Edge City goes back to Bhutan, a country wiring its national ID to Ethereum

Edge City, the group that runs month-long pop-up villages for people building in crypto, AI, biotech and other frontier fields, is taking 40+ people to Bhutan from Nov 11 to 19 1↗1. The trip runs nine days and starts in Paro ↗2. It begins ten days after Edge City India, its three-week village in Goa, closes on Nov 1 ↗3.

The plan is part retreat, part working visit. Edge City says the group will spend time with monks, hike to remote monasteries and walk old footpaths ↗1. It will also meet the Pelsung Innovation Lab in Thimphu and the team building Gelephu Mindfulness City, the new city region in Bhutan's south ↗3↗5. The event listing puts the price at $6,000 for a shared room and $7,500 for a private one ↗2.

This is a return trip ↗1. In September 2025 Edge City co-founder Timour Kosters 1 brought 30 people from the Edge City community, toured the Gelephu site and co-hosted a 120-person Ideas Exchange in Thimphu with the GovTech Secretary's office ↗4. His recap listed what he wanted to follow up on: a shared workspace in Gelephu, Edge City members mentoring young Bhutanese, a lab on consciousness and AI, and regular exchanges of builders in both directions ↗4.

The idea goes back to 2024. On stage at Pragma Bangkok that year, Kosters described smaller scouting trips of about 100 people, run as a way to "start to establish relationships with folks on the ground" in a new country 1. Then he named one: "I was just in Bhutan a few weeks ago… that's looking like a pretty likely one that we'll do next year" 1.

Since then the link has become more formal. In July Kosters said Edge City had spent a year working with the government and the royal family on a mentor residency that sends experienced founders to work alongside Bhutanese builders for one to two weeks ↗6. In August he gave his reasons for bringing technologists there: Gross National Happiness written into the constitution as a broader measure than GDP, Gelephu as a rare chance to design new institutions, and a living Vajrayana Buddhist tradition with centuries of thinking about attention and the mind ↗5.

The tech side is easiest to see in Bhutan's national digital ID. At the Ethereum Privacy Stack event during Devconnect 2025, Anand Acharya and Kinzang Dorji of Bhutan NDI sat down with Austin Griffith of the Ethereum Foundation 2. They described citizens opening a bank account from home by scanning a QR code and sharing only the data the bank asks for, with about half of citizens onboarded at the time 2. Personal data stays on the phone. As one of the NDI team put it, "we are only using the blockchain for the trust anchor", meaning the chain holds identifiers and public keys, not personal information 2.

The system started on Hyperledger Indy, moved to Polygon for anchoring schemas and has added support for Ethereum 2. The team said that "one of the major project that we are looking into is to see if we can conduct elections" 2. Griffith, who had visited months earlier, recalled that "one of the hackathons, the second one was about the land registry system" 2. The NDI side also pointed to cheap hydro electricity, already used for Bitcoin mining, as a reason to look at AI data centers, and invited technical visitors to come and help 2.