I’m Sacha Pignot (Soushi888), the gardener and navigator of AlterNef, a living knowledge airship exploring alternative systems for coordination, value, and governance.
I call myself a mystique-technologue. Not as a provocation, but because the term captures what actually drives my work: the conviction that building distributed systems is, at its root, a spiritual act. When you design architecture where every agent is sovereign, where no central authority dictates truth, where trust emerges from cryptographic proof rather than institutional power, you are making an ontological statement about the dignity of each participant. The code expresses a worldview.
I live in Montreal and I’ve been circling the same question for years, approaching it from different angles: how do we build digital systems that help communities coordinate resources, share knowledge, and govern themselves without recreating the power asymmetries of the platforms we are trying to replace?
The Path Here
In 2016, I discovered blockchain technologies around the same time I started imagining AlterNef, initially as a blog structured around the seven petals of permaculture that could one day grow into a peer-to-peer university. Blockchains and the ideas orbiting them (decentralization, cryptographic trust, programmable coordination) captivated me with the possibility of rewriting what I think of as the “societal software.” But the deeper I went, the more the limitations became visible: global consensus, artificial scarcity, the energy cost of making everyone agree on everything.
In 2020, I found Holochain, and it immediately resonated with what I had been looking for. Agent-centric architecture, no mining, no tokens required. Each participant maintains their own source chain, and the network validates without dictating. This was the version of Web3 that matched my actual vision: sovereignty without isolation, coordination without control.
In 2021, I worked with Pierre Lévy on IEML (Information Economy Meta Language), a computable semantic metalanguage for collective intelligence. The collaboration lasted some months, but Lévy’s work left a lasting imprint: the conviction that machines should understand meaning, not just process text, and that collective intelligence needs a shared semantic foundation to function.
Then in 2023, I started building Requests & Offers with hAppenings Community, which brought me into the orbit of hREA, the Holochain implementation of ValueFlows. Working with Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen on the economic vocabulary layer led me, through the hAppenings Community database of Holochain-related organizations, to Sensorica and the Open Value Network model. The synchronicity was hard to ignore: Sensorica had pioneered ValueFlows through their NRP/CAS (Network Resource Planning / Contribution Accounting System) alongside the very same people I was now collaborating with on hREA. And Sensorica happened to be based in Montreal, my own city.
That convergence is where I work today. The vocabulary problem (how do different communities describe economic events in compatible ways) turned out to be just as fundamental as the infrastructure problem. ValueFlows and REA accounting provide the common language. Holochain provides the substrate. The rest is building.
What I Build
My main projects form a coherent stack:
Nondominium is a ValueFlows-compliant application for tracking and governing shared resources on Holochain, developed with Tiberius Brastaviceanu (Tibi) from Sensorica’s Open Value Network. The core idea is custodianship rather than ownership: resources belong to the commons and are managed by designated custodians. We’re building the person management, resource tracking, and governance zomes that form the foundational MVP, with a Python ERP bridge connecting legacy systems like Dolibarr to the distributed commons.
Requests & Offers is a peer-to-peer marketplace for the Holochain ecosystem, built with hAppenings Community. It enables organic matchmaking of skills, services, and resources without a centralized platform extracting value from every transaction.
Both applications share the same Holochain foundation, Svelte 5 frontends, and ValueFlows/hREA semantic layer. They’re two facets of the same vision: infrastructure that lets communities manage their own economies.
I also contribute to open-source enterprise tools at EvoluData (TikiWiki and Dolibarr), because organizations need reliable systems today while the P2P stack matures. The bridge work matters: you can’t ask a community to abandon their existing tools overnight.
Languages and tools I work with daily: Rust, PHP, TypeScript, Svelte 5 / SvelteKit, Holochain HDK, ValueFlows/hREA, Effect TS.
The AlterNef Vision
AlterNef means “Ship of Alternatives” (from the French nef, meaning ship). This Digital Garden is the prototype phase of a broader vision: a distributed educational and spiritual community built around what I call the Right to Alternative, the principle that free thinking beyond institutional dogma is not just permitted but necessary for human development.
The long-term vision draws from several currents: P2P Spirituality (horizontal networks of shared wisdom replacing hierarchical authority), non-linear personalized learning, fractal sovereignty (the same governance patterns at household, community, bioregional, and global scales), and the Aquarian principle of unity without uniformity.
If that sounds utopian, consider that the technical foundations already exist. Holochain provides the distributed substrate. ValueFlows provides the economic vocabulary. What’s missing is the social practice, the communities willing to experiment. This garden is where I think through those experiments publicly.
The seven branches of inquiry here (Land & Nature, Built Environment, Tools & Technology, Culture & Education, Health & Wellbeing, Finance & Economics, Governance & Community) are not arbitrary categories. They map the territory that any community serious about self-governance must eventually navigate.
Contemplative Practice
Daily meditation, weekly Qi Gong, and ongoing study within Western esoteric traditions are not decorative hobbies bolted onto a tech career. The inner work informs the outer architecture.
Qi Gong teaches sensitivity to flow, to the way energy moves through interconnected systems. When I design data flows in a distributed application, the same attentiveness applies: where does information want to move? Where are the blockages? What happens when you force a pattern versus allowing one to emerge?
The Hermetic and Theurgic traditions I draw from emphasize the sovereignty of the individual seeker within a fraternal network, which is exactly the social topology that agent-centric systems encode in software. The parallels are not metaphorical. They are structural.
Music and Jazzotherapie
I play saxophone and am developing what I call Jazzotherapie: a practice that combines jazz improvisation, movement, breathwork, and Qi Gong as a therapeutic modality. My musical influences span from Astor Piazzolla’s tango nuevo to Nobuo Uematsu and Joe Hisaishi’s compositions for games and film.
This is not separate from the technical work. A good jam session and a good peer-to-peer network run on the same principles: active listening, emergent coordination, trust without control. Musicians in a jazz ensemble are sovereign agents following shared rules (a key, a tempo, a form) while maintaining complete freedom of expression within that structure. Replace “key” with “shared DNA” and “tempo” with “validation rules,” and you have a Holochain application.
Let’s Connect
If you work on distributed systems, commons-based economics, semantic technologies, or the intersection of contemplative practice and technology design, I would love to hear from you.