Vitalik Buertin reveals 2 issues to solve after Zuzalu ‘popup city’ experiment

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed that he still needs to solve at least two major issues — governance and membership — to make his “popup city” or “network states” concept workable.

Speaking at the Network State Conference 2024 in Singapore on Sept. 22, Vitalik Buterin explained the theory behind “network states” — a movement where online communities come together to form physical communities and seek political autonomy.

The mathematician reflected on his experiment called Zuzalu for which involved bringing 200 people from the Ethereum community, crypto executives, biotech entrepreneurs, and scientific researchers into Montenegro from March to May 2023. 

The goal was for people to work together to solve collective problems like human longevity. 

“Bring these people together for 60 days, try to be a city, and then see what happens,” said Buterin.  

Vitalik Buterin at Network States 2024 conference. Source: YouTube

He said that people enjoyed the experience, which involved healthy eating, cold plunges, and lots of yoga, and that the human element was crucial. However, he added that it was “unclear what immediate next step Zuzalu implied,” and governance issues were not solved. 

Buterin explained that these states could have their own regulations that serve their citizens and could reject over-regulation that stifles progress (as seen in the West), however, it was not clear from the experiment how to proceed with implementing them, he said.

He said that popup cities are a new medium where you can “do sci-fi” and think ten steps ahead. However, there needs to be productive relationships between network states as tribalism , which can be seen on social media today, is “zero-sum and unproductive,” he said. 

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Vitalik concluded that popup cities have “product market fit” but “we have to solve governance and membership more.” 

“To go further from here, the path depends on the goal,” he said before summing up:

“We should all be cooperating much more even if we have different goals and we should think carefully about how.” 

The concept of network states was spawned by Balaji Srinivasan and commented on in length by Buterin in 2022. Network states are presented as a potential successor to libertarianism, combining elements of individualism with community values.

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