The path

Ten steps, and not one of them is a pivot.

From three months in the Amazon at nineteen to a dance on the Moon in 2035. Each step is the direct consequence of the one before it, which is the only reason the last one is credible.

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The path

A menstrual cup, an ice cream, and a dance on the Moon.

Ten steps, and not one of them is a pivot. Each one is the direct consequence of the one before it, which is the only reason the last one is credible.

  1. 00The road

    from 16

    I started at sixteen and never really stopped

    Mexico first, at sixteen. At eighteen I left for South America: a year overland, backpacking and hitchhiking. I crossed into the Amazon right after turning nineteen, and stayed three months.

    Back in Mexico I started international relations and left it. A year in Europe instead.

    Fifteen years of the same habit: go and look at how it actually works.

  2. 01The body

    2015 — 2019

    I started at the smallest scale there is

    WeyCup, the first Mexican social menstrual cup, made in Mexico, certified by COFEPRIS. And the Red Tent, carried for years with NosAmo Colectivo: Ometeotl, Promise Land, Cosmic Convergence, Eclipse, Envision.

    It went where those workshops rarely go: indigenous communities, schools, women's prisons. El País and mexico.com ran the story in 2018.

    2 October, Tlatelolco: thirty women painting Coyolxauhqui back together, the moon goddess torn apart and thrown into the sky. #DespiertaUnaDespiertanTodas.

    Steph outside the Red Tent in the jungle, in a wine dress with a layered necklace.
    The Red Tent · Cosmic Convergence

  3. 02The first bitcoin

    2017

    A festival paid me in bitcoin

    A Red Tent production, settled in bitcoin. That is how I learned money could work without anyone issuing it, and then I watched it climb.

  4. The palapa ice cream stand at night, string lights above and a hand-carved wooden sign reading HELADO across the counter.

    03The exchange

    Oaxaca

    I wanted to hand out points. All I had was ice cream

    A palapa on a beach in Oaxaca, a hand-carved sign reading HELADO, and a second price list for the kids: a cone for a bag of the rubbish they had just picked up.

    The first rewards system I ever ran paid out in ice cream.

  5. Aerial view of the Sian Ka'an beach cleanup: a white tent, the crew spread along the sand in white shirts, and a thick dark band of sargassum at the waterline.

    04The town

    2020 — 2022

    TulumCoin was never really about a coin

    One effort out of many: a recycling centre, and points so that picking something up counted. Many coins on the table, more ideas than hands.

    2022 was too early and it paused, but the tracking went on chain. Everyone who took part is still on the record. TulumCoin, today →

  6. 05The rabbit hole

    2021 — 2023

    Someone told me I was wasting myself

    A mentor, bluntly: too smart to keep thinking about menstrual cups and little festivals. Then he backed me while I learned.

    My angels wanted the focus on the money. I wanted it on regeneration, measured. I kept the second answer.

    And I made Entre Monedas, a documentary on community currencies already working in Mexico.

  7. The Birth of Eden: two figures underwater in a cenote, one in coral reaching down and one in pink rising from the rock, light falling in shafts through the surface.

    06The Moon

    22 February 2024 · lunar south pole

    The message I sent to the Moon

    Piece 214 of 222. Page 570 of the Lunaprise Moon Museum. Made with Kelsey Candra, Isla Moon.

    Everyone assumes it is AI. None of it is. Two people underwater in a cenote, lit only by the light that falls into cenotes.

    What went up was love, regeneration and beauty: a seed of hope, left where nothing erodes.

    Moon Church: what is being written for the next payload →

    Many more missions are coming. First we look after our home.

