Residency Report: Highlights and Outcomes - Buenos Aires 2025

My name is Charlotte K. I'm the producer of the funding the commons residency in Buenosiris. Uh we just wrapped three weeks uh of uh collaboration, of friendship, uh of late night debugging and uh 3 a.m. sessions on how to uh fix the world's most pressing issues.

Uh it was a lot of fun, but also a lot of uh hard and uh meaningful work. And uh yes, James just joined us. Perfect. Um and for those who don't know what the residencies are about, uh basically we bring together uh builders, uh developers, entrepreneurs, uh academics, and uh ecosystem leaders. And uh we bring them in this container and in this uh very multi-disciplinary uh environment.

They engage in peer-to-peer learning. Uh but we also bring top-notch uh mentors, people who actually uh build things that matter such as Roger Dingeldine uh who was with us the first week. He's the co-founder and lead architect of uh the tour project and he's going to be speaking in this stage uh just before lunch this morning. So I really highly encourage you to catch his talk. Um but uh yes, this residency is uh really uh an intense container.

It's a lot of fun. It's very energizing. It's also challenging. Uh what also we trying to do is to have a strong culture of accountability. Our uh residents are sharing uh their goals publicly.

They have to share their updates regularly and we really try to uh create this um gentle productive pressure to make sure that they keep uh making uh tangible progress on their um projects and um yes. So we have with us uh today Stephie uh Stephie Pereira from she's a founder of uh XYZ data science uh we have our other resident Sarah Johnstone who is the co-founder of uh really founder which is a crowd uh founding platform for refugees and we have our very own CTO of funding the commons James Varrell um so before you start we start u I would like to ask James maybe if you have any other comments you want to add to the residency on why we do the residencies and uh what challenges we're trying to tackle.

Thank you, Charlotte. Uh yes, uh residencies are super important actually. Uh I came to learn during our residency that a lot of the early ideas of protocol labs uh were established during such sort of similar circumstances in California. Uh indeed uh Juan Bennett spent a lot of time in places like this and indeed Vitalik actually visited uh on the way also and we know also that Vitalik um himself spent a lot of time co-living uh with certain different types of communities. So I mean we have an established history of the value of spending immersive time surrounded by people who are forward thinking.

Uh it's certainly a process of upgrading for everybody who's there to be able to to teach each other and to learn and to share. I mean everyone has different perspectives of life and experience and different skills and knowledge that they can share with each other. And there's a certain type of magic which can happen when you have these conversations late into the night uh like until 3:00 in the morning with Roger Dingle every night and then wake up the next day and are able to continue these conversations over breakfast. So you have this like longlasting deepening uh that takes place that can only really happen under such uh such a container. Um actually uh I would love to riff on that like uh for our residents like what's the piece of advice you received from a mentor or from a peer that uh really helped you uh push your project forward?

Any of you?

I'm happy to start. So I like many of the residents was really fortunate to spend a few days with Roger and one of the conversations that really impacted me uh was Roger was really challenging me to think about how I'm building infrastructure and either reinforcing or disrupting power structures and I really appreciated this perspective and also just his insights. Uh to have him in the container for 5 days was um actually pretty life-changing I think for a lot of us. Um but he he really has created such a meaningful network with you know eight million users a day. We'll hear from him more later but to have someone like that in our container um challenging us and pushing us and asking critical questions uh for us as entrepreneurs at early stages of building uh was really influential for me.

Yeah, for me um a little context. I was doing research on time back uh return on the in on the grants giving for giving by web 3 ecosystems to projects. So basically time back return on uh funding uh and I arrived at at the residency in an inflection point because I have done research and I was in a point that I I couldn't see it being scalable. I couldn't see it being applied in other places and I was basically deciding to move on with another topic and uh talking uh with James and other people that have worked in opensource uh software um I had this a lot of ideas and having their expertise that's something that I don't have because I have always like worked in in closed source um uh companies uh really helped me understand that like the way that I was going was not like a a really nice way like it it would not like have a lot of uh return and actually brought me back to my research and figuring out how to unlock scalability on the methodologies that I trying to apply.

Thank you. Uh another question that I want to ask uh is what connections or collaborations you feel will survive uh this residency and uh I actually want to ask you Sarah because you've been a collaboration monster. It's been really funny to watch you every week, every few days you were like coming up uh with new collaboration with our residents. Uh so yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah.

So, I think for me the residency was really successful in that I was able to enroll a lot of residents into understanding the problem that I'm trying to solve, which is getting aid into refugee communities. And I think that enrolling people in that problem and having more minds thinking about that was really critical. So, there were a few invaluable partnerships that I made. Uh, one was with a cryptographer. We're experimenting with a digital artifact that I'm very excited to showcase actually today, later today.

Um, and we'll use this as a fundraising mechanism for refugee communities. Also, I had a designer from Logos that was in the residency, um, who was working with me on an ongoing basis and helping me with user journeys and design mechanisms and rapid prototyping. And that is really invaluable too to be able to do that in such a confined space. Um I also had the relay ID team who was there. This is a side collaboration project with human wallet and Hollenum and uh our partners Ruffite and this was the first time we were all in the space together.

