# Building Pop-up Villages that Accelerate Real World Crypto Adoption | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 1:04:45
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-uVuE6XwnOAg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVuE6XwnOAg

## Description

Join us to explore the growing trend of popup villages and popup cities, starting with Zuzalu. We'll look at how these short-term communities have helped the crypto world and beyond.

You'll hear real stories from Zuzalu, ZuConnect, Edge City, Aleph / Crecimiento, The Mu, MegaZu and ZuThailand. We'll talk about how these villages can speed up new ideas, but discuss where we need to try more things.

We'll end by talking about why it's good to step outside the crypto digital world, into the physi

Speaker(s): Timour Kosters, Nicole Sun, DC Posch, Janine Leger
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Coordination, Ethereum for Good, Social

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for being here, and welcome to the session on pop-up cities. My name is Timur. We have an amazing set of folks here up on stage, and we want to make this a very interactive session. So, we'll be passing around the mic for some feedback from the folks here. If you're tuning in on the live stream, welcome as well. It's so wonderful to have you. So, just a quick overview of the agenda for today. I'm going to start with a little bit of context on the history of social gatherings, which will ground us in the the the context and the lineage of what's happening here. We'll talk a little bit about Zuzalu. We'll share some fun stories, and then we'll get into the relevance of this movement for crypto and crypto adoption. Then we'll talk about the design space for pop-ups, and then some of the challenges and opportunities. But, I'd love to start, just so you know who's up here, just a very quick set of intros. I'll kick off myself. My name is Timur. I'm one of the co-founders of Edge City. My background is in building startups, which I did for about 8 years in New York, and then I was a partner at a VC fund for 2 years. I was lucky enough to go to Zuzalu, and had a very kind of personally meaningful experience, which pulled me on this concept, and pretty much from that point decided to do this full time. So, that's me. Nicole? Hey, I'm Nicole. I'm currently working on Zoo Thailand, but before this, I helped start Zuzalu. And yeah, that's how I met everyone here. Hi, I'm Janine Le'Jae. I'm one of the co-founders of Edge City, and I helped with getting Zuzalu off the ground. So, got really excited about this movement last year. Um have been obsessed with communities and what can happen with social dynamics um and how we can actually like progress the future in some way because of it. Hey. Uh yeah, great to see everyone. Uh my name's DC Posh and I'm a co-founder of Dimo, uh DimoPay. And uh it actually Dimo started out of Pop-Up Village, started like came out of uh Zuzalu, which was an amazing experience. Uh and and I I I helped build the the V0 first prototype of of ZUTASS. Um we'll talk about that in a bit. And yeah, great glad to be here. Yeah, awesome. So, we have a quite a range of perspectives here uh from some of the folks who really started this movement to uh DC, who's been one of the the quickest uh tech development stories to come out of the space. The space is only a year and a half old, which is an interesting bit of uh context to have. So, yeah, that's that's um that's that's that there. So, okay, I think a really good place to start here will be to talk about the lineage and the history of this movement. And the point that I really want to come across here is that humans and human societies have had a long history of coming together to talk about new ideas about how society should be structured. Humans have a lot of uh creativity and collective agency in this process of shaping society, and it often looks like taking some space away from mainstream society to gather in a space that will allow for discussions about new ideas that can then spread and permeate through the rest of society. These movements have through history been critical and very important in incubating new ideas and new technology. And I think this gives us a bit of an idea about what is actually happening with pop-up cities. My personal assertion is that pop-up cities are a new surface area for this type of experimentation, especially for a lot of the ideas that we're developing in the crypto space to find actual meaningful ground for tangible in real-life experimentation. A lot of the things we're doing are quite heady, they're quite abstract. And so what we've seen already in the last couple of years is that it's a very it's it's kind of fertile ground for um for tangible applications for how to live, how to build new tech, and how to ultimately improve society. So I I I went deep down this rabbit hole. I originally had maybe 20 different examples. I picked five just to give us a little bit of a sense um for what's happening here. So the first one is the Enlightenment salons in 17th and 18th century France. These were mostly in Paris. They were social gatherings, they were often hosted by mostly hosted by women, and they were kind of a safe space for new ideas about philosophy, politics, and science. This was you know France at the time was a monarchy, but it was the the general prevailing sense of the Enlightenment was is there actually a new way to structure society? Right now that feels a little trivial, maybe kind of obvious to us, but at the time it was really uh very I mean literally revolutionary to even be talking about ideas of moving beyond a monarchy. And the I mean the impact of these environments was was huge, right? They spread ideas uh from the Enlightenment, kind of the classical uh ideas we think of about liberalism, like individual liberty, uh freedom, individual rights, human rights, and this is kind of the the birthplace of modern democracy. Um and obviously, if you study the history of the French Revolution, you see that this was critical in making France a constitutional monarchy for a brief moment, and then obviously a full republic. So, that's kind of one one example that we can hearken back to. Another one that's slightly less well known, but I think is potentially even closer to what's happening here, is what's called the Chautauqua movement. So, this started in late 19th century US in a place called Chautauqua in upstate New York, but it very quickly spread throughout the country. So, I think it's actually a really cool model for what's happening here. Essentially, it was a adult and kind of family education movement. So, every summer in this town, they would bring university professors, they would bring folks and families to come together and and teach each other. It was kind of like a long unconference that happened over the course of 1 to 2 months. Um and this and and it had folks like Henry Ford, who's pictured here and a bunch of the other kind of big innovators of the time who would come and spend their summers there. And this eventually spread around the country, so pretty much every city in the US had a Chautauqua. In the summer, some of them happened throughout the year. And it actually kind of approximates very closely what's happening with things like Zuzalu, things like Edge City, Zuthailand, where we have these 1 to 2 month temporary gatherings that are then now starting to pick up steam again. So, yeah, it's just a really cool example of a small idea that became a national