Zuzalu: The First of Its Kind Pop-up Community

Transcript

all right it's kind of it's kind of crazy being on this stage like I walked in yesterday and was like okay I now need to be a performer because this is a crazy Stadium um so thank you everyone for being here and for all those in the audience that are friends that are here awesome to see your faces so yeah what is zuzulu um it's been the first of its kind pop-up community that is seemingly mysterious to a lot of people and we wanted to make sure we shared more of it with the world so firstly who am I um why am I up here I really care about using crypto to pull the better future

working on public goods funding at Bitcoin and building IRL communities and now zuzulu I'm one of many core contributors that have made suzalu happen so it's the first of its kind pop-up City that we did for two months in Montenegro in a small isolated time town we brought together 200 core residents and had over 600 visitors in ethereum CK Tech longevity biotech and philosophy that came together for our time we had people from all over the world so we tried to make sure we had people from

China from the US from Africa from South America from Central America from truly all over and we brought together people that had a shared desire to learn create live longer and healthier lives and build self-sustaining communities that create a more positive impact on the world oh man these slides okay but what problem does zuzulu actually address there's been a lot around Network States as a new idea startup cities you know this idea around like what is the

infrastructure that's going to support these self-sovereign cities and new network States and what we realized is this there's just not a lot of Open Source Frameworks that can be used or experimentation that's being done in addition the loneliness epidemic is insane and it's something that doesn't get spoken about enough in my opinion it's at a record high that people are feeling lonely and isolated and that's actually driving negative Health outcomes where it's just increasing a lot of health issues that we're seeing in the world today in addition there's sort of being this

like cultural Evolution so let's just let's just look at history for a moment we had these nomadic tribes that sort of roamed around and found different places to live and you know they were between 50 to 200 people and we then sort of moved to agriculture where we started splitting up tribes because everyone wanted a ton of land so that they could farm and create produce in Homestead that thing shifted us you know to the Industrial Revolution where it took people out of their homes away from their families and fast forward many years we've sort of got to this like remote working environment where many people are isolated for their whole day

which is so far from those nomadic tribes that we once lived in I want to credit biology for this great image that also inspired vitalik to think more deeply about this experimentation area and that's on the screen here so when looking at you know what I just went through in terms of the history and where we've got to people being more isolated less happy where where are the missing pieces one one piece could be like coordinating sustainable communities and humans have gotten pretty good at this pop-up event space like we're really good at throwing

conferences we're great at creating you know parties concerts festivals events just for a very short period of time with a lot of people because human coordination getting everyone in the same place is really hard and our working environments don't really support a long-term Festival of sorts we have also gotten really good or at least have experimented for a long time with building universities and cities and sort of building these institutions but there's this like experimentation area that no one has really been playing in and that's the 100 to 500 person community that is together for a

two-month period so what is zuzulu it's primarily an experiment we planned it in less than two months it was something that came together at the end of January this year and vitalik buterin was an instrumental force in saying you know let's let's give something new a go let's test out this idea of bringing people together to live in community Let's test out this network State thinking it's it's just run an experiment like why not and given the timeline um to bring together 200 people for two months and

how do you keep them entertained how do you keep people actually working how do you make this logistically feasible we had to prioritize a number of key things and what I'm going to walk through is just some of the core areas that made what zuzulu is a success so firstly living in proximity getting people to just be in the same area then actually bootstrapping and using the ethereum sort of culture and ecosystem that already exists to bring people together we did a lot of tech experimentation to make sure that what we were doing there had a purpose built local relationships both with the

government and with the local community decentralized the event planning because we had two months there was no ways that we could as a small team bring in and organize a conference every single weekend then we focused on Health and Longevity and bringing in activities that would support both and across the board like Community empowerment was at its core one of the biggest reasons we had a massive and amazing success of susily so when it comes to living in proximity we really wanted to focus on how do you bring people together where they are in

walking distance of one another so that you can increase serendipitous interactions you've got low level of logistical overhead and we have increased autonomy of not as organizers having to plan anything but as individuals just being able to walk around bump into someone plan something and sort of go from there this was also a testing ground for advancing human coordination enabled by ethereum and ZK applications we've all got a dream right um when when you look at what zuzulu has been in a way zuzulu was a real life example of how ethereum is coming to

