Vitalik: Why I built Zuzalu

The market performance of Meme token Zuzalu is overwhelming. Its concept originated from the experimental community Zuzalu founded by Vitalik. Why is the Zuzalu token so popular? Let’s first review Vitalik’s original intention of founding Zuzalu.

Written by: Vitalik Buterin

Compiled by: Joey Zhong

This article was first published in October 2023

*This article is Vitalik’s first-person discussion of an experimental community called Zuzalu that aims to translate online culture and tribe into physical places, and explores the ideas and practices behind it. The author highlights the uniqueness of Zuzalu, describing it as a transnational virtual community that is related to the cryptocurrency field but also has its own goals and culture. Zuzalu’s experiment involved building a mini-city that could house 200 people over the course of two months. The goal of this experiment is to blend different cultures and create a unique sense of community. The article mentions some of the successes of the experiment, including technical and social advances, as well as the internationalization of the community. However, the article also raises a number of questions and challenges, including the size and goals of Zuzalu, and how to maintain its specialness and appeal over the long term. The author believes that Zuzalu may develop into a structure with characteristics such as a university, a monastery and a digital nomad center, but needs to continue to be explored and developed. Overall, this article discusses an interesting experiment exploring the convergence of online and physical communities and how cultural and social connections can be shaped and developed in a changing environment. *

Translator’s Note: There is no formal official translation of Zuzalu. The literal translation of Pinyin is “Zuzalu”. The translator asked Vitalik that Zuzalu is an interesting word he created and has no unique meaning. However, in the Zuzalu Chinese community, A widely used informal nickname is “Pig House”.

We tend to think of physical places and the activities and culture they bring with them as static. As an individual, you might choose to move to a specific place: to San Francisco to appreciate its open and accepting culture or AI development scene, to Berlin to appreciate the open source hacker culture, or to Asia to be part of a new world and growing The rising world.

At the same time, we take all of these characteristics as given, as exogenous and fixed parts of the human world—there are existential trade-offs you have to make choices about. But what if things might be different? What if cultures or tribes with their own goals and values formed online could materialize offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?

Similar ideas have been circulating in online philosophy circles for decades. In 1988, French sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote a book called The Time of the Tribes, arguing that the next era would see more of institutions exercised within groups defined by common interests rather than shared history or ancestry and soil. Recently, Balaji Srinivasan wrote “The Network State,” arguing that communities defined by common interests can begin as purely online discussion forums, but over time “Embodiment” is the face-to-face center. From the perspective of economic democracy, David de Ugarte’s Fiers advocates cultural and economic cooperation between transnational groups, coordinating online and offline.

The virtual transnational community that the author calls home, the cryptocurrency space, is a unique place to view these issues. On the one hand, it is a “tech” industry. The entire space runs 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 via the Internet.

But it also has many unique features of its own. Unlike other tech industries, which are often consolidated around San Francisco or sometimes New York City, cryptocurrencies have curiously resisted the gravitational pull of geographic centralization. Ethereum’s legal headquarters is in Switzerland, with a second major entity in Singapore. Many of its developers are based in Berlin. The main development teams are located in places such as Romania and Australia. One Layer 2 extension protocol is located in India and the other is located in China.

In a sense, Ethereum is already one of these digital internet tribes. It has been “realized” frequently through regular conferences held around the world, attracting thousands of people each time. These provide participants with opportunities for regular face-to-face interaction and casual connections without having to obtain a U.S. visa or pay sky-high rent. For weeks on end, the Ethereum community has been shaping human geography to a greater extent than just reacting to it.

The beginning of Zuzalu

As of 2022, I’ve been thinking about many of these topics for some time. I read and reviewed Balaji Srinivasan’s book on the network state, wrote about what crypto-cities might look like, and explored governance issues in the context of blockchain-native digital structures like DAOs. But the discussion seemed too theoretical for too long, and the time seemed ripe for more practical experiments. The idea for Zuzalu was born.

