Timothy Leary once called Terrence McKenna "one of the five or six most important people on the planet." Others would come to recognize McKenna as a kindred spirit, dubbing the ethnobotanist and mystic the “Timothy Leary of the ‘90s.” 

At the end of the century, McKenna, a native of Colorado, was a fixture of the counterculture, renowned for his perspectives on psychedelics and shamanism – as well as his incisive criticism of dogma.

"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window,” McKenna said. “Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

It’s being open to that possibility that sent Tim Gulley – a McKenna follower – on his healing journey to the Amazon. Within three short years, he went from working as an “IT department of one” for an Indianapolis company to pouring virtually everything he had into AyaCoin, an ambitious cryptocurrency project whose token could be exchanged for ayahuasca retreats.

Today, six years after it “royally flopped,” he remains convinced that web3 and psychedelics will play important roles in our future. While there are many tales of failure in crypto, here is the rare story of what happened behind the scenes, which Gulley hopes others can learn from. 

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It all began nearly a decade ago in Indiana.

In 2015, one of Gulley’s family members was suffering from “severe, suicidal depression,” he shared via email. Traditional approaches like doctors, therapists and antidepressants weren’t working. “And not only was it not helping,” Gulley said, “this person was slipping away right in front of my eyes.”

He’d heard stories about people seeking healing in the Amazon, “and how they entered this so-called spirit world and encountered beings almost beyond imagination,” he explained. “On one hand, it sounds too fantastical to be true, but on the other hand, all these native people seem to have known about it for a long time and treat it with great reverence.”

“The token didn’t raise ‘a dime. The project essentially faded away.’”

— Tim Gulley

Desperate for alternatives, Gulley and his parents maxed out their credit cards to fly his family member and himself to Ecuador for a 13-day ayahuasca retreat. “The experience forever changed my life, which I don’t say lightly,” he said.

The experience also exhausted his two weeks of paid time off, so when he landed back in the states, he drove from the airport straight to work. It was “incredibly disorienting,” he said – a stark “juxtaposition of this wholesome environment where like-minded people from all around the world came to heal together…compared to this uber-toxic work environment.”

He went on, “It made it very clear to me that I needed to get out of there. So I literally quit my job, moved to South America and started cleaning puke buckets.”

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Gulley returned to that same retreat in Ecuador. For six months, he worked as a caretaker in exchange for room, board and a couple hundred bucks a month. “Even though my mom thought I was crazy for it, what she couldn’t understand was the meaning behind it all,” he said. “When another human being looks you in the eye with tears of gratitude and thanks you from the bottom of their heart, that just touches you on a level that you’ll never forget.”

This was his purpose, Gulley realized, and a new life goal emerged: to have a retreat center of his own. 

His journey began with AyaAdvisors, an independent review website for ayahuasca retreats. He built the site and its online presence, but growth was unavoidably slow. “To this day, Google bans you from using keywords related to ayahuasca in Google Ads,” he explained, “due to the complicated legal nature of these plants in the States.”

According to the U.S. government, DMT (the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca) – alongside LSD, MDMA, marijuana, psilocybin and others – are Schedule 1 drugs, which suggests they have a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use.

This policy persists despite a growing dossier of scientific evidence that suggests otherwise. And it discounts the lived histories of many indigenous peoples, whose “great reverence” for certain plants has been cultivated over millennia. 

It’s this kind of dubious, centralized thought that lends credence to McKenna’s hunch, and has led some to liken psychedelics with web3 – or, at least, to see them as natural partners in dismantling outdated paradigms.

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As Gulley mulled funding strategies for his center, he looked toward crypto. “I strongly believe in the future of Bitcoin in particular as the dollar continues its slow digression into hyperinflation,” he said. “And [Ethereum] seemed like the perfect fundraising and profit-sharing vehicle at the time.”

In 2018, he launched AyaCoin. “Something needs to be done, to help people suffering from depression and PTSD, and nature has the answer,” Gulley reads in a voiceover for an AyaCoin promotional video. “AyaCoin is different from other cryptocurrencies, because it’s the only one that helps heal depression and PTSD.”

Gulley’s vision for AyaCoin was to fund his retreat center, purchase land to protect the rainforest and provide a token that folks could exchange for ayahuasca retreats. He envisaged it enabling crowdfunded support for people who couldn’t otherwise afford retreats. And he anticipated robust returns for token holders – “a minimum of 12 percent per year,” he wrote in the project’s launch email. 

He also sought to share 5 percent of the revenue with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which for 40 years has led a movement toward “evidence-based approaches to psychedelics,” promoting “psychedelic healing for all.” 

The organization “politely declined” his offer, Gulley said.

Gulley put an “immense amount of effort” into the framework of AyaCoin, navigating “seemingly never-ending legal complexities…and hands-on work with a lawyer” that depleted his savings. 

“I just can’t adequately emphasize how much time and effort I put into considering every little detail of that project,” he said. Yet,  he thought, “if you make something great, people will connect with what you have to offer.”

The initial token offering went live in September, 2018. Based on his timeline, Gulley projected he’d have the funds to purchase his property by the end of the following year. 

“And yet once all the pieces were in place,” he said, “I sent out the announcement to our mailing list [and got] crickets.”

The token didn’t raise “a dime,” Gulley said. “The project essentially faded away.”

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Gulley eventually left Ecuador. Last year, he started splitting his time between Thailand and the U.S. He’s now working on a different passion project, Dadly – a dating site for single gay dads. But he hasn’t given up on the retreat center.

“With the way things are shaping up in Colorado,” he said, “it's very likely that I will start a retreat center there once Ayahuasca legislation goes into effect in 2026.”

In 2022 Colorado’s ‘Natural Medicine Health Act’ legalized the use of psilocybin. In June of 2026, the state’s Natural Medicine Advisory Board will consider expanding the act to include other natural substances, like DMT.

Elsewhere, clinical trials and a new generation of thought leaders are pushing psychedelics’ benefits into the public’s consciousness. Stigmas persist, however – as does the federal government's “schedule 1” designation that, essentially, asserts all drugs that “dissolve opinion structures” are bad.

Last month, the FDA denied a MAPS-driven petition to approve MDMA as a clinical PTSD treatment. Regulatory progress can be glacial – a quality shared by web3, where innovators are also forced to seek refuge in safe haven states.

Perhaps not coincidentally, McKenna’s native Colorado is one of the most crypto-friendly states, too. Residents can pay taxes in cryptocurrency, and the government’s ‘Financial Technology Sandbox’ program empowers builders to innovate with regulatory flexibility. 

While he’s no longer an active participant, Gulley continues to follow web3 news and root from the sidelines. “I basically just lurk in the shadows and watch as history slowly unfolds in front of my eyes,” he said.

It does feel like, slowly, more eyes are opening, and more are willing to join the history as it unfolds. But people still don’t like to be wrong. And until more are willing to open up to that possibility, these frontiers will remain lonely, mostly uninhabited places. As McKenna once said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

lead image: Tim Gulley at the elephant sanctuary in Koh Samui, Thailand