    1. A rocket climbing at night, its flame trailing behind it.

      The launch

    2. A glowing shape inscribed into the titanium plaque of the payload.

      The shape inscribed into the titanium

    3. People holding each other in a control room as the landing is confirmed.

      Back on the Moon, fifty-two years later

    4. The NASA globe, and a group holding the Mexican flag in front of it.

      The Mexican flag, in front of the NASA globe

    5. The launch tower, and a crowd watching it.

      Everyone who came to watch

    6. The Lunaprise crew on the red carpet at Kennedy Space Center.

      Kennedy Space Center

  9. RegenWeek '24 Tulum — Celebration for the Declaration of Sanctuaries, over a green leaf beaded with water.

    07The signature

    2024

    If a payload can carry art, it can carry consent

    The Universal Declaration of Peace: signed on chain, so the signature belongs to the signer. RegenWeek '24, Tulum.

    The names are the next payload.

  10. 08The dome

    2019 → 2035

    I have built the dome before

    In 2019 the Red Tent became a geodesic dome in a field: el Templo de la Alquimia de la Diosa. Women inside, in a circle, on red cloth.

    I asked the astronauts whether you could dance on the lunar surface. Yes, under a dome. It is on the roadmap and the date is 2035.

    The dance is the party after the achievement: proof we regenerated this planet first.

    The first dome I built was for a goddess, in a field in Mexico. The next one is on the Moon.

  11. Steph on stage at the ReFi Austin launch with a microphone, The Birth of Eden on the screen behind her.

    09The layer

    2023 — 2026

    Then I went to see how the rest of the world does it

    Austin, where I launched ReFi Austin. Bali, a place whose beauty could reconquer the world instead of being invaded by it. Singapore and TOKEN2049 for the rails. LABITCONF for the line from Argentina north.

    Fifteen years of ideas I never had the funding to ship. FlowBond is the vehicle that ends that: an operating system for ecosystems. FlowBond →

    The generation that looked after the most beautiful planet in the galaxy, because it is the one we live on.

  12. 10Built

    2024 — 2026

    The Moon was the proof, not the finish

    Everything since has been on the ground. FlowBond became the floor: one identity carrying wallets, attestations and login under thirty-odd products, so nothing built after it has to pour its own foundation. On top of it, the things people actually touch: FlowMe, Origo, Voces, FlowGarden, Kai World.

    Then I went and lived it. Four weeks running the Commons Hub in a house in the Austrian Alps with old wifi, where nothing on the screen was seeded and the app stayed empty until the people in the building filled it. ShareTlan put a farm's spare nights on a ledger. And on a bench at that residency, Savia: two electrodes, a living current, and a question nobody has answered.

    Fifteen years of ideas I could not fund, finally standing up as one system.

  13. 11The mission

    now

    Make the extractive system obsolete, not defeated

    You do not win against a system that takes. You build one that gives back more than it costs, and the old one stops making sense. That is the whole strategy, and it is why the work is infrastructure rather than protest.

    So first we fix our own systems, with a little love, until they look after themselves the way a forest does: no one waters a forest. Then the harder half, which is people. A human being can be regenerative — leave a place better, measurably, as a habit rather than a campaign. Enough of us doing that and extraction is simply the more expensive way to live.

    Regenerate the Earth. That is the mission. Everything else on this page is a tool for it.

22 February 2024 · 18:34

A piece of my work left Earth.

The Lunaprise Moon Museum rode Intuitive Machines' Odysseus to the lunar south pole: the first American craft on the Moon in fifty-two years, and the first ever privately built. My work is on it. It is still there. It will outlast every server this site has ever run on.

That is the standard I build infrastructure to: make the thing that stays.

Steph Ferrera with the Lunaprise crew on the red carpet at Kennedy Space Center, February 2024.
Lunaprise · Kennedy Space Center

2035

Then we dance on the Moon.

I asked the astronauts the obvious question: could you dance up there? They said yes, under a dome. So that is the date on the roadmap, and it is not a metaphor: an ecstatic dance in a sixth of the gravity you have now, bodies doing things bodies cannot do down here.

It is the party after the achievement, and the achievement is not the trip. It is that we regenerated this planet first, hit the numbers we set, and left the most beautiful world in the galaxy in better shape than we found it. You do not get to go and look at other worlds until you have looked after your own.

Take care of your one square metre. Then five. Then a thousand. That is the whole invitation, and everything on this site exists to make it easier to say yes to.

See what is already standing →