Ipê News #23 - Autonomous Worlds, California Forever, Moltbook, and more.
Your weekly update on what is happening in the Startup Society ecosystem.
Hey builders! Welcome to the 23rd edition of Ipê News.
🏘️ Community Updates
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).
🏫 Learning
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 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.
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.
Follow the journey and join the community on Twitter or Discord.