Vitalik Buterin Discusses The 2-Month Zuzalu Experiment

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. But here today on Bankless, we are exploring some new frontiers, new frontiers in new technologies, all of which seem poised to completely revolutionize the world and change everything about the operating system that society is currently running on. In fact, there are as many as five other technologies out there that are all accelerating in progress. And while each one of these new technologies are pioneering into their respective frontiers, they're also all beginning to converge with each other. The intersections of these various frontiers are fertile grounds for massive disruption of the status quo. AI, longevity, synthetic biology, network states and coordination, and zero knowledge cryptography. Each of these are paradigm-changing technological frontiers, and each of these industries are in various stages of development and maturity. But Bankless Nation, I'm here to tell you that each one of these frontier technologies is a tidal wave coming for society. The crypto wave hit society in 2021. Now society is learning how to deal with this nascent but powerful technology. And society is in the middle of being hit with the AI wave now in 2023, and that wave only appears to be growing in size. The waves of synthetic biology, longevity, network states, zero knowledge cryptography, and other technology frontiers are still to come. This was the main subject of a two-month-long experiment called Zuzalu. Bankless viewers who are watching the background of my podcast shift in the last two months will notice I was gone from my Brooklyn apartment for two months. I was in Montenegro of all places at this thing called Zuzalu. Zuzalu was an experiment in a temporary community. The idea here is that we have crypto conferences or conferences in general, which are between two and twenty thousand people for anywhere between two days to a week. And then there are hacker houses, which are 20 people for even as long as a year. Zuzalu was an experiment in a specific arena of both size of people, number of people, and lengths of stay. So Zuzalu was 200-ish people for two months of time, and then also about 600 more people that would come in for shorter term stays, like one to two weeks during specific themed weeks. Zuzalu is a brainchild of Vitalik Buterin, but it was really a holistic effort of many different individuals from across many different industries, and also individuals who were adept at community building itself. It was simultaneously a place for different frontier technologies to come together and discuss and collaborate and cross-pollinate, while also producing this experiment in what a temporary short-term community looks like, something in the middle of a network state, a coordination, a digital nation that manifests physically in the world for two months at a time. So like I said, every single week as usual had a theme: longevity week, synthetic biology week, new cities and network states, AI and crypto, public goods, zero knowledge cryptography, digital tribes, and QWERTY nations. The idea behind Zuzalu is that residents were staying there for the entire eight-week period, and residents would watch hundreds of visitors cycle through to have their week-long sets of talks, panels, and workshops. While the visitors of Zuzalu were able to present their respective work and industry to people across vastly different other industries, the benefits of this are huge because some of these technologies have never really had a meaningful meeting place before. For many of the industry leaders here, Zuzalu was the first opportunity for them to meet their fellow industry professionals, but not just other professionals inside their own industry, but founders, researchers, and builders across other industries who can bring unique perspectives and knowledge to the table in order to cross-pollinate, spread knowledge beyond internal walls, and optimize for serendipity by just including new people from new industries. And then the community aspect of this made this especially unique because having cross-industry conferences is one thing, but this was a cross-industry, two-month-long community. We lived together, we ate breakfast together, we all became friends, and that level of cross-pollination is just so much deeper and lasting than what a three-day or week-long conference could even bring. So Bankless Nation, this was Zuzalu. And here's what you can expect from Zuzalu content. My first conversation that you're going to hear is this one with Vitalik Buterin, which we will get to in just a second. And we'll talk about some of the philosophy and ideas and meaning and purpose behind Zuzalu. What it is, what he thinks it is, what it can be, what other people think it can be. Really, the question of what is Zuzalu is embodied in the question itself. There is no answer. It's up to us. And eventually, the idea is that Zuzalu spirals into a headless movement where maybe soon there is a Zuzalu near you. I recorded 18 different interviews at Zuzalu from all across the different industries that had representation there. These interviews range from 20 minutes to up to a full hour. These topics of conversations range from synthetic biology to AI to crypto in Africa to how to live forever to even conversations about Zuzalu itself, like this one. Some of these are very much crypto conversations. A lot of these are only crypto conversations if you use your imagination. So to understand the significance of each of these episodes, I want to share my biggest