Since its inception, blockchain has been linked to ideals of distributed cooperation, freedom from social and economic hierarchies, and a rejection of government oversight. These value-laden concepts are not inherent in the technology, but rather are imbued by its designers and users, often through open-source communities: online networks collaborating through peer production to build their own blockchain. In this paper, we argue that values practices bring the utopian process to reality in the form of commons based peer production and the development of a blockchain. Blockchain technology has a particular role this process as the community values are encoded to software code, and thereby they more directly affect the journey toward the utopia. We this taking place in three stages: beginning with a desire for something new, engaging in the utopian process through values process, and encoding utopianism into infrastructure. Using an ethnographic study of an online community building a blockchain, we identify three values practices unique to this context and their connection to the utopian process.
