A Spiritual Cryptocurrency from Highden Temple

25^th May 2026

Highden Temple, a “mystery School for soul initiation, leadership, magic and the creation of soul culture” located in Palmerston North, has started up its own cryptocurrency. For those who don’t know about Highden Temple, founded by Bruce Lyon, our own Bronwyn Rideout has written plenty about it.

The temple’s awful (I’m being polite here) history isn’t enough; they’ve recently created their own cryptocurrency called Highden Coin. On the Highden Coin website, very few details are shared, and what is said is very wishy-washy. They say their coins will be released gradually over twenty-five years, through 49 cycles/initiations - and twice each year they will gather at Highden for six weeks. These gatherings are to do “transformative work” at the temple, and build up the community. 17 of these initiations have already occurred, so a third of the supply was released when the coin was created. You can currently (as of the 24th of March) buy a coin for 0.01607 USD, or 100 coins for ~2.75 NZD - up ~60% from 0.01 USD per coin when it was released in March this year.

Highden says of the cryptocurrency:

It is an experiment in currency that seeks to reflect something rarely measured in conventional economic systems: devotion, care for the Earth, the growth of consciousness, and the building of places where love can take root.

After reading their website, I had many questions. The big one is “why”? (Playing dumb here) What is the point? What is the advantage? Why not just accept plain old dollars? What makes this cryptocurrency special compared to the 16,000+ cryptocurrencies that have already been created? How many coins will be released? Who will get the coins? There is just no real information available to answer any of these questions.

I think we can guess some of the answers though. As the promotional material says: 🤑

Highden Coin supports the ongoing work of Highden. It is not offered as an investment or financial product and carries no expectation of profit.

Diving into the technology, the Highden Coin (HDEN) token is built on the Solana blockchain. Solana is a public proof-of-stake blockchain platform that anyone can build their own tokens on top of. Proof-of-stake is different to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, and it requires token holders to lock some of their coins so that they can’t be sold. This makes these kinds of coins much more environmentally friendly than proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, although there are some downsides.

Highden Coin is using Token-2022, aka “Token Extensions”, a standard for tokens that allows fairly advanced tokens to be created. That said, looking at the code, this seems to be a plain, highly centralised token with no unique technical utility - so they’re not really making use of the advanced features they have available.

The top 9 accounts hold 95% of the tokens, with the top account (FYZai1pTaF1v6sTDx1YVUiBHqmGY51jesXpnGFNUEyPC) holding 1.47 million tokens, accounting for 18.8% of the supply.

Seven other accounts have about 740K tokens (9.5%) of the supply each, or 67% of the total:

• 2G687EaQZdXHHk9otWB8PVNi5WmNvRnJsVqrLVrybJpk
• EBhVViWaiG2vy3S71FnoEvYfVfvy2swQboTVzcehg2nK
• EC3x97JkiJ5B1BdKMvkGgTtzk2fucJkrohJmFLqU84n5
• 53pc2cURBh6qZytw4gnWEeSetTYzjXwxX5q9awoMrRJF
• 4ZL3U1vFcpg2PWm2QHcuKEHSko4JBaUyAkkZmvHRsSMA
• CoFRTJTDsgqzDwLRM4FBAeJvCw5izNtLu2uqfmdBHXwr
• FhtpeyvA91gaLFG1JCgMZCYUS7NbMABYT4DtAKvE5dqT

Raydium Vault Authority #2 (GpMZbSM2GgvTKHJirzeGfMFoaZ8UR2X7F4v8vHTvxFbL) has 613K tokens, which is a further 7.9% of the supply. Raydium, aka Swap Raydium, is a decentralised exchange (DEX) built on the Solana blockchain. This allows Highden Temple to trade their unknown, unremarkable token for whatever price they want. I hope they will report each trade to IRD, as each one is a taxable event under the law - although I have a suspicion that the owners may choose not to.

A bubble map of the accounts and the direction of trade.

On top of being able to trade tokens at any price, the cryptocurrency creators can also generate more tokens at any time; the Highden Currency token’s metadata can be changed by the owner, who has the ability to update the name, symbol, and URI of the cryptocurrency. All tokens are unlocked, allowing liquidity to be removed at any time. These are all hallmarks of a bad investment, because the creator has almost total control over the currency. This coin can be “rugpulled” at any moment, like has happened with countless crypto and NFT ventures in the last few years.

I think we could all agree that this just smells terrible - a forest of red flags on a mountain of shit.