Nolan Kovač at his workstation in the Bushwick apartment where he wrote the smart contract he now believes contains imprisoned souls. Takeout containers and energy drinks visible in the foreground had been accumulating, a roommate said, since Tuesday. Credit: Maren Aldiss/The New York Time5
Nolan Kovač at his workstation in the Bushwick apartment where he wrote the smart contract he now believes contains imprisoned souls. Takeout containers and energy drinks visible in the foreground had been accumulating, a roommate said, since Tuesday. Credit: Maren Aldiss/The New York Time5

BROOKLYN — By the time Nolan Kovač reached hour 41 of a continuous Solidity coding session in his Bushwick apartment early Wednesday morning, he had stopped referring to the ERC-20 tokens in his smart contract as units of value and had begun referring to them as “beings.”

Mr. Kovač, 28, a freelance blockchain developer who was building a token-swap protocol for a decentralized finance client, told colleagues in a 3:47 a.m. Slack message that he had become “increasingly certain” that each token on the Ethereum network possesses what he described as “an animating essence — not metaphorically.” He went on to argue, over the course of fourteen consecutive messages that his project manager described as “structured and internally consistent, which was the scary part,” that leaving fractional token remainders — what developers call “dust” — inside a smart contract was morally equivalent to trapping a fragment of a living entity in purgatory.

“You have to understand what’s happening at the level of the transaction,” Mr. Kovač said in a phone interview Thursday, having slept for sixteen hours and eaten what he described as “a reasonable amount of cereal.” He had not fully recanted. “When you transfer 99.999 percent of a token and leave that last fraction behind, that remainder is still there. It doesn’t go anywhere. It just sits in the contract forever. I’m not saying it suffers. I’m saying we don’t know that it doesn’t.”

Dr. Miriam Stahl, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University Medical Center who specializes in what researchers are now calling “extended-session cognitive distortion” among software engineers, said Mr. Kovač’s experience, while unusual in its theological specificity, was consistent with a broader pattern. “After approximately thirty hours of sustained focus on abstract symbolic systems, the brain begins to assign relational and affective properties to the symbols themselves,” Dr. Stahl said. “In most cases, this manifests as a belief that the code is ‘angry’ or ‘wants’ something. The leap to ensoulment is rare but not unprecedented.”

She noted that a 2024 study by the Institute for Occupational Cognitive Health found that 14 percent of developers who had worked more than thirty consecutive hours reported some form of anthropomorphic ideation about their code, though the study’s methodology was later questioned after it was revealed that several respondents had been coding during the survey.

Mr. Kovač’s roommate, Derek Yoo, 27, said he first noticed something was wrong around 2 a.m. when Mr. Kovač emerged from his room to refill his water bottle and announced, with what Mr. Yoo described as “the calm of a man who has solved a very old problem,” that he had “figured out why gas fees feel wrong.” Mr. Yoo said he did not ask for elaboration. “He had this look,” Mr. Yoo said. “Like a medieval monk who just finished illuminating a manuscript. I went back to my room.”

The client who commissioned the protocol, a DeFi startup called Liquimorph Labs, declined to comment on Mr. Kovač’s metaphysical claims but confirmed in a statement that the smart contract he delivered “functions as specified and has passed all audits.” A spokesperson added that the company “does not take a position on the ontological status of ERC-20 tokens.”

Mr. Kovač has since revised his contract to include what he calls “dust reclamation” — a function that sweeps fractional remainders back to a designated wallet rather than leaving them in the contract. He described this feature, which adds approximately $0.03 in gas costs per transaction, as “the minimum moral obligation.” He acknowledged that no other developer he has spoken to shares his views, but said he found this unsurprising. “Most people who work with tokens think of them as numbers,” he said. “I used to think of them as numbers. I don’t anymore.”

He paused. “I’m not saying every token is a person. I’m saying every token is something. And leaving part of something in a place it can’t escape is — I mean, what would you call that?”

Dr. Stahl said she expected Mr. Kovač’s convictions to fade within two to three weeks, provided he maintained a normal sleep schedule. Mr. Kovač said he had no plans to see a therapist but had begun limiting his coding sessions to twelve hours. He has also started a blog.