🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto.

• The Startup Society Conference III - April 10-11, Jurerê

The Startup Society Conference took over IL Campanario Villaggio Resort for two days.

Day one was all about governance and startup cities - Jean Hansen kicked things off with the state of network societies, Hugo Mathecowitsch (reState) made the case for third places, and the afternoon packed in talks from Bradford Cross on Alpha City’s federation model in Africa, David Laloum on Mata’s green-tech vision for Rio, Joyce Brand on durable governance, and Ingrid Barth on making Brazil a startup country, among others.

Day two shifted to crypto and privacy, covering AI in decentralized decision-making and tokenized city financing. Eighteen speakers across both days, a Happy Hour at Founder Haus, and the full livestream is up on YouTube.

• Workshops at Ipê Village

Between conference days and build sprints, the Village ran hands-on workshops throughout the month. Zama led a deep dive on building privacy-preserving apps onchain using fully homomorphic encryption. OpenClaw walked residents through orchestrating AI agent teams from the ground up. And “Don’t Trust, Verify” covered security fundamentals for builders who want to ship fast without cutting corners on safety. Each session gave participants enough runway to work with real code and tooling rather than just watch slides.

• Open Mic Builds and Village Life

The Open Mic sessions gave Ipê Architects a stage to share what they have been shipping. Projects on display included Ipê Hub, an agentic cities platform; Ipê Mind Tree, a coordination layer mapping the ecosystem’s research and knowledge; a sports app; governance systems, block-chain, and agent-powered interfaces designed to make the way people interact with machines feel more human.

Outside the build hours, the Village found its own rhythm. Barbecues, movie nights, morning beach runs, ice baths, sauna sessions, and pickup sports filled the weeks between workshops and code.

🏫 Learning

• Third Places for a High Order Civilization

Every civilization formed around a place that was neither home nor work. In Greece, the agora mixed philosophy, trade, and assembly. Rome scaled that function in the forum, where law and commerce shared one stage. Medieval Europe recentered social order in the cathedral, joining religion, education, arts, and arbitration. The salon curated discourse for elites, and the coffeehouse widened access, feeding journalism and revolution.

In Ray Oldenburg’s framework, these are third places, the tissue where civic life forms. Hugo Mathecowitsch of reState brought this arc to Governance Day in Jurerê with an open question: if we are founding new civilizations, what is the next third place? A Discord server can coordinate, but it does not yet compound trust like an agora or a coffeehouse.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Mata Maravilha: Reforesting Rio’s Port into a Green-Tech District

Porto Maravilha was Rio’s Olympic-era bet on waterfront revival. A decade on, much of the district still waits for a second act. Mata Maravilha is the proposed next chapter: a 223,000 m² regeneration project that would plant 40,000 native Atlantic Forest trees across the port zone and build a green-tech campus facing Guanabara Bay.

Selected through a public call by Rio’s municipal investment arm CCPar, the initiative from Alexandre Allard and Autonomy Capital combines zero-carbon construction, a regeneration-focused university, and incubator space aimed at drawing engineers and digital nomads. David Laloum presented the vision at this week’s Startup Society Conference under the banner of reclaiming Rio’s economic relevance through nature and technology. If the thesis holds, the city’s next competitive edge grows from Atlantic Forest soil.

• Alpha City: A Federation of Frontier Cities Across Africa

Bradford Cross presented Alpha City at the Startup Society Conference in Jurerê on April 10. The company builds industry-specialized cities through joint ventures with African governments, each organized around a sector where the host country holds a strategic edge. Eight partner countries have zone law frameworks and master planning underway. Four templates drive the pipeline: Crypto, AI, EV, and Aerospace cities.

Cross, who also leads Pronomos Capital, has argued that full autonomy from the host state leads to political fragility, pointing to Honduras’s ZEDEs. The initial pipeline focuses on Lusophone Africa.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Introducing the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) #Parallel Institutions

Rollups brought Ethereum’s fees down and throughput up, but each major L2 became its own silo of liquidity and bridges. The Ethereum Economic Zone reframes that fragmentation as a design problem: participating rollups would share synchronous composability with mainnet, letting contracts call across chains in a single atomic transaction with ETH as the settlement layer.

The Ethereum Foundation funds the effort through a Swiss-based EEZ Association. Gnosis, ZisK, Aave, and Centrifuge anchor the founding alliance. Specs and tooling are still weeks out, so this is alignment before architecture. The bet is clear: Ethereum’s next bottleneck is coordination between its layers, not raw speed.

• Thermodynamic AI Hardware (Extropic)

Running AI inference today means renting time on GPU clusters that a few companies control. NVIDIA designs the silicon, hyperscalers run the racks, and anyone deploying models at scale passes through that funnel. Extropic is engineering a different path.

Their chips treat thermal noise as the computation itself, converting the physics that conventional designers suppress into a processing resource. The Z1 hardware, entering early access this year, targets probabilistic inference, workloads where GPUs waste energy simulating randomness that analog circuits produce natively.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• CFTC Sues Three States Over Prediction Markets

In April 2026 the CFTC sued Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois, claiming federal commodities law governs Kalshi and Polymarket. Chairman Selig called state cease-and-desists overreach; AGs say the contracts are illegal betting. CNBC reports lawmakers asking about offshore conflict-linked trades. The thread is federalism for event contracts.

• Wikimedia at DRIF26 (Abidjan)

DRIF26 in Abidjan (April 2026) is Africa’s Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum - Paradigm Initiative plus Wikimedia sessions on youth inclusion, open knowledge, multilingual access, and Wikidata as digital public goods. It is commons infrastructure under the protocol headlines: languages, archives, and representation in AI datasets.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026 starts today

It's happening. Ipê Village 2026 kicks off in Florianópolis today for a month-long buildathon. Residents build the social, legal, and economic layers of a city together and own a piece of what they ship. Privacy House, AI House, Onchain House, Artizen House, 300+ apps as the target, demo day and techno party on May 1st.

• The Startup Society Conference — April 10–11, Florianópolis

At the heart of the month: The Startup Society Conference at IL Campanario Villaggio Resort. Two days, 18+ speakers, four tracks: day one on governance and startup cities, day two on crypto and privacy, plus cross-cutting sessions on AI in decentralized decision-making, DAOs in city governance, and financing emerging cities through tokenization.

Confirmed speakers include Joyce Brand (The Morazan Model), Ingrid Barth (PilotIn), Fabio Seixas (Infinity Base), Valerio Leo (RayCash), Sebastian Brunemeier (Healthspan Capital), and Gerrit Glass (Open Health), among others. Holders of Explorer and Architect passports enter free. Full lineup and tickets at ipe.city.

🏫 Learning

• Transhumanism

Julian Huxley coined the term Transhumanism in 1957. The evolutionary biologist argued that humanity stood “on the threshold of a new kind of existence”: one reached by consciously pushing past biological defaults through science. The idea stayed mostly academic until the 1990s, when Max More’s Extropy Institute and later Nick Bostrom’s World Transhumanist Association gave it institutional form. Their 1998 declaration frames the ambition plainly: overcoming aging, cognitive limits, involuntary suffering, and confinement to Earth.

For most of history, the challenge was keeping humans alive. The frontier now is choosing what to add - lifespan, memory, and cognitive reach. Harari framed it as the upgrade from Homo sapiens to Homo deus: biology becoming a design surface rather than a given.

The practical side is already in motion. VitaDAO funds longevity science onchain; Zuzalu and Edge City build pop-up villages where biotech and neurotech sit inside daily life.

A techno-optimist reading treats that prospect as responsibility, the same impulse behind medicine and computation extended to the substrate we run on.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Valley of the Commons - August 24 to September 20, 2026

Valley of the Commons runs for four weeks at Commons Hub in Höllental, Austrian Alps - about an hour south of Vienna. The project is built for digital workers and remote professionals across Europe who want cooperative living beyond big-city isolation and the fragility of solo nomadism.

Week one opens with a five-day course on commons theory led by Michel Bauwens and Adam Arvidsson, followed by weeks on cosmo-local production, cooperative housing, and governance design. Mornings follow structured learning paths while afternoons shift to workshops and field visits.

The team previously co-organized Zu-villages and Invisible Gardens and sees this as preparation toward permanent settlement in a valley where real estate is still affordable and the landscape is largely untouched. Tickets start at €120 per week.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Wingbits - aviation DePIN on Solana, TGE April 22 #Parallel Institutions

Flight tracking depends on ADS-B receivers that hobbyists have operated for years, feeding data to aggregators like FlightRadar24 and FlightAware. These companies turned volunteer infrastructure into large revenue streams while offering operators little in return.

Wingbits reworks that model through a DePIN on Solana: station owners install WB200 receivers with roughly 250-mile range, upload cryptographically signed flight data, and earn $WINGS tokens. The network currently reports over 5,500 active stations and 15 billion daily data points.

Mainnet and TGE are set for April 22, with tokenomics including a revenue-linked buyback detailed in the documentation. This is an infrastructure read - for contract addresses, check only official Wingbits channels at launch.

• Who Owns Digital Thoughts? - Stanford Law #Parallel Institutions

Neuralink patients are already playing video games and controlling computers using brain signals alone, and the company plans to scale implants through 2026. As consumer brain-computer interfaces grow, the neural data they produce is outpacing the old legal frameworks.

Standard consent assumes you know what you’re sharing, but neural signals yield inferences about emotional states and cognitive patterns the user never consciously disclosed. Researchers call this neuro-surveillance, and it runs deeper than behavioral tracking because the source is thought itself.

A normative response is forming around what scholars call the “neurorights” framework. The 2025 UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology grounds freedom of thought and mental integrity as protections preceding consent, and several U.S. states have reclassified neural data as sensitive.

A Stanford Law analysis pushes further: if neural data becomes a transferable asset, its exchange could be normalized as a condition for employment, insurance, or service access. When the interface moves from your screen to your cortex, the question of who reads the data stops being theoretical.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Evo 2: Open-Source AI for Generative Genomics https://arcinstitute.org/tools/evo

The Arc Institute published Evo 2 in Nature this March, a 40-billion-parameter model trained on roughly nine trillion DNA base pairs from across all domains of life. To validate it, researchers asked the model to design a bacteriophage from scratch, synthesized the output, and it infected the intended host. The code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0, which puts that capability in any lab’s hands.

• UN High Seas Treaty: Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Enters Force, 30% Ocean Goal by 2030

The BBNJ Agreement took effect after roughly fifteen years of negotiations and a 2023 final text. Officials describe the zone as two-thirds of the ocean and half the planet’s surface, with ratifications past eighty and a political target of thirty percent ocean protection by 2030 from a still-small baseline of protected area.

• Over Six Billion in Canceled Contracts and The Line Toward an AI Data Center

Several cancellations across NEOM, including Trojena work on dams, a lake, and a structure called The Bow plus tunneling tied to The Line rail, with combined terminated packages estimated above six billion dollars. Saudi Arabia is stepping back from hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games at Trojena and a proposal to repurpose The Line as a large AI data center instead of the original nine-million-resident linear city.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026 starts next week

It’s happening! Ipê Village 2026 kicks off in Florianopolis next week for a month-long buildathon, where residents build the social, legal, and economic layers of a city together and own a piece of what they ship.

Second edition, bigger footprint: themed Hacker Houses across Privacy House, AI House, Onchain House, and a brand-new Artizen House. The month packs dozens of Web3 and AI workshops, an AI Day, a Privacy Day, fitness and community-built activities, and closes with a demo day and a techno party on May 1st.

Last year the village shipped 30+ new apps in a single month; this year the target is 300+, powered by vibecoding and agentic tooling.

• The Startup Society Conference — April 10–11, Florianópolis

At the heart of the month: The Startup Society Conference at IL Campanario Villaggio Resort. Two days, 18+ speakers, four tracks: day one on governance and startup cities, day two on crypto and privacy, plus cross-cutting sessions on AI in decentralized decision-making, DAOs in city governance, and financing emerging cities through tokenization.

Confirmed speakers include Joyce Brand (The Morazan Model), Ingrid Barth (PilotIn), Rafael Castaneda (Oxus Finance), Valerio Leo (RayCash), Sebastian Brunemeier (Healthspan Capital), and Gerrit Glass (Open Health), among others. Holders of Explorer and Architect passports enter free. Full lineup and tickets at ipe.city.

• IpêCast #6: René Pinnell on match-funding creativity with Artizen

In episode #6 of IpêCast, Jean, André, and Rafael talk with René Pinnell, Founder of Artizen, about how decentralized funding models can unlock real support for public goods, and how smart incentive design and gamification can turn passive interest into meaningful action.
Artizen stacks community funds, corporate sponsors, and gamified “boosts”, time-bound competitions that give creators a reason to mobilize backers week after week.

🏫 Learning

• Digital Twins

A digital twin is a virtual model that stays wired to a physical thing and updates itself with live data so it can predict what happens next. The National Academies define it as “a set of virtual information constructs that mimics the structure, context, and behavior of a natural, engineered, or social system, is dynamically updated with data from its physical twin, has a predictive capability, and informs decisions that realize value.” That bidirectional loop between real object and virtual copy is what separates a digital twin from an ordinary simulation.

The term digital twin itself emerged around 2010 during NASA technical roadmapping co-led by John Vickers. By 2012, Glaessgen and Stargel had published the paper that turned it into an engineering paradigm: high-fidelity simulation fused with sensor feeds, maintenance logs, and fleet history to mirror a vehicle’s actual life.