movement. The next one is Black Mountain College, which was a a experimental college. It was a reaction to kind of the industrial education movement in the early 20th century. It had a lot of interesting folks like John Cage. Buckminster Fuller actually invented the geodesic dome while he was at Black Mountain College. Um Um it was the center of American avant-garde art and poetry. So, it influenced a lot of American culture. Um but again, it was this It was the It was a permanent place, but for most people their experience of it was that they would go there for 1 to 2 months. They would go deep on some ideas. They would collaborate with other folks who were there. And out of that came a lot of interesting philosophy, art, um technology, like uh like Buckminster's work. That's actually him pictured here. Um it's a little bit pixelated on the screen, but uh yeah, just really interesting history. It's even less than just 100 years ago. Auroville. So, Auroville is an interesting example in India. It's actually a permanent new town that's still going. Um and it was created as an attempt to uh to figure out a place focused on human unity and sustainable living, and uh especially human flourishing. There are people that live there full-time, but again, for a lot of people their experience is ephemeral. So, they come for a month or two. They stay there. They learn. They develop ideas. Um at the time this kind of came out of the '60s, you know, uh cultural revolution happening in the US. So, uh the hippie movement, a lot of talk about peace and harmony. Obviously, the Vietnam War was happening at the time. Um It's It's It's big. There's, you know, 3,000 people, but uh they've I think they've had over 100,000 in terms of like folks that have been there. Um And it's a really interesting experiment that shows that these things can have a lot of longevity over time. And one Oh, yeah. So, the last one here is the Santa Fe Institute, which is a little bit of a more contemporary example, but I think gives a really good sense of what's possible here when people come together around a particular concept of study. So, SFI is um focused on the idea of complexity science. It was started by folks that were part of the Manhattan Project, and um yeah, it's a space for people to tackle complex problems. It's a very multidisciplinary research space, which I think is very interesting. They actually incubate a new way of bringing together scientists and tech people and thinkers from variety of different fields and finding ways to kind of uh create collaboration points between them. Um huge impact. Again, it has influenced a lot of scientific thinking in modern times, a lot of mathematics, economics, biology, and and especially computer science. So, uh yeah. And there is one honorable mention, which is Burning Man. Um I I wanted to include this because I think when people think of pop-up cities, this is probably the first thing that people think of. It's it's a literal pop-up city for, you know, 10 months of the year there's nothing but desert in this place, and then um people start building, and for a week there are close to 100,000 people there. Um it has had a huge cultural impact. It has spawned a really a global movement of burns. There are now burns in most uh regions around the world. It's obviously quite radical in the experience that people have. It's it's quite different from people's traditional lifestyles. I think so I've I've been going for a long time. I do think it's a very interesting experiment, but I do want to call out that I think it's ultimately very different to what we're trying to do, and I think that's important to note because again, it's like a a um it's it's an association that people have and that they come to quite easily, but I see the burn as a a chance for people to very momentarily kind of LARP or um yeah, like role-play a completely different lifestyle to the one that they currently live. Whereas, I think the thing we're trying to do with pop-up cities and obviously there's there's infinite variety of what people will do with this format, but um it's much more approximating what could life actually look like if it was thoughtfully designed. Um yeah, so that's that's that. And the the question is, so where do we go from here? We, you know, our generation has a whole set of new problems. Some of these old institutions or movements were the the answer to a prior set of problems. We have our own. There's a lot going on. I I don't need to tell you. Um but we also have new tools. There are things that have been developed in the last couple of decades that have reached maturity that are now usable. Um obvious examples, internet, AI, and and and ultimately blockchains, which we believe are very kind of foundational tool for this kind of experimentation. We'll get into some of that later. There are new experiments starting to happen. There's new ideas like the network state. There's Zuzalu. There's Edge City, Zú Thailand. And so I I really see these pop-up cities as a way to prototype new solutions, like I've been saying, and each experiment kind of brings us closer and closer to what a a resilient, inclusive, and flourishing community um yeah, so that's that's my little bit. Great. Yeah, thank you. Awesome. That was amazing. Um and I think this is like something so important for us to do generally is like look at history of movements and so much of them have been pretty low-tech. And by the way, if you guys want to come over, feel free to. Um so much of them have been this sort of lower-tech type environments and really focused on just how do we get people together? And I think right now I've got this very interesting opportunity with like technology has progressed substantially and can actually benefit from and connect to a lot of these sort of low-tech environments to bring like low-tech and high-tech together in some magical way that makes some of these movements like actually long-lasting or spread and proliferate in ways that technology is able to help with um that didn't happen previously. So this section Oh, we're going to have to do a little exit cuz I did a did a whole update of these. Um yeah, refresh. This section we're going to try and make a little bit more interactive with all of you. Um we'll go through a little bit of the history of Zuzalu. I think Nicole and I haven't really like sat and spoke to a lot of people about what that all looked like and and why and how we were doing things. So firstly, before we sort of get to that, one thing that, you know, I wanted to profile is this was a really great slide that someone put together um Bob would had put together at uh Edge City Lana this year, which was just last month. And he sort of was like, "Okay, what am I seeing? You know, these pop up. Where are they fitting in the stack?" And this this idea of sort of these pop-up villages being between, you know, we've got hours of time together, few days together, 5 to 10 days together, and that the 30-day onward mark, or at least, you know, a month, maybe it's 2 months. We don't quite know that right amount. It's like it really is where that like IRL community and culture actually start to form. So, there's something interesting, you know, when you look at the Ethereum industry, where if you pack up all of the different crypto conferences that we all attend, we're starting to get to that amount of time and there's like a real culture that has developed as part of Ethereum. And this what we're almost trying to do in these pop-up villages is like, can we