In the spring of 2023, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin convened approximately 200 residents in Lustica Bay, Montenegro for a two-month experiment called Zuzalu -- a "pop-up city" designed to test whether a temporary physical community could develop novel governance, identity, and coordination systems. What emerged was not just a successful gathering but a movement: within 18 months, over 20 derivative pop-up villages had launched worldwide, organizations like Edge City became self-sustaining businesses, and critical infrastructure projects like Zupass (a zero-knowledge proof identity system) moved from prototype to production. Zuzalu demonstrated that temporary physical coordination can seed permanent digital networks, and that the design space for community governance extends far beyond traditional DAOs.
Background
The concept of network states and pop-up cities had been circulating in the crypto-adjacent intellectual sphere since Balaji Srinivasan's 2022 book The Network State. The core thesis was that communities could form around shared values online, then manifest physically -- reversing the traditional nation-state model where geography determines community.
Vitalik Buterin's motivation, articulated in his October 2023 essay "Why I Built Zuzalu" in Palladium Magazine, was more pragmatic. He observed that the Ethereum ecosystem's annual conferences -- Devcon, ETHDenver, and others -- produced intense but fleeting bursts of coordination. Two days of talks and hallway conversations were insufficient for the kind of deep collaboration and social experimentation that could produce genuinely new governance models. What would happen if you extended a conference from days to months?
The timing also reflected growing interest in longevity science, zero-knowledge cryptography, and AI safety -- communities that were intellectually adjacent to Ethereum but rarely in the same room. Zuzalu was designed to create that room.
The Mechanism / Program
Zuzalu (Montenegro, March-May 2023)
Zuzalu ran from March 25 to May 25, 2023, at Lustica Bay, a resort development on Montenegro's Adriatic coast. Approximately 200 core residents lived onsite for the full two months, with additional weekly visitors rotating through. Participants were drawn from Ethereum, longevity/biotech, rationalism, and AI safety communities.
The governance structure was intentionally minimal. There was no DAO, no token, and no formal decision-making framework. As Vitalik later noted, a 200-person community lasting two months was "either too short, too small, or both" for formal onchain governance. Instead, coordination was largely bottom-up: residents could permissionlessly book meeting spaces, sub-events and tracks emerged organically, and daily traditions like morning cold plunges developed without central planning.
The most significant technical output was Zupass, built by the 0xPARC team. Zupass is an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that allowed residents to prove membership in the Zuzalu community without revealing their specific identity. This enabled anonymous polling, gated access to spaces and conversations, and privacy-preserving community coordination. Zupass was maintained by a small team of three full-time developers funded by 0xPARC Foundation.
VitaDAO co-organized a two-day longevity biotech conference covering cellular reprogramming, immune system rejuvenation, and DNA damage. These cross-disciplinary collisions -- crypto engineers talking with biotech researchers, governance theorists sharing meals with AI safety researchers -- were central to Zuzalu's design intent.
ZuConnect (Istanbul, October-November 2023)
Following Zuzalu's success, ZuConnect was organized in Istanbul from October 29 to November 11, 2023, timed to coincide with DevConnect. Approximately 300 full-time residents participated, plus over 100 part-time visitors. ZuConnect expanded Zupass's functionality to include event ticketing, community polls, gated Telegram chats, and an anonymous chat bot.
Vitalik set up a quadratic funding round at ZuConnect, marking one of the first deployments of QF within a pop-up city context and providing direct funding to projects spawned by the community.
Derivative Pop-Up Cities (2024-2025)
After ZuConnect, Buterin recommended that the community decentralize Zuzalu. The result was a proliferation of derivative events, each organized by someone who had attended the original and each with distinct thematic focus:
- Edge City -- Focused on frontier technology, organized popup villages in multiple locations including Edge Esmeralda (Northern California, June 2024, one month). Edge City reportedly became a cash-flow-positive business.
- Vitalia -- Focused on longevity science, hosted a popup village in Prospera, Honduras in February 2024. Distinguished by its single-topic focus and intention to build a permanent home base. Later forked into two separate initiatives.
- Mu -- Focused on hackers and builders.
- Zuzalu Taiwan -- A plural pop-up city adapting the model for an Asian context.
By October 2024, multiple pop-up cities emerged simultaneously in Chiang Mai, Thailand, creating an interconnected ecosystem. In total, around 20 groups assembled Zuzalu-style pop-up villages worldwide within 18 months of the original event.
Outcomes
- Zupass moved from prototype to production and is now used by multiple communities beyond the Zuzalu ecosystem for privacy-preserving identity, ticketing, and polling.