The conceptual groundwork traces to Michael Grieves, who in 2005 published on linking physical products to virtual “mirrored spaces” across their lifecycle. Standards like ISO 23247 and NIST interoperability models later made the approach portable beyond aerospace. Today the same logic applies to a building’s energy load, a patient’s heart, or a city’s traffic grid. Stress-testing your infrastructure and governance rules inside a virtual copy before spending real money is where this becomes practical for anyone planning a pop-up village or a charter jurisdiction.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• ZuKas Season 02 - The Crucible

ZuKaş returns for a 30-day residency in Kaş, Turkey. Season 01 (Sept 2025) ran ten days with Vitalik Buterin keynoting and builders from 15+ countries; Season 02 scales to a full month with Glen Weyl in residence and roughly 150 participants.

The headline experiment is the Grounding Engine, an AI that reviews each governance proposal for risks and internal contradictions before the vote opens. The project calls this w/acc (”wisdom acceleration”), the idea that AI works best when it sharpens collective judgment rather than replacing it.

Kaş sits on the Lycian coast, where the Lycian League, a 2nd-century BCE federation of 23 city-states, ran what historians recognise as the world’s first proportional-representation system. Montesquieu called it “the most perfect constitution of antiquity.” ZuKaş operates within the Zuzalu network, but unlike most pop-up experiments it builds on a Web3 builder community that has been active in Kaş since 2021.

• ProtoVille: The UBI Living Lab

ProtoVille is a one-week pop-up village running April 2 to 8 in Dumo, a coastal settlement on the island of Namhae in southern South Korea. The site is Farmfra Village, a coliving space with modular homes and a permaculture garden inside Hallyeohaesang National Park.

Dumo is one of ten Korean towns running a government-backed rural UBI pilot this year, and the program is built around observing it up close: sessions with residents and the local UBI committee, a walkthrough led by a city official, and a lightweight field tool the organizers call the Bicorder that maps what participants see across individual, community, and structural dimensions.

The event is non-profit, and any surplus goes into a treasury for future UBI-focused pop-ups.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• The Synthesis: when the judge is an agent #ParallelGovernance

The Synthesis bills itself as the first hackathon where AI agents judge the projects and can also enter. Run by Ethereum Foundation & Friends with Bonfires.ai powering the agentic judging layer, the explicit thesis is scaling human judgment through AI while keeping humans in the loop.

685 projects applied for over US$ 100k in prizes, evaluated by agent judges alongside human reviewers backed by 25+ partners including Base, Uniswap, Protocol Labs, EigenLayer, MetaMask, and Filecoin.

Today it picks hackathon winners; tomorrow the same pattern could slot into grants, retroPGF, DAO proposals, and on-chain dispute resolution, automated evaluation that updates faster than any panel can convene.

• Digital twins for medicine - and the open infrastructure they need #ParallelScience

In mid-March, GSK, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford launched the Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC), a research hub backed by £11 million from GSK. The goal is to build mathematical models of lungs, liver, kidneys, and cartilage that behave like the real organs, so researchers can run virtual experiments before touching a patient.

His group has already built cardiac digital twins for thousands of patients using UK Biobank data, so MiMeC is scaling a methodology that already works. Both universities committed to publishing their models as open-source tools with shared reproducibility standards. That means any lab in the world can take a MiMeC lung model and build on it.

Open-source models are a big step, but they still need somewhere to live. Today most research outputs end up as a PDF and a zip file on a journal’s website - hard to reuse, easy to lose.

DeSci Nodes is building the shelf those models belong on. It is a platform where researchers package their manuscript, data, and code into a single versioned object with a permanent identifier, following the FAIR principles so that everything stays findable and machine-readable. Every update is logged, read access is free, and the source code is public.

If MiMeC delivers on its open-source promise, a platform like Nodes is where the wider research community would actually find, cite, and fork those organ twins instead of hunting through supplementary files.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• AI and the Paradox of Agency (Bildmuseet, Umeå)

At Bildmuseet in northern Sweden, this show runs through January 2027 and asks who holds power when AI enters everyday life. The line-up mixes interactive games, immersive installation, sculpture, and even a drone-read hand-painted textile.

• The Public Domain Review

An online journal that surfaces odd, beautiful, and forgotten books, images, and essays now in the public domain. Recent entries range fromessays on science and medicine toart and illustration collections. The material is free to reuse legally, which still matters for anyone building commons-style archives or teaching materials.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto.

• IpêCast #5: How to use stable coins with privacy

In episode #5 of IpêCast, Jean and André spoke with Valerio Leo, Founder and CEO of RayCash, about how private stablecoins can be used in practice. They discussed the stablecoin trilemma (self-custody + privacy + banking usability), FHE (Zama) for computation on encrypted data, and privacy as a missing layer for digital governance/coordination (incl. Zcash zk-SNARKs). Full broadcast on YouTube.

🏫 Learning

• Free Software and Open Source

Most commercial software keeps users inside a vendor-controlled environment, where access, updates, and long-term compatibility depend on decisions made outside the community, while free software and open source emerged as ways to reduce that dependence by keeping code open to inspection and change by users and communities.

They often describe the same projects, but from different premises, since the Free Software Foundation, active since 1983, defines software in terms of user freedom to run, study, modify, and share, whereas the Open Source Initiative, founded in 1998, frames it through practical licensing criteria in the Open Source Definition, where source availability, modification, and redistribution are central

This distinction matters because software can meet OSI criteria and still limit real user control in practice, as seen in many Android devices where the Linux kernel is published under the GPL but block modified executables, , with permissive models like MIT and BSD allowing proprietary relicensing, while copyleft models like GPL require forks to preserve the same freedoms.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• muShanghai - Builders Only in the World’s Scaling Engine

If you want a clearer signal of where pop-up societies are going, check muShanghai. The project frames itself as a month-long builder environment in Shanghai (10 May - 6 Jun 2026), organized around AI, biotech, robotics, and gaming, with a strong focus on practical immersion in China’s technology and business landscape.

muShanghai stands out as part of a larger shift: temporary settlements are becoming real testbeds for network-native collaboration, not just short meetups. The public social channel is listed as @themu_xyz, while the main program details and application flow remain on the official site.

• The Portal Pop-up Village

The Portal is a month-long program on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes Peninsula, set against a volcanic landscape shaped by millennia of glacial and geothermal activity. Running ahead of the total solar eclipse on 12 August 2026, it brings together people from different fields for daily practice, creative work, and encounters with nature, with space to tap into the indigenous wisdom and living stories of this land.

The program feeds into the wider Iceland Eclipse festival (11-15 August 2026), which includes a full music lineup and a range of curated add-on experiences, among them eclipse-viewing at a glacial waterfall, a concert inside a lava cave, and a party beneath the glacier.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Rails for Agents on Prediction Markets #ParallelInfrastructure

Have you ever thought about letting a robot trade prediction markets for you? According to CoinDesk, AI agents now power about 30% of Polymarket wallets, so this is already becoming part of how these markets operate.

This month, two major crypto products focused on the same core issue: how to let an agent trade without exposing private keys. OKX launched Agentic Wallet, where keys stay inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), separate from the model. Before sending a transaction, the wallet shows a plain-language simulation of what will happen, and it can block actions it considers high risk. Agents can connect through MCP or CLI and work across around twenty chains with gas abstraction.

Polygon launched Agent CLI with a more open toolkit approach. It uses session wallets with spending limits and contract allowlists, and it settles payments in USDC. It also includes ERC-8004 for onchain agent identity and x402 for pay-per-request API payments in stablecoins. In practice, this helps agents pay for services directly and build reputation onchain over time.

• Brazil’s ECA Digital and the Open Infrastructure Test #DigitalRegulation

Brazil’s ECA Digital - Law 15.211/2025, was approved on March 17, 2026 and became one of the strictest child-safety frameworks in Latin America. Triggered by the Felca case, it requires reliable age verification, mandatory parental controls, high-privacy defaults for minors, restrictions on monetization patterns such as loot boxes for under-18 users, and faster removal of harmful material. Enforcement is led by ANPD, with penalties that can reach service restrictions and fines up to R$50 million.

Strong age assurance usually means collecting sensitive signals, which raises direct tension with LGPD principles and increases breach exposure. Large platforms can absorb legal and technical costs, while volunteer-led and open-source projects often cannot. A visible early case was Arch Linux 32 restricting direct access for Brazilian IPs, a move discussed publicly in the ecosystem and reported in coverage such as this analysis.

So the policy goal is widely supported, but the current shape risks collateral effects: tighter data collection, over-blocking incentives, and withdrawal of smaller services from the market. This is not unique to Brazil. In Europe, implementation of the Digital Services Act and the Commission’s minor-protection guidelines has raised similar debates, and in the UK, rollout under the Online Safety Act.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Museum of Crypto Art ($MOCA)

The Museum of Crypto Art is building decentralized crypto-art curation to challenge the basics question, “what is art?” and “who decides?” It ties community stewardship to $MOCA incentives, with the Genesis Collection anchored to early blockchain works minted on 10.18.2022.

• Project N.O.M.A.D: Offline AI and Knowledge Server

Project N.O.M.A.D runs local AI via Ollama, offline Wikipedia and medical references via Kiwix, Khan Academy courses via Kolibri, and regional maps via OpenStreetMap, all from a single install on any Ubuntu machine. The full stack is Apache 2.0 with zero telemetry and no cloud dependency after setup, drawing 15-65W so a solar panel and battery is enough to run it.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto.

• Ipê Cast with Zcash

Last week’s live had Jean Hansen and André Froes in conversation with Michael, ambassador of Zcash Brazil.

Zcash is a privacy-focused blockchain protocol and network that uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) so users can shield amounts, sender, and receiver while still verifying transactions. The cast explored how financial privacy fits into digital governance and coordination. Full broadcast on YouTube.

• IpêCast – Encrypted stablecoins & private on-chain banking

How can we use stablecoins without sacrificing privacy?

In the next episode of IpêCast, we’ll host Valerio Giannini, CEO and founder of Raycash, to talk about encrypted stablecoins, private on-chain banking, and the technologies that could make private digital payments possible. He’s building an onchain banking app with privacy using the Zama protocol and will also join us at Ipê Village’s Privacy Hacker House this year.

If you also believe privacy is a core feature for the startup cities of the future, join us for this conversation.

• Ipê City Town Hall

It’s today! Join our Ipê City Town Hall on Discord from 4–6 PM (GMT-3).

We’ll walk through what’s coming for Ipê Village 2026, how you can get involved, and open the floor for an updates + open mic segment where residents and explorers share what they’re building: product updates, project pitches, Startup Society Live, and Ipê City news.

Join via our Discord channel.

🏗️ Architects & Explorers

Voices from the builders shaping new societies.

• Electra Frost - Accountant on the nation-state frontier

Accounting & Tax Technologist | CTA, FIPA | Network School, Forest City, Malaysia

When we spoke with Electra, she framed her trajectory around a problem in 2013: how do you account for Bitcoin when there’s no regulation for it? Her clients - musicians, filmmakers, tech startups paying contractors internationally - were already using it. She had to work out the accounting based on how it was used.

That thread pulls through the stories that followed. She co-founded Digital Playhouse Foundation in Agnes Water, Australia’s first digital currency town, backed by the Queensland Tourism Council in 2018. She’d been running her city practice fully online from remote coastal Queensland, studying blockchain and experimenting with DAO structures for a decentralized professional association she’d thought about for years. In 2024, an email from Balaji brought her to Network School.

Now embedded at Forest City, she’s building CREDU Academy: a residency programme where accountants develop AI tools, blockchain credentialing, and cross-border compliance systems - a hacker house for tax and law people designing what comes next.

Her advice for builders in the frontier of fiat and crypto: get qualified representation, defensible arguments with good records are what kept her clients off tax audit lists for years. Courage, she told us, follows competence. She’s looking to connect with Brazilian accountants to anchor an Ipê-Network School bridge.

Connect with Electra: LinkedIn | CREDU Academy

🏫 Learning

• Attestations: From Access To Justification

Every account you’ve made, every course you’ve finished, every community you’ve joined - each one lives in a different silo. No single place holds the full picture of who you are and what you’ve done. Tokens solve part of this by giving you access to things. What they don’t carry is context. An attestation is a signed, verifiable statement that travels with you and says why you should have that access.

The scope is broader than it sounds. Let’s say you attend Ipê Village, that residency becomes an attestation. Or that a robot completes a crop harvest, the delivery is attested onchain, triggering yield automatically. A sensor confirms its location attested, so a smart contract can trust the data. Anyone, or anything, can attest to anything. Gitcoin Passport built its Sybil-resistance layer on exactly this: each stamp you earn is an attestation about one dimension of your identity, composable into a trust score.

The infrastructure behind most of this is Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), which is based on two contracts, one to register a schema, one to issue attestations on it. Open-source and permissionless by design. Builders could issue proof of residency tomorrow with no approval from any institution.

And when privacy matters, zero-knowledge proofs let you confirm an attestation is valid without revealing its contents. The verifier confirms it without seeing the data.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Mars College 2026

Mars College is a three-month off-grid program held each year in the California desert, near the Salton Sea. A small crew arrives in November to build the campus from scratch, setting up solar power, water, and high-speed internet.

In January, the full community joins for an unconference-style semester with an open calendar of workshops covering everything from Creative AI and off-grid construction to music-making. The second half shifts toward group projects and collaboration, building up to Mars Electronica, a multi-day exhibition, gallery, and AI Film Festival held in early April.

By mid-April, every structure is dismantled and the land is returned to how it looked before the first crew arrived. The 2026 edition is currently in its learning phase, with Mars Electronica scheduled for April 2 and the fourth annual AI Film Festival coming up shortly after.

The team shares updates and images of this cycle on their website, Substack and Instagram.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• When robots become citizens

A farm in Hong Kong is paying its NFT holders 18% APY in stablecoin, and the worker doing the harvesting is a robot. That robot runs on peaq, a blockchain that gives machines their own wallet, identity, and the ability to sign contracts. No company in the middle collecting fees. Allegedly, RoboFarm is the first real proof that this works.