So we were able to ensure that we're building interoperable solutions and have a lot of conversations around shared learnings um and ensuring we're building the capacity of the larger container around this uh problem of the you know aid to aid in the humanitarian aid crisis right now.

Beautiful. Uh and Stephie maybe do you want to share some um concrete um achievements that you've done during the residency like uh be specific you know what exists now that didn't exist uh a few weeks ago.

Yeah. So as I have said I I was in that inflection point that I didn't understand if I could uh apply the research in different ecosystems and um I I was like about to give up and and and try another topic and in the residency like because it it's hard to understand how much u validation you get from being the residency and how much connection you can get. So I could connect with uh connections from people that were there to validate the u the need for that research and then from there I understood what was like blocking the the the scalability and I I'm I could I could like develop a script and not going to talk about the code here but something that automates uh a key point of the the model that I I need to apply. So right now I have this this this piece that can like put together can let me uh scale uh the research to other uh ecosystems too.

Thank you. Um and I feel like that brings me to think about uh how do we measure the impact of uh residencies because I think uh they are really catalyst for people and for projects but uh sometimes uh it's a bit intangible to uh measure the impact and uh James uh came up with a great solution for this. I would love you to talk more about it please.

Yeah this is my third residency and it's my responsibility to tell the datadriven story of the success of the residency. So I this year decided to try to make my life easy and push responsibility down uh or across to other people. And so we built a platform which the residents could then use in order to document their projects. And you can imagine some kind of nearly social media-esque looking thing where you have the ability to have a profile for yourself that you own that you can take ownership of and expand on and a place to add your different projects and to give different updates on these things and you can comment and like. This was super interesting because it allowed us to create a datadriven graph of impact where we can see that um Sarah made an update here.

It's a log in time. I can like this. I can comment on this. And this is a sort of indication of quality. And over time we were able to build this out also through uh being able to thank each other in a telegram channel which was then also adding this data into the database.

And so over time we've built out this kind of impact graph of impact within the residency but also the interactions between people in the residency because this is where where the real value comes. You know we've heard people talk about this how um you can have a cryptographer helping you in your project. You can have a a builder helping you with a PC but how do you even document that or how do you even reflect that in a way that uh the impact of this is taken forward into the success of the project. So it was an early foray into the experimentation of what could be possible around documentation. We had an AI generated way of um assigning metrics, impact metrics for each of your projects.

So you could go there and click a button and it would send your description and your updates into an LLM along with our database of hundreds of impact metrics. It would automatically select those for you and generate new ones if they didn't exist. And then this is on the road to the sort of air quotes later destination. I didn't want to say final destination but we're bu we're generating a hyperboard out of the residency right now. Uh which is essentially a collection you can imagine like a billboard basically.

Um which is a collection of hyperserts which are generalized impact certificates. Um this generalized impact certificate was actually being built during the residency also the V2 of that and this is a project which came out of protocol labs uh which essentially aims to bridge the funding gap between early stage research and venture capital because a lot of you know research is done papers are created and then later on in the story venture capitalists are able to kind of fund early stage projects for example but there is this funding gap And this is particularly problematic in the public good space where we are absolutely focused. So these impact certificates are built as a mechanism to bridge that gap in order to allow people to contribute early to projects and be attached to the future success of those projects. So we're building these hyperserts into the platform itself. The project of hyperserts exists outside of the platform but the idea is to build that into the platform and then the data that backs these hyperserts that backs these impact certificates will actually be the data that's gathered during the residency and this will later be put into a sort of federated web 2.

5 uh storage place that's not a database uh that's called at proto at proto is the underlying infrastructure that's used for blue sky which is a social media platform that's you know an alternate to x.com for example but at proto itself is not specific to this kind of twitter or this x.com or blue sky use case it's a more generic social graph uh technology uh upon which you can build any sort of uh social media so we're super excited about this technology we feel that the future of uh social graphs and social tech uh is absolutely vital to the future and so super excited to have worked with the Hyperserts B team who was building B2 within the residency have them embedded with us have them working directly with people in the residency and super excited to kind of build out this prototype of what documentation of impact could look like in a transparent verifiable way.

Thank you so so much James. Uh yeah you really nailed it with this platform. It really helps to streamline the event uh production of residencies but track impact and also gamify uh collaboration. So really good job. Uh I think it's probably time to wrap up this segment on the residency.

Um if you want to see a concrete output of the residency, I really uh invite you to come at 4:35. Uh we're going to talk about a life case that we've done with some of our residents and a local NGO called Muarez Dosmil uh who give micro credits to women entrepreneurs and uh we run a life case uh in IAE business school with Ector Rosha the director of the IE business school and it's really a beautiful illustration of the type of uh connections and collaboration that this residency is meant uh to unlock. So if you want to see a concrete example of a beautiful multi multistakeholder collaboration uh please meet me here at 4:35. Thank you so much Sarah, Stephie and James and see you this afternoon. Thank you.