suits — “Intent Paths to Decentralized Public Administration (D-PAN)”
Summary
Nathan Suits is the initiator of City/Sync, a civic technology initiative building decentralized infrastructure for local governance and coordination. His work explores how blockchain-based systems can bridge digital and real-world coordination, empowering citizens to co-create responsive and transparent public institutions. With a background in governance design and token engineering, Nathan focuses on transforming civic engagement into a programmable, verifiable layer of the public economy.
Synopsis:
This presentation introduces City/Sync, a decentralized framework for civic coordination that reimagines how communities organize and act collectively. At its core lies the concept of intents as a structured representation of human goals that can be matched and executed onchain to facilitate real-world coordination. By extending intent-based architecture beyond digital systems into physical and civic environments, City/Sync creates a dynamic interface between citizens and cities, turning social coordination itself into programmable infrastructure.
10:50 – Spencer Saar Cavanaugh — “Intentional Semantics”
Summary
Spencer Saar Cavanaugh is a governance and knowledge management consultant, drawing from leadership experience in the DAO space. He specializes in cosmolocal knowledge architecture, visual identity, and onchain organization design. Currently, he is templating tools and processes for knowledge gardening.
Synopsis:
By unifying existing stable vocabularies and schemas such as DoaP and FoaF, it is possible for researchers, software engineers, and other builders to declaratively publish their work in semantically rich and machine-readable fashion. These vocabularies provide the building blocks for trust networks to emerge, but the precise implementation is still to be determined. Using novel technologies, such as Arweave for peer-to-peer publishing, archiving, and syndicating, we can begin to explore mobilizing semantic trust networks without institutional mediation.
11:40 – Ven Gist — “Intent-Based Cookie Jar”
Summary
Systems designer and philosopher of networks bridging applied cybernetics and design. Helped productize Moloch DAO through DAOhaus; co-founded Raid Guild, Public Nouns, and The Open Machine.
Synopsis:
In this talk, I will introduce an AI-augmented intelligence system inspired by open-ended intelligence theory—demonstrating its first major application: the Intent-Based Cookie Jar, an emergent funding mechanism that aligns human and machine intent for autonomous coordination and public goods funding.
DAY 5 — WEDNESDAY OCT 29
Theme: Speculative Intents
(Art, science, and the future of expressive economies)
10:00 – Stina Gustafsson — “Beyond Value: Intent-Based Economies and Funding in Art, Research, and Technology”
Summary
Stina Gustafsson is an independent curator and art strategist working at the intersection of art and blockchain. She advises museums, cultural organizations, and companies on creative collaborations, events, and research within web3 and digital culture. Active in the field since 2018, she founded the art research department for the blockchain foundation Department of Decentralization and has written two influential reports, There Is No Such Thing as Blockchain Art (2019) and Wanderer Above a Sea of FUD (2021). Her work explores the sustainability of the art world and its workforce through emerging technologies. She has collaborated with institutions such as the Bundeskunsthalle, Kristianstads Konsthall, MoCDA – Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, and Berliner Volksbank, and with artists including Hito Steyerl, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jonas Lund, and Joan Heemskerk (JODI). Since 2021, she has served on the International Selection Committee for the Lumen Prize, advising on the longlist for Moving Image and Immersive Environment.
Synopsis:
How can intent-based economies shape the ways we create and share value across art, research, and the wider creative sector? By looking at how aesthetic practices hold the tensions between the technical, social, and economic, without trying to resolve them, we’ll explore how intent can open up new ways of valuing, creating and imagining.
10:50 – Marcus Khoo — “New Networks of Knowing Together in Co-Creating Decentralized Science”
Summary
Marcus Khoo is an independent consultant working across the technology, culture, and education sectors. He is currently the core facilitator of the DeSciWorld Fellowship, a year-long research fellowship and project incubator for work furthering the Decentralized Science movement.
Synopsis:
Decentralized science (DeSci) strives to reimagine the conditions under which knowledge is produced, supported, and shared. Using the DeSciWorld Fellowship as a case study, we’ll trace how researchers, technologists, and other often overlooked knowledge workers are experimenting with new infrastructures of collaboration, verification, and co-creation across diverse fields.
11:40 – Closing Session
Summary
Reviewed prepared “Takeaway Questions” from prior 4 days (section below). Remaining attendees spoke about the cumulative effect of the lectures, which one person described as “a shift from a transactional to an intent based mindset. The circle was at times skeptical and at times enthusiastic about the challenge of or even likelihood of a paradigm shift along these channels, with multiple suggesting that a hybrid approach will likely be the final outcome. Does this this mean a hybrid of old world and new world, or a new world in which hybrid exchange systems co-exist under these new primitives?
Takeaway Questions
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Immanent versus institutional legitimacy: should we be coding full stack operationality into our work, or should lean into external institutions to meet where we fall short? If we did the latter, what are the logistical realities, when thinking of intents, of making expansive social, political and legal elements legible to solvers? Is it feasible or desirable?
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“Semantic dark matter”: if solvers can only interact with state, what data is unavailable to them? What kind of data gets made semantically legible, and what gets excluded? If communities aren’t literate in web semantics, how can they even know what kind of information is needed to be legible in this way? Can semantic web commons in the form of open source software made legible through agentic interfaces help resolve this bias, or give communities the tools to create their own permissioned substrates where agents can dwell?
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(similarly) the oracle problem: what are the role of sensors and digital twin technologies in making material conditions legible to solvers and resolvable to intents? What epistemological baggage is being brought to the table here and how can alternative ways of knowing be expressed in this intermediation?
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What is the roll of feedback? Two areas seem relevant:
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Feedback with regard to dimensionality of economic media: in the beginning of a new economic substrate, users will be stunned by a few axes of dimensionality. after a few generations, that frontier will be much wider.
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Feedback with regard to the permissionless coalition building that anoma permits. A group of counterparties respond to an intent anonymously - potentially, they could grow into levels of trust and even open up walls so that they can reveal information about themselves, and become something more like a real org rather than an anonymous coalition (though this may take many cycles).
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What is the gap between the capacity of the technology and human inclination? Are there design elements of the intent centric or agentic web that are underindexing on cultural and psycho-social forces that could take things in radically different directions from what the game theory might permit?
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Goodhart’s law: does the combination of intents with the zk scaffolding of Anoma solve Goodhart’s law in some cases by making metrics opaque until they are fulfilled, and once fulfilled providing spontaneous discovery/matching?
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Scale invariance: in an intent-centric architecture, scale (individual, organization, nation) should be more or less invisible in counterparty discovery unless programmed in. What are the implications here for systems design?
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Institutional neuroplasticity: a cool phrase (from Jeff Emmett) - how can we build institutions to be as dynamic and responsive as nature’s cognitive infrastructures?
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Greater-than-human agency: what does it mean to enact the agency of nonhuman or even inorganic agents through economic media? What are the ethical challenges in doing so - and what do the complexities of large systems or superorganisms, made up of suborganisms that should themselves be understood as ethical creatures, tell us about human agency itself?
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Somatic data/nonrepresentational media for intents: can we build semantic infrastructure to read biodata, biosemiotically calibrated data (that is, data that is designed to speak in the grammar of alien “umwelts” or world models) or qualitative data? How can intents serve the potential of an economy of qualia or the nondual?
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Convenience/frictionlessness: what are the limits of UI/UX optimization? should we be aiming for convenience optimization on par with more antisocial competitors, or is there an element of friction that can be attractive in its own right to users, as well as enmeshed in app design as a feature rather than a bug?
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Hybridity When it comes to implementation/adoption of intents-based framework for the economy, should we expect a hybrid relationship between new world and old world? Recent literature seems to suggest that the solver model of economic exchange is inevitable in some form, and the implications of it will be widespread. In that case, the hybridity could be between different (competing) solutions of the intent-solver problem, but it seems likely that the one that will dominate in this competition is the most modular one, the one with most degrees of freedom and most tolerance for hybridity within its architecture.
Overall Notes
Overall it was well attended and engaged - even in the closing session, the attendance had waned but those who remained had a lot to say, which I take to be a good sign for overall engagement. The speakers themselves did a good job of addressing and imagining around Anoma, with a couple of standouts for elaborate point by point engagement (Cheryl Chen, Pablo Ruano and Nate Suits come to mind). These sections and the talks collectively are a significant resource for infra builders who are interested in how the technology stack lands for end users and potential app builders. (We’ll undertake a meta-analysis of this in coming weeks.)
There was some presence from Helix which was very fruitful at times, but there was a real thirst from builders and theorists for detailed engagement on the timeline, architecture, and design possibilities of Anoma that didn’t quite get met. For a potential follow up, a design Q+A with this community could be valuable.
Overall, the series made clear for us that there is a LOT of interest in Anoma from diverse communities in crypto thinking and building beyond the limited lens of number go up.
Studio A (@lynx and I): While we continue to build community and think about education - both through the lens of the narrow interests of Anoma and where Anoma sits in our own broader thesis of ecological or living intelligence - we are considering the use of our network and associated artifacts for establishing channels of feedback between infrastructure builders, current builders in the application layer, and those who just learning about Anoma.
If that last point is of interest, or if there are any questions, concerns, feedback about the Festival, reach out!