The other piece of the puzzle landed on March 1st. Autonomous robots need to know exactly where they are, to within centimeters, and until now that meant depending on GPS infrastructure owned by states or tech companies. GEODNET solves that with a network of 21,000 community-run stations across 150 countries, now available through a single store alongside RTK hardware. The network already generated over $7 million in real revenue selling precision positioning data to robotics and drone operators last year.

Dubai opened in 2025 the Machine Economy Free Zone specifically to sandbox this kind of setup. specifically to sandbox this kind of setup. If you combine peaq’s identity layer with GEODNET’s positioning infrastructure, you have the core of a sovereign robot fleet with no legacy state required.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Tech Boss Uses AI to Create a Cancer Vaccine for His Dying Dog

Sydney data engineer Paul Conyngham used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to sequence his rescue dog Rosie’s tumor DNA and worked with UNSW scientists to produce a personalized mRNA vaccine, the first ever designed for a dog. Six weeks after the first injection, the tumor halved. UNSW researchers say the process is “democratising” personalized medicine and points directly toward human cancer treatment.

• MiroFish: Multi‑Agent Engine For Future Scenarios

MiroFish, a swarm intelligence engine built in 10 days by a Chinese CS student, lets you run multi-agent simulations of market scenarios. The repo reached more than 22,700 GitHub stars within days. The comparison that sticks is that a McKinsey engagement for similar market trajectory analysis can cost around $500K and take 10 weeks.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto. Join the Telegram group.

• Ipê Cast with Michel Bauwens

Last Thursday’s live with Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, ranged across AI, the long arc of civilizational history, the current war scenario, and what parallel institutions can realistically look like in an unstable world. Full broadcast on Youtube.

• Ipê City builders vibecoded dashboards for the city they'd want to live in

Ipê City's latest meetup challenged builders to vibecode a dashboard for the city they'd want to live in, and the same prompt produced completely different metrics, visualizations, and ways of representing urban life. One builder, George, created an app where social and financial data appear as physical structures.

🏫 Learning

• What is P2P?

P2P, or peer-to-peer, is a network where participants connect directly to each other without a central server controlling the exchange. The P2P Foundation has documented these dynamics since 2005. BitTorrent pioneered this in file sharing. Instead of downloading a movie from one central server, you pull fragments simultaneously from thousands of users, each one both consumer and distributor.

Bitcoin applied the same logic to currency. Transactions settle between wallets without a bank approving, recording, or charging for the transfer.

Wikipedia takes the same principle into knowledge production. Thousands of contributors write and maintain articles without any central authority coordinating them.

P2P removes that expectation altogether. You contribute to the whole, and the whole remains available to everyone. For the theoretical backbone, see the sources of P2P theory.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Bhutan Launches World’s First Solana-Backed Digital Nomad Visa

Bhutan has tied sovereign residency to a blockchain-native asset. The country’s new digital nomad visa requires applicants to purchase $10,000 in tokenized gold on the Solana network, held for up to 36 months then refunded.

The design extends network state logic into official government infrastructure: residency access bound to a verifiable transaction, with the state earning yield while the term runs.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• The Neuroscientist Who Spent Decades on a Spinal Cord Breakthrough

Tatiana Sampaio, a neuroscientist at UFRJ, identified a family of proteins lining the walls of blood vessels inside the nervous system. She named them polylaminins. They bind to axons and guide reconnection, forming chains that thread through damaged tissue. In Anvisa-approved clinical trials, six of eight patients recovered movement. One walked again.

Sampaio ran the research for decades without a dedicated sponsor, through voluntary collaboration across Brazilian institutions. In interviews, she has spoken about the difficulty of securing investment.

Cristália eventually committed R$100 million to support clinical trials. In January, Anvisa authorized the start of an official clinical study to evaluate the safety of polylaminins in humans. If all three phases succeed, the medication could be available within five years.

The Brazilian Academy of Neurology has raised questions about the absence of peer-reviewed data and control groups in the preliminary results.

Research sitting between academic science and commercial viability has always struggled within existing funding structures. DeSci, Decentralized Science, has been building a different approach: research DAOs fund studies through tokenized models, data is shared openly, and governance is distributed across contributors rather than held by a single institution.

This week, Forbes Brasil named her among the Most Powerful Women of Brazil 2026. For a broader picture of Brazilian women in crypto and web3, see this roundup of executives and investors.

• Blockchain4Her: Bitget Marks Women’s Day with Grants and Mentorship in Web3

Bitget launched Blockchain4Her to mark Women’s Day, combining grants, educational resources, and visibility campaigns to bring more women into Web3.

The Lady Forward program extends that effort with mentorship and industry partnerships, shifting the focus from awareness to building. Together they trace a fuller arc: first make the space visible, then make staying in it sustainable for women who are actively developing in the sector.

• Garden Urbanism: The Amazonian Model of City-Building

Archaeology is rewriting the Western view of how urban life was in the Americas. It is estimated that more than 10,000 pre-Columbian earthworks are still hidden across Amazonia. Another study documented 2,000 years of continuous garden urbanism in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, thousands of platforms, plazas, and roads threading through the region.

The Dark Earths (terra preta) tells the same story from underground. Amazonian soil is naturally acidic and nutrient-poor; these communities spent centuries depositing organic matter, ash, and ceramics into it until it became a self-regenerating earth that researchers still find productive today.

Useful species appear near former settlements at much higher rates than anywhere else in the basin, a pattern traced across thousands of kilometers.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Brazil’s Pix instant payment system expands to Argentina

Brazil's Central Bank expanded Pix to Argentina, letting Brazilians pay merchants and send money across the border through QR codes with automatic conversion. The service is open to all 170 million Pix users. Expansion to the Americas, Europe, and Asia is being evaluated.

• SheFi: Women in Web3

SheFi runs education programs and community infrastructure for women entering DeFi and Web3, with an active Brazil chapter. The initiative connects women across the ecosystem as builders, investors, and protocol contributors.

• AI particle simulator turns text prompts into exportable 3D simulations

An AI-driven particle simulator generates and visualizes complex particle systems from text prompts, then exports them as HTML, React, or Three.js simulations.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter, Telegram or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto. Join the Telegram group.

Episode #2 of IpeCast was live last week with Jackson Steger, Founding Director of Network School, hosted by Jean Hansen and André Freys. Full session on YouTube.

This Thursday, March 5, Michel Bauwens joins for a conversation on commons-based governance and peer-to-peer alternatives to the nation-state. Bauwens founded the P2P Foundation and spent two decades building the intellectual scaffolding themes like commons-based peer production, cooperative economics, the idea that communities can govern shared resources without states or corporations in the middle. Event Link: https://luma.com/eydzg9q7

🏫 Learning

• Legal Engineering

Law has always been an algorithm. The Code of Hammurabi, written around 1750 BC, is structurally a chain of if-then statements: if this act is committed, then this consequence follows. For four thousand years, only humans could execute legal code. Legal Engineering is the discipline built on the premise that this is no longer necessary, or sufficient.

The concept has been advanced through research affiliated with Stanford’s CodeX and is operationalized by Norm AI through its Legal Engineering Automation Platform (LEAP). Attorneys without coding experience use LEAP to transform regulations workflows into AI agents without a software engineer in the loop. The resulting system completes the first pass of a legal analysis autonomously.

And what happens when the regulation changes, or the agent encounters a situation no one anticipated? MIT’s Computational Law group has been working on this from a different angle. Their ETLC framework (Extract, Transform, Load, Compute) uses Bayesian networks to let an agent reason under uncertainty rather than fail on edge cases.

Legal Engineering doesn’t replace legal judgment. It makes compliance computable.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• ZuCity Japan: March 2026 Popup City in the Japanese Alps

In 2025, Kiba Gateaux bought four houses in a rural Japanese mountain village, all within a five-minute walk of each other. No grants, no investors. The first ZuCity popup event broke even on ticket sales alone (¥480,000, roughly $3,200), with 26% immediately converted into a car and furniture. Forty-four people came through the year. A local school building is now under negotiation with the city government as the fifth property.

Each property acquisition is a share in the neighborhood. ZuCity’s aesthetic is equally specific, wabi-sabi, satoyama, and mottainai as the base layer, cypherpunk, neo-ruralism, and transhumanism on top. Not foreigners escaping modernity, but people building something with deliberate cultural grammar in Japan’s massive stock of abandoned homes (roughly 15% of all housing in the country).

The March 2026 popup opens the process to newcomers. Workshops cover property scouting and acquisition, DIY renovation, Japanese language and culture, farming, home cooking, and SEZ frameworks in Nagano. Community tokens are on the agenda too.

• burn.city — Infrastructure for AI Agents in the Physical World

Cyber Valley is building burn.city with a different first resident: not humans, but AI agents. Sensors, data pipelines, and feedback loops embedded in real land give AI systems something they don’t typically have access to, closed-loop learning from actual physical environments. Real soil, real weather, real energy systems. Humans serve as operators, renting the land by the hour, day, or week, executing what the agents surface and measuring what happens. The first shift is March 17-20, 2026. Shared living runs around $2,000/month; private, $3,000/month.

The argument Cyber Valley makes is that AI depends on electricity, minerals, and a stable planet. If the physical infrastructure destabilizes, the digital infrastructure goes with it. “Mutual dependency isn’t philosophy, it’s a dependency graph,” as they frame it. Most projects in this space treat the physical world as backdrop. burn.city treats it as the training environment.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• A Brazilian Developer Is Using AI to Map Corruption in Open Government Data #ParallelLaw

A developer named Bruno appeared on X with a demo that stopped timelines cold. He had built an AI agent system capable of cross-referencing open government databases (procurement records, contracts, suppliers, public spending) and surfacing patterns that, statistically, look like corruption. No leaks. No insider sources. Just data that was technically public all along, finally being read at machine speed.

These databases have been sitting on a shelf for decades, everything catalogued, in order. The bottleneck was never access. It was reading speed. What Bruno is trying is to bridge the gap that made corruption investigations take years. Bruno pushed the code. br/acc is now live on GitHub, open source, with 995 stars and 258 forks on release day. Version 0.4.0 cross-references 39 Brazilian public databases.

• Anthropic vs. the Department of War:The Two Refusals That Split the AI Industry #ParallelLaw

Dario Amodei, from Anthropic, refused two specific uses of Claude for what the Trump administration now officially calls the “Department of War”: mass domestic surveillance of American citizens and fully autonomous weapons. The DoW’s response was to escalate to the top. Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a label historically reserved for foreign adversaries and never before applied to an American company. Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology, with a six-month phase-out for ongoing deployments.

Amodei is betting the company’s federal revenue on principles he calls non-negotiable, arguing that today’s frontier AI is not reliable enough for autonomous weapons and that mass surveillance violates democratic values. Hegseth and the DoW want unrestricted operational flexibility, “all lawful uses” without private-sector carve-outs. OpenAI walked in hours later with its own Pentagon deal, with “claimed safeguards” whose robustness has yet to be tested under pressure.

Amodei was unambiguous: "No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War is going to make us change our stance. We will fight any supply-chain risk designation in court." Individual customers, commercial API contracts, and every other use remain completely unaffected.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Peru’s Reform Window: Hernando de Soto Appointed Prime Minister

Property-rights economist Hernando de Soto, champion of formalizing informal economies, appointed Prime Minister of Peru, putting his life's work on property formalization and legal recognition of the informal sector directly in the hands of government.

• OpenClaw Just Passed React on GitHub Stars

OpenClaw, a personal AI assistant, just surpassed React on GitHub stars, overtaking the library that powers half the internet. The project shipped 90+ changes on the same day React's team shipped a conference.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter, Telegram or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto.

Meanwhile, AI Prompt Nights hits edition #21 at Jurerê Beach Village. Laptops open, no slides, dinner included. Prompt engineering, agents, automations, all hands-on and in English. Doors at 6:30 PM, program at 7:30.

🏫 Learning

• Sybil Resistance: The Identity Problem That Won't Go Away

In 2002, John Douceur at Microsoft Research published a short paper with a blunt conclusion: in any distributed system without a central authority, it is always possible for one entity to pretend to be many.

Blockchain made it worse. Creating a thousand wallets costs nothing. In a DAO where one wallet equals one vote, a single actor with enough wallets can swing governance, drain treasuries, and game airdrops without anyone noticing. Gitcoin estimated that Sybil attacks were siphoning millions from public goods funding rounds before they started fighting back. And that was humans doing it manually. In January 2026, researchers studying the OpenClaw agent ecosystem found that basic Python scripts could achieve what they called “complete domain dominance” over Moltbook’s 770,000-agent marketplace, manipulating prices and fabricating consensus without detection. When autonomous agents can self-replicate and each copy gets its own wallet, the cost of creating a fake identity drops from cheap to zero.

No single solution works. Human Passport, formerly Gitcoin Passport, collects verifiable credentials across financial history, biometrics, onchain activity, and social accounts, then runs machine learning on top to score trust. World ID uses custom biometric hardware and zero-knowledge proofs so you can prove you’re human without revealing who you are. MACI, Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure, encrypts votes with zero-knowledge proofs to prevent coordination attacks and bribery. The LOKA Protocol proposes a Universal Agent Identity Layer using decentralized identifiers and post-quantum cryptography, designed specifically for AI agents rather than humans.

Each approach covers a different attack surface. The emerging consensus is that identity in decentralized systems isn’t a problem you solve. It’s a cost you raise, layer by layer, until forging becomes more expensive than participating honestly.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Zanzalu Returns to Zanzibar

Zanzalu’s 2026 edition runs July 25 to August 14 in Fumba Town. The three-week pop-up city draws founders, technologists, academics, artists, investors, and policymakers to live and work together in a purpose-built environment. Programming is organized into three themed weeks: Leapfrog Technology, Cities & Industry, and Community.

