Zuzalu
A one-time, two-month 'pop-up mini-city' for roughly 200 people in Montenegro (2023) — the originating experiment that Edge City and other frontier gatherings explicitly descend from, documented firsthand by its founder.
- Zuzalu ran from March 25, 2023 for two months in Kotor, Montenegro, housing about 200 people — sized deliberately between a 10–20 person hacker house and a week-long conference, per Buterin's own stated reasoning.
- Meals were run on a $15/person/day budget loosely modeled on longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson's 'Blueprint' diet, chosen for practicality within shipping and budget constraints.
- The 0xPARC team built 'Zupass,' a zero-knowledge-proof identity system letting attendees prove Zuzalu residency without revealing their specific identity, used both in-person and in apps like 'Zupoll.'
- Bottom-up culture emerged without central planning: daily cold plunges, self-organized group cooking, and karaoke sessions all developed spontaneously; a permissionless event-booking system let any resident create their own sessions.
- Buterin reports genuine international diversity (no single country over one-third of attendees, with the US and China as the top two) but limited subject-matter diversity (the Ethereum/crypto community was the clear plurality).
- The piece explicitly states what did NOT happen: no DAO governance was attempted, and crypto payments were 'present but limited' — named as unfinished experiments for future attempts, not successes.
Ethereum's founder, writing this firsthand account directly — published in Palladium Magazine, October 2023. This is a primary-source account by the person who built the thing, not a secondhand summary.
Cited by Buterin as a direct intellectual precedent for Zuzalu's premise (communities forming online before 'materializing' offline).
Cited as an earlier sociological precedent for interest-based (rather than geography-based) communities.
Cited as a related precedent focused on transnational economic/cultural collaboration.
Named team credited with building the event's zero-knowledge identity system.
Cited as the dietary inspiration for Zuzalu's communal meals, adapted to a $15/day budget.
EVERY SOURCE IS NAMED SO YOU CAN VERIFY IT YOURSELF. NAMING A SOURCE IS NOT ENDORSING IT.
- Has the specific Zuzalu event (Montenegro, 2023) ever been repeated, or did the concept fully transition into spinoff/successor gatherings such as Edge City?
- Buterin himself asks in the original piece whether 'Zuzaluism' is destined to remain a niche cultural movement — has that question been answered in the time since publication?
- What became of the specific technologies tested (Zupass, Zupoll) — are they still in active use anywhere, including at successor events?
This is the most rigorously self-critical source the Atlas has charted anywhere so far — written by the founder himself, published in a serious outlet, explicitly naming what worked, what didn't, and what remains genuinely unresolved rather than presenting only promotional claims.
Zuzalu is the direct ancestor of Edge City (already charted in this region): Edge City's own materials state it is 'part of and contributes to the Zuzalu ecosystem,' and Edge City co-founder Janine Leger's prior work included Zuzalu Montenegro directly. Read together, the two entries trace one continuous lineage from a single 2023 experiment to an ongoing global network of pop-up villages.
SOURCE: palladiummag.com/2023/10/06/why-i-built-zuzalu (scraped 2026-07-09), authored by Vitalik Buterin
What actually became of Zuzalu after 2023 — did the format repeat, or fully evolve into spinoffs like Edge City?
Edge City (charted separately in this region) explicitly credits Zuzalu as its origin and shares overlapping founders and community. The original Montenegro event itself does not appear to have been repeated in the same form as of this research.
Report from the field →Edge City
A network of month-long 'pop-up villages' for people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society — explicitly aimed at eventually seeding a permanent town.
SeedHome
A compression-only prefab bio-shelter built from curvilinear shell geometry and decentralized robotic fabrication — the flagship product of Bio-Veda's bio-architecture academy and blueprint-licensing business.
Science and Alchemy of Consciousness (France)
A real, currently-running annual multi-day conference and retreat — its 5th year in 2025 — bringing the Implosion Group's device makers, theorists, and practitioners together at one venue for lectures, device demonstrations, and communal meals.