speedrun culture building? And what does that actually look like? And how do we how do you spend this, you know, period of 30 to 60 days together and really develop something different culturally? And something that I think we can go through as a group is just how each of these pop-ups, in a way, are creating their own culture that is slightly different and unique um in in some capacity. The other was is just kind of where Vitalik ended up really spending his time thinking was like we've seen the dates and the meetups and the conferences and like that structure we've iterated on a lot. Um but then, universities and cities and towns and countries, like those are also like very ingrained in a specific way. And this was a um a 2 by 2 that I mean a graph that Balaji had originally put together and Vitalik really kind of looked at this and was like, wait a minute, there's a sort of this open gap. And we should maybe just be experimenting there. So, a large part of this was just like, cool, that's a space for experimentation. Um and that's where that kind of started. And sort of the the next piece is like why? Like why even begin to start experimenting in that space. One, it's like this dissonance with governments, like a lot of people unnecessarily resonating with the countries that they're living in. The network state movement sort of got that kicked off in in a in a major way along with many other things that were happening. Um just work environments are actually pretty stale. Like when you actually start to think about just corporate work environments, there's sort of this open question that COVID really put in the air of like, "Okay, people working remotely, what does this look like?" Um as well as a shift from closed source type company environments to more open source ecosystems. And how do you actually build spaces for these open source ecosystems versus a company that's it's a very clear box. Let's all go into the space and and work in this office. The other piece is that like we've, you know, seen both ourselves experiment with that age city and what we experimented with at Zuzalu and some others are working around is just like the chronic health disease crisis is pretty real um across the world and like healthy living environments has not necessarily been a focus, but it has become a real big issue. And then when you actually look at education, it has just gotten progressively more expensive over the years and not necessarily solve more problems or made people smarter and iterate in an interesting way. Um and lastly, just like innovation in general is is expensive. But that those were sort of like starts of some of the why um to start building Sid's experiment. And then we got to where it all started. So, do you want to go through a little bit of the beginning? Yeah, so when Zuzalu came about, um I can say it from like my perspective of how I got involved. Um I ran into Vitalik at a little MEV hacker house, and there were like 200 people around him, but no one was talking to him. So, I walked up, and I was like, "Hey, I read your recent blog on crypto cities." Um and we had a little bit of a discussion, and I invited him to a hacker house that I was hosting, to which he surprisingly came. Um and then there we talked rifted on everything from like Ethereum-related like account abstraction things to what his personal life was going, um to like how can we potentially do a crypto city? So, it was actually last Devcon in Bogotá, where we sat down, and he finally asked me like for 200 Do you want to do an experiment that's 200 people for 2 months? Um so, like the rationale there was there's so much theory going around, why don't we just try and do something in practice? Um and that was a very casual start, and from there we pulled in a lot of different contributors. Um Miloš, who represented Montenegro locally and helped us connect to, for example, the prime minister, who was a very young world leader, I think the youngest at 35 at the time, and had a background in crypto. Um so, that's kind of why we chose Montenegro for the first experiment. We thought we would get like a lot of visa support. Um and it was also a place where we happened to have a venue ready to go, and we planned the whole thing in 2 months. So, it was not perfect by any means, but scrappy in a fun way. Um and then from there we brought on Vincent, who is like a very curious guy. So, he knew a lot of people in biotech, of which Vitalik was very interested, and he helped be an inviter, and he brought in Janine and Lawrence, and they also helped contribute in like Well, Janine ended up doing a lot of things operationally, um but that's sort of like the beginning of the core team. Um so, the core team helped drive this experiment to start, but I think the experiment itself is very co-created by a lot of different people. So, we had tech teams. Um we'll talk about that this a little bit more later, but Zcash part helped start Zupass, which is a really interesting tech identity experiment. Um and then Althea and PSE team helped start the Zuzalu.city permissionless website. So, that became a core basis for how we did permissionless culture. Um and yeah, a lot of other teams helped build this experiment together. So, when we look at some of kind of like the original thinking, a piece of it was like, "Okay, can we make this cheaper than living in sort of a San Francisco or New York?" Like, what does it actually look like to build a place that is awesome in some capacity with like intellectual rigor as well as interesting people. Cuz like ultimately at the end of the day, we all just want to be around interesting people. Um and there there was a sense of like, "Okay, can we experiment in that area?" So, we decreased the price of um and had some subsidy to make sure that that was the case. We also were like, "Wow, 8 weeks, long time. What do we do with this?" Um and ultimately decided to sort of like bring in all of these different contributors that Nicole was mentioning to help structure different weeks throughout the time that we were together. One learning that we had from that is weeks uh it's a great way to bring people in that uh kind of interested in pop-ups generally, but the longevity of some of that learning then sort of like dissipates once that sort of like concentrated week of programming is gone. So, figuring out how we can do like extensive learning in some capacity has been something we've iterated on this year, but this was kind of the original start and we just brought so many different people in um and this was so valuable because it brought in many different leaders and it made sort of, how we started Zeus not about a team that did it all, but about how do we empower many leaders in this community to go and do other things themselves, to build and contribute, and think about like what they would structure and how they would structure it. So, there's kind of this tension that exists now that's interesting around how much do you let different groups, as we learn and figure out like, oh, this type of program worked or that type of program worked, how much do you create structure around that versus allow people to come in and still build their own unique programming that like contributes to the culture of the space and and the people that bring it in. This is just a early, um, state. Like, this was the website to begin with and sort of a start of like, there's different projects and these different things that we're working on and these different ways that you can add sessions to the