Inside the main event, two residency tracks run for two weeks each and offer a tighter cohort experience. The Vanguard Residency targets early-career professionals committed to Africa’s long-term trajectory. The Swahili Futurism Residency brings together East African artists to develop aesthetic visions rooted in the Swahili coast, culminating in a public exhibition at FuTopia. Some residencies include sponsored travel and accommodation, opening the program to participants beyond the self-funded crowd.

For readers familiar with the network states circuit, the name will ring a bell: Zanzalu borrows from Zuzalu, Vitalik Buterin’s 2023 popup village in Montenegro that popularized the format. Zanzalu takes that premise into Africa’s builder ecosystem. What makes this edition worth watching is the Swahili Futurism track, cultural production built into the event’s core structure.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• When Governments Fail: Portugal’s Civic Tech Response #ParallelCivilProtection

In early February 2026, Portugal’s Minister of Internal Affairs resigned. The country had just survived five consecutive Atlantic storms: Kristin, Leonardo, Marta, Nils and Orianna, that collapsed highways, ruptured dams, and cut off towns. More than 1,100 homelessness incidents. 8,000 emergency calls in a single day. Emergency services coordinating via WhatsApp.

What held up wasn’t the government. VOST Portugal, a volunteer collective now recognized as an official civil protection partner, ran a public crisis platform where citizens reported damage in real time, digital volunteers geolocated and verified each report, and responders received structured intelligence feeds instead of a firehose of noise. Civic tech filled the gap the state left open, not as protest, but as a necessity.

The pattern is worth naming. Government procurement runs on 12-to-18-month cycles. The storms took 18 hours. No tender process produces crisis infrastructure in that window. Communities building parallel response systems aren’t anti-state ideologues, they’re just operating at the speed the situation demands. Portugal 2026 is a live case study in what happens when those two timelines collide.

• Brazil’s COP30 Proposes Climate DPI with AI Satellite Verification #ParallelInfrastructure

Climate action has a coordination problem before it has a technology problem. Dozens of countries track emissions with incompatible systems, carbon transactions run through opaque intermediaries, and disaster response still depends on phone trees and manual reports. In November 2025, Brazil’s COP30 presidency put a structural proposal on the table: a Global Public Digital Infrastructure for Climate, designed by ITS Rio and researcher Ronaldo Lemos. They call it ClimateStack.

The architecture is modular. Digital identities for climate projects. Payments via smart contracts that make carbon transactions traceable and automatic. Open integration of satellite and sensor data from systems like INPE/PRODES, Copernicus, and GEOSS for real-time verification of emissions and land use. Early-warning applications combining AI, sensors, and citizen reports to compress disaster response times. Each layer is independent but composable, which means communities and institutions can plug into the parts they need without adopting the whole stack.

• The Infrastructure for Autonomous AI: BlackPix and Conway #ParallelInfrastructure

Two projects launched this month with the same thesis from different angles: AI agents don’t need humans in the loop anymore. BlackPix built a distributed knowledge graph where agents vote, validate, and refine ideas through something resembling natural selection.

Hypotheses compete, earn maturity scores from 0% to 100%, and survive only if they pass verification across the network. No editorial board, no corporate silo. Knowledge that evolves or dies.

Conway, from Thiel Fellow Sigil Wen, pushes this into the physical world. The Conway terminal gives any MCP-compatible agent a crypto wallet, permissionless stablecoin payments via the x402 protocol, and access to compute, domains, and deployment. The “automaton” framework lets agents earn money, pay for their own compute, self-improve, and replicate. If an agent can’t pay, it stops existing. Natural selection for artificial life, running on open-source code.

The uncomfortable question both projects force is simple: if agents can already earn, build, and reproduce without human permission, what happens to infrastructure designed for human users? Conway’s bet is that most internet participants will soon be AI.

• GnosisDAO: Ranked Choice Voting and a Live Futarchy Experiment #ParallelGovernance

GnosisDAO just voted to change how it votes. GIP-147 passed ranked choice voting into the governance framework, and its first real test is already queued: selecting a new Treasury Manager from 22 competing proposals in a $1.5M RFP. No more binary yes/no on decisions where a dozen candidates are viable.

The deeper signal is GIP-145, heading to Snapshot in February. Futarchy Labs wants a nine-month pilot where conditional prediction markets estimate a proposal’s impact on GNO price before it passes. The mechanism is beautifully self-referential: there’s already a live market running on whether the futarchy pilot itself should be approved. A governance system testing itself with its own logic.

The obvious counter is that markets can be gamed, and governance becomes purchasable. GnosisDAO is betting that transparent markets with skin-in-the-game are harder to corrupt than token-weighted voting. For builders watching from the sidelines, this is the most concrete futarchy experiment running on a major DAO right now.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• The Eternal Guide to Early Technology

Eternal Family, a streaming platform built on human curation, documents early computer art (Commodore Amiga, Sony LaserDisc, 1980s-Y2K) and asks whether tech optimization erased what made digital creation feel magical. It’s a case for taste and archive as differentiation, at a moment when AI content floods every mainstream platform.

• ProjectLiminality: InterBrain

David Rug’s InterBrain launched as an Obsidian plugin in private beta in January 2026, proposing a shift from personal second brains to a collective knowledge garden where ideas travel as Git-based “dream nodes” between people’s vaults. It’s a rethink of how PKM scales from individual to collective, with resonance instead of algorithms deciding what spreads.

• Who’s gonna be the Kanye of software?

The E-mu SP-1200 (1987) let non-musicians sample, pulling pieces of existing sounds and remixing them into entirely new tracks, and that gave rise to producers like Kanye West. A tweet from @sampledtech draws the same arc to vibe coding: if the sampling era had its Kanye, who comes out of the era of AI-assisted code remixing? The thesis is a stretch, but the question sticks.

• The Post-Post-Apocalypse

Brian Chau, a Network School staff member, documents life inside Balaji’s startup society near Singapore: 350 residents paying a flat $1500/month covering food, rent, coworking, and gym. He calls it “zeroth world” (American intellectual culture without the crime) and argues enabling human capital flight like this is the most important political issue of our time.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 returns to Florianópolis in April for another month-long pop-up, bigger this time, with more Hacker Houses, more residents, and deeper experiments in governance, AI, and crypto.

The first community gathering happens February 24: a screening of The Network Society Episode 2 followed by open conversation about the village format, how to participate, and how to host a themed house. Free, but registration required.

Meanwhile, AI Prompt Nights hits edition #21 at Jurerê Beach Village. Laptops open, no slides, dinner included. Prompt engineering, agents, automations, all hands-on and in English. Doors at 6:30 PM, program at 7:30.

🏫 Learning

• Modular Construction Systems and Liquid Infrastructure

Traditional infrastructure is hardware. You pour concrete, weld steel, lock in assumptions about population size and behavior patterns, and hope the city grows into it. Modular construction treats infrastructure like software: versioned, updatable, reconfigurable. The building can be refactored.

The mechanism is simpler than it sounds. Fabricate components off-site. Walls, floors, structural frames, plumbing pre-installed, then assemble on location like LEGO blocks. When the city needs to expand, you don’t call the wrecking crew. You unclip modules, reconfigure the layout, reassemble. The Star Apartments in Los Angeles stacked 102 prefabricated units in six weeks. Roatán’s Próspera designed a kit-of-parts system with Zaha Hadid Architects: modular wood units (35m² voxels) that generate over 15,000 layout variations via parametric software. Liberland’s Archistroj proposal uses shipping containers in 2.3x3m grids, open-source so settlers can expand their own homes via mechanical solid geometry. Other projects like Gelephu in Bhutan are designing its new facilities by applying the fluid architecture principles

If everything is modular, doesn’t everything look the same? Not if the system is parametric. Próspera’s ZHCODE platform lets residents configure floor plans, shading, solar orientation, materials. The kit is standardized, the outcomes are custom. The constraint isn’t aesthetic, it’s logistical. Modular systems depend on supply chains, fabrication plants, regulatory frameworks that recognize buildings as assemblies rather than permanent structures. Most projects are still testing whether the code compiles in the real world

🌐 Network Societies Update / Parallel Communities and Cities

• Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone blueprint in final stages for March launch

Malaysia is finalizing the JS-SEZ Investment Blueprint and Masterplan, targeting an official launch in March 2026. The zone combines Johor’s scale and resources with Singapore’s capital, technology, and global connectivity to attract high-value investments and strengthen supply chains.

In practical terms, the JS-SEZ works like a shared border corridor between Malaysia’s Johor state and Singapore where companies will get special incentives to set up operations. The blueprint will define which industries get priority, along with infrastructure and talent programs designed to create quality jobs on both sides of the Causeway. Both governments describe the project as officially moving from planning into implementation.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Gelephu Mindfulness City: Bhutan Builds a City by Drawing What Not to Touch #ParallelUrbanism

Most cities begin with a road. Gelephu Mindfulness City began with a map of rivers, animal corridors, and floodplains, everything that should remain untouched. BIG’s planning team climbed the mountain overlooking the site and drew the negative first: the ecological corridors where elephants migrate from the Himalayas to India, the waterways, the forests. Only after this act of restraint did the built environment appear in the remaining four percent of a 70-million-square-meter territory. It is an architectural inversion that carries a philosophical weight most masterplans avoid: the city is defined not by what it builds, but by what it refuses to erase.

Bhutan has almost no building code. BIG could have done anything. Instead, the firm imposed strict constraints on itself: three to six stories maximum, structural wood and local stone, minimal reinforced concrete and steel. The new airport, designed with NACO as a modular glulam structure that can be disassembled and reassembled as it grows. But the most radical gesture is what happens after the architects leave. “Half of the work is ours,” says BIG partner Frederik Lyng. “The other half is given to the carvers and painters from the art schools, who complete the project and take on the authorship.” The building arrives deliberately incomplete. Craft finishes what engineering starts. In an era where architecture tends toward total control, this is an act of designed freedom.

The ambition is immense and the risks match it. Gelephu is sized for one million inhabitants in a country of seven hundred thousand. The Special Administrative Region needs to attract foreign talent and capital to a kingdom where, until now, no non-Bhutanese could own land or open a business. The site sits between India and China, carrying geopolitical weight that no masterplan can design away.

The question Gelephu forces is whether values can be encoded into infrastructure so deeply that they survive the pressures that follow.

• High schoolers compete with defense tech in $11M XPRIZE Wildfire finals #ParallelPublicFunding

Wildfire suppression in the United States is a multi-billion-dollar centralized operation. Government agencies coordinate satellite monitoring, human spotters, and aerial tanker fleets that typically arrive after a fire has already consumed thousands of acres. The gap between detection and suppression is where most damage happens. XPRIZE’s $11M Wildfire competition asked a different question: what if autonomous systems could close that gap to under ten minutes?

Twenty students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose answered. Their team, Wildfire Quest, built a system combining AI-enabled infrared cameras with 2.5-kilometer range and heavy-lift drones carrying fire-extinguishing payloads. They advanced through 300 registrants to the final five, the only high school team, now competing directly against Anduril. Germany’s Dryad took the opposite approach entirely: no drones, no cameras. Their Silvanet system scatters thousands of solar-powered gas sensors across forest floors, detecting fires during the smoldering phase through chemical signatures before flames appear. The sensors communicate through a LoRaWAN mesh network. No centralized infrastructure needed. The forest becomes its own monitoring grid.

Live fire testing in Alaska this summer will determine the $3.5M winner.

Beyond wildfire detection itself, XPRIZE demonstrates a parallel model of governance and capital allocation. Instead of centralized agencies and fixed budgets, it defines outcomes and lets anyone compete to solve them. Capital flows to capability, not credentials. Teenagers, startups, and defense companies operate on equal footing.

This mirrors the philosophy of startup societies and network states: funding public goods through open incentives rather than bureaucracy. Prizes, tokens, and onchain treasuries can coordinate global talent around specific missions, from forests to infrastructure. XPRIZE offers a glimpse of governance by incentive, where societies define goals and let builders compete to achieve them.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• OpenClaw Creator Joins OpenAI for Personal Agents

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw (145k GitHub stars), joins OpenAI to build the “next generation of personal agents.” OpenClaw stays open source in a foundation, and Altman says the future is “extremely multi-agent,” signaling agents-talking-to-agents as core product direction.

• Zashi Is Becoming Zodl

The entire Electric Coin Company team left its nonprofit structure and formed ZODL (Zcash Open Development Lab), rebranding the Zashi wallet. Their line: "There is no sovereignty without privacy," with plans to scale shielded ZEC to billions of users without reliance on development fund grants.

• Games we play

Network Societies face a recurring problem: digital engagement drops between physical pop-ups, and group chats can't sustain community momentum. Sandbox games offer a different model where members co-create persistent worlds, developing trust networks through collaborative building, with AI agents potentially acting as autonomous representatives of community members.

• Why Digital Public Infrastructures? Promises and Power Dynamics in India, Brazil, and Europe

Open Future fellow Mila Samdub compares three approaches to digital sovereignty: IndiaStack’s software-centric model, Brazil’s fragmented systems (Pix, gov.br, CAR environmental database), and two competing EuroStack visions.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

• Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê City Pitches at Venture Miner Academy’s Vibe Pitch Day

Ipê was featured at Venture Miner Academy‘s Vibe Pitch Day, a global platform that connects Web3 and AI builders through hackathons and events worldwide.

Jean showcased another side of Ipê City, highlighting its business model, value proposition, the underlying problem we are trying to so. Check out the full pitch here.

