This article is Vitalik’s discussion from a first-person perspective about an experimental community called Zuzalu, which aims to transform online culture and tribes into physical places, and explores the ideas and practices behind it. The author emphasizes the uniqueness of Zuzalu, describing it as a transnational virtual community that is related to the cryptocurrency field, while also having its own goals and culture. Zuzalu’s experiment includes building a mini-city that can accommodate 200 people for a duration of two months. The goal of this experiment is to merge different cultures and create a unique sense of community. The article mentions some successes of the experiment, including progress in technology and social aspects, as well as the internationalization of the community. However, the article also raises some questions and challenges, including the scale and goals of Zuzalu, and how to maintain its distinctiveness and attractiveness in the long term. The author believes that Zuzalu may develop into a structure characterized by features such as universities, monasteries, and digital nomad centers, but continuous exploration and development are still needed. Overall, this article discusses an interesting experiment, exploring the fusion of online and physical communities, and how to shape and develop culture and social connections in a constantly changing environment.
Translator’s note: Zuzalu does not have an official translation, and it is transliterated as “祖扎鲁” in Chinese. The translator asked Vitalik, and Zuzalu is an interesting term he created without a specific meaning. However, in the Chinese Zuzalu community, the widely used informal nickname is “猪猪楼” (Piggy Tower).
We tend to think that physical places and the activities and cultures they bring are immutable. As individuals, you may choose to move to a specific place: go to San Francisco to appreciate its open and accepting culture or the AI development scene, go to Berlin to appreciate open source hacker culture, or go to Asia to become part of the new world and the rising world.
At the same time, we consider all these characteristics as given, as an exogenous and fixed part of the human world – you have to make choices in the existence trade-offs. But what if things could be different? What if the culture or tribe formed online, with its own goals and values, could be realized offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?
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Similar ideas have been circulating in the philosophy of the internet for decades. In 1988, French sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote a book called “The Time of the Tribes”, arguing that the next era will see more institutions operating in groups defined by common interests rather than common history or blood and soil. More recently, Balaji Srinivasan wrote an article called “The Network State”, suggesting that communities defined by common interests can start from purely online discussion forums but “actualize” into face-to-face centers over time. From an economic democratic perspective, David de Ugarte’s proposal for phyles advocates for cultural and economic cooperation between transnational groups, coordinating online and offline.
The author refers to the virtual transnational community as a cryptocurrency space, which is a unique place to address these issues. On the one hand, it is an “industry” of technology. The entire space operates on advanced software and mathematics, such as blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs. Users interact with it through applications running on computers and mobile phones, which receive data provided by the internet.
But it also has many unique characteristics. Unlike other technology industries that usually integrate around San Francisco or sometimes around New York City, cryptocurrencies strangely resist the gravitational pull of geographical centralization. The legal headquarters of Ethereum is in Switzerland, with a second major entity in Singapore. Many of its developers are in Berlin. The main development teams are located in Romania and Australia, among other places. One layer 2 scaling protocol is in India, and another is in China.
In a sense, Ethereum has already become one of these digital internet tribes. It has “realized” frequently through regular conferences held around the world, attracting thousands of people each time. These provide participants with regular face-to-face interactions and chance encounters without the need for a US visa or exorbitant rent. For weeks on end, the Ethereum community has largely shaped human geography, rather than just responding to it.
The Beginning of Zuzalu
By 2022, I had been thinking about many of these topics for some time. I read and reviewed Balaji Srinivasan’s book on network states, wrote articles on what cryptographic cities might look like, and explored governance issues in the background of blockchain-native digital structures such as DAOs. But the discussions seemed too theoretical for too long, and the time seemed ripe for more practical experiments. This is where the idea for Zuzalu was born.
Zuzalu is an experiment that takes these ideas to a new level. We already have hacker houses, which can last for months or even years, but usually only accommodate around ten to twenty people. We have held conferences, which can accommodate thousands of people, but each conference only lasts for a week. This time is sufficient for chance encounters, but not enough to establish truly deep connections. So, let’s take a step in two directions: creating a temporary mini-city that can accommodate 200 people and lasts for two months.