calendar. And this has been iterated on a ton. So, everyone in this room who's like, who here's interested in building like pop-up city tech or kind of social technology in some capacity, there is so much room for experimentation, they and there is so much room to build. Um, this was the start last year and now we've got things like Social Layer and everything that Simple Fi's doing and stuff that, um, Cursive is doing and stuff that Lemonade is doing and there's all these different projects that are now trying to build and I think it's a very interesting space that is going to have a lot more people operating pop-up villages and pop-up cities around the world. And like, if we can actually just get a lot of technology that helps with that coordination, that'd be super interesting. Yeah. So, with that, let's get the story of Zupyak started. Yeah, sure. Oh man. Um so my Okay. All right. Um Uh My my story with uh with Zcash started just a bit after um what Nicole and Jeanine were just talking about and it was through uh some of my friends at Zerox Park. I was talking to them about uh this event. This so I I heard about it through them and then I was you know immediately interested. Okay, this sounds like something out of Neil Stephenson, right? This is a lot of like, you know, Ethereum core. I was very fascinated with Ethereum at that time. I was working on a like, you know, a Bitcoin light client that runs on Ethereum. So I was like uh something I've been building and a lot of people in in you know, core R&D and people who are like digital nomads and they're moving to this like, you know, post-Yugoslav microstate for 2 months. Like this is an incredible thing to be happening and like and uh then you know, a bit into this I I also realized that that uh you know, there was a lot of scramble to to make it happen. Um I was talking to you know, Ivan good friend of mine um over at Zerox Park and uh he was saying, yeah, we need to to build this zero knowledge proof-based passport for Zcash. Um okay, like and when does this start? 3 weeks. Uh all right. Uh so I ended up saying, okay, you know, I can help ship this if if I can join if I can come to this, right? Uh then we ended up just, you know, in the uh like sort of like lowering ourselves down the mine shaft for for those 3 weeks and and and and doing this. Uh A lot of good memories. That was really fun, actually. Um Actually, I'm curious. I'm with like, you know, so Zoopass has sort of iterated and evolved a ton since then. I I was part of this the initial prototyping version of it that it it's built the built the version of it that existed for Zoos Zoos Alu like number one. Uh uh How many people here have used any of the zero-knowledge proof stuff in Zoopass? The answer is probably everyone here cuz Devcon's actually using it. Well, Devcon's using it, but I think it's Devcon's using it in like a scan the QR capacity. Exactly. Um for Zoos Alu, we were actually doing things where so like one of the original things on this where the Z in Zoop like part of it where it comes from is uh I mean you could make zero-knowledge proofs that you are a Zoos Alu resident without revealing which one. And so we ended up doing some really fun experiments um at uh at the event that were related to this around, you know, anonymous polls, anonymous messaging, um but not, you know, like internet-wide anonymous messaging like you know everyone who's writing on there is is people who are you're living with. They're they're one of the, you know, two 300 people. Um So I yeah, I think we'll talk about a little bit more about that in in in just a bit, but I think one of the ways that, you know, we're we're here at an Ethereum conference. I think one of the ways this really relates is that um pop-up cities, pop-up villages are an amazing way to basically um bootstrap critical mass for new ideas. And they're an amazing prototyping tool. And you can try things that, you know, would be very hard to like get it to work sort of like on the open internet and would also be very hard to get it to work with just five people. If you need to do something with a thousand people, this is a pretty amazing way to do it. So, DC is the founder of an incredible startup called Dimo. You should check it out if you haven't. But I'm curious, DC, if you're open to sharing how you had the idea for Dimo and then the kind of progressive steps of developing it at progressive uh pop-up cities? Sure, totally. Um it's funny, actually, you know, you kind of can connect the dots looking backwards more easily than at the time, right? Uh So, one of the things Zuzalu was was an amazing time. Um One interesting thing is that a lot of the people there, even though they're like you people a lot of people people are like dedicating their lives to Ethereum, right? Like, that's like they're they're deep in it. The amount that people are actually using Ethereum day-to-day was not very much. Um and you would see people, you know, uh and and and we sort of you know, there's a few of us there who are looking at this and saying like, you know, how do we just make this much easier to use? How do we make this more useful? And uh Dimo V1 came out of that, where it's like, all right, let's make something that is like uh you know, PayPal, Revolut, like, WePay, whatever it is, but runs on stablecoin rails, runs on rollups, like this was actually we were kind of leading it off a little bit, you know, so skate where the puck is going, like at the time, you know, we were saying, okay, like, this is going to be like free instant transactions one-to-one. We're actually sponsoring like 50 cents of gas for each one, but we knew that that was going to come down. And then, you know, like, a year later, 4844, now it's like 1 cent, 1 second transactions. It's like, okay, if this is about to happen, let's build the thing for that world. Um and then, you know, like, what we're doing now, Dimo Pay, I think it's funny, part of that came out of the the subsequent, you know, Zuzalu Connect, right? We spent a a couple of weeks in uh, Turkey right before uh, Devconnect. That was a sort of the the the start of it, and then we like really like you know, figured that out in we had conviction about that like later when we went to, you know, Argentina. You go to places where people use a lot of stablecoins. And where people are like doing uh, you know, I think the the the sort of most widely distributed version of what you could call real-world Ethereum or real-world crypto, right? It's places like Turkey, it's places like Argentina. It's We talked to a bunch of people in Africa who are working remote getting paid in stables. Um, and and this is like uh, it's a whole different world from I think a lot of what you see in like western crypto world where sort of like, you know, outside of the like core like sort of intellectually curious R&D audience, there's a lot of people who just like want to buy something, they want it to go up, right? Like for those people though, this is like they're using the permissionless nature of the chain to be able to do things they couldn't otherwise do. I thought that was very compelling. The really hard part there was a lot of those people you know, are not deeply into self-custody. They're like, "Yeah, we love Lemon, for example, in Argentina." Lemon being a like custodial stablecoin app that will give you, you know, certain like nice features that rely on it being custodial actually that people really like. Um, same in Turkey, same in Argentina. And so, uh, what we're doing now is