takeaway that I got from Zuzalu, and that's this: Ethereum and crypto is the eldest sibling of a bunch of frontier technologies. It's alone in this room waiting for its fellow siblings to grow up. AI is actually recently of age, so now crypto and AI are starting to be able to play together. Decentralized science will help longevity and synthetic biology come into the fold. The episode with Boris and Mikey will help illustrate that. Digital nations have a lot of work to do, and my episode with Primavera de Filippi will show you that way. Network states and new cities, there is an immense new need for competitiveness in governance over our physical countries and cities. When we get a bunch of new cities in the world, where are they going to find financial and governance tools ready out of the box? Well, Ethereum, of course. In my conversation with Nicholas, will guide you through this world. So while crypto is currently going toe-to-toe with the old world of securities law and nation state regulation, it is simultaneously stuck waiting for its future use cases across other frontier technologies to grow up and mature. But the biggest takeaway that I got, Bankless Nation, is that as all of these other frontier technologies grow up, and yes, crypto is not the only frontier technology that's up there, they are going to need Ethereum. They are going to need open, public, permissionless blockchain rails. They are going to need secure block space. The rapidity and speed of innovation and progress in the crypto space matches some of the innovation and speed and progress and just paradigm-shifting technologies being built elsewhere. The frontier technical nature of all of these industries will bring them together. So meanwhile, here Ethereum sits alone, fighting with its parents, the nation-states, the regulators, the old world, while its younger tech siblings are still too nascent to give it support. But Bankless Nation, I guarantee you that day will eventually come where each one of these technologies will impact your life. Zuzalu was a taste of the future. Everyone and everything at Zuzalu felt like they got beamed in from 20 years in the future to show the rest of Zuzalians how the future will look from their vantage point. The longevity people tell us of an inevitable future in which the option to live forever is a choice that you can make. The network state people show us a future of fluid human migration and citizenship across the globe. Synthetic biology people tell us about a future in which we can grow buildings and vehicles and materials out of organic material, and that material can self-repair and self-propagate. Everyone at Zuzalu was a futurist, and I would also add that everyone had a resigned note of optimism. Resigned specifically, though, as in everyone looked at the future and they see a paradigm-shifting technology that could improve the human condition at a very deep level, and then they also see these seemingly impossible obstacles that get in our way: governments, dystopia, malicious use of the technology. No one in Zuzalu was naive about the trials that each individual industry faces. In fact, one of the main purposes of Zuzalu was to collaborate on how to get over these obstacles together. But no one at Zuzalu was a quitter. All the researchers, builders, and founders at Zuzalu, if they were given the one true ring, they would all take it to Mordor or die trying. So we're going to release these conversations over the next few weeks and months on the podcast and the YouTube. So treat these conversations as Zuzalu as a sort of choose your own adventure. So this is an opportunity for you to speed date other frontier technologies beyond crypto, because eventually all of these technologies will converge together on Ethereum, and that's what I see. Ethereum offers solutions, offers scaffolding, offers a place for other frontier technologies to collaborate and communicate and build upon. So this is why we're doing this. And every single episode of Bankless, we tell you this is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. These Zuzalu conversations are how to get started with other frontier technologies, technologies that are on a collision course with society. If you listen to these conversations and understand their implications, you'll be ready and you won't be surprised when these tidal waves of technological innovations start colliding with the world that we live in. If you want to learn more and just experience more at Zuzalu, in front of every single theme of an episode, whether it's an episode about network states or AI, I will give you the taste of Zuzalu during that week. What was it like? What was Zuzalu like during AI week? Because Zuzalu was different during AI week than when it was a synthetic biology week or network state week. Each community, each set of founders and builders and researchers kind of brought their own vibe, and also the community of Zuzalu progressed and developed. So Zuzalu itself as a digital nation that manifested for two months is also part of this frontier technology. So if you are interested in explicitly learning more about Zuzalu, they will be contained in the intros to every single episode. 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As we speak, people are packing up their apartments, their hotel rooms, and getting in their planes to go home. And it has been a long two months. Vitalik, we'll start this interview at the end because it is the end of this journey of trying to figure out what Zuzalu is. Do you feel like that you have come to an answer as to what Zuzalu is?