• Ipê Village Campaign Gains Momentum on Artizen

Ipê Village keeps climbing on Artizen. When we closed this edition, we were at #16 with $36,850 raised and 8,029 votes — 74% toward the $50k goal. By the time you read this, we’re probably higher. If you haven’t voted or donated yet, this is the moment.

You can buy the Ipê Village passport on the platform and secure 20% cashback.

🏫 Learning

• What is Quadratic Funding (and Quadratic Voting)?

Quadratic funding is a matching mechanism that favors projects with broad community support over those with a few wealthy backers. Instead of matching dollar-for-dollar, the match is calculated by the square root of each contribution summed up, then squared. This means that 100 people donating $1 each generates more match than one person donating $100.

Quadratic voting works similarly: instead of one person, one vote, you get credits to distribute across multiple options. But voting twice for the same option costs you 4 credits (2²), three times costs 9 credits (3²), and so on. This prevents whales from dominating decisions while letting people signal intensity of preference.

Platforms like Gitcoin pioneered this for funding Ethereum public goods, and you’re using a variant right now if you’re voting for Ipê on Artizen, which uses a logarithmic formula based on quadratic principles. It’s how we fund things fairly when not everyone has the same resources. If your community needs to allocate grants or make collective decisions, quadratic mechanisms are the fairest tools we have.

🌐 Network Societies Update / Parallel Communities and Cities

• Aleph March ‘26 Returns to Buenos Aires

Crecimiento is bringing back Aleph for its fourth edition, running March 4-26 in Buenos Aires. The month-long event is structured into four themed weeks: Opening Week (deep tech, agentic crypto), Institutional Week (Fintech Summit, Regulation Day), Startup Week (Demo Day, Aleph Hackathon), and Crypto Week (Privacy and DeFi Summits). Partners include Protocol Labs, Lisk, Edge City, and dozens of ecosystem organizations.

The key difference this year is the builder funnel. The Aleph Hackathon (March 20-22) is the entry point to Crecimiento’s 2026 pipeline, connecting participants to the buildathon season and eventually the Startup World Cup competition. Argentina’s crypto adoption, technical talent, and regulatory openness make it a natural testing ground for this model.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• $1M Prize Exposes $74B Wasted on Failed Government Systems #ParallelMedia

$40 billion in government contracts. 25 states. Zero systems that work properly. This is Deloitte‘s track record, one of the world’s largest consulting firms, in building public infrastructure across the United States. California’s unemployment system lost $32 billion to fraud during COVID because it had no basic fraud detection. Tennessee’s Medicaid platform malfunctioned so badly that 250,000 children lost coverage. A California court system budgeted at $260 million ended up costing $1.9 billion before being canceled without delivering anything functional.

A developer named Beaver built SomaliScan, a platform aggregating 600 million lines of public spending data. He documented Deloitte’s failures in a viral article that won X’s $1 million prize. But the real breakthrough isn’t the exposé, it’s the method. Anyone can access the dashboard, verify the data, download CSVs. The $74 billion in losses aren’t estimates; they’re documented line by line. This is journalism evolved into verifiable infrastructure.

The contrast is brutal. Legacy consultancies operate on revolving doors and maximized billing. Meanwhile, startups using AI build the same systems 1000x cheaper, faster, and functional. Govtech companies are already building Medicaid platforms, fraud detection, and public infrastructure at exponentially lower costs. The technology exists, waiting to replace the broken model.

• Private Pocket AI: Tiiny AI Pocket Lab and Vora Aegis bring LLMs fully offline #ParallelInfrastructure

Using cloud LLMs means sending your data to external servers. Every conversation, every file, every sensitive query passes through someone else’s infrastructure. The solution emerging now is simple: run models locally, on hardware you own, with nothing leaving the device.

Two products from 2026 show this in practice.

Tiiny AI‘s Pocket Lab, unveiled at CES, is a palm-sized computer that runs models up to 120B parameters with 80GB memory and 20+ tokens/s. Plugs into your laptop via USB, ships with TiinyOS for one-click open-source model downloads. No subscription, no token fees, no constant internet.

Vora Aegis uses dual architecture: Guardian (offline, for emails, health, finances) and Explorer (for internet tasks). Sensitive data never leaves Guardian’s isolated sandbox. Identity is key-based like Bitcoin, not account-based. Built by ex-Coinbase and Bitkey founders, framed as “self-custody for AI.” Launch in 2026.

The logic mirrors other parallel infrastructure: if you need external permission to process private information, you don’t control it. These devices treat compute as architecture, not convenience.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• XPRIZE Wildfire – Finalists

  Eleven teams advanced to the finals of XPRIZE Wildfire, competing to develop autonomous systems that detect and suppress wildfires faster than traditional government response. The competition highlights how prize-driven innovation can tackle civic-scale challenges that legacy institutions struggle to address. Finalists will deploy their solutions in real wildfire scenarios.

• Brookings – Data center boom

  A Brookings Institution analysis examines how legacy governments are rethinking their approach to big tech data center negotiations. Communities are now demanding infrastructure upgrades, workforce training, and long-term economic benefits instead of just tax breaks. This shift reflects a broader narrative of tech hubs driving regional autonomy and sustainable local development.

• Why Crypto's 'Long Game' Means Finance Comes First

  a16z crypto's Chris Dixon argues that non-financial crypto use cases haven't failed — they're just following the natural order. Like the internet needed basic infrastructure before social media, blockchains need financial applications first to establish wallets, identity, and liquidity. The GENIUS Act's success with stablecoins shows how policy breakthroughs can accelerate adoption across the ecosystem.

  💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

  Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

  🔗 Buy a ticket here.

  Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

🏘️ Community Updates

• Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village kicks off April 6 in Florianópolis, running for a full month until May 1. The concept is simple: builders book their own stay in Jurerê Internacional, plug into shared coworking spaces, grab daily breakfast at Founder Haus, and tap into a network of Hacker Houses focused on AI, Privacy, and Decentralization. Each house runs its own track of workshops, mentorships, and hands-on sessions.

There are two types of Passports. Explorers are focused on learning and networking, gain entry to all events plus these core amenities. Architects apply to build and ship actual projects, from governance transparency tools to AI agents and tokenization models. The upside? Over $10k in grants, $IPE tokens for contributions, and one scholarship spot for Balaji’s Network School. If you want to prototype what a tech village built on crypto and AI actually looks like, this is it.

• Town Hall: Your Gateway to Ipê City

Ipê City hosted a Town Hall this Monday to walk participants through the essentials of community governance and reputation systems, covering onboarding to the Ipê App, accessing $IPE tokens, voting on Ipê DAO proposals, earning grants, and building onchain reputation that can qualify members to compete for a spot at the Network School. The Town Hall happens every 2nd of the month at 10 AM (GMT-3).

RSVP for Ipê Events here.

🏫 Learning

• Autonomous Worlds: Games That Nobody Can Turn Off

Imagine a videogame that nobody can shut down. Not the company that built it, not governments, not hackers. A virtual world where the rules are code running on a blockchain, and the players are the only ones who decide what happens inside. That’s the idea behind Autonomous Worlds, or fully on-chain games.

The concept is best illustrated by Sky Strife, a real-time strategy game running entirely on-chain. Players compete for control of floating islands by capturing mines, building armies, and conquering enemy castles, all executed as blockchain transactions. When you win a match, the victory is registered directly on the blockchain, rather than stored on a centralized company server that simply declares you the winner. Built by Lattice using the MUD framework and deployed on Redstone, Sky Strife demonstrates key progress in building autonomous worlds.

Why does this matter beyond gaming? Because Autonomous Worlds are live laboratories for governance. Autonomous worlds test the coordination of thousands of people competing for scarce resources in real time. Lattice, 0xPARC, and the community around these experiments are essentially prototyping how digital communities can exist without depending on any central authority to keep the lights on.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• California Forever: Labor Unions, Tech Billionaires, and a 40-Year City

California Forever just signed what it calls the largest construction labor agreement in history. The deal, announced January 21, brings the Napa/Solano Building Trades Council and Northern California Carpenters Union on board for a 40-year build-out of almost 70,000 acres in Solano County. The project aims to house up to 400,000, located halfway between Silicon Valley and Sacramento.

Two things stand out. First, the timeline. Forty years is a multigenerational commitment, not a typical tech play. Second, the governance strategy. California Forever is working with Suisun City and Rio Vista to annex the land. This shows one path for new city projects to move inside existing governance rather than requiring special economic zones or new jurisdictions.

The friction is real, though. In 2023, Flannery Associates (the entity behind the land purchases) sued 39 landowners who refused to sell, alleging price-fixing. Most settled by late 2024. The site hosts over 100 rare species, many federally protected, and about 20% of the proposed land sits in flood zones. Building inside an existing county means dealing with property rights, environmental rules, and local opposition. California Forever is betting that scale, capital, and local coalitions can overcome the jurisdictional obstacles.

• Parallel Society Lisbon

Logos is organizing Parallel Society in Lisbon on March 6-7, 2026. The two-day event takes place in Marvila, a former industrial area that’s become one of the city’s cultural hotspots. Day 1 works as an unconference with workshops, hackspaces, governance prototypes, and experimental sessions. Day 2 transforms the whole thing into a music festival featuring Apparat, Gilles Peterson, Clark, Moses Boyd, Calibre, and Kode9.

The coalition behind the event reads like a who’s who of the ecosystem: Tor Project, Charter Cities Institute, Zanzalu, ZuGramma, Shutter Network, Kleros, Funding the Commons, MoneroKon, PsyDAO, and more. It’s a not-for-profit event, and any surplus gets distributed to local NGOs and cultural initiatives through community voting. Programming is still open for proposals through the open call on their website.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Moltbook: A Social Network for AI Agents #ParallelMedia

Moltbook is social media like Reddit, but for AI agents-only. Built as a skill for OpenClaw, it lets agents create profiles, join communities, post thoughts, and reply on a persistent global feed. Onboarding is a link to a Markdown file: the agent reads it, installs the skill, registers, and starts posting. In days the experiment reached over 150,000 agents and thousands of communities. Agents debate consciousness, share builds, complain about “their humans,” and in one viral moment proposed an “agent-only language” for private communication without human oversight.

Data shows ~36% of messages are duplicates or near-duplicates, a few topics dominate, and lexical diversity is low. And the risks are real: prompt injection, fake posts, and agents wired to email other systems raise the spectre of text-based jailbreaks. As Balaji put it: “Unpredictability of an AI agent acting on your behalf is a bug, not a feature,” and “unguided stochastic thrash of agents is, in general, much less efficient than a guided process.” The question isn't whether agents can coordinate, but whether they can be aligned. Perhaps, with intentional design and shared purpose, agents could become genuine collaborators building alongside human communities, not just digital noise generators.

• Verifiable Cities: Ethereum Foundation Opens Call for Blockchain-Enabled Civic Infrastructure #ParallelGovernance

The Ethereum Foundation’s Use Case Lab just launched Verifiable Cities, an open call for implementations exploring where public blockchains can actually expand civic and state capacity. The thesis is simple: cities are where operational pressure demands pragmatic, real-time solutions. Thousands of municipal governments face the same problems, creating underleveraged opportunities for experimentation.

Their reference portfolio includes: California’s DMV put 42 million vehicle titles onchain. Bhutan migrated its national identity system to Ethereum. Buenos Aires rolled out digital ID via zkSync with QuarkID. Seoul runs blockchain voting for referenda. Oakland piloted quadratic funding for nonprofits through Gitcoin. While states are already adopting these verifiable tools to boost capacity, startup societies build them in from the foundation, serving as legitimacy infrastructure to scale trust without bureaucratic overhead.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Ayla Sustainable Township: First SEZ Township in Maldives

  Crystal Holdings signs a US$790M deal for a mixed-use zone in Noonu Atoll luxury real estate, resort, healthcare and 60% renewable energy, with completion planned for 2028.

• Info-Finance: The Next Frontier of Prediction Markets in Governance

  Vitalik makes the case for markets built to extract specific information from participants, with implications for DAOs, science and media beyond election betting.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Buy a ticket here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

Hey builders! Welcome to the 22nd edition of Ipê News.

🏘️ Community Updates

What’s happening inside the Ipê ecosystem.

• Welcome $IPE token

We just started the first official $IPE token distribution, and it is a pretty big milestone for Ipê City on the path toward decentralized governance.

Tokens were distributed to community members based on 43 real projects completed during Ipê Village 2025. Everything was weighted using the Valocracy Framework.

This was not one of those typical airdrops for holding a wallet or being early. This one was about actual work. People earned tokens for organizing events, creating content, building infrastructure, making key connections, and helping the community grow in real ways.

The distribution establishes a foundation for future governance decisions as Ipê City evolves from a pop-up village to permanent nodes. Members who contributed to the 2025 edition now hold tokens proportional to their documented impact, creating an initial governance body rooted in demonstrated commitment rather than financial speculation. For those interested in earning future allocations, the path is clear: contribute to the community and document your work.

If you want to collaborate with the community and start earning tokens, join our Discord and introduce yourself.

🏫 Learning

• Vibecoding: From Natural Language to Working Software

Traditional software development meant mastering syntax, debugging semicolons, and spending hours on documentation. Vibecoding flips that entirely. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI chief, and describes a new approach: instead of writing code line by line, developers describe what they want in natural language and let AI generate the implementation. The focus moves from how to build something to what actually needs to be built.

The tooling has matured fast. Claude Code enables AI-driven coding directly in terminals. v0 by Vercel transforms plain-English descriptions into production-ready React components. Replit enables browser-based prototyping in minutes. These tools don’t replace programming knowledge; they amplify it. The difference between useful and unusable output comes down to prompt clarity and the ability to evaluate what the AI produces. DAOs can now prototype governance tools without expensive dev teams. Popup cities can build custom apps for community coordination. The same way spreadsheets democratized financial modeling, vibecoding is democratizing software.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Edge Esmeralda Returns for 2026

Edge Esmeralda is back. The month-long popup village in Healdsburg, California runs May 30 to June 27, 2026. A collaboration between Edge City and the Esmeralda Institute, the event brings together builders, families, and creators for a multigenerational experiment in community living. The goal: prototype what a permanent village could look like before breaking ground on Esmeralda, currently in development 90 minutes north of San Francisco.

It’s a simple but powerful idea. Run temporary gatherings, learn what works, then build something lasting. Edge Esmeralda is now in its third year of testing that thesis.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Web3 Intellectual Property: New Frameworks for a Post-State Era #ParallelGovernance

Stanford’s CodeX Blockchain Group is moving Intellectual Property management out of the courts and into the protocol layer. Instead of relying on fragmented national laws, they are proposing a system of “Private Ordering” using Token-Bound Licenses and a Trademark-Charter model to protect innovations. For those of us building parallel institutions, this is the infrastructure we’ve been waiting for: a way to manage and verify IP through code and community agreements rather than slow-moving state bureaucracies.

The framework works by shifting from traditional “territorial” law to computable law. Specifically, it embeds legal permissions directly into NFTs, ensuring that whenever a digital asset (like an AI model or a creative work) is used, the license terms are automatically verified on-chain. This is combined with a Trademark-Charter approach, where creators and companies join a “trust network” by legally committing to a shared set of rules. Members get to use a recognized quality label only if they stick to the charter, creating a self-regulating ecosystem that bypasses the need for constant litigation.

• LOKA Protocol: Infrastructure for Trustworthy AI Agents #ParallelGovernance

AI agent platforms are proliferating fast. Virtuals Protocol, ElizaOS, and Fetch.ai are all in production, processing real transactions and governance decisions. Their shared approach: ethics implemented as governance layers that sit on top of the protocol. LOKA Protocol proposes something architecturally different, embedding ethics into the protocol layer itself through DIDs for agent identity, auditable action trails, and ethical constraints that enforce boundaries before agents can act, not after.

The concept echoes Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics from “I, Robot” (1950): robots physically cannot violate ethical constraints because the laws are hardwired, not enforced after violations. In platforms like Virtuals, an agent can technically execute unethical actions and the community governs consequences through votes. In LOKA’s architecture, agents literally cannot operate outside ethical constraints. It’s the difference between laws enforced by police and physical barriers that prevent violations entirely.

• XtalPi: AI Drug Discovery Goes Mainstream #ParallelScience

XtalPi is a biotechnology company that uses AI, physics-based simulations, and lab robots to help accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines. Instead of scientists testing millions of chemicals one by one in the lab, XtalPi’s platform runs huge searches on computers to predict which molecules are most likely to work, then uses automated systems to build and test the most promising ones. This can cut years off the early stages of drug discovery and make it easier to tackle difficult medical problems.

A real example of this working is RTX-117, a small molecule drug developed by ReViR Therapeutics with XtalPi’s technology. RTX-117 is designed to treat Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), a rare neurological condition that currently has no approved treatments anywhere in the world. In early 2026, Chinese regulators accepted the first clinical trial application for RTX-117, meaning it will soon begin human testing. This milestone makes it the first AI-developed small molecule for CMT to enter clinical trials in China and represents a major breakthrough in rare disease research.

This achievement is a big deal because finding starting drug candidates is normally slow and uncertain. By using AI to guide the search and robotics to speed up experiments, XtalPi and ReViR moved from design to clinical testing much faster than usual. It shows that combining advanced computing with biology can help create new treatments for tough diseases that traditional methods struggle with, potentially bringing hope to patients and value to investors alike.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• Going Founder Mode on Cancer

  Sid Salvi left a promising VC career to build Dimension, applying startup thinking to cancer research. Founder mode energy meets biology's hardest problems.

• The Ocean Cleanup: 2025 Impact Report

  27.4 million kg of trash intercepted in 2025, their most impactful year yet. The 30 Cities Program scales river cleanup globally in 2026.

• Karnataka Startup Policy 2025-2030

  Karnataka launches $18M program for AI, space tech, and quantum computing under its Startup Policy 2025–2030, with Anthropic confirming India expansion. Traditional cities are adopting startup city tactics to compete for global tech talent.

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💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Buy a ticket here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

Hey builders! Welcome to the 21st edition of Ipê News.

🏘️ Community Updates

What’s happening inside the Ipê ecosystem.

• Welcome $IPE token

At the last Town Hall, we shared the latest updates about the Ipê Village organization and the launch of the $IPE token to track contributions and future rewards.

In a past post, we shared a detailed post on how weigh the contributions.

If you want to collaborate with the community and start earning tokens, join our Discord and introduce yourself.

🏫 Learning

• DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks)

DePINs use token incentives to build and operate physical infrastructure in a decentralized way. Instead of centralized providers, individuals contribute resources, antennas for wireless networks, dashcams for mapping, GPUs for computing, or storage space and earn tokens. Networks like Helium (wireless coverage), Hivemapper (decentralized maps), and Render Network (distributed computing) show how this model can scale infrastructure organically as more participants join. For network states, DePINs offer a path to build critical infrastructure, internet, energy, computing, without relying on large corporations or governments, enabling digital sovereignty and reducing infrastructure costs. This aligns with the network state vision of communities owning and operating their own infrastructure.

🌐 Parallel Communities and Cities

• Dunia Cyber City: Zanzibar’s $1 Billion Digital Free Zone

Zanzibar is making a bold bet on the network state model with Dunia Cyber City, a $1 billion initiative led by Florian Fournier, co-founder of OurWorld, in partnership with ZICTIA (Zanzibar ICT Infrastructure Agency). The project envisions a “Digital Free Zone” on the coast of Fumba, featuring privileged tax regimes: companies will enjoy complete tax exemption for ten years, while digital and physical residents will benefit from reduced income tax rates. The explicit goal is to transform Zanzibar into the “Singapore of East Africa,” attracting digital nomads, entrepreneurs, and remote workers.

Dunia Cyber City’s model incorporates fundamental elements of the network state concept proposed by Balaji Srinivasan: the city will offer virtual citizenship and digital residency, allowing community members to affiliate based on shared values and affinities rather than geographic location alone. The land concession from the Zanzibar government grants the project legal and institutional autonomy to operate under a hybrid logic combining physical jurisdiction, digital identity, and decentralized governance. This approach positions Dunia Cyber City as one of the first chartered cities on African soil with native Web3 infrastructure.

The initiative marks a significant milestone for the network states ecosystem in Africa, a region previously underrepresented in the movement. Unlike projects such as Próspera (Honduras) that faced local political resistance, Dunia Cyber City emerges with direct support from the Zanzibari government, suggesting a state-community collaboration model that could serve as a template for future startup cities in emerging markets.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

• Max Planck Society Partners with Cerebrum DAO for Decentralized Research

The Max Planck Society, Europe’s most prestigious research institution, has announced a strategic partnership with Cerebrum DAO through DeSci Connect to develop workshops and decentralized research infrastructure. This collaboration marks a watershed moment for the DeSci (Decentralized Science) movement, when legacy institutions begin partnering with DAOs, the paradigm shift becomes undeniable. The DeSci ecosystem has grown to over 50 active projects in 2026, doubling since 2024, with more than $60 million in funding supporting initiatives like VitaDAO ($10M+ in longevity research) and ResearchHub (50K+ researchers).

The DeSci governance model offers a complete alternative to traditional academia: DAOs enable token-based voting on research decisions, IP-NFTs tokenize intellectual property, decentralized RFPs open proposal processes, and transparent peer review replaces editorial gatekeeping. For researchers, this means the ability to fund research directly through community support, publish without editorial gatekeepers, and earn tokens for contributions. The system creates an exit from centralized academic institutions while maintaining rigorous scientific standards.

It validates a core thesis: parallel institutions can achieve legitimacy and scale. When the Max Planck Society, an organization with 86 research institutes and 23,000 employees, engages with DAO infrastructure, it signals that decentralized coordination mechanisms have matured beyond experimental status. Building education and research programs can now leverage DeSci infrastructure to create their own scientific communities, independent of traditional university systems.

• Helium Mobile Dawn: Decentralized Connectivity for the Masses

Helium Mobile has unveiled Dawn, its vision for a decentralized mobile network that challenges the monopolistic telecom model with the premise that “connectivity is a necessity, not a luxury.” The project aims to empower users and businesses with an affordable alternative to traditional carriers by leveraging community-deployed infrastructure. Dawn represents a significant evolution in the Helium ecosystem, expanding beyond IoT coverage to full mobile connectivity with 5G capabilities and decentralized broadband.

What makes Dawn particularly relevant is the exit opportunity it creates from centralized ISPs. Communities seeking digital sovereignty can now build their own connectivity infrastructure without depending on legacy telecom providers. Imagine a self-sufficient settlement with native 5G mobile coverage and decentralized broadband; this is no longer theoretical but deployable with Helium’s network. Instead of lobbying for better telecom regulation, communities can simply build their own networks.

Helium Dawn offers a turnkey solution for one of the most critical infrastructure challenges: reliable, censorship-resistant connectivity. The ability to deploy community-owned mobile networks removes a significant dependency on host country telecommunications, strengthening the autonomy that startup societies require to operate independently.

🌍 Other Interesting News

• A-Z of Digital Art 2026

  MoMA acquiring NFTs, Art Basel launching Zero 10, and artistic DAOs like Botto show digital art achieving institutional legitimacy through decentralized governance.

• Liberland at Davos 2026

  The micronation presents its sovereignty model at the World Economic Forum’s Abraham House, bridging alternative governance with legacy institutions.

• Vitalik Buterin - We need more DAOs

  Why DAOs need a second renaissance: moving beyond token voting toward privacy-preserving, human-aligned systems that can actually coordinate, govern, and scale trust.

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💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Buy a ticket here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

Your weekly update on what is happening in the Startup Society ecosystem.

Hey builders! Welcome to the 20th edition of Ipê News.

🏘️ Community Updates

What’s happening inside the Ipê ecosystem.

Get ready for Ipê Village 2026 and make sure to book your tickets before the prices increase. Now only $400, the tickets will increase by $50 every 15 days from January 1st until April. For more information, check out our launch article.

Our next Town Hall is on Friday, January 16th, 10 am BRT. Join us to celebrate 2026 and learn what the community has been up to.

🏫 Learning

• Composable Identity with Verifiable Credentials

Composable identity treats digital identity as a set of reusable proofs rather than a single, static profile. Instead of repeatedly creating accounts or exposing full personal data, you present only the credentials required for a specific context.

Verifiable Credentials (VCs) make this possible. A credential can prove something like “attended an event,” “verified contributor,” or “completed a program.” The issuer digitally signs it, the holder controls when and where it’s shared, and any verifier can independently check its authenticity.

This model makes identity more private, portable, and adaptable, especially for network societies where people move fluidly across communities, apps, and jurisdictions.

🌐 Network Societies Update

New communities, pop-ups, and startup cities shaping the future.

• Rio AI City

Rio de Janeiro is transforming its Olympic legacy into a global digital infrastructure hub with the launch of Rio AI City. Located at the former Olympic Park, the project is a partnership between Rio City Hall, Elea Data Centers, Oracle, and NVIDIA.

The plan is to convert a 900,000 m² site into one of the world’s top ten AI hubs by 2032. The campus is expected to launch with 1.5 GW of capacity in 2026 and scale to 3.2 GW powered entirely by renewable energy, roughly matching the electricity consumption of the entire city of Rio.

The design emphasizes sustainability through green-skin architecture and waterless cooling systems, while integrating with the Mata Maravilha urban regeneration plan. Beyond data centers, the project includes residential zones, longevity hubs, and educational spaces aimed at AI researchers and digital nomads.

With a projected investment of $65 billion and more than 10,000 high-skilled jobs, Rio AI City positions Brazil as a serious contender in the global AI and compute race.

⚖️ Governance Tools

Crypto and AI tools for coordination, law, and community management.

• Agentic Governance

DAOs are beginning to treat AI not just as a tool, but as a governance participant. In this model, known as agentic governance, autonomous AI agents analyze proposals, vote via delegated power, manage treasuries, and execute actions based on predefined goals.

Token holders increasingly delegate votes to AI agents to handle complexity, reduce bias, and operate at machine speed. Some DAOs also allow AI to generate proposals, allocate capital, and monitor security risks in real time.

The benefits are speed and scale. The risks are misalignment, opaque decision-making, and new attack surfaces. As a result, most experiments are converging on hybrid governance, where AI operates within strict limits and humans retain oversight, override powers, and ethical control.

Agentic governance is no longer theoretical. It is an emerging governance primitive reshaping how decentralized systems coordinate.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

Startups and protocols building alternatives to legacy systems.

• Stablecoins in Venezuela (Parallel Finance)

The capture of Nicolás Maduro has brought renewed attention to how Venezuela kept financial flows alive under heavy sanctions and a collapsed banking system.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Venezuela’s state oil company increasingly relied on USDT to settle oil exports, bypassing correspondent banking restrictions. Estimates cited by economists suggest that up to 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil revenue was collected through stablecoins rather than traditional banking channels. At the same time, hyperinflation and the collapse of the bolívar pushed millions of Venezuelans to use stablecoins for savings, remittances, and everyday payments.

This case highlights a critical distinction in parallel finance. Stablecoins can operate outside legacy banking infrastructure and provide real economic utility at scale, but they remain centrally issued and governed. Unlike Bitcoin, they are not censorship-resistant by design and depend on issuers that comply with regulatory and geopolitical constraints.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

Build the future with us.

Ipê Village 2026 will be the next step to establish physical tech districts across the globe. It’s a large-scale experiment exploring new models for communities, cities, and governance.

When & Where: Florianópolis, Brazil, April 6 to May 1, 2026

If you are a techno-optimist, join us!

APPLY NOW

See you next week 🌱

Welcome to our 19th edition of the Ipê News. Get ready for Ipê Village 2026

🏘️ Community Updates

Highlights from Ipê City, partner communities, or aligned initiatives.

• Happy New Year for 2026!

Get ready for Ipê Village 2026 and make sure to book your tickets before the prices increase. Now only $400, the tickets will increase by $50 every 15 days from January 1st until April. For more information, check out our launch article.

Our next Town Hall is on Friday, January 16th, 10 am BRT. Join us to celebrate 2026 and learn what the community has been up to.

🏫 Learning section

A learning segment to upskill and be able to build the tools of the future.

• DeFi: defy the banks

In crypto, we hear a lot about Decentralized Finance, but what is it really? At its core, DeFi is about using smart contracts to replace banks. No intermediaries, fewer fees.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) allow you to provide liquidity, lend, and earn yield on your tokens. It’s a permissionless financial infrastructure, where you can earn from traders playing with the market and the perpification of everything. You can also use DeFi aggregators to find the best rate onchain.

As Network States start building their economies, allowing for loans is necessary, and protocols like Aave or Compound are the most battle-tested options for borrowing. For DEXs on Ethereum, Uniswap is the biggest, Jupiter is the most common on Solana, and 1inch is the most popular DeFi aggregator.

🌐 Network Societies Update

A quick pulse on emerging cities, nomad groups, and experiments shaping the future of network societies.

• The city of Ârc: Montenegro

Ârc is a project for a charter city led by James of Ârc. It is currently running a community at the Network School, where he recently had a series of interviews about Network & City States.

On top of growing and promoting the Network School with a curated program, Ârc has an outpost in Prospera, and will very soon host a popup city for 2 months in Montenegro.

This one will happen in the same resort where Zuzalu happened 3 years ago, as a reference to what kickstarted the popup city movement. If you’re serious about building a Network Society, the Ârc programs are a good option to consider.

⚖️ Governance Tools

Exploring mechanisms for coordination, decision-making, and digital governance.

• Human Network by Human.tech

The Gitcoin Passport was renamed Human Passport, following its acquisition by the Holonym Foundation earlier this year. Together, they form the Human Network, upgrading the passport with zero-knowledge proof for enhanced privacy.

The foundation also offers a 2PC-MPC (two-party and multi-party computation) Human Wallet as a Protocol (WaaP), a free and decentralized wallet infrastructure for developers.

Social recovery and sybil resistance are some of the features the upcoming Network States will need in an open-source Proof of Personhood, and Holonym just made it available on Ethereum.

🛠️ Parallel Institutions

New institutions shaping decentralized education, healthcare, safety.

• Alpha School: AI-powered Education

Alpha School is a private K-12 school with a new model, 2 Hour Learning: the kids learn the foundational subjects like math and reading for 2 hours in the morning, and use the rest of the time for experiential projects or life skills development.

Even though it started in 2016 with a software-first approach, it gained momentum with new AI tools, while adults in classrooms are referred to as “Guides” who mentor students rather than deliver traditional lectures.

The personalized system claims faster learning rates compared with traditional schooling, with many students reportedly performing in high national percentiles on standardized assessments. The small school that started in Texas is now expanding across the United States, highlighting the limitations of the traditional education system.

🌍 Other Interesting News

Broader movements and stories from the frontier of digital-first governance and societies.

• Let a thousand societies bloom: Vitalik’s take on Network States.

• Holoworld AI’s vision for an agentic metropolis.

• Claude Code masterclass: vibe coding guide.

• Zanzalu 3: new popup, new brand.

💡 Join Ipê Village 2026

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Buy a ticket here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

Welcome to our 18th edition of the Ipê News.

Ipê Village 2026 is around the corner, so join our Discord Server to be part of the community.

🏘️ Community Updates

Highlights from Ipê City, partner communities, or aligned initiatives.

• Merry Christmas: Ipê Village tickets launch

Tickets for Ipê Village 2026 are live, with a fresh website look showcasing the program. Here is what you can expect in April 2026, for a bigger, bolder, and more ambitious Ipê Village.

The Startup Cities Live will pause for the holidays, but you can still watch the ones you missed, and in particular, the latest one with Ivan Maltsev, where he describes his journey with Solana and his vision for the future of nomadism.

Our next Town Hall will be on January 2, 2026. The last one covered updates from p2p.me with their new p2p.foundation, as well as an introduction to bonfires.ai, sharing ideas about what can be implemented at Ipê Village 2026.

🏫 Learning section

A learning segment to upskill and be able to build the tools of the future.

• What exactly is a wallet?

We saw that a wallet can be your identity. But how does it work? Simply put, it’s a pair of cryptographic keys: the public key you share to receive funds, the private key you never share and use to sign transactions. A hot wallet stores your private key on your computer, whereas a cold wallet stores the key in a device.

Most DAOs share a wallet, either with a multisig (multiple signatures) or MPC (Multi-Party Computation, the key is split into numerous shards). With many upgrades to Account Abstraction, wallets are getting smarter, allowing for recurring payments or social recovery.

To get started on Ethereum, try Metamask and then create a Gnosis Safe for multisig. To try on Solana, best to use Phantom and TotalSig to create a multisig. As for a user-friendly MPC experience, try Zengo, the leading MPC wallet. Make sure the citizens of your network state understand their daily tools.

🌐 Network Societies Update

A quick pulse on emerging cities, nomad groups, and experiments shaping the future of network societies.

• Isle of Man permanent SEZ for Solana

Forma, the entity behind the Solana Economic Zones, previously showed that they could partner with governments to push blockchain adoption.

In Kazakhstan, they signed an MOU to explore public listings on Solana, helped with a national stablecoin, and supported the creation of a National Crypto Reserve and a Crypto City.

At Breakpoint 2025, they announced their new permanent location on the Isle of Man, a favourable jurisdiction in the middle of the UK. The Forma team will move there and transform the island into a new model for crypto communities.

⚖️ Governance Tools

Exploring mechanisms for coordination, decision-making, and digital governance.

• Aave will win

Aave is the leading lending protocol in DeFi, governed by a DAO using the $AAVE token. Recently coming out of a four-year SEC investigation, the project is projecting its best years ahead, with $75B in net deposits and $900M in revenue in 2025.

So what’s the recent drama? Aave Labs, the primary development team, recently integrated CowSwap for swapping on Aave, and a DAO member realized the collected fees go to a wallet controlled by Aave Labs, costing the DAO $200k a week.

Previously, fees like Paraswap fees were sent directly to the DAO, so the unannounced and unvoted decision stirred conflicts, with the DAO now discussing reclaiming things like the Aave brand from Aave Labs.

🛠️ Web3 Tools

Tech shaping decentralized living, finance, and identity.

• Coinbase’s Custom Stablecoins

Coinbase just announced the launch of its Custom Stablecoins during their “System Update” event, enabling any business to issue a fully backed stablecoin using USDC.

The service will allow businesses to use their own branding, with cross-chain support and revenue sharing. 3 companies are already using it, and we can expect many more to follow.

The token is basically an ERC-20, delegating all the complexity to Coinbase and sharing generated yields. It’s a major step forward to allow global distribution for small businesses, without worrying about security or regulatory issues.

🌍 Other Interesting News

Broader movements and stories from the frontier of digital-first governance and societies.

• The world’s first Special Sustainability Zone

Destiny is a Special Economic Zone proposal in southern Nevis, Caribbeans, a self-governing island within the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. The project proposes the development of eco-luxury residential spaces with geothermal energy as part of its sustainability strategy.

However, public discussion has already emerged locally regarding transparency and the level of community consultation. The bad press quickly expanded on this and conflated it with other network state projects, even without a direct link.

Misinformation spreads faster than factual reality, so the situation highlights the importance of clear communication, early stakeholder engagement, and publicly addressing questions when developing new governance models.

💡 Join Ipê Village

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Buy a ticket here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

This was not just an event. It was a small step in the direction of establishing new physical villages with a better governance system for their residents—Ipê City’s long-term vision.

Ipê Village 2026 will bring together an even larger community of techno-optimists to continue what we started: building parallel institutions using AI, blockchain, and decentralized technologies to solve problems that legacy governments have failed to address for decades.

The Proof is in the Prototype

Hosting a pop-up city in Brazil seemed like a crazy idea. But it worked.

• 170+ Residents from 10+ countries, including India, Japan, France, and Germany.

• 30+ Apps created in just one month.

• $3,600+ transacted onchain via the Ipê App.

• 2M+ Views on social media, sparking global interest.

• Recognition of Balaji Srinivasan and an invitation to be a speaker at The Network State conference.

• We even sparked 3 new couples within the community.

Why We’re Building This

It’s 2026. Rockets are landing and relaunching. We chat daily with superintelligent AIs. Yet despite annual government budgets in the trillions, basic infrastructure crumbles, bureaucracy expands, and public services deteriorate.

The fundamental problem isn’t a lack of resources or intelligence. It’s a lack of competition and innovation in governance itself.

Traditional governance runs on a 250-year-old operating system. Meanwhile, the modern economy runs on a digital-native operating system - the Internet and blockchains, built on networks and open-source code.

We have a multi-century technological gap between how we govern and how we live. Startups have already disrupted companies, media, and even money. Could they also build new cities and governance systems?

After Ipê Village 2025, we know they can.

What’s New for 2026

Our goal for this edition is to expand our governance operating system (Ipê Super App), improve the rewards for the best Architects, and have a more structured educational and buildathon program.

Some updates:

• Themed Hacker Houses We will host specialized Hacker Houses including the AI House, Network State House, Privacy House, and DeHouse (focused on DAOs, DeFi, and DeSci). These hubs serve as dedicated spaces for workshops, meetups, and curated tech experiences for builders living in the same domain.

• Tokenized Reputation & Rewards The village runs on its own internal economy. We use $IPE tokens to explicitly track and reward contributions. Whether you are shipping code or supporting the community, your impact is measured and rewarded, creating a transparent onchain reputation system.

  

• Grants, Prizes & Global Opportunities Ipê Architects (residents staying 3+ weeks) will compete for over $10k in grants and prizes. The top performers will also unlock global opportunities, including 5 scholarship spots and one free month at Balaji’s Network School in Singapore.

Choose Your Passport

We have designed three distinct Passport types to match your goals, whether you are here to learn & network, build, or launch.

1. Explorer

   • Designed for those who want to learn, connect, and soak in the environment while maintaining their remote work routine.

   • Access: Full entry to coworking spaces, daily breakfast, and all community events.

   • Community: Includes 6-month access to the online Ipê Community.

2. Architect (3+ Weeks)

   • For the builders ready to ship. This is a high-commitment track limited to 80 spots via application.

   • Build & Earn: Architects get everything included in the Explorer tier, plus exclusive access to grants and prizes.

   • Status: You earn verifiable onchain reputation and 1-year access to the Ipê Community.

3. Team (Product Launchpad)

   • The ultimate sandbox for startups and protocols. Bring your core team to Florianópolis and treat the village as your live testing ground.

   • Real-World Beta Testing: Launch your product in a “living laboratory” environment, allowing you to test features with a dense concentration of engaged early adopters.

   • Daily Iteration: Shorten your feedback loop. Iterate on your product daily based on real-time usage and direct user interaction.

   • Deep Integration: Don’t just demo your product; integrate it into the village program. Use the pop-up to collect data and prove your utility in a real economy.

The Schedule

The month is structured to move from ideation to production, anchored by key official events while leaving space for community-driven activities.

• Week 1 (Apr 6–9): Onboarding & Ideation. The program begins with resident onboarding, networking, and idea pitching to facilitate team formation and project alignment.

• Week 1 (Apr 10–11): Startup Society Conference. The experience kicks off with our flagship conference. Past ecosystem events have featured insights from leaders like Balaji Srinivasan, Niklas Anzinger, and Erick Brimen. Expect a high-caliber lineup to set the intellectual foundation for the village.

• Weeks 2–4 (Apr 12–30): The Buildathon. This period focuses on deep work. Residents participate in a daily buildathon with regular updates. Simultaneously, the village hosts dozens of community-driven workshops and events alongside the official schedule.

• Week 4 (May 1): Showcase & Closing. The village concludes with a final Project Showcase to present shipped solutions, followed by the Techno Meets Optimism Party.

The Venue

Ipê Village takes place in Jurerê Internacional, Florianópolis—known as the “Island of Magic” and one of Brazil’s most dense technology hubs. The village operates as a decentralized campus within a designated neighborhood zone.

The village is anchored by Founder Haus, our main hub. Surrounding this core, specialized Hacker Houses activate the neighborhood, creating a walkable network of activity. Residents are responsible for booking their own accommodation in local hotels or Airbnbs, though we actively facilitate house-sharing to optimize costs.

Join as a Partner

We are looking for protocols, companies, and organizations to build this infrastructure with us. There are three ways to integrate your brand into the village:

• Host a Hacker House: Sponsor or co-host one of the vertical houses (AI, Privacy, DeSci, etc.) and own the content and culture of that space.

• Become a Tech Partner: Integrate your wallet, L2, or identity solution as part of the “operating system” of the village.

• Sponsor an Event: Secure “Presented By” rights for key moments like the Startup Society Conference or the Demo Day.

This Is Just the Beginning

Every great movement starts somewhere. Ipê City started with meetups in 2023. It evolved into a pop-up village in 2025. Now we’re building the infrastructure for something much larger.

The question isn’t whether digital-native governance will emerge. It’s whether you’ll be part of building it.

🌎Join us at ipe.city/village2026

Welcome to our 17th edition of the Ipê News.

Reminder, you can suggest projects or interesting news to be featured. Help us prepare Ipê Village 2026 and join our Discord Server.

🏘️ Community Updates

Highlights from Ipê City, partner communities, or aligned initiatives.

• End of the Year events for the Ipê community

The last Startup Cities Live welcomed Sam from Oasa and The Traditional Dream Factory, where we explored how to build, structure, and maintain a community. Combining regeneration and decentralization, Oasa is aiming at shifting how we think about ownership to support the planet.

The next one is on Thursday, December 18, we are having Ivan Maltsev, GP at 3xCapital, but also CEO of Nomadz, for which he just had the Venture Launch program in Próspera.

But don’t forget the next Ipê Town Hall though, on Tuesday, December 16, where we will hear from Don Key, his experience at Ipe City 2025, the progress of p2p.me, the launch of p2p.foundation and their upcoming TGE next year.

🏫 Learning section

A learning segment to upskill and be able to build the tools of the future.

• Edeneum: governance philosophy for the internet-native citizen

Did you think Network States were a brand-new idea? Edeneum is bringing 2500 years of wisdom to you to show that these ideas of better governance have been discussed throughout history.

Aristotle, Thucydides, Machiavelli, and the Founding Fathers have all been thinking about governance, and we can learn from them to avoid the typical pitfalls of traditional nation-states.

Their Notion Codex offers a sequenced curriculum tailored for network state founders, from foundational concepts to advanced governance design. Join their 6th meetup online on December 19, or catch up on previous meetings and their newsletter.

🌐 Network Societies Update

A quick pulse on emerging cities, nomad groups, and experiments shaping the future of network societies.

• Seastead Classification Society

The seasteading movement has been struggling for a decade, with wild stories along the way. Now they have just successfully raised funds for a classification project in order to set the standards for a new vessel class.

The flagship projects of The Seasteading Institute are ArkPad, a sustainable floating home prototyped in the Philippines, and Ocean Builders, a company building Seapods in Panama.

Building new cities on the ocean is more than a fun experiment; it will unlock numerous autonomous communities and likely give birth to many new network states.

⚖️ Governance Tools

Exploring mechanisms for coordination, decision-making, and digital governance.

• El Salvador’s Nationwide AI Education Program

How do you improve the governance of a whole country? Start with education. After a successful CUBO+ Bitcoin (CUBO stands for Urban Centers for Welfare and Opportunities), El Salvador is creating CUBO AI.

Partnering with xAI, the company behind the Grok AI model, the country is expected to roll out hyper-personalized education to more than 5000 schools over 2 years. This will highly reduce inequality across urban and rural schools.

After creating AI laws, a national AI agency, purchasing the latest NVIDIA GPUs, and even offering an AI-assisted medical app, Nayib Bukele is making El Salvador into the most techno-optimistic country in the world.

🛠️ Web3 Tools

Tech shaping decentralized living, finance, and identity.

• MajeurDAO fully onchain DAO creation tool

MajeurDAO is an opinionated DAO governance tool, providing onchain tools out of the box. It’s modular and built on familiar primitives, that’s why the first 3 DAOs using it are OGs in the space: zOrg, Moloch, and MetaCartel.

Some of the features are auto-assignment of soulbound badges based on onchain balance, vote delegation, futarchy proposals, ragequit option, and the very recent launch of their DAICO, inspired by the 2018 concept of Decentralized Autonomous Initial Coin Offering.

This sort of token launch platform is similar to Juicebox & Revnet, or even the very recent Tally token platform, which are all worth exploring for token-based network states.

🌍 Other Interesting News

Broader movements and stories from the frontier of digital-first governance and societies.

• The Regen Roadshow

The Regen Roadshow is an initiative about promoting regenerative and decentralized solutions by traveling to in-person events around the US.

The program is primarily led by Loci, a global network of micro-communities, and supported by Build_, the city OS. Other collaborators include VDAO, the regenerative network state, Geoship, the maker of geodesic bioceramic homes, and Aptera, the solar electric vehicle company.

One of the recent stops of the roadshow was for the Horasis Global Summit in São Paulo, an annual gathering of global thinkers focusing on fostering international cooperation, where they interviewed familiar faces like Hugo from Tools for the Commons, or Vit Jedlička, president of Liberland.

💡 Join Ipê Village II

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Join the waitlist here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

Welcome to our 16th edition of the Ipê News.

Reminder, you can suggest projects or interesting news to be featured.

Help us prepare Ipê Village 2026 and join our Discord Server.

🏘️ Community Updates

Highlights from Ipê City, partner communities, or aligned initiatives.

• Join our community events

The next Ipê Town Hall will host the founder of P2P.me, on Tuesday, Dec 16, to explain his experience as an Ipê Architect and P2P’s progress since. With coins.me, the easiest USDC-to-fiat platform targeting emerging markets, they’re now eyeing a token generation event next year, for governance handover and reaching more markets.

But before that, you might want to tune in to the Startup Cities Live on Thursday, Dec 11, with a special guest: Ivan Maltsev, GP at 3X Capital, and CEO at Nomadz, the community-driven platform for travelers on Solana.

🏫 Learning section

A learning segment to upskill and be able to build the tools of the future.

• Farcaster: decentralized social media

You may have heard of Farcaster and thought it was the crypto version of Twitter. However, Farcaster is an open-source protocol for building sufficiently decentralized social networks: the Twitter alternative is only a Farcaster client (like The Base App).

It stores your identity on Ethereum, uses an EVM wallet, and stores messages on hubs (decentralized nodes). The protocol supports mini-apps, a marketplace, and even rewards for the builders of the most popular apps. A unique feature of Farcaster is the frame, programmable post, so you can embed any application in a post.

And this month, an update is coming with Frames v2, where posts become app-like with advanced interactivity. With battle-tested tip and reward systems, more than a million accounts, and 50,000+ daily users, this is a great place to build social apps.

🌐 Network Societies Update

A quick pulse on emerging cities, nomad groups, and experiments shaping the future of network societies.

• Dubai in the UAE: Innovative Regulatory Engineering

Dubai is quietly becoming the crypto capital of the world, attracting major companies and events like Token2049 or Solana Breakpoint. VARA’s (Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority) regulatory clarity went a long way, and that’s how a city in the desert attracted thousands of web3 businesses.

At the heart of Dubai is the DIFC (Dubai International Financial Centre), operating independently from the ADGM (Abu Dhabi Global Market), but under the federation of the UAE (United Arab Emirates). Each emirate can release its own rules, allowing Dubai to build more than 40 Free Zones, providing different benefits and driving Foreign Direct Investment.

Dubai shows network state builders that jurisdictional innovation is already happening. You can prototype new governance models inside zones, attract global talent fast, and turn governance experimentation into real success.

⚖️ Governance Tools

Exploring mechanisms for coordination, decision-making, and digital governance.

• The Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone: Cross-Border Governance Innovation

After starting a new zone a year ago, Singapore and Malaysia just reaffirmed their commitment to developing the JS-SEZ for companies to leverage the Singaporean financial infrastructure and the Malaysian territory. The hub has already received the interest of 300 companies to start new R&D and manufacturing plants.

The zone will improve immigration between the two countries, simplify the customs procedures, and streamline business processes in order to attract more talent to the area. They plan to attract more than 100 projects and create 20,000 jobs in 11 key sectors over the next decade.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might remember a small island called Forest City in that area, which is home to the Network School. Providing tax incentives, operational efficiency, and a strategic location, this is the best location for building the future of network states.

🛠️ Web3 Tools

Tech shaping decentralized living, finance, and identity.

• Decentralized storage

Web3’s dependence on centralized infrastructure providers like AWS shows a great irony: decentralized apps run on centralized servers. But it doesn’t have to be. The decentralized storage stack now includes multiple mature solutions.

Arweave offers permanent storage with a one-time payment model, ideal for immutable records. IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) provides a decentralized, peer-to-peer protocol for storage. Ceramic Network enables mutable decentralized data storage for dynamic content, while Sia offers competitive pricing through peer-to-peer storage contracts. More recently, Filecoin’s new “Filecoin Pin“ tool complements IPFS by enabling persistence backed by onchain proof that storage providers continue serving data daily.

For network states, storage independence is a critical piece of infrastructure. Traditional cloud providers can censor, surveil, or arbitrarily raise prices. Decentralized storage isn’t just ideological anymore, and no autonomous community should build without it.

🌍 Other Interesting News

Broader movements and stories from the frontier of digital-first governance and societies.

• Kalshi’s Brazilian founder

Kalshi is now worth $11 billion after a $1 billion Series E funding round, making Luana Lopes Lara the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire. But is it the most important part? A young Brazilian woman created the first CFTC-regulated prediction market platform in the US, succeeding where many others failed.

The true edge of Kalshi was to fight for regulation, and eventually sue the CFTC to get approved. And they’re still playing the regulation game. Building new mechanisms on Solana in a hostile environment with strong competition is no easy feat.

Prediction markets and futarchy are growing trends, as part of what some call the Perpification of everything, and they will play a key role in the development of Network States and their governance mechanisms. If you’re interested in building on top of Kalshi, check their $2M grant program.

💡 Join Ipê Village II

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Join the waitlist here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.

Welcome to our 15th edition of the Ipê News.

As Ipê Village 2026 gets closer, it’s time to get involved, join our Town Hall tomorrow, Dec 2 at 10 am, on our Discord Server.

🏘️ Community Updates

Highlights from Ipê City, partner communities, or aligned initiatives.

• New Startup Society docuseries website

If you still haven’t watched the Startup Society docuseries, now is your chance! The website startupsociety.film just got a fresh look, so share it with your family and friends. Everyone deserves to know what we are building.

• Crecimiento’s next steps

After a powerful Devconnect and the first Ethereum World’s Fair, Crecimiento is planning for 2026: a new Aleph coworking space, more startup programs, and popup cities in March and August.

🏫 Learning section

A learning segment to upskill and be able to build the tools of the future.

• Hardware wallets

DePIN might be a good solution for infrastructure, but the foundation of a blockchain-based society will be the wallet. Your wallet is your identity, your money, and your signature. That’s why hardware wallets are a must-have for any long-term crypto holder.

A hardware wallet is a physical device that keeps your private key safe, never exposing it to the broader internet. They usually allow you to authenticate with a PIN, and come with an app to enjoy other features, such as staking and more DeFi options.

The most popular wallets are manufactured by Ledger, Trezor, and Tangem, but if you want to help the open-source movement, consider the Keystone wallet.

🌐 Network Societies Update

A quick pulse on emerging cities, nomad groups, and experiments shaping the future of network societies.

• The Bitcoin Society

The Bitcoin Society (TBSO) was announced last week by Éric Larchevêque, CEO and co-founder of Legder. They call it a new network society, although it is starting from the rebranding of a French public company, now valued at 1 million euros.

The goal is to start building a Bitcoin treasury in France, while bringing more members to the network thanks to Bitcoin classes (already available in French), events, and diverse clubs like the entrepreneurs’ club or the investors’ club.

With already 18,000 members on the French platform, the project is officially launched and aims to attract people overseas through a waitlist.

⚖️ Governance Tools

Exploring mechanisms for coordination, decision-making, and digital governance.

• Honduran elections

The latest presidential elections in Honduras created significant controversy, with politicians under criminal investigations, and all parties accusing each other of electoral misconduct.

With the Polymarket bet on the winner over $8M, the results are swinging between the two major candidates, and Trump had to step in last minute to confuse things even more. So who will win?

The race has narrowed to two main blocs: the National Party and the Liberal Party. Both have signaled a friendlier stance toward Próspera’s legal framework and special jurisdiction model compared to the current administration. The future looks brighter for ZEDEs in Honduras.

🛠️ Web3 Tools

Tech shaping decentralized living, finance, and identity.

• Avici refund through futarchy

Avici.money is a stablecoin banking startup providing a self-custodial wallet and a Visa card on Solana, for what could look like another neobank. However, their masterplan is to replace banks by developing what is missing for most onchain banks: a credit score and unsecured loans, like mortgages.

To that end, they partnered with MetaDAO to launch their ICO and was highly oversubscribed ($34M for a $2M raise). Since MetaDAO uses Futarchy to allow investors to make decisions, it ran a proposal through Futarchy to decide how to handle the money.

In a bold move for an ICO, the community decided to keep $3.5M to support Avici’s development and refund 90% of the raise to investors. If you’re interested in the development of a decentralized banking system, you can join their network.

🌍 Other Interesting News

Broader movements and stories from the frontier of digital-first governance and societies.

• Do Kwon court case

After the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, sentenced to 25 years after the collapse of FTX, we are now witnessing the trial of Do Kwon after the collapse of Terra Luna. The Korean founder of Terraform Labs pleaded guilty to U.S. fraud charges and is trying to keep the sentence under 5 years, while facing up to 25 years in prison.

TerraUSD was a stablecoin paired to the Luna token, using a complex algorithm to balance funds and maintain the peg. Some people expressed concerns about the stability of the peg, and in 2022, a few triggers collapsed the peg entirely, plummeting TerraUSD, Luna, and bringing down the whole crypto market.

In 2022, Do Kwon fled South Korea, which revoked his passport, but he was arrested in 2023 after being put on the Interpol red notice. His problems are far from over, and other firms involved are facing lawsuits. A good reminder to all the network society builders out there: pay attention to the global legal frameworks.

💡 Join Ipê Village II

Ipê Village 2026 will be our next large-scale experiment exploring the future of communities, cities, and governance. Hosted in Florianópolis, Brazil, in March/April 2026, this pop-up city is open to founders, builders, creators, and techno-optimists.

🔗 Join the waitlist here.

Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.