something that's like, "Okay, if you want to do anything on Ethereum in like one transfer, right? Even if it's from a custodial app, how do you facilitate that? Someone wants to place a Polymarket bet, how do you let them do it directly from Lemon?" So, that that's what Dimo Pay is. So, we had the our whole like arc of of of what we're up to closely related to things that we learned from these sort of like intensive experiments. And I think that's an amazing segue into the relevance of this entire movement for crypto adoption and and crypto adoption, which is what um this talk is about. It's it's such a good example of a product that was developed in the context of where people will actually use it, so inside a pop-up city. And then with progressive pop-up cities, you know, you have like 4 months, 5 months in between them, you can actually develop the product and then the next time you go, so between Zuzalu and Zuconnect, you were able to build something for for this new market where we were all going to be suddenly, and for the 400 people who are there in the pop-up city to actually use it, iterate it. They had a baklava stand, we had to use Dimo, and you'd spend a dollar on some amazing baklava, which is really really cool. And then actually be able to start to expand your reach and go out to progressively bigger and bigger markets until you get somewhere like Argentina where it's like, "Wow, not just the people in the city, but everyone here actually needs something like this." Now, I wish I threw that picture in the slide deck of of Nollan and I sitting there with the the the red hats with the baklava stand. That was a good time. Yeah. And and that that goes to you sort of some of the recognition you have. This building building take eco like what does an ecosystem need versus a company? Right? Like with Ethereum is an ecosystem with many different projects in it and this push towards open source and kind of like thinking what does that type of way of working need and way of living need that's different to the current construct of of um companies where it's like ship in a space and then send it out to to customers. It's we're in a spot of like iteration and you know, getting feedback, getting people to build in one another's ecosystems, getting people to build on um and use the open source technology that we've got. So, these pop-up city environments are space to test and iterate and share what we are doing and what you are working on in a way that we haven't necessarily had previously. And we're just seeing teams come to life with that. Like they are so excited about this idea of like being able to build a thing, have users instantly that are totally captive and excited to support and build on and connect them with other groups and there's just sort of this network that grows, which is quite similar to what we have seen grow with the pop-up city network. So, instead of us being a project that, you know, with Zuzalu there was this kind of open question of like, can we actually progressively decentralize, but then have a core? What does that look like? Do we Do we run Zuzalus? Do we not? There was sort of this big open question and after Zuzalu Montenegro, which sort of how we structured it was, you know, it that was chaos. It was absolute this last sort of last-minute of 6 weeks of planning to give um to give you guys context there. It was like, you know, they had found a spot, but when when I came onto the team, it was we we had like 10 weeks before Zuzalu had started. My wedding was the first week of Zuzalu. Um I was very excited to I I you know, my plan was like I was planning other events at the time and I was working at Gitcoin and like my what I really cared about was bringing together um folks to think about like, how can we fund community-shared needs? And that was sort of this focus of like public goods. It's like, public goods are fascinating for communities. Funding people's shared needs should happen in some capacity. Um and I wanted to bring it IRL. Like, Ethereum was a space that was just doing this in an interesting way online. But, I very distinctly remember coming into the space and saying like, I never really wanted to have a Twitter presence. I was like, I don't understand that world. I understand like the in-person and like tangible world, and that's what I want to build for, and it's just going to take longer. Um but then Zuzalu sort of popped up as this thing, and I was like, this is definitely exactly aligned with like what I've been trying to think about working on. Um at the time I was building a IRL community in Austin, and then looking at like how Ethereum could be supporting that type of structure. So, um when Vitalik and Vincent asked me to join the team, I was like, oh, this is great, but I have my wedding in 10 weeks' time. So, my wedding was the first week of Zuzalu. The The team really held down the fort with that. Um and we all just like scrambled to make it happen, and I think what was beautiful about Zuzalu was how much we had to rely on the community from the beginning, because we had so little planned. Like I remember when we started, you know, people were like accepted you know, wanting to join for 2 months. We were like, wow, someone actually wants to come. We've We've got people. This is amazing. Then we're like, do we open the Discord? Do we not? We don't have any plans yet. Um and there was sort of this push towards like build in public, build with everyone. And that building with everyone sort of led to a culture from the beginning that developed around letting many different flowers bloom, and letting many different projects sort of come out of this, and many different people contribute. So, after Zuzalu Montenegro, everyone was like, when's the next Zuzalu? When's the next Zuzalu? And we were like, well, let's try and like build something that's not Zuzalu, but it's just a using the zoo ticket to have people um have attention, but doing we called it Zuzalu Connect. Um, because it was a lot of us from the same team, everyone was like, "That's Zuzalu." And there was this idea of like, "Okay, well, I want to go to the Zuzalu thing moving forward." versus like allowing many different projects to come out of it. So, there was this hard decision that was made around just decentralize in a way that like generally had no no call to Zuzalu. And it was scary to so many people cuz it was like this thing that we'd built as a community, was it going to disappear forever? Was it going to like become something else? Like there was there was definitely a lot of fear there for people. Um, and for for us as a team as well. And it was a decision that was like so beautiful because you start looking at this ecosystem. And this is a year in. Um, and you've we've gotten here. It's like the from Zuzalu Montenegro, there was Zuzalu Connect that happened that spun off. Um, the move is kind of connected to being part of the core. Actually, this should be a line that goes across here. This is still Someone mapped this out for us. Um, and they've sort of spun out a whole bunch of different things that also spun out Mega Zoo that that you've got now sort of Meta Camp and what's being built there. Um, seeing Network State. Generally, like the Network State book is kind of like a core that, spun off sort of Zuzalu Montenegro. Network School was something that, um, in speaking to Balaji earlier this year, he was not sure what he was going to win or how he was going to sort of build Network School, but because of Zuzalu and because of Edges of