life we not only Built a few tools there but what I really want to highlight is the fact that we were able to bring people together in such a short period of time not because we had two months of planning that went really well but because ethereum as an ecosystem has been laying the groundwork for years it's at its core a you know social infrastructure layer that we could use the ethereum community has been nomadic for a while because of all the conferences being in different locations it's remote first so it allowed people to sort of uproot and and move pretty easily and on top of it there's this

incentive structure where it's a value add to socialize with others in the ecosystem because it strengthens our projects it strengthens all of the work that we're doing as a collective and my hypothesis is this would have been really hard to pull off with people in web to Tech Giant companies like the incentive just isn't there to trust one another and build together if you had someone from Google Amazon and Facebook all trying to live together in a community for this extended period of time so I do think that us pushing the boundaries of how ethereum is enabling

this like large-scale coordination as well as like ZK applications being able to help with that is a space I'm super excited to explore so when we look into that we built some really cool things well that's easily um I'm so impressed with all of the people that sort of raise their hands and wanted to figure out how we could not just use existing infrastructure for different conferences but instead build our own so instead of using a ticketing platform that had you know a QR code to tell people where they were going we built zoo pass and Zupas is just like such a fun name it's such a cool product

and the team really worked super hard on this so massive thank you to the Xerox pack team Brian DC vivec and Ivan for kind of pulling this together in the short period that we had as you can see here we have this QR code that got people that was at your check-in to actually arrive at suzlu it was scanned to let you know that you could go into different events it was scanned for breakfasts um so it was just like our All Access application what's exciting to see is we're starting to build on zoo pass in different ways so you can see these fun zoo stamps that I have next to my zoo pass which uh NFC cards which I'm

actually going to pull out one right now that I've got with me so he has a great little NFC card that's the Run Club because I ran the Run club and admit that anytime I found someone that was in the Run Club they could tap my NFC card and get access and acquire a stamp so this created sort of in-person connection and people wanting to make sure that they are attended at an event so that they could get get the advanced stamp and this is a really new area of play that I'm excited to see where the team takes it Zoo poll was out you know one form of governance that we started looking at we very simple it was simple take that just

made it super easy to pull what was going on and helped with decision making I'm going to share a little poll that we did which showed that many people were objectively happy at zuzulu we had sort of over 80 that were super happy there we had over 85 percent of people said that they made connections that were valuable for their regular work outside of Zuzu that they wouldn't have made outside of suzalu and this is super exciting ninety percent of people agree that they feel more inspired to make a positive impact so some other projects that we had was a zuzulu Twitter called Zoo cost so it's a

fully Anonymous Twitter that was created and then a collision resistance tool that allowed full you know agenda setting everyone could just put up their questions and then using and and you'd have to have access by as you pass and have like a collision resistance aspect to it when voting up or down what you wanted to chat through But Not only was this an experiment in you know building Tech and using the ethereum ecosystem but it was also about connecting with the locals and so we had a ton of local integration and a big shout out to uh uh tamiwa over here who did a great job

of integrating us through we did a local day at udg we invested in some startups here we had a Montenegro day out at zuzulu where we brought out the Prime Minister and the ex-minister of Finance who were all really excited about the concepts that we've come up with and are pushing forward the idea of Visa changes to make it more accessible to come to Montenegro as well as the idea of making aging a disease and these are these are huge you know political changes and that just a small community could help inspire in addition we had a farmer's market because we really wanted to make sure we were interacting with local farmers and

starting to show the community the value of eating from the source and from close to home and then we had a crypto 101 day with 100 people from the local community where we taught them all about crypto and blockchain as mentioned we decentralized all the events um and what we did was each week we sort of had a series of different topics that became the shelling point for that topic and we had everything from a synthetic biology weekend and had a ton of speakers and people in the space come in we did a lot around longevity we had a public goods week we had a zero knowledge week and hackathon we had the new cities in network State week Ai and

