Samuel Delesque, founder of the Traditional Dream Factory ecovillage in Portugal and co-creator of the Closer governance platform, explains to Pinchbeck how the project ties a crypto token to physical access rather than financial speculation. One token, priced at roughly 242 euros at the time of the conversation, entitles the holder to one night on the land per year in perpetuity, and the same unit of time serves as the basis for dividing both build costs and governance rights. Delesque describes it as a stewardship token: buyers accept that the land is placed into the commons and regenerated rather than extracted from. He contrasts this with 1960s back-to-the-land communities, discusses the roughly fifteen permanent residents and the tiers of participation on site, and addresses the speculation question directly.
Guest: Samuel Delesque
In brief
- Delesque says the token's utility is physical access rather than financial leverage, with one token equal to one night per year on the land forever.
- He argues that most traditional ecovillages lack a clear ownership and governance structure, so residents who leave after decades of labor take none of the value they created with them.
- He describes the token as a stewardship instrument that explicitly denies holders the right to deplete the land, with purchase conditional on the land being placed in the commons and regenerated.
- He contrasts the secluded, disconnected communities of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement with a model in which software and governance tools are shared globally while production stays local.
- He says roughly fifteen people live on site permanently, with capacity for up to eighty or a hundred during festivals, and multiple tiers of participation including volunteers, builder residents, guests and full-time co-housing residents.
- He says the aim is to divert a fraction of the trillions in global real estate capital into biodiversity and carbon capture, and accepts that token prices may rise as a way of bonding the community's interests to the project's success.
Full text
Yes. So, I mean, we're a bit different from the the typical crypto project in that uh we're backed by land, right? So, your token is backed by access rights to physical land and we're developing a thriving eco village in Portugal. So, we're building a co-l livingiving space. We're expanding into a tiny house development soon. Uh we built already a lake and a biopool kind of all of this uh things happening on the ground kind of in parallel to to the technology. And the the key difference between crypto projects and and us is that uh we seek to put real value on chain. So instead of just having all of these financialized kind of instruments and where you can kind of have all the leverage and all the different things that uh uh that crypto provides uh we like our utility of the token is being able to have physical access to the land.
And one token is one night spent at TDF per year forever. So it renews every year. If you buy 10 CDF tokens, you can come 10 nights this year and 10 night next year and so on and so on. Uh so it's a very simple and straightforward model. uh and the the crypto aspect kind of enable us to uh decentralize the the the access right to the space and we looked at more like um people spending time in the project as the kind of base unit of division for how do we divide the total cost of building such a space uh and also how do we divide the the governance right associated um with governing such a space.
So we devised a few primitives that basically enable landbased project similar to ours to bring in these new tools, these technologies into the realm of smallcale physical communities uh which should solve some of the the downside of traditional eco villages. And so some of those are well first of all a lot of eco villages don't have a very clear ownership or governance structure. Um, a lot of the communities that were set up in the 60s like kind of was a back to the land movement, uh, they they had a lot of enthusiasm about ecological preservation and these sort of things, but it was more about living in your own secluded bubble and disconnecting from the global system. I think what we're seeing now is like more of a transition into a more cosmolo view of the world where you have certain things that are better shared globally. the things that uh light for example like uh software and governance tools and uh you know kind of the whole means of production are shifting to to becoming more like this where you have uh access to technology which you can send via the internet to any remote community anywhere in the world uh mixed with more like on-site local action and production.
Um and so yeah so in a way basically when people buy the token it gives them an access right into this like physical space through this um governance mechanism and uh we can kind of get all the benefits from from the crypto side of things which is access to liquidity people can buy the token they can sell the token so you don't have to be stuck with a physical space when you when you when you when you move there but you and also you can acrew value in that project right and there's a downside of traditional um eco villages is that um well because there was not like any clear like um equities that you could distribute to people or these kind of uh instruments that meant that a lot of people end up spending a lot of time and effort in building these spaces and after 30 years maybe they leave and they go somewhere else and they can't really take any of this value with them. So by creating a tokenized economies that actually represent the the most precious asset which is the access in terms of time in in the space um you can create a more equitable bonding mechanism for a community to be able to define what does value mean and how do we uh come in and come out. And so it enables it enables you as a customer to be able to show up to an eco village and to put in your energy and so on and to earn the token as a compensation knowing that if you leave someday you'll be able to have some values you can take with you. Um yeah one one big kind of difference between our token and and let's say traditional real estate or other ways you can organize these sort of things is that we are a stewardship token. Um so what we didn't want to to bring from the capitalistic world is this idea that simply by owning the token you can have the right to completely um deplete the land extract from it and so on.