This hits the sweet spot: it is ambitious enough and sufficiently different from the repetitive content that has become tiresome, where we actually learn something, but still light enough to be logically manageable. And it intentionally does not centralize any specific vision of how to do such things, whether Balaji’s or others’.
This work began in January. A team of about four people started scouting locations and decided to build a resort in Montenegro. Resorts are usually quite expensive, but the bargaining power of renting one hundred apartments at once, combined with the option to choose the low season when the resort is usually empty, greatly reduces the cost.
We invited about a dozen invitees, who in turn invited more people and shared the application form in several communities: the Ethereum community, focusing on developers and researchers in the fields of zero-knowledge proofs, longevity, and broader biotechnology industries, and European rationalists. We also hired researchers and builders from “Yuan”: internet tribes, network states, community building, and governance. By February, the team had grown to about 8 people and quickly started logistical work. This was a challenge, but surprisingly easy to manage in cooperation with existing resorts.
On March 25th, the event began and two hundred guests quickly poured in. The centralized planning part of Zuzalu could be used from the beginning. We collaborated with a local restaurant to create a self-service breakfast based on the blueprint menu of longevity master Brian Johnson. These meals combined Brian’s vision of the healthiest diet and lifestyle with practical needs, such as adhering to a daily budget of $15 per person.
In terms of cryptocurrency, the 0xLianGuaiRC team created ZuLianGuaiss, an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that allows you to prove that you are a resident of Zuzalu without revealing which one. This can be used in person or online, including anonymous login to applications like Zupoll. Soon after, we turned the balcony of one of the apartments into a gym.
However, what happened from then on was completely bottom-up. The tradition of taking cold showers every morning naturally emerged and grew over time. The group started cooking their own food independently. A month later, we started singing karaoke. At first, the core team organized a conference room equipped with high-quality audiovisual equipment and created a webpage where any resident could use it to book time slots and hold their own activities without permission. Soon, residents started creating sub-events and tracks began to appear.
In conclusion, Zuzalu feels like it has achieved its core goal: it brings together a new cultural combination and feels like a city.
What have we learned?
The “form factor” of two hundred people living together in one place does work. People are willing to come, and almost everyone who comes says they enjoy the experience. This reflects something I later experienced at a four-day blockchain conference in Palau in the Pacific Islands: the event deliberately reduces formal meeting formats and focuses on informal gatherings and spend-time-together activities, which many attendees greatly appreciate as a unique element of the event.
(Note: The translator was deeply involved in the Palau Blockchain Summit, which also inspired ideas about launching an archipelago network – Archipelago.Network is an exploration of creating a utopian cyberspace for self-sovereignty, bringing together individuals from around the world seeking self-sovereignty and digital freedom in their exploration of on-chain governance. The archipelago is a metaphor for organizing the world and people in a way that is not based on power relations, but draws strength from diversity.)
Over time, the extended duration of Zuzalu has successfully created a different mindset. The four-day conference is a break in your life, but the two-month stay is your life. For some, it has been proven that the small but highly concentrated network effect produced by hundreds of people caring about what you care about can indeed replace the large but more dispersed network effect of global megacities.
The idea of building and testing a technology within a focused community of enthusiasts has also proven to be successful. ZuLianGuaiss was initially a clunky hackathon software, but through real-time usage and user feedback, its usability quickly improved significantly, making it more usable than many blockchain applications that have been around for years. A healthy lifestyle is also a technology – the most effective social technology – and it has also been rapidly improved in Zuzalu.
We have not yet fully achieved the goal of developing a lower-cost, less time-consuming extreme longevity lifestyle like Brian Johnson’s, but we have made significant progress. Technologies with a strong cultural component, while developing new software tools and new human habits, may be very suitable for this approach.