Zuzalu is an experiment that takes these ideas to the next level. We already have hacker houses, which can last for months or even years, but usually only hold about ten to twenty people. We’ve had conferences that could hold thousands of people, but each conference only lasted a week. That’s enough time for a casual meeting, but not enough time to create a truly deep connection. So let’s take a step in two directions: create a temporary mini-city that can accommodate 200 people and last for two months.

This hits a sweet spot: it’s ambitious enough and different enough from what’s already tiresomely repetitive that we actually learn something, but still light enough to be logically manageable. And it’s also intentionally not focused on any specific vision, Balaji’s or otherwise, of how such a thing should be done.

The work begins in January. A team of about four people began scouting the site and decided to build a resort in Montenegro. Resort prices are usually quite expensive, but the bargaining power of renting a hundred apartments at a time, combined with choosing an off-season time when the resort is usually empty, keeps the cost significantly lower.

We invited about a dozen invitees, who in turn invited many more, and shared the application form in several communities: the Ethereum community, focusing on people working on zero-knowledge proofs, longevity, and the broader biotech industry developers and researchers, and European rationalists. We also employ researchers and builders of the “meta”: internet tribes, web state, community building and governance. By February, the team had grown to about eight people and logistics were quickly put into motion. It was a challenge, but surprisingly manageable working with an existing resort.

On March 25, the event started, and two hundred guests quickly poured in. The “centralized planning” part of Zuzalu is available from the start. We partnered with a local restaurant to create a breakfast buffet based on macrobiotic guru Brian Johnson’s blueprint menu. The meals combine Brian’s need to determine the ideals and practicalities of the healthiest diet and lifestyle, such as sticking to a budget of $15 per person per day.

On the cryptocurrency side, the 0xPARC team created Zupass, an identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs that you can use to prove you are a resident of Zuzalu without revealing which one you are. This can be used in person or online, including anonymously logging into apps like Zupoll. Soon after, we turned the balcony of one of our apartments into a gym.

What has happened since then, however, has been entirely bottom-up. The tradition of taking a cold bath every morning emerged naturally and grew over time. The group begins cooking their own food independently. A month later, we started singing karaoke. Initially, the core team organized a conference room with high-quality audio-visual equipment and created a web page that any resident can use to book time slots and host their own events without permission. Soon, residents started creating sub-events and tracks started popping up.

All in all, Zuzalu feels like it has achieved its core purpose: it brings together a new mix of cultures and feels like a city.

What did we learn?

The “form factor” of two hundred people living in one place for a long time does work. People want to come, and almost everyone who comes says they enjoy the experience. This mirrored something I later experienced at a four-day blockchain conference in the Pacific island nation of Palau: the event was deliberately reduced to a formal conference format and instead featured informal spend-time-together activities. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for this unique event component.

(Note: The translator was deeply involved in the Palau Blockchain Summit. This trip also inspired the idea of starting the Archipelago Network - Archipelago.Network is a utopian cyberspace that explores the realization of self-sovereignty, bringing together people from all over the world seeking to An exploration of on-chain governance by individuals with self-sovereignty and digital freedom, the Archipelago is a metaphor for a way of organizing the world and people, where coexistence is not based on power relations, but draws strength from diversity.)

The extension of Zuzalu’s duration managed to create a different mentality over time. A four-day conference is a break in your life, but a two-month stay is your life. It turns out, for some at least, that the small but highly concentrated network effects of a few hundred people caring about the things you care about can indeed replace the large but more diffuse network effects of the world’s megacities.

The idea of building and testing a technology within a dedicated community of enthusiasts has also proven successful. Zupass started out as essentially a clunky piece of hackathon software, but through real-time usage and user feedback, usability quickly improved significantly, becoming more usable than many years-old blockchain applications. Healthy lifestyle is also a technology - which works best as a social technology - and this is rapidly improving at Zuzalu.

