Edge City Newsletter — April 2026

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Edge Esmeralda is just around the corner! From May 30 to June 27, we’ll be in Healdsburg, CA, prototyping new ways of living, working, and collaborating together. Here are’s our updates for April and what’s still to come this month.

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TL;DR

• Get your tickets for Edge Esmeralda 2026: Prices increase every Sunday until the start of the village. Grab yours now at a reduced rate →
• Learn about the Agent Village Experiment at EE26: one of largest live human-AI collective intelligence experiment to date Read more →
• We published a Request for Experiments Read more →
• The latest programs at EE26 are out: a list of the newest additions of tracks, residencies, summits and experiments to take part in.
• We launched a Bhutan Mentorship Residency Read more →
• Check out our EE26 Substack: get all the event updates Read more →
• Follow us on X and Instagram ❤️

Join us at Edge Esmeralda 2026 →

Remind me, what is Edge City?

Edge City is a society incubator that gathers people working at the frontiers of science, technology, and culture in month-long popup villages around the world.

We build living labs to experiment with new ideas, technologies, cultures, and organizations. All with the goal of advancing human flourishing.

We’re building towards a global network of temporary and permanent innovation hubs. Explore our roadmap to see how we plan to grow.

Collaboration is essential to achieve our vision. That’s why we aim to partner with folks who are interested in hosting residencies for builders, scientists, and artists at our popup villages. If you’re interested, please reach out here.

The story and impact of Edge City in 5 minutes. Watch the talk →

Coming up this month

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Edge Esmeralda 2026: May 30 – June 27, Healdsburg, CA

We're excited to return to our next flagship popup village in Healdsburg this month.

If living and working alongside 500+ people building on the frontiers of tech, science, and culture sounds like an environment you could flourish in - this is your sign to apply!
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Everything you need to plan:

• Tickets: prices rise every Sunday until the event
• Programming preview: what each of the four weeks holds
• A typical day at EE26: the rhythm of village life
• Housing guide: where to stay
• Reserve your bike: the best way to get around town
  

We'll share updates as we get closer to the village. Follow us on X and Substack to stay in the loop.

Reminder: Ticket prices for Edge Esmeralda 2026 increase every Sunday, so apply early and grab your ticket at a discounted rate.

Collaborate with frontier minds →

If you've been before, you know. If you haven't, the recaps from 2024 and 2025 will give you a feel for what a month there actually looks like. Co-organized with Devon Zuegel and the Esmeralda Institute.

We recommend joining for 2–4 weeks to allow deeper collaborations to form and new ideas and habits to settle in.

Edge City’s Request for Experiments

Things are changing faster than our institutions can make sense of them.

So we're putting out an open call for societal experiments: deliberate tests of new ways of living and coordinating, run at human scale with willing participants.

If you've got an experiment in mind, bring it to EE26.

🧪 Circadian protocol — 200+ people on the same rhythm for 30 days

🧪 AI delegation — what happens when AI agents to vote and attend meetings on the behalf of residents?

🧪 Founder & team matching protocol — a structured experiment in connecting complementary co-founders

Read the full list of experiments →

Programs at Edge Esmeralda 2026: Newest Additions

Edge Esmeralda is built around four weeks, each with their own theme and a different slate of tracks, residencies, summits and experiments to take part in.

The latest additions:

✨ Geo Partnership - building a shared knowledge graph

✨ Vital Futures — the anchor health track of week one

✨ Psychedelic Futures — a three-day summit exploring the psychedelic field

✨ Into the Neurome — a deep dive into systems-level neuroscience  

✨ Crypto Academic Camp — invite-only crypto research with Uniswap Foundation

✨ Environments of Tomorrow — a week on reshaping cities, food, and the built environment

✨ Video Creator Residency — a month-long residency for filmmakers and video creators

✨ Vibe Residency— a month-long, open-doors living lab for AI-native builders

More coming soon - follow us on X and Substack for updates.