Esmeralda that we did earlier this year, he was like, "I've now got two proof points that sort of have me like wanting to test in this sort of way. So, there's a couple of things that have spread out from this side of it. Then when you sort of look at the like what we said of Zuzalu as a name shouldn't be used, but like use Zoo and get people to build Zoo villages all over being, you know, something we wanted to see. There's just been so many different projects that have been built and have their own beautiful culture that's like super super unique. Um some some kind of different like pieces of culture like some people are diving into the health stuff. Some people are diving into like we only want Ethereum developers and they've got a ship and they've got a ship the whole time. Um some are trying to focus on a specific group of diaspora like Four Seasons really focused on how do we support the Chinese diaspora and like making sure that is the core one of the core values that they hold true. Uh so recognizing that like new society gets built with so many different like small nuances, but having a, you know, North Star in some way um to help rally people around has been beautiful to see and like that collection I think will only take will will take many many years to kind of figure out who's doing what and how do we connect them all together. But that was a bit of bit of back story of the day. I can add a little bit more. Um I feel like a lot of things that look like happy were like small decisions that Vitalik made in a split second which ended up making a lot of sense. Like he was always right at the end of the day. So, even at the first ever Zuzalu Montenegro opening ceremony and the way that was set up, all of us were just like seated on bean bags. There were like eight people on a stage. Um and he already welcomed forks. He was like, I want you guys to fork this. I want you guys to take this however you want. I want to see more leaders. Um and the reason being the first Zuzalu was very broad and almost by intention, and there was no centrally set vision and that was very deliberate cuz we want people to take this in different ways. And that's been like I think what's most powerful about pop-up cities is what you've seen is like strong leaders, people movements and people that rally around certain values have been able to use this as a conduit and as a framework to build community. So, we've seen that like EdCity has been able to build a very strong community and do repeat events. We've seen Mou do that. Mou is a entirely grassroots sort of fork of Zuzalu and they've done like three, four events now and they always involve locals. So, what we've seen is like individual leaders are good at different things, care about different things, and because of that they can take this in different ways. So, when Vitalik decided to decentralize this, I think a lot of people are scared, but it's definitely proven to be the right choice because we've had 20 plus pop-ups just this year. And if it were just one team, there's like a 0% chance we could have done 20 pop-ups ourselves. So, yeah, 20 pop-ups. All Vitalik did was he started this, press play on the experiment, and he provides funding. So, he matched a quadratic funding round or two actually for both events and tech teams. And that's been a nice little like pool of money that helps people kick off their own pop-ups. But for sure, it definitely is still biased towards people who are high contacts, who've done these before, but we almost want to welcome more people to come in. Like we want to grow this bigger. We want more pop-up city organizers. We want more initiatives rallying around different things. And I think the last thing here before we actually shift to like more of a workshop type thing is Zuzalu was really just like a seed that was planted. And see it like as a seed versus an umbrella with so many different ideas that would love to continue seeing being built. And different groups building technology to support these, building actual built environments that can host pop-ups, building operational teams that can support pop-ups in different ways, bringing in different community members um to, you know, actually drive things forward. Like it it truly was the seed that has allowed many different groups and projects and ideas to flourish. And the hope is that there's just so much more that comes out of this over the next couple of years. I think social technology is such a powerful idea and it does take both low-fi and high-fi environments to sort of like bring that together. So, on that note, who has laptops? Cuz we had a FigJam planned, but I'm only seeing a few laptops in the crowd. So, instead, why don't we do a set of questions and just kind of go around and keep it a little bit more informal? Questions are also folks, I mean, I guess something brought you here this morning, right? Unless you just stumbled into the wrong room. But even then, if you have thoughts or curiosities, if maybe you haven't been to one of these, you want to build technology for one of them, you want to build one yourself. Curious if anyone has anything to share. Yeah, I can come around with a mic as well so everyone on the stream can Okay, you shall and then we'll repeat what you say. Yeah, that's a good idea. Just to open the floor, we're building a network state in Japan. While this is our first backer, but I want to learn from you guys' experience building these short-term communities. We're trying to build longer-term ones. What is it called? Yatase. Yatase is a new network state in Japan. Yeah, that sounds awesome. What are you guys going to be focused on? What's kind of a core idea? Yeah, our our core commandment is well, our our moral innovation is that building is moral. And so the core commandment is that we we build. And so we're bringing together a more innovative entrepreneurs and helping to do cross-cultural learning and communication over a 6-month 10-year period. Long-term long-term thing. So we're doing one site and then we're going wide instead of tall. So biology is doing Singapore 2.0. We're doing 100 150-person sites. So all all in Japan? All in Japan. Wow. Cool. The shape of that sounds a bit like uh Crecimiento / Aleph down in Argentina. I'm curious if that's something that you were inspired by or is it's different from that? Honestly, I've heard of them but I haven't connected with them yet. So I'd love to Thank you for the reference. I'll try to link up with them and then I'll let you know what I find. Patron, in front of you over there, can you Totally. Very nice. And they're they're doing something So Crecimiento is a movement that was incubated um at Edge City Denver in the sauna actually, which is some lore. And uh so that was around 10 months ago and it very quickly spun very quickly grew legs. Um props to Juan Benet and and many many others who have been pushing that forward. Um Janine organized a trip to Argentina like a month later and then they managed to do an incredible pop-up city called Aleph in August. And the only way that that actually happened was because of tapping into this whole group. Like at Edge City, we were literally in the sauna and Juan was like, "I want to I think there's an opportunity in Argentina." And I was like, "You are not Argentine. And neither am I. So we need to make sure that like this is something that is led by locals. Um and the son from the Moo was actually at Edge City Denver. And he was just hanging out. And I was like, "Son, I need you. You're going down to