Vitalik: Governance and membership issues still need to be resolved to realize the concepts of "popup city" and "network states"

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that he still needs to solve at least two major problems — governance and membership — to make his concept of “popup cities” or “network states” viable. Speaking at the Network State 2024 conference in Singapore on September 22, Vitalik explained the theory behind “network states” — a movement for online communities to come together to form physical communities and seek political autonomy. Vitalik reviewed his experiment, called Zuzalu, which involved bringing 200 people, including the Ethereum community, crypto executives, biotech entrepreneurs, and scientific researchers to Montenegro from March to May 2023, with the goal of working together to solve collective problems such as human lifespan. “Bring these people together for 60 days, try to become a city, and then see what happens,” Vitalik said. He said people loved the experience, which included healthy eating, cold diving, and lots of yoga, and that the human element was crucial. However, he added that “it’s not clear what the next move Zuzalu hinted at is,” and that governance issues have not been resolved. Buterin explained that these countries can have their own regulations to serve their citizens and can reject excessive regulation that stifles progress (as seen in the West), but it is not clear from the experiment how to continue to implement these regulations. He said that popup cities are a new medium where you can think ahead "like science fiction." However, he said that productive relationships need to be established between network countries because the tribalism that can be seen on social media today is "zero-sum and ineffective." Vitalik concluded that popup cities have "products that fit the market," but "we have to solve more management and membership issues. To go further from here, the path depends on the goals," he concluded, "even if we have different goals, we should all strengthen cooperation and think carefully about how to cooperate." (Cointelegraph)