5 MIN7 APR 2026

Sovereignty When it Matters: Exit as Survival

If the systems we build don’t hold when they’re needed most, are we all just LARPing?

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This community-submitted article recalls Porto Circle steward G IRL's experience presenting a privacy-focused egress app for domestic abuse victims to Logos developers and the community at Parallel Society. G IRL urgently needs developer support. Learn more and help victims.

What’s a G IRL like me doing in a room like this? That question sat quietly under everything. 

I was about to address a room full of developers, builders, people who speak in systems and primitives and create solutions that actually work. I’m not a cryptographer. I’m not a protocol engineer.

I’m a normie.

I’ve spoken in front of people my whole life – in my career and education – but this was different. When something matters this much, your brain starts scrambling. How could I convey this? Would anyone care? But my mind kept returning to death versus survival rates… and pixelated dick pics.

Which is not as leftfield as it may seem, as that was my initial entry point into web3. A relentless stream of unsolicited dick pics got me thinking creatively. I could subvert this intrusion. So I turned them into NFTs. 

I wanted to find ways to transform something violating into value, to give something back to the victim while layering in education to help women learn how to make their money make money, to emancipate themselves from The D – which could stand for "dictator" (or the obvious). I put together resources to help young people learn how to say no, how to receive a no, how to regulate during rejection.

Taking something uncomfortable and making it feel addressable.

So sitting in that room, completely out of my depth but feeling oddly at home, made a certain kind of sense.

But I wasn’t there just as me. I was there as G IRL.

The girl in real life is the one who holds the context. The reality. The lived understanding of what it actually takes to exit something you might not survive leaving. An activist. An educator. She’s the reason I was in that room holding both parallel selves.

Trying to communicate something that doesn’t naturally fit in a typically male-dominated space. 

Domestic abuse is often framed as violence. But that framing’s too small. 

It's a control system.

It’s your movement being quietly restricted. Your access to money tightening. Your world shrinking without you clocking it in real time. It’s digital monitoring, social isolation, pressure that builds slowly and deliberately until leaving becomes the most dangerous thing you can do.

And carrying something like that into a room like that isn’t easy.

It’s not a neat idea. It’s not a clean pitch. It’s a massive, cumbersome thing. Hard to hold up, harder to position, and even harder to “sell” without it feeling like you’re trading in something that should have never been transactional.

How was I going to get that across?

Appealing to a room full of developers to build something rooted in this reality is not a light ask.

It’s complex. It’s uncomfortable. It sits right at the edge, where systems either prove themselves or fail those who need them most.

And there’s a line I’m constantly aware of. Between sharing enough to make it real and not feeling like I’m peddling my trauma for buy-in.

I don’t want to do that.

So I made it simple.

I was clear. I let the facts land as they are.

I made myself a bridge between lived experience and technical implementation. Between something human and something buildable.

Because I understand what it means to need to leave and not have a safe way out. I understand how systems fail, quietly and repeatedly, at the exact moment they're needed most.

This isn't about the number of pull requests from unique contributors. It isn't about which chain has the most validators. And it isn't about how the tokens are distributed. 

This is where decentralised systems either prove their value in the real world or remain theoretical.

Because sovereignty isn’t abstract when you’re trying to leave.

It’s not philosophical. It’s immediate.

Can I move safely?

Can I communicate without being seen or heard?

Can I hold proof of what’s happened?

Can I get out?

That’s sovereignty. Right there, at the edge.

And if the systems we’re building don’t hold in that moment, then what are we actually doing here?

I opened with a question:

If it takes on average seven attempts to leave, and the most dangerous point is when you try, what does that do to your odds? 

Then factor in that you are 800 times more likely to be killed after strangulation.

You don’t need exact numbers to know what happens when risk compounds.

And will you still be breathing after the seventh attempt anyway?

And that’s the point.

We were all there. In that room. This community. This coalition of builders, thinkers, and doers gathered at Parallel Society.

All that capability, in one place.

The kind of people who take problems like this and build systems that actually hold when they’re needed.

Because if risk compounds, so can solutions.

And if a group like this – with all its intelligence, all its power to build – decides to change the outcome…

I like our odds.

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