Argentina in like 2 weeks time and you're planning to sort of build a pop-up of sorts down there. Can you start like thinking about and looping in different folks?" And they were incredible um with just like quickly bringing together people to do a call. And we had a call to share about like the sort of opportunity in Argentina that Juan um had sort of like identified and some people locally had kind of thought through. And we had this call like 2 weeks later with like 10 different founders and builders um and creators that presented from like Argentine folks that were just like amazing um And we had like 300 people on that call and we're like, "Wow, this is just an amazing community. Like we should go down and spend spend time down there." So we went down while the Moo was still happening. Petra was someone who was at Sues Lu and you know, I was able to be like, "Petra, can you help in some way? Like who who should who should people here meet?" Um Petra is Argentine, right? Okay, yeah, great. And and we had sort of a series of like breakfasts and workshops and meals and they were just people in the community there that were really inspired to do something that we could support get off the ground. Um and that was something that you know, then I was like, "Okay, August timeline because this new government um in Argentina doesn't have a huge window. It's like 4 years is a really short amount of time. Like we need to do something bigger in August." And Juan had spent a lot of time um at different Edge City environments where he was just like, I want to like use this model to kick off some of this like to spark these initiatives. And then it was just like a local team and individuals that were so passionate about the project. There was probably 70 people that were like working on it. Other people internationally came in and helped as well. So it was really again like another initiative that just spun up really quickly because of this network getting started. And you know the the people who are now carrying it forward uh within the network but like doing it in their own way. Like there's no you know there's no top-down leadership that's that's driving that. Yeah, I'd be interested you just said they like the model the model what is the model? What is the what's this continuous? Is it like for example a principle like Burning Man has what is the core and do you have a playbook for different locations to get started? We've got a playbook. Um we've got an Edge City playbook. We have an old Zuzalu playbook. I think when it when we say the model loosely long amount of time with many people. And I actually I I've seen some people get um you know want a model like they like it has to be 150 people to be a Zuzalu and I'm like wait what? That was just what we had. Like that was an idea that you know more than Dunbar's number is useful. But I think iteration around that is really important. But I do just think like loosely it is you know longer long time frame around some core values. Burning Man took 30 years to like come up with their principles. And I think this is another thing of like coming up with principles too early um can sometimes sort of pigeonhole you into like it has to be a specific way when there's still a lot of learning that we have to do. So the you can take a look at the playbooks. We've tried to like be more operational on those versus like this is the the principles that you need to follow. Yeah, I think like every single pop-up has completely different values and the overall pop-up city movement is just very vaguely empowering people to do their own experiments. Um and that's why I think like I want to see more people go crazier with it. Like I want people to completely break the current pop-up city model and do something new that takes off. Um the original format I think people are just enjoy. Um so I would eliminate like to grow this to something new. Like I would say hacker houses if it's smaller than like 100 people then you're probably not a pop-up city. You're probably a hacker house. If it's shorter than a month you're probably more of a conference residency. And if you only have like one focus then maybe that is also considered a residency. Like the core values of the original Zuzalu were sort of playing at intersections and playing like these new novel experiments. So yeah, the experiment itself is to do more novel experiments. Yeah, any uh a few minutes left. If people have any more questions, comments, roasts. Yes. Uh do you have some like online element communities so that like after you leave that city kind of stay connected and you're still part of that online community and you keep on uh Yeah. connection for it. So, uh to the prior point, we're still very much in the in the process of experimentation around these things. We are very much IRL maxis in the sense that we feel like 99% of the possible kind of connection moments happen in person, but people have spontaneously started to um you know, gather, do little meetups around the world in the cities that they happen to share time in. So, that's something that's being cultivated. We don't necessarily want to have We don't want to fall into the same trap of some of the mistakes that we've seen some communities make of trying to lean too hard into like, "Okay, everyone has to be on Discord, you know, all the time. You always have to monitor what's happening." And there's a lot of like cognitive load that happens there. But TLDR, we're experimenting. We're still going to, yeah, try new things. Yeah, there's not there's not like one sort of shelling point online community where all of the even even the specifically Zuzalu folks are. Yeah, actually, okay. So, we have open town halls that people can join. They happen monthly now. Um and it's a lot of the different pop-ups coming together and having discussions. So, that's like a good place and maybe we should share that link somewhere. Um and I think like a separate thing I actually think this is a big problem of Zuzalu is it's like very in illegible like and there's no real way of like engaging in long-form contribution. So, one thing So, I'm hosting a pop-up after this called Zuzuland and one thing we're doing with that is trying to build it entirely in public. So, we are going to have an open discourse, so not Discord, just like the standard forum um for people to like talk about pop-up cities if they would like. Um so, that would be a potential starting point. And yeah, some something that sort of we've seen is people have tried to go online after like people have tried to build the community between and it's there's still a lot of iteration that is needed in order to sort of like keep the momentum or actually like provide a lot of value in the in-betweens. But I think that there's also the side of things happening more often in person. Something that I've recognized is projects that have tried to get off the ground in like Edge City environments that we've had and even at you know, we didn't really have Zuzulu connect. I think it was a was a good one here or some some of the other pop-ups even with Krystyna where they're like, "Hey, can you use my tool? Like, I really want this tool to be used, but actually I don't I don't have the time to come and be there." And like there's a tension between wanting to see a lot of people's like projects out in the world and and used. And a deep recognition that we've had is like people that are trying to iterate from afar and build for a pop-up but not being there have not succeeded super well because