We haven’t quite reached our goal of developing a cheaper, less time-consuming version of Brian Johnson’s extreme longevity lifestyle, but we’ve certainly made significant progress. Technologies with a strong cultural component that simultaneously develop new software tools and new human habits may be well suited to this approach.

That said, there’s still a lot of experimentation to be done. Crypto payments, a long-held dream of the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities, exist but are limited. No one is even considering using a DAO to govern Zuzalu, a decentralized autonomous organization running on the blockchain. A community of 200 people lasting two months is either too short, too small, or both for something like this to really make sense. But these two dreams are important, and future experiments, whether conducted by the Zuzalu community or independent spin-off projects, will undoubtedly make a more concerted effort to realize them.

Zuzalu has also managed to become a highly international community: no country accounts for more than a third of attendees; unsurprisingly, the top two are the United States and China. This diversity is largely deliberate, a deliberate strategy to avoid being captured by the internal struggles and excesses of any single national culture. In terms of subject areas, Zuzalu is less diverse: while non-crypto communities are also present and appreciate the experience, the Ethereum community is the clear first mover.

But maybe that’s not a failure: Great diversity isn’t about equally representing society or humanity as a whole, it’s about strategically bringing together and building bridges among groups who might not otherwise care about each other.

What questions are left unanswered?

What this experiment doesn’t do so well is clearly demonstrate where to go next. Balaji’s “Network Nation” does speak to the multi-century history of small-scale “communist societies” in the United States and elsewhere, but it also emphasizes a grand geopolitical vision: the decentralization movement, a twenty-first-century century of non-aligned movement, protecting freedom in an illiberal and highly conflictual world. Perhaps such a movement could even offer a peaceful alternative to the unstable geopolitical poles of China and the United States, however, Zuzalu has no real sense of achieving such a lofty goal.

Many cultural movements—digital nomadism, crypto-anarchism, and more—developed with excitement at first, but have since stabilized and become part of the global political and cultural landscape. They are stable, even important, but ultimately do not change the world once they saturate their base of nature enthusiasts. Will “Zuzalulism” suffer the same fate? In fact, might it be a good thing to tone down your ambitions a bit and let that happen?

It’s easy to think that Zuzaluism in its current form is destined to be quite niche. The community Zuzalu attracted, while impressive, also had clear biases: many attendees were young, few were families with children, and those who came only stayed for a few days, with about a third of attendees are already digital nomads. Thanks to subsidies, many people who are not rich can come, but judging from their personal connections, they are still quite elite.

More broadly, much evidence suggests that large portions of previously static populations rarely start over and move somewhere unless faced with a powerful “push factor” like a true war of conquest to seize their own land. Something else. 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, whose job it was to weaken aggressive forces and set an example for other countries that might do the same. But it is also clear that mass immigration is far from a grand solution to major geopolitical problems.

So that leaves the question: Where do we go from here? History is replete with examples of intentionally staged medium-sized and long-term gatherings that didn’t turn the world upside down but still left a valuable impact. Universities are a good precedent to think about – an ironic precedent given how many of us were keen to disrupt brick-and-mortar universities a decade ago with online MOOC services like Udacity and Coursera, but nonetheless one that is yet to come. well-received precedent.

Monasteries are another example. A few years ago, the philosopher Samo Burja asked why there were no monasteries dedicated to perfecting software, given that many software engineers had made enough money and now aspired to personal spiritual advancement. Ultimately, the Zuzalu community does have higher ambitions than founding universities and monasteries, even if they are lower than fixing global politics. In any case, a model adapted to a new domain is rarely an exact copy of anything specific that came before it.

My own prediction is that Zuzalu will become partly a structure with aspects such as a university, a monastery and a digital nomad center. But it will also introduce entirely 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 places and new societies. That said, there’s still a long way to go. Many roads are unexplored or even unknown, so the journey has only just begun.

Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum.