Zuzopolis
#004 · Tivat, Montenegro · founded by Vitalik Buterin
“Public goods are sacred.”
An open-source civilization. All work funded by retroactive grants. All laws compiled to source. All disputes resolved on chain.
Ethereum researchers, longevity scientists, anyone who has ever shipped a public good for free.
🇲🇪Tivat, Montenegro
Zuzalu happened in Tivat for a reason: cheap real estate, EU adjacency, a government willing to write a Crypto Valley framework. The successor polity gets a year-round campus there, plus seasonal pop-ups in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and Chiang Mai. The Adriatic coast is the headquarters; the diaspora is the body.
The moral case.
Ethereum proved the technical case for credibly neutral infrastructure. Zuzalu proved the social case for credibly neutral community. The third leg is a civic case: a polity that writes its laws as smart contracts and funds its public goods with retroactive grants. Vitalik already has the trust capital. The substrate is built.
From idea to polity.
- 01Convert the Zuzalu campus in Tivat into a year-round residency
- 02Launch retroactive public goods funding rounds quarterly, in collaboration with Optimism Collective
- 03Charter an Ethereum-native court system for member-state disputes
- 04Publish the Zuzopolis Charter as a forkable smart contract
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta with the first 5,000 ratified citizens
Why I sent you this link.
I have lived at Network School for over a year. I have watched the network state thesis go from a book to a real, lived experiment. I have seen Balaji put it to work, and I have seen what is missing.
The missing piece is a federation. A meta-layer that gives every distinct community a constitutional home, a shared census, an interoperable passport, an anthem, and a way to recognize each other as legitimate.
That is what Interneta is. The United States of Interneta. The optimistic meta-layer for network states.
Zuzopolis is what I think you would build, if you decided to build one. The One Commandment is what I have inferred from your public work. The site scout, the next steps, the citizenry: all educated guesses. They are wrong wherever you say so.
If any of this lands, I would love a fifteen-minute conversation. If none of it lands, I would still love your reply telling me where I missed.