crypto intersection and it was just amazing to see how valuable these weeks were for the communities that came in around those topics of Interest we heard that it was from people in the AI week they said that it was a very important weekend in the context of the AI conversation and it was the most inspired they felt from the network State week Mark litta who runs the charter City Institute said it was the most interesting event he had attained in years leading him to think more thoughts than perhaps any other event post covered and not only did we have these broader

like very specific topics and intellectual topics that we created but we had these community events that were thrown by the local community anyone could put up something on the website called zuzario.city and help Inspire and get other people involved in participating so we had everything from daily cold plunges that were very strict at 8 AM and 1 p.m we had um a takeover of the local restaurant where we had the whole Community cooking for one another and eating together we did a lot of all of these different projects that the local community decided or the local residents of zuzalu decided they wanted to see come to life and we did

whatever we could to support one another in doing so and Health and Longevity was a really important piece starting with health and because that's like a easy place to get people on board so we did a ton of hikes we ran marathons we did these daily cold plunges we had yoga we had people going on a rafting trip we had people biking it was something where bringing Health into the culture was a really important piece of the day and not only did we do activities but we had an amazing connection with one of the local restaurants where we had a healthy breakfast every day there was a vegan breakfast with salad and no seed

oils which everyone sort of used as this morning's shelling point that became the way that they started their day in socializing with everyone that was there and then going on with their day in different ways but while I've gone through the value of you know Building Technology and what we were able to achieve as a community and then going through the value of the local integration and you know what we did with the local community and trying to push forward this concept of network States and changing changing legislation the piece that's really important about zuzulu that came to life was just the value of the community and the strong

Network that was created because of it so it wasn't a few of us that pulled this off it was this entire group and I just want to highlight a few key people um one of many who was amazing was AFR Wang she did a great job of facilitating meaningful connections across like multilingual communities and different groups and the total outcome of that was she carried this cross-pollination to edcon with a side event where in the Side Event we've got someone from Consciousness speaking we've got someone in the longevity space speaking we've got people speaking about Network States it's a really pushing the boundary of what we're sharing with the crypto community and the intersections that we

have we had Pablo he did a phenomenal job of just giving back to the community and building really interesting tooling and one being rubber ducky which was a bot that took over all support Communications we didn't actually have to have someone who did that because he trained the the rubber ducky bought to do that instead to mewa did an incredible job of mobilizing and encouraging all of us to participate with the local community and we've developed a mentor program that is going to move forward after this with the local University which just a huge thank you to all of that effort

Mike Johnson is someone who's been doing a ton in Cutting Edge research in neuroscience and Consciousness and because of his time at zuzulu where he said it's been so productive for his work and what he's been doing from a research standpoint he started also bringing in the intersection of like crypto and AI into this like neuroscience and Consciousness lens and none of that would have happened unless he had all of this time with this group so seeing where that research pushes the boundaries will be really interesting so as I kind of said um zuzulu is so much more than just an event it is really a place that's

ideally trying to help Inspire residents to feel inspired to go and do and make a positive impact in the world and 90 of zuzulu residents agreed that this was the case for them us seeing how zuzulu can help build the future of this world around Network States and coordinations and communities and intentional communities and what that looks like is super important it's not just about a one-time event it's about open sourcing the experiment and the Playbook that we have and inspiring others to create real-life communities that are pushing the boundaries of this

world of pop-up cities and network States and many people have asked you know well how do I get involved what do I do and like there's so little information online and I do want to highlight that zuzulu has been a in Real Life Community First and an online community second so find someone who is from zuzulu or go to the website zuzulu.city that will have a ton of in-person events that'll come up over the over time and you can go and participate with others from the community at those events in the future

and lastly I just want to say a massive thank you to the whole zoo Community for making this experiment one that is pushing the frontier of network states coordinations of take in you know the ethereum and ZK ecosystem and a big thank you to the team vitalik milosh Nicole Marine Alana Lawrence Vincent and a local Montenegro team who just did so much to bring this to life we're excited to see how we can help Inspire and support other communities in the future and please be on the lookout for the open source tools

that we'll keep developing thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]