there's a there's the value is in the iteration on the ground. Um so, being being at these spaces where you can iterate and get feedback and like a real feedback and, you know, are dedicated to that, I think, is super valuable. Hi, my name is Jason and uh um I think today is my first time I genuinely have a touch point with Zuzalu. So, um I find it a very interesting experiment. I like to ask, okay, each and every one of you, what is where was the the last Zuzalu and what is one thing, okay, that caught you off guard? So, there was a moment where I found myself DJing with Grimes and that definitely caught me off guard at Zuzalu. This was a very strange set of occurrences that had to happen for that to be the case, but there I was on the Montenegrin seaside with that happening. Um it and that kind of it's it's a funny story, but it illustrates the diversity of experience that's possible in environments like this. It was a diversity that led to me having a very personally meaningful experience where I felt like many sides of my personality were activated in the time that I spent in that space and I think that's kind of a core strength of pop-up cities. They really allow for this just like breadth and depth of of experience. so yeah. How about you guys? Um so, I think to this point it's like pop-up cities. I I would actually say that Dzl again was the seed versus an umbrella and the umbrella is more of pop-up cities. Um So, okay. Um I think a moment that caught me off guard recently was we just did Edge City Lana, which was in um Chiang Mai and it was a really awesome experiment like seeing the progression just even in the past 18 months of community, of the technology, of people that are building, of how people are understanding these these spaces was was truly amazing. And a a moment that I had that caught me off guard was an idea from last year was like, "Oh, we should have more families in these spaces cuz we don't want to create a spot that no one actually wants to get to the next step of life." Like we don't want Peter Pans. We want people that actually like think about building a better society. Um and it was very much so this recognition of like if we don't have kids, we will build a lot of Peter Pan syndrome and we will fall into the trap of like what companies today and what work environments today have almost fallen into, which is like many women having to choose between work or family. And it's like it doesn't have to be that way. Like we should be able to participate in the workforce in whatever way that we can contribute to versus like the stay-at-home mom syndrome. And maybe it's I just have a personal fear of being a stay-at-home mom and never want to do that. Um but the the moment that sort of like really caught me off guard was seeing that idea be seated at Zuzalu of like I don't want a future of Peter Pans. I want a future of people building something building the future together. And being at Edge City this year with many families and one moment of a mother with her two daughters um being at a workout class which was also another thing that I really wanted to push at Zuzalu was like making sure we did have health and like we we brought in longevity folks but I was like okay but like we have to like stick if we are going to say that we're a healthy place like we have to stick to that. Which they'd put sort of a gym Uh I remember this well. They put a gym like a 45-minute walk up a hill in a tent. And they were like there's your gym and I was like no one's going to go there. Like you need to optimize for the laziest self when it comes to working out. And I was like at probably 2:00 a.m. and I was like you know what? Screw it. We need to put the gym in the town and they would they wouldn't let us cuz they were saying like well it's going to mess our little pretty marina up and like there's no way you can. So I like mapped out all of the apartments that we had like rented out for the time and I was like which apartment has the largest balcony? And I was like fine. I'll stay in this apartment so that like I I have this we can use this balcony space. And I was like move the gym to the balcony because that was private land that they couldn't control. They weren't stoked about it but like they had to sort of comply. So I had a gym on my balcony and it was truly like you know a last ditch effort at like making sure we had a space that at least people could work out. But getting to see the progression this year of having many many workout classes like one aspect that we want for the Edge City is to focus on like building a healthy city um and having, you know, workout classes, having gyms, having access to, you know, you can be active at any given time. And seeing this moment of like a mom with her two daughters and a workout instructor that we'd brought out that was that had become like this beloved relationship where the mom and daughter were attending every single morning with with this um workout instructor and she was leave the workout instructor was leaving the next day and both daughters and mom were like in absolute tears after 2 weeks of being able to do workout classes together in a space. And I was like, this is just a really cool moment where we sort of engineered like a completely different social environment to something that was normal but it was kind of this like seeds that had become something bigger. Yeah, caught me off guard um a lot of things but I guess like this time when Balaji was playing the network school, um there was a moment where I was just like answering all the questions and they were like, what else can we do? And I realized that like some of this all of this is just so easy and all it everyone just needs to do it and by doing it you'll have experience. So seeing that like someone like him who initiated this coming back and just asking for operational advice is like very surreal. Um seeing that there was like 10 plus pop-ups before um Devcon in Chiang Mai, that was surreal. Um there's just this movement has really taken off and I really did not think um it would do so so quickly and yeah, I don't know, very happy about that. Um this one's maybe a bit further afield but uh one one experience that definitely caught me off guard uh so I mean we were just to make it not make it sound like this was like a big vacation. People were like pretty locked in. We were working for the most part at Zuzalu. Um but towards the end, there you know, there was a group of us that went wakeboarding, wake surfing. And I ended up talking to the this Russian wake surfing instructor. Um right? And completely like like unprompted he was telling us, you know, like his stories and he was telling us about how he uh did a lot of things off of stablecoins, USDT. Like paid his kids tuition in USDT. Um because he's locked out of regular banking, right? And he had escaped basically to Montenegro, you know, at the start of the conflict so that that he wouldn't get embroiled in that. Um and that was pretty visceral. It's like I'm on a small boat with this guy, right? Really friendly guy and it was pretty amazing, you know, seeing people who are sort of using the uh you know, permissionless nature of of of the system to uh permissionless nature of Ethereum to basically escape uh authoritarianism and claim some freedom for themselves. That was really cool to see. All right, I think we have to wrap up there but thank you everyone so much for joining us. This was really wonderful. And yeah, we'll be around a little bit outside if anyone has any questions. So