When the original ideas of Zuzalu came to be in your brain and in other people's brains about what this could be like, was there any original intent? Like what was the main goals before people actually arrived at this place that we now call Zuzalu?

You said what comes out of that, this space of 200 people for two months. What do you think something like Zuzalu, what are the emergent characteristics that can come out of this landscape of size and time of 200-ish people for two months of time? What's unique about that setup?

You said there are 200 people here at Zuzalu, but I think something like 800 or 900 have actually come through Zuzalu over the two months. In addition to the different neighborhoods that you've called them, like you have the longevity people and the ZK people and the Ethereum people, that has created some sort of emerging cross-pollination. But also from my experience from the last few months, there seems to be even though it was just months, seasons that came and went, because weeks had themes and different people came to populate what was Zuzalu at a different time. What do you think was the benefit or net product of this dynamic of 200 people here at one given point but 800 people over the eight weeks?

For people who want to know what Zupass is, Zupass is kind of like a passport, except for Zuzalu, a two-month-long passport that works inside of this community. But it is now infrastructure that future Zuzalus or future other temporary communities can also use. So it was this dynamic passport that could change, but then also you could collect stamps. The interesting thing about it, I'll make it clear to viewers that this is not the same as a coveted vaccine card, is the zero knowledge aspect. If I can take out my Zupass right now, I open up the visual passport thing on my browser, and I get this. It's basically a QR code, and that QR code contains a zero knowledge proof, a standard SNARK, which proves that I am a member of the set of Zuzalu residents without revealing which one I am. A bunch of interesting apps were built on this. There was Zupoll, which had polls where only Zuzalu residents could vote but the votes were anonymous and only once. And then Zucast, which was a Twitter where all the accounts were numbered and only if you were a Zuzalu resident could you get one numbered account. A lot of really fun online stuff happened. They were used for physical gatekeeping for events when capacity got limited as well. And then there are stamps, which are the Zupass equivalents of POAPs. I was a cook for one of the community dinners and I got a POAP saying that I'm a cook. I'll be getting one for being on the Bankless podcast here at Zuzalu. There's a bunch of really nice POAPs that have been going around.

The next thing I was hoping to ask about is there's all of these different fields of thought, fields of study that came to be at Zuzalu. Interestingly, I wouldn't really call this an Ethereum focused event. There were many, many Ethereum people here, but like you said, there were synthetic biology people, longevity people, network state people, AI people, public goods people who were very much Ethereum people, ZK people who were very much Ethereum people. But I wouldn't really call it an Ethereum event. What kind of thought went into the selection process of what kind of topics were going to be here at Zuzalu?

While I said this didn't really feel like an Ethereum event, the undertones of this whole thing was very Ethereum. The residents that stayed for two months were disproportionately crypto people. To say that first there was synthetic biology week and then longevity week and then AI week kind of doesn't do the service of talking about all the cross-pollination that happened. Can you talk about what happened from your experiences, the cross-pollination and the value that came out of having all of these different communities kind of churned together?

One experience I had while all of these different seasons kind of came and went was learning that every single one, regardless of what it was, the longevity people, the network state people, the AI people, the ZK people, they all have a very practical and understood way that that connects to Ethereum. Every single one has like, 'Oh, this is the way that these two industries could build together.' In this current moment in crypto, we are once again in the bear market, and in bear markets we tend to soul search. Yet again, our meme coins are dominating the Twitter zeitgeist of the moment, which has left a lot of the long-term believers once again frustrated that this is what this industry is at least at the cursory level, the top-down level. The reflection, the learning moment that I've had, I'm wondering if you have felt anything similar, is that Ethereum seems to be in crypto at large, I think, is like the eldest of a bunch of frontier technologies that has grown up first. AI I think is now also coming of age. But when we talk about network states, where are all of these new charter cities or new network states or new coordinations going to get their Wall Street? Where are they going to get their financial infrastructure? It's going to be crypto. Decentralized science, Ethereum offers a foundation for this industry. Same thing with synthetic biology and all of these emergent new technologies. There all seems to be a very good hook into Ethereum. So one of the biggest takeaways that I've had from Zuzalu for me personally is just that Ethereum and crypto at large seems to be the eldest of many sibling technologies, and it's just looking around waiting for all the other ones to grow up. I'm wondering if you have any reflections on that conclusion.

That's exactly why I would kind of bisect between the knowledge side of Zuzalu, the tracks that we've been talking about, but then also, like you said, two months is your life, so there's a social life side of things. I'm wondering what you think for you personally. Everyone got to experience Zuzalu their life at Zuzalu, how Zuzalu would change their life for their own because it was a choose your own adventure for what you wanted to make out of Zuzalu. How did the social milieu and what Zuzalu is, how did that, what did you really get out of that personally?

What were you able to achieve at Zuzalu that you wouldn't have been able to achieve without it?

Many people are getting on flights today and tomorrow and are largely going to be out of Zuzalu. What are you going to miss the most about Zuzalu?

So Zuzalu is coming to an end, but there's this desire for everyone to see more of it. Do you have any aspirations or ideas about what Zuzalu could become? What could Zuzalu be in its maximally manifested state?

What do you want your role to be as Zuzalu develops into something bigger?

Like I said, we're at the last day of Zuzalu. People are packing up their bags, but yesterday we had a community moment of reflection and we all tried to come together to come to consensus about what are the values of Zuzalu, what does it mean to be a Zuzalian. I'm wondering what your perspective is on that question. What does it mean to be a Zuzalian?

Vitalik, thank you for being trusting enough of humanity to be able to cast off all of these things into the hands of humans that can do a variety of things to whatever is thrown their way. I appreciate it. And thank you, David, for continuing to steward the Bankless Nation. This is the West, this is the IKEA frontier, this is the absolute unknown. You could lose all of your assets and all of your sanity, but for those of us who have been here, it is and I expect will continue to be a wonderful journey. Thank you very much.