Ipê News #17 - Edeneum, Seasteading, CUBO AI, and more
Your weekly update on what is happening in the Startup Society ecosystem.
Hey builders!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.