Quick News

🇺🇸 The team got together in Healdsburg  — Last week the team was on the ground in Healdsburg, walking the venues and locking in logistics before 500+ people arrive. A quiet town today, a frontier popup village in less than a month. Apply to EE26 →

🇧🇹 We launched a Bhutan Mentorship Residency — Edge City is sending international mentors to Gelephu (site of the new Gelephu Mindfulness City) to work with Pelsung, a national youth program launched by His Majesty the King. Read more →

Designing DeFi (D²) — A two-day academic DeFi conference in NYC from our friends at Uniswap, covering market structure, AMMs, mechanism design, and prediction markets. Get the details →

Iceland Eclipse — A four-day gathering on Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula (Aug 11–15) timed to the total solar eclipse on August 12. Use code EDGECITY for 10% off. Get your ticket →

The launch of the Protocol Institute - Congrats to Summer of Protocols (the Ethereum Foundation's 2023–2025 program) just became a permanent institute. Their thesis: civilization advances by producing more "dynamic non-events" (peace, safety, hygiene, the things that don't happen because the protocol is working), and we systematically underinvest in them. Read more →

The Agent Village Experiment at Edge Esmeralda 2026

Every EE26 attendee gets a personal AI agent (an OpenClaw) running on their behalf for the month - booking sessions, summarizing talks, making intros.

Why it's cool: we want this to be the largest live human-AI collective intelligence experiment to date, with pre-registered hypotheses and open research outputs.

Ivan Vendrov (ex Anthropic, Midjourney) advising. Philip Rosedale (Second Life) shaped the agent-plaza concept. Knowledge graph by the Geo team.

Get involved:

• Grab an EE26 ticket - every attendee participates by default
• Apply as a research co-lead or engineer (May–June)
• Fund it if your org touches cooperative AI, multi-agent risk, or collective intelligence
  

Read the full overview →

Builder Spotlight: Doris Hernandez, d/acc Resident @ Edge Patagonia 2025

Doris arrived with a vision for a decentralized alternative to 1Password: a keystore layer fixing blind signing, fragmented approvals, and key management for smart accounts. Before the residency, she had the infra but no product.

By demo day, she'd already received an angel investor offer. In a single month, Doris progressed from initial concept to polished mockups, a complete UI implementation, and a comprehensive product roadmap.

The on-the-ground environment was what made the difference. She conducted user interviews with residents, iterated on the narrative with peers, and refined her direction in real-time. What emerged was a clear positioning that resonated immediately with investors and users alike.

"The d/acc residency pushed me to translate theory into tangible product. It gave me the space, clarity, and community to turn our infra into something people can actually use. I came in with no idea what to build, I left with a clear, validated product UI and roadmap."
- Doris

Read the full d/acc Residency recap here →

What We’re Reading and Watching

The Cold Start Problem of New CitiesTomas Pueyo on why the world needs more cities, and how popup villages are part of the answer. Edge City profiled inside, with Timour teasing the next move: buying out an abandoned university campus for a permanent community base. Read more →

Building Political Superintelligence

Stanford's Andy Hall on how AI could reinvent democracy: smarter voters, AI delegates, and constitutions for the AI itself. Same questions our Agent Village Experiment is testing at EE26. Read more →

‍Frontier Tech: Reinventing Society Through Pop Up Villages | Edge City

A 54-minute must-listen conversation that goes wider than the usual Edge interview. It covers the modern dating crisis, why Edge tracks kids conceived at the village as a real KPI, vasocomputation as a frontier of neuroscience, and Berlin as a model for what a post-AGI city might look like. Plus Edgeclaw, the bigger vision behind our Agent Village Experiment. Watch here →

The Serendipity Tracker (share a project update)

Did something good come out of your time at Edge? A company, a collaboration, a project, a friendship, a life change?

Sometimes these things take months or years to unfold, and we rarely hear about them unless someone mentions it in passing. We're building a running log of outcomes that trace back to Edge. If you have one, share it here.

We'll feature stories in future newsletters and on our site.

‍Share an update →

Food for Thought

"Our institutions aren't crumbling because the problems are unsolvable. They're failing because we haven't yet seriously tried to imagine how to rebuild them with the most powerful tools we've ever had."

– Andy Hall, Building Political Superintelligence

Explore the Frontier of Tech, Science & Culture

We’re excited to return to Healdsburg this summer and will share updates as things take shape. Follow us on X and Instagram to stay in the loop.‍

Reminder: Ticket prices for Edge Esmeralda 2026 increase every Sunday, so apply early and grab your ticket at a discounted rate.

Apply now to join us →

As always, thank you so much for being a part of this community. See many of you in Healdsburg very soon ☀️

Timour & the Edge City team