Tangle Samuels, left, Eric Chennells, centre, and Leo Weese, right, sit in the DCTRL members area, on March 9. DCTRL is an anarchic meeting space for bitcoin enthusiasts in Vancouver.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
For more than a decade, hackers, digital anarchists and cryptocurrency luminaries have descended through the mouth of a whale into the basement of a decaying Edwardian building in downtown Vancouver.
It’s not just any whale. The basement staircase of the 116-year-old Tiedemann Block was painted in ironic homage to the Bear Whale – a legendary speculator who, in crypto lore, tried to sink bitcoin in 2014 by placing a large sell order well below the market price.
Tangle Samuels, a member of DCTRL, the group that has called the basement home, recalled the community’s battle to slay its foe and support bitcoin’s price.
“We are the true believers,” he said. Members describe DCTRL – pronounced variously as decentral or decontrol – as Vancouver’s longest-running decentralized tech space.
But the run is coming to an end on West Pender Street as DCTRL has been forced to vacate the premises to make way for redevelopment. A new 12-story mixed-used residential building will retain only the existing facade with its terra cotta lions’ heads.
DCTRL, at 436 W Pender Street in Vancouver.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
DCTRL members say a planned studio space on the new building’s roof is impractical for their gatherings, which sometimes include live DJ sets. They are looking for a new place to call home.
At the same time, some cryptocurrency adherents are facing a challenge to their faith. Born out of an anti-establishment movement of “cypherpunks,” who saw cryptography as a way to resist the encroachment of the state into private lives, cryptocurrencies have become increasingly established in the world of traditional finance.
In a February, 2009, post, Satoshi Nakamoto, the likely pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, described a new form of electronic cash that was “completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties.”
Now, Canadians buy bitcoin ETFs in their RRSPs and even trade crypto directly in some mainstream brokerages. Cryptocurrency users must report their holdings to the Canada Revenue Agency, as they would any other asset.
In March, U.S.-based Kraken Financial announced that it had become the first digital asset bank to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s payment infrastructure, with a master account that lets it maintain a balance at the central bank. Last month, Iran demanded ships pay tolls in bitcoin for safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr. Chennells, a member of DCTRL.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
For DCTRL member Eric Chennells, the shift from the technology’s anti-establishment roots has been disorienting.
“It’s confusing for us in the trenches. Like, how do you reconcile these values with Wall Street and Bay Street?” he said.
For a group that has relentlessly advocated for wider adoption, there is sometimes a sense of Pyrrhic victory. “If you win, it fades into the background. But if it fades into the background, then you’ve kind of lost because you’re being co-opted.”
Starting in 2013, DCTRL sublet the downtown basement, which once housed a reptile farm, later an underground magazine factory, from a ground-floor hair salon called Bangtown. It evolved into a shrine to decentralization, walls bedecked with meme-heavy art, stickers and graffiti.
A display shelf holding vintage bitcoin mining machines and blockchain paraphernalia anchored the corner of the main room. A framed Zimbabwean $100-trillion note hung on one wall. A photo of ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, taken during his visit to the space around 2014, adorned another.
Mr. Weese uses the bitcoin-operated 'Bepsi' machine at DCTRL.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
Rooms and hallways were lined with displays, keyboards and cables. A cryptopowered vending machine, dubbed the “Bepsi,” accepted payment in a number of digital currencies and was used by Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim.
Mr. Samuels said the space reflected Vancouver’s cryptocurrency culture built around “developers, builders or creatives,” in contrast to Toronto’s finance focus.
“People can do whatever they want here, and I think it allows for this really special creativity in this permissionless, decentralized way,” he said.
DCTRL holds educational seminars, weekly meetups for Ethereum enthusiasts, open-mic nights, chess tournaments, jam sessions and decentralized dance parties. Members say the space has helped to incubate and promote a string of decentralized projects, including blockchain-based machine learning network Bittensor and Enjin Coin, a cryptocurrency designed for virtual goods in games.
One member, who didn’t want to be identified for personal safety reasons, said physical spaces like DCTRL were important for helping to overcome increasingly tribal online interactions by allowing for free discussion. While a screen at DCTRL was dedicated to showing the bitcoin price, members say they are interested in cryptocurrency for reasons that have little to do with investment.
The members area of DCTRL features memes, art, stickers and graffiti.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
Jenn Mentanko, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University whose research focuses on the culture of bitcoin, said users see it as an alternative to a financial system they feel no longer works for them.
“What it is for a lot of people is this safeguard from inflation, this kind of way to opt out of the system. And that kind of philosophy carries on to a number of areas in their life,” she said.
“People think that they’re, at best, speculative investors, at worst, scammers. They’re kind of experimenting with a new form of monetary policy, or economic governance … It’s a bit deeper than just the ‘crypto-bro’ stereotype.”
Ms. Mentanko said that while the aims of the financial world and groups such as DCTRL are very different, the spread of bitcoin is a natural outcome of its decentralized nature.
“You can use bitcoin however you want to. There’s no authority over bitcoin to say, no you can’t, you shouldn’t have a bitcoin ETF,” she said.
Questions about its utility nevertheless linger.
A cabinet full of artifacts, such as various bitcoin miners, at DCTRL.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
Bitcoin has also been billed as a hedge against inflation. But it tumbled from its October, 2025, highs earlier this year even as gold soared to new records.
A 2024 paper by Ruchi Patel, a senior policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, concluded that El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 – a world first – had generated only limited benefits, “largely undermined by the uneven and neocolonial impacts of crypto on local people, land and resources, and power.”
Crypto-based scams are widespread: In its spring economic update, the federal government proposed banning crypto ATMs, which it said were “a primary method for scammers to defraud victims and for criminals to place their cash proceeds of crime.”
One DCTRL member expressed concern that cryptocurrencies connected to U.S. President Donald Trump and his family had caused reputational damage to digital assets as a whole.
Closer to home, Vancouver’s city council dropped work last month on a motion to make Vancouver a “bitcoin-friendly city” after staff determined that the city is not allowed to invest in the digital currency under its charter. The mayor, a noted proponent of bitcoin, had proposed the motion in December, 2024, shortly after the price of the digital currency breached US$100,000 for the first time. It currently trades around US$77,000.
The back of the building that housed DCTRL.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
“We asked staff to take a serious look at it, and we appreciate the work they did. Their conclusion is clear that this isn’t an eligible vehicle for the City of Vancouver, so we’re moving on,” Mr. Sim said in a statement.
Mr. Samuels said the mayor remains sympathetic to DCTRL and has met with members several times. In a November, 2023, public hearing on the redevelopment of the Tiedemann Block, Mr. Sim praised the group and said he wanted to support the city’s crypto ecosystem.
The members of DCTRL are optimistic that more governments and institutions will ultimately adopt bitcoin because of what they see as its technical superiority to existing systems that are limited by their reliance on trust in central banks and financial institutions.
They are similarly sanguine about their coming move. While their location may change, the core vision of the group is “going to live on,” said Mr. Samuels.
“As much as we love this space … I’m ready to be above ground.”