- Edge City became a self-sustaining organization, demonstrating that pop-up city coordination can generate viable business models.
- Daimo, a crypto payments app allowing users to split bills onchain using USDC with free transactions, was built as a direct response to a problem identified at Zuzalu (nobody was using crypto for everyday payments).
- Hundreds of projects, companies, hackathon teams, funds, and network city concepts were conceptualized, built, or scaled at Zuzalu and its derivatives within the first 12 months.
- Cross-disciplinary pollination between crypto, longevity, AI safety, and governance communities produced collaborations that would not have emerged at single-discipline conferences.
- Quadratic funding was deployed in a physical community context at ZuConnect, establishing precedent for QF as a local governance tool, not just a digital grants mechanism.
Challenges and Solutions
Challenge: Governance and decision-making were undefined
Vitalik identified governance as one of two fundamental issues. Who decides the rules of a pop-up city? How are conflicts resolved? The original Zuzalu had no formal governance, which worked at small scale but would not scale.
Solution: Derivative events experimented with different governance models. Edge City developed operational structures for managing multi-week villages. The broader movement began exploring how tools like Zupass could enable privacy-preserving voting for community decisions, though no consensus governance framework has emerged.
Challenge: Membership selection was opaque
The second issue Buterin flagged was membership. Who gets invited? The original Zuzalu's invitation-only model created perceptions of exclusivity and raised questions about how such communities could become more inclusive.
Solution: Derivative events adopted varied approaches -- some used open applications, others maintained curated cohorts. The tension between community quality and openness remains an active area of experimentation.
Challenge: Sustainability beyond the initial event
A two-month gathering requires significant upfront capital and volunteer coordination. Converting temporary momentum into lasting institutions is inherently difficult.
Solution: Edge City's path to cash-flow positivity showed one viable model. Other initiatives like Vitalia's permanent base in Prospera attempted a different approach: using a pop-up as a seed for a permanent community. The diversity of sustainability models is itself a form of experimentation.
Challenge: Measuring impact beyond anecdote
While projects like Daimo and Zupass provide concrete outcomes, much of Zuzalu's value lies in relationship formation and idea exchange that is difficult to quantify.
Solution: The community has leaned into qualitative documentation, with detailed blog posts, retrospectives, and media coverage serving as the primary record. More structured impact measurement remains an open challenge.
Lessons Learned
- Two months is a threshold. The extended duration was critical to Zuzalu's success -- relationships and projects that require deep collaboration cannot form in a two-day conference. Subsequent events have confirmed that multi-week formats produce qualitatively different outcomes.
- Minimal governance works at small scale but does not transfer. The absence of formal decision-making was a feature for 200 people over two months, but derivative events quickly found that scaling requires explicit coordination structures.
- Zero-knowledge identity is a practical tool, not just a theoretical primitive. Zupass demonstrated that ZK-based identity can serve real community needs -- from anonymous polling to gated access -- in physical settings where trust and privacy coexist.
- Pop-up cities are a coordination laboratory. The true output of Zuzalu was not the event itself but the dozens of derivative experiments it spawned, each testing a different combination of duration, theme, governance model, and sustainability strategy.
- Physical co-location remains irreplaceable for certain kinds of innovation. Despite advances in remote collaboration, the density of new projects, companies, and ideas generated at Zuzalu-style events suggests that physical proximity unlocks coordination capacity that digital tools cannot yet replicate.
Conclusion
Zuzalu was a proof of concept that temporary physical communities can function as innovation laboratories for governance, identity, and coordination systems. Its most lasting contributions are not the event itself but the infrastructure (Zupass), organizations (Edge City), products (Daimo), and movement (20+ derivative pop-up villages) it generated. For the public goods funding ecosystem, Zuzalu demonstrated that governance experimentation requires spatial and temporal room that conferences do not provide, and that the tools emerging from these experiments -- zero-knowledge identity, quadratic funding in physical contexts, privacy-preserving community decision-making -- have applications far beyond pop-up cities.
Sources
- Why I Built Zuzalu -- Vitalik Buterin, Palladium Magazine
- I Spent a Month Inside Vitalik Buterin's Social Experiment -- Decrypt
- Vitalik Buterin Identifies 2 Hurdles After Zuzalu Popup City Test -- CoinTelegraph
- Let a Thousand Societies Bloom -- Vitalik Buterin
- Zuzalu: A Pop-up City on the Mediterranean -- Free Cities Foundation
- Zone of Scenius -- Edge City Blog
- About Edge City
- Zuzalu City
- Learning from Popup Villages -- Jon Hillis
- Zupass -- GitHub
