Isla Munro-Hochmayr - Zuzalu Hubs as d/acc and FOSS Accelerators - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Thank you for being here for the last talk of the day. I hope I will keep you awake. Um, I heard I have more time than I thought, so I'll try and make some time for Q&A. I'm Isa. I'm from the Switzerland team.

We're building a network state and future society sandbox in Switzerland. Um, what the heck is this? Um, that is what I aim to tell you about. So we are building a network state a permanent village in Switzerland as an accelerator for open-source and DACK aligned tech. If anyone has heard who's heard of Diaak here actually excellent this is good.

So actually much better than I expected. DAK um there was an essay written by Vitalik two years ago approximately called my techno optimism where he talks about the fact that we need to accelerate technology in a safe way. um technology good, centralization and mind control bad. Um and yeah, a lot a lot to talk about there. But anyway, so um what we're building here is a place where builders can go to build uh a place where anybody uh who really thinks about the long term of technology, humanity, society uh can come and build and accelerate also researches.

Um, we want to build this out as a fund and as importantly as a token economy that aligns the interests of long-term residents, investors and builders. Where did this journey start? So, two, yeah, roughly two years ago, I was at Zuzulu in Montenegro. Uh, Zuzalu was an event that Vitalik pulled together was a pop-up village over two months. And I remember having an a resounding feeling when I was there of this is the group of people.

this if any group of people is the group of people that can actually improve humanity and save us from some of the doom timelines that we're uh actually having. Um and these this imperson village environment was the first time that I as a builder had actually felt like yes I have my place in the world and some people find that in Silicon Valley but I think one Silicon Valley is one place in the world uh two it's very expensive and three not everybody aligns perfectly with the Silicon Valley uh move fast and break things and what we're building with the is more like move fast and try not to break things. So, we're trying to build permanent villages for doing the builder thing without breaking things. Um, and yeah, what this essentially is is a place for people to build uh for people to build ambitious open-source decentralized projects that need a place to coalesce. It's a place for good and important projects that will would normally otherwise face the untenable choice of compromising their values or collapsing.

Um and essentially we're creating a place where builders have freedom to build and collaborate with peers. Why is this so important? So Vitalic outlined in the SEAK essay, we need to build and accelerate the next century, particularly the next decade are critical for deciding our future between one where technology is accelerated, yes, but controlled by singular companies, individuals, wealthy individuals or governments with potentially mal intent. Uh the next decade is really the cho the the decade where we probably have the most chance of a of averting the doom outcomes. And the way that we actually avert those outcomes is by allocating capital to the right things.

As I'm sure you're all aware, hundreds of billions and trillions are already being spent on AI and will be spent on AI um mostly by centralized actors. Web 3 has the chance to actually be the be the group of people, be the movement that accelerates technology in a way that aligns with the act principles, where we look out for privacy, where we look out for decentralization and democratic values, and where we build open source. Who here would like to have a brain computer interface connected and have that brain computer interface be closed source? I'm I'm surprised there's not at least one, but I'm very glad. So open source is definitely important if you're going to have technologies that have control over your brain, right?

And there's a lot such many such examples where it's better to have open- source technology. It's better to have verifiable things and it would be better not to rely on closed source centralized actors. So we need to do something about it. At the same time as we need to do something about it, capital allocation is actually getting harder. Uh you might have noticed that it's even harder now online with all of the AI slop and with all of the people on social media that are just bots to actually figure out who online is real, what is valid, what is worth your attention.

Uh at the same time that it's getting harder, it's actually also becoming more scalable. So you have things like conviction markets, prediction markets, launchpads, etc. Also memecoins where you can either scale the right thing or the wrong thing. So the biggest risk is not overspending but misspending. One way or another the money will be spent.

Do we spend it on the right things or the wrong things? One of my favorite uh writers and bloggers uh Albert Wena has said that we're living in an attention economy. That capital is actually not the bottleneck. Attention is the bottleneck. Um and importantly what how does an attention economy work?

Well, it means you get attention and with that attention you get legitimacy and from that legitimacy follows capital. What we would actually need if we want to allocate capital to the right things is that we start with legitimacy and what is credible and those things create signal and then we allocate capital to those things that are actually credible and have created signal. Um, and two of my favorite people have written about the concept of legitimacy. Vitalik talks about it as a powerful social technology and the fact that we should use it. And Alex Zenko, who's an amazing blogger and has just joined A160 as a partner, writes, "Founders are actually customers for legitimacy."

And this is a super important point. What we're trying to do is support founders. And founders are looking for legitimacy. What do they do with legitimacy? They raise capital.

They get support. They hire people. So legitimacy is actually the critical bottleneck that we need to solve for. And how do we do that? And that is what we essentially with this permanent village are trying to do.

Uh we are trying to be a pilot in Switzerland for what hopefully will be a transnational network of such villages and accelerators. Um and we are trying to work in a way where we design our governance and tokconomics so that legitimacy is actually at the core. It's been really interesting with the Zuzalu pop-ups. We've seen that these physical hubs actually help us to concentrate legitimacy. Um, if you can imag like I stand up here and say something and you go, okay, it creates a little little bit of legitimacy.