That being said, there is still a lot of experimentation to be done. Cryptocurrency payments have been a long-standing dream of the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities, although they exist but are limited. Not even considering using DAO to manage Zuzalu, DAO being a decentralized autonomous organization that operates on the blockchain. A 200-person community lasting two months is either too short, too small, or both to truly make sense of such things. But these two dreams are very important, and future experiments, whether conducted by the Zuzalu community or independent derivative projects, will undoubtedly make more consistent efforts to achieve them.
Zuzalu has also successfully become a highly international community: no country has more than one-third of the attendees; unsurprisingly, the top two are the United States and China. This diversity is largely deliberate and intentional, as a strategy to avoid being captured by internal struggles and excessive behavior of any single ethnic culture. In terms of thematic areas, the diversity of Zuzalu is low: although non-crypto communities have also emerged and appreciated this experience, the Ethereum community is the obvious pioneer.
But this may not be a failure: outstanding diversity is not about representing the entire society or humanity equally, but about strategically bringing together and bridging groups that would not otherwise care about each other.
What other questions have not been answered?
One area where this experiment did not perform well is in clearly showing the direction for the next steps. Balaji’s “Network State” does indeed discuss the centuries-long history of small-scale “communist societies” in America and elsewhere, but it also emphasizes a grand geopolitical vision: the decentralized movement, which is a non-aligned movement of the 21st century, protecting freedom in an unfree and highly conflicted world. Perhaps such a movement can even provide a peaceful alternative for the unstable geopolitical bipolarity of China and the United States, but Zuzalu has not yet truly achieved the feeling of such a noble goal.
Many cultural movements – digital nomadism, crypto-anarchism, and so on – started out with excitement and gradually settled down to become part of the global political and cultural landscape. They are stable, even important, but once their natural fan base saturates, they won’t change the world. Will “Zuzaluism” suffer the same fate? In fact, is it a good thing to lower ambitions and let this happen?
It is easy to think that the current form of Zuzaluism is destined to be quite niche. The community attracted by Zuzalu is impressive, but there are also obvious biases: many participants are young, few have families with children, and people only stay for a few days. About one-third of the participants are already digital nomads. With subsidies, many people who are not wealthy can also come, but in terms of social connections, they are still quite elite.
More broadly, there is much evidence to suggest that unless faced with a “driving force” as powerful as a real conquest war, a large part of the previously static population will rarely start again and move elsewhere. Even in Russia, less than one percent of the population left the country after the current war began. Of course, many of those who left were Russia’s best and brightest, tasked with weakening aggressive forces and setting an example for other countries that might do the same. But it is also clear that large-scale migration is far from a grand solution to major geopolitical problems.
So this leaves a question: where do we go from here? There have been many examples in history of medium-sized and long-term gatherings that were intentionally organized, which, although not world-changing, still left valuable impacts. Universities are a good example to consider – this is an ironic example because ten years ago, how many of us were enthusiastic about disrupting physical universities through online MOOC services like Udacity and Coursera. Nevertheless, it is also an example that has not been fully appreciated.
Monasteries are another example. A few years ago, philosopher Samo Burja asked why there were no monasteries dedicated to perfecting software, given that many software engineers have already made enough money and now desire personal spiritual progress. Ultimately, the Zuzalu community does have ambitions higher than creating universities and monasteries, even if they are lower than fixing global politics. However, models for new fields are rarely precise replicas of anything that came before.
My own prediction is that Zuzalu will partly become a structure with aspects of a university, a monastery, and a digital nomad center. But it will also introduce new activities, such as “incubating” new technologies, including social technologies, through testing in dedicated communities. It will also find its place in the “meta” by becoming a gathering place for future builders of various new physical spaces and new societies. In other words, there is still a long way to go. Many paths remain unexplored, even unknown, so the journey has just begun.
Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum.
Original author: Vitalik Buterin
Original title: Why I Built Zuzalu
Original source: LianGuailladiummag
Translation: Joey Zhong
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