NuMundo

NuMundo — originally “Project Nuevo Mundo” — started in April 2013 as a platform to connect people with impact communities around the world. Ecovillages, permaculture education centers, indigenous-led projects, regenerative farms. The idea was to make visible a network that already existed but had no shared infrastructure.

Building the Map

The network grew to over 200 land-based projects. We ran Indiegogo campaigns to fund development. We went through The Batchery and later Startup Chile, where we received a $30,000 grant. I was CEO from founding through April 2020.

The platform was straightforward — a directory and booking system — but the network it represented was anything but. These were places where, as I wrote at the time, “past and future meet to seed a regenerative culture.” Indigenous communities preserving ancestral knowledge alongside technologists experimenting with new governance models. The overlap was the point.

The Blockchain Experiments

NuMundo was where I first started experimenting with crypto and alternative economics. In 2015, we created NuCoin using the Bitcoin Colored Coins Protocol — one of the earliest tokenization experiments I’m aware of in the impact space. In 2016, we ran a mutual credit experiment in Costa Rica, using “room night credits” as a barter medium between communities. In 2018, we integrated crypto payments through CoinPayments and Dash.

None of these experiments scaled in the way we hoped. But each one taught me something about what decentralized economic coordination could look like — and where it broke down. I wrote about the political economy of decentralization on Medium, trying to work out the thesis in public.

What Worked and What Didn’t

NuMundo worked as a network. People found communities. Communities found each other. The handbook we published on GitBook became a resource for the broader movement. In 2014, we co-organized the Tribal Alliance Retreat in Costa Rica, which brought the network into physical space.

What didn’t work was the business model. [placeholder — what specifically made it unsustainable? Was it the market, the model, the timing?] The platform went dormant around 2020.

The Revival

NuMundo is coming back. The network still exists — the communities are still out there, still building. The infrastructure needs updating, and the context has changed. But the core need — connecting people to places that are practicing regeneration — hasn’t gone away.

The barter exchange experiments from NuMundo planted a seed that grew into something more ambitious: a full mutual credit protocol. That became ReSource.