But if you spend a month in a pop-up village with 200 other people, the tight social graph that is created between those people becomes really obvious really quickly which people know what they're talking about and are actually building something meaningful and which people are completely full of Um, sorry. I hope that's okay. Um, so what we've realized is a kind of a social technology with these physical hubs that you can use to create lines instead of dots and lines are really important for legitimacy. So the thesis here is we create legitimacy in these physical hubs and then we scale that legitimacy by bringing in things like prediction markets and c and and conviction markets. And we want to actually with our accelerator use conviction markets.

So people that get to know each other, understand each other, build reputation, and then actually can support each other to get capital that way. So why Switzerland as a pilot? Um I've been in Switzerland for 10 years. I am obsessed. I'm a Switzerland maxi.

Uh it's already emerging as Crypto Valley, but it kind of lacks its Stanford. Um it's there's incredible talent. We have ETH, which is like the MIT of Europe. We have EPFL. We have the incredible people at CERN.

It's number one globally in innovation per capita and that for the 20 past 20 years running. Uh there's clear and consistent regulation of web 3. It's not dependent on which which government is in power today. Um and very importantly there's a 700 year history of decentralized governance. Um and what we are kind of calling a deact cultural technology around governance.

Um very interesting most people wouldn't be aware of this is a concept of subsidiarity. In Switzerland, power doesn't come from the federal government. It comes from the individual. Power starts with the individual as the sovereign and is delegated to the community, to the canton, and then to the federal government. And when you're building things where open source, where decentralization matters, that's a really important place to start.

So, we've been working with Vitalic over summer to figure out how could this actually look as a token model. Um our core thinking around this uh and I I want to speed up so I can answer some questions. So our core thinking around this is to have instead of just proof of stake with capital. So I have capital and I stake that and that is the legitimacy. We want to actually have proof of stake with your legitimacy, your reputation, your credibility in the community.

And that's something that we're working on as an innovation to have a kind of hybrid proof of stake proof of proof of legitimacy model. The important thing really is that this is these villages are not going to be things that are just owned purely by investors and that no one that's in them and part of building them has a say in. We want to build these as uh structures where over time the community the cooperative of builders that are there for the long term actually has the vast majority of ownership and say over the outcome of these things. That's a hard thing to do. Dows have shown how hard governance is but we're taking on the challenge.

So what is the core value proposition here? And what is the core value proposition of Silicon Valley? Essentially, it's legitimacy. It's access to talent, investors, experienced adviserss. It's a decent lifestyle, having health and wellness, climate, a nice environment.

Switzerland does well in that. And it's also runway. We need funding, investment for builders. They need a cost of living that's affordable. Switzerland does terribly on cost of living.

That's one area where we're having to like where we have to do the innovation and ease of doing business is important. So how we're imagining this, it's a legitimacy flywheel. Builders gather in Switzerland. They're attracted by a freedom loving country where they can do their thing, build things that are actually aligned with their values. The legitimacy starts concentrating.

There's a social graph that makes it clear who's real and who's building something meaningful. Capital allocates well. Great projects are supported and accelerated. Those things attract even more talent. More successful projects emerge.

The reputation grows. The returns to the endowment fund grow. That endowment fund can sustain the hub and fund even more builders. And then more builders come and the cycle accelerates. That's the vision.

So in May, we built a proof of concept in uh a ski resort called Lux. uh we worked with them where we had 200 people there for a month and very excitingly the ski resort is actually so excited by what we're doing that they've asked us to work with them to bring uh this into a pilot with them and also potentially long-term to bring the entire resort on chain with our ecosystem token. We're working with a number of exciting builders to build out things around identity, around reputation, around prediction markets. And 2026 is about building the MVP. And uh yeah, that's I mean that's it.

We've got big big visions. The long term we want to build our own village really and have the full ownership of the village by the community members. Uh we're working looking at real estate cooperatives and things like that. Um but yeah, I have a couple of seconds so uh like two minutes. So if anyone has questions, I would love to answer them.

Yeah, thank you. Very bullish on what you've said. You've also explained why Switzerland as well. Just curious. Um so a startups struggle with uh raising capital, right?

That's one of the problems you're solving. But where would the initial capital come in from?

It's a great question and that is definitely the hard part. We need to essentially bootstrap an endowment fund together. Um that's where it matters to us that we're building a token model that people believe in and that they can buy into this token model and say we believe in this that creates an additional original endowment that can then um sort of scale and be reinvested and and hopefully grow. At the same time, I think we are also thinking about things like for-profit funds that can be related in this ecosystem, but we have to be quite careful not to imbalance it. So that then the whole thing just becomes about profit, which we've already done before.

And just a second question, right, one of the things uh we're also solving for is uh the cost of living. Uh is it more expensive since it's a top ski resort? And a small question is is there a gym at the ski resort? Is there a gym at a

there's a ski resort? Again,

there's a gym. There is a great gym. There's also a sauna. Um, important to a lot of people, there's also a cold plunge in the river. Um, sorry, the first part of the question was about the cost of living.

Um, the the ski resorts working with us. They're doing a yeah, strategic partnership essentially to make it affordable for us to pilot this with them and longterm we hope that we will even build new resorts with them.

Thank you.