What Can a Web3 Popup City Teach Us? by Ali Serag

This is a guest post, first published on Ali Serag's Substack and shared here with permission. The views are Ali's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City.  

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Imagine a city that materializes for just a moment in time — a living laboratory where innovation and human connection converge. What could we learn from such a place? I had the privilege of exploring this question firsthand at Edge City Lanna, a popup village nestled in the lush mountains of Chiang Mai, Thailand, from November 4th to 8th. The event included a hackathon co-sponsored by Flow, this hack wasn’t a regular competition; it was an immersive experiment in reimagining how we live, work, and solve problems. Oh, and high up in these mountains, Vitalik manifested out of nowhere to talk for the first time ever one-on-one with Dieter Shirley, the co-founder of Flow, CryptoKitties and inventer of ‘NFT’.

The Concept of Popup Cities: Accelerators for Community and Innovation

The idea of popup cities is inspired by Zuzalu, a novel initiative that created temporary environments to foster kinship, exchange ideas, and experiment with new societal structures. The popup city emerged in Montenegro in March 2023 and inspired by Balaji’s idea of ‘Network States’, highly aligned online communities that possesses the capacity for collective action, enabling them to crowdfund physical territory globally and ultimately gain diplomatic recognition from existing nation-states. Another one that followed in August 2024 was Aleph in Buenos Aires, that sought to turn Argentina into a global startup and innovation hub, bringing together investors, policy makers, founders and startups together to catalyze how web3 could help address economic challenges the country was facing.

These popup villages act as accelerators for human connection, blending physical and digital interactions in ways that reimagine community and innovation. They are defined by having a temporary fixed duration, being community-driven, thematic and utilizing web3 technologies for things like governance and identity verification. Edge City Lanna carried this ethos forward, bringing together 600 builders, dreamers, and doers from around the world to explore the intersection of technology, culture, and organizational structures — all dedicated to human flourishing.

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Chiang Mai, the former kingdom of Lanna, provided the ideal backdrop. With its cool, breezy evenings, expