Building a holistic psychedelic wellness community on Web3
Why blockchain-based tokenization protects your privacy without sacrificing transparency
A regenerative economic model for community-driven organizations
Tokenization is core to decentralization. Web3 is a collection of decentralization tools that enables ownership and governance by the community of a mission-driven organization. If we stopped thinking of ourselves as “customers”, “clients”, “patients”, and instead as “owners”, how could we build a community that’s regenerative and self-sustainable? If we are to be “owners” of our own mental well-being, then why not be self-sovereign in the economics too?
Tokenization allows for different models of capitalism and organizational structure to exist. It enables the use of economic incentives for distributed contribution, ownership, and governance rights for all stakeholders. This enables the adoption of a regenerative economic model. The decision-making can be done with speed and the organization can be scaled across borders.
To achieve this mission (aligned with our philosophy), we looked for new tools that would help us protect people’s privacy without sacrificing transparency, create a cooperative with distributed decision-making & governance at speed and scale, and enable members of our community to be owners and stewards of the collective and define our systems in ways that are best suited to our vision.
Blockchain, crypto, and DAOs are some of the core technologies we are using to build a community at Mind Lumen. In doing so, we are tokenizing mental health & wellness services.
If you aren’t already familiar with Mind Lumen, we’re building a community-owned platform that facilitates safe and seamless access to psychedelic support and other wellness services (preparation, experience, integration). We are building a 3-sided marketplace that connects seekers (people who need healing), with practitioners (therapists/guides/facilitators/sitters) and spaces (Airbnb for healing spaces) while maintaining privacy and transparency.
Mind Lumen is not a traditional technology startup. Our primary focus is on community – our vision is to be community-owned and governed, offer healing access & support networks independent of one’s financial resources, and adapt regenerative economic principles of capitalism to empower all members of our community to connect to each other.
The use of decentralized technologies is a natural fit.
This article gives a breakdown of how we plan to use these technologies.
Cryptocurrency enables the alignment of economic incentives with our mission
“Crypto is a lot of things – including terribly explained” - New York Times
Cryptocurrency is decentralized money, meaning there are (generally) no centralized intermediary organizations that have the power to monitor and mediate transactions. To learn more about cryptocurrency, click here.
Traditionally, when you purchase something, you either pay with cash or use a digital service like a credit card or e-transfer that is traceable directly to your identity. This puts data about your purchasing behavior in the hands of multiple third parties, who are usually profit-seeking and who may share that information in any way they manage to obtain permission to, including with government agencies who request it.
As an alternative to making payments via traditional finance or “trad-fi”, when you purchase something using a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, that transaction is usually public, but your identity is kept private. The only information that is publicly available about you is the amount of the currency that was sent when it was sent, and the unique cryptographic addresses that sent it and received it. No names or other identifiable information are recorded on the public blockchain.
For most of the world right now, psychedelic medicines are either illegal, decriminalized, or deprioritized. While Mind Lumen only operates in places where psychedelic medicines are legal, decriminalized, or deprioritized, we recognize that even people who can transact for legal service offerings, still want their privacy protected.
Unless they have your informed consent, your bank, payment processors, employers, government, and insurance companies should not need to know about your psychedelic journeys. By using cryptocurrency, we enable you to better protect your privacy when working with psychedelic medicines.
Another benefit of cryptocurrency is that it enables more flexibility in how an organization defines its own economics. This includes the fees charged on different types of transactions, options for how people can use or benefit from holding a currency, and other incentives for community members.
At some point in the future, we envision issuing our own cryptocurrency, $LUMEN. This currency will be governed by policies that support our regenerative economic model.
Blockchain provides security, and transparency of transactions without sacrificing privacy
A blockchain is a digitally distributed, decentralized public record of transactions that are verified as true, using cryptography. To learn more about blockchain, click here.
At Mind Lumen, we are balancing two conflicting priorities: 1) maintaining organizational transparency and 2) protecting the privacy of all seekers and practitioners of plant medicine journeys.
Blockchain enables us to balance these two priorities by allowing us to define which information is written to a public blockchain and which information is kept private.
We use blockchains to record information about financial transactions, as well as things like some practitioner feedback and information about other non-financial contractual agreements or transactions. Having a trustworthy public record of this information also helps to incentivize integrity and maintain transparency within our community.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) for Psychedelics
A DAO is a distributed organization, represented by rules encoded as a transparent computer program, controlled by the organization’s members, and not controlled by a central authority. A DAO model enables building an organizational cooperative that makes decisions at speed and scale with incentives tied to outcomes without centralized authoritarian mandates. To learn more about DAOs, click here.
Our vision for Mind Lumen is to become a global organization that supports people around the world by finding trusted guides and spaces for psychedelic journeying.
To achieve this, our responsibility as Mind Lumen’s stewards is to create the right conditions to empower our community in furthering our mission, and to pass off increasing amounts of responsibility to the community over time. Within the next few years, we plan to expand our ecosystem so that anyone can contribute to our mission and be directly rewarded for it.
In order to make this happen, it makes sense for us to use a DAO.
Generally, co-operatives are a good model for ensuring that an organization’s members have a say in how things are done. However, traditional co-ops don’t scale.
One of the big differences between DAOs and co-ops is that DAOs are governed autonomously, via smart contracts (computer programs that automatically execute based on the terms of an agreement and whether they are met). By working towards increasingly automating the governance of Mind Lumen and empowering our distributed, global community to contribute, vote, and collaborate on how the organization is run, we can become far more scalable than a traditional co-op.
Through the proper implementation of smart contracts, we can also empower our community to make decisions quickly. Some examples of this include:
empowering small groups of 8-10 people to form and collaborate on projects, then unlock pre-determined earnings as phases of a project are completed
hosting community votes on protocols, processes, and issues the community faces (members can initiate proposals too)
working with the community to build automated systems that reduce opportunities for centralized control over the organization
In short, a DAO is much like a distributed co-op and allows us to create a self-governing system that is increasingly owned and run by our global community.
The combination of all the tools allows us to build a regenerative economic model of benefits and governance that benefits stakeholders of the community.
To summarize why we are using blockchain, crypto, and DAOs to build Mind Lumen, it comes down to empowering individuals and communities using economic incentives. Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and the DAO are new tools to decentralize power structures to foster an equitable society.
As a final note, we aren’t suggesting that the use of these tools should be maximized across the entire psychedelic medicine space right now. While these tools have matured in recent years, they are still evolving. What seems reasonable or exciting today might look very different in the future. We are committed to evolving in healthy ways as these tools and this space both continue to change.
References:
Crypto, Blockchain, DAO’s - New York Times series
The TAO of DAO - Building ethics adjudication system on the blockchain