We have to break that cycle of extraction that's been put in place over the last many centuries which has been causing depletion of resources globally and the tragedy of the commons. Um, and it's how can we actually reverse that and how can we actually have local communities that are actually enhancing the local ecosystem so that leaving a positive trace on nature and so when you buy the token you are buying it with the uh condition that the land will be put into the commons. The land will be regenerated. We're going to be replenishing the commons and through the token you'll be getting access to that common. Um, cool.
And um tokens I think you're telling me it's like a $100 euros or something per token right now around that. 242 currently. 242. Okay. Okay. So that gets you one night a year but for perpetuity in a way. Exactly. If you buy 10 tokens for 2,400 you have 10 nights in perpetuity. And um but then what about the people? How many people are living at the community right now? So we have about 15 people on the ground more or less per permanently right now. Um but I mean we can have between 10 to 80 people. So basically for events we'll have like up to 80 up to 100 people.
Um and that happens pretty frequently when we have small festivals and so on. Um and then in our day-to-day life I mean you have different ways to to come and stay. So I mean you can be part of the permanent team, you can be a permanent resident. So this like the whole tiny house neighborhood that we're building, this is getting into more of a co-housing model. So having people who are here full-time, uh having families here, people who maybe run the businesses here, maybe people who are part of the the the team actually running the farm operations and so on. Um but then in parallel, you can also just come as a volunteer for a couple weeks or you can come as a builder resident or you can just come as a guest and just spend a few days.
So the goal is to kind of have all the different levels of engagement so that we're not just stuck with one fixed community that kind of stagnates but to have a bit of both. So where we get some people staying longer term, some people rotating and so on. Um cool. And then so people who live there permanently uh how does their share in the in the in the structure work? I mean do you said that they get rewarded over time for contributing? Um so they have mass tokens or something like that. Yeah. So basically the total number of tokens that we minted initially corresponds to the total number of accommodations that will be available in the project once the first milestone is completed.
Uh so that's like 14 rooms that we're building and four studios and a house and and so on and so on. And then we take that we multiply it by the number of days that they're available per year. So for example for a private street it's going to be two tokens per night times 365. And so that gives us a total uh initial supply of tokens. Um now we reserve 20% of that supply for contributions. So if you're like working on the team or maybe you just come for a month and you build a treehouse like we kind of define different projects that we want to get done and for those we assign token rewards.
So if you're part of the team, you basically acrew a token and over time you basically have your um that representation uh which is like a fraction of the total access to this village which you can resell if you want to. Um and then that get mixed with a couple of other tokens. So the proof presence and proof of proof of sweat which are just governance tokens representing other rights and just pure financial. So it's kind of this mix of uh governance through spending time here doing work and also holding the actual asset and the access to the asset. So it sounds like in a way I guess it's not a project where anybody's going to get like super wealthy.
It's more about uh creating a sustainable infrastructure. Well, I mean um we like our aim is not necessarily to remove the speculative aspects from from from real estate. Um some people would put that as a critic towards us. Uh but what we are seeing is we want to funnel some of this uh funding that goes into real estate which is trillions of dollars. Um right it's the biggest asset class in the world and we want to take a fraction of that asset class and invest it into biodiversity, carbon capture and kind of ecosystem benefits. And so uh for us it wasn't the highest priority to not have any kind of return on it.
And so if uh ultimately it's it's a market, right? So uh once all the tokens are issued and we we build and and so on, it's still going to be a marketplace and it's possible the token value will be going up by a lot because a lot of people want to come and spend time here. Um so that is still a possibility and so if that's the case if the project is very popular uh because we built a great facilities because we have a great community on the ground and because we managed to spread the word about the project well that mean that the token value increases. So uh because it does that basically what it does it it bonds the interest of the community right because now everyone that participated in the project they actually have an interest and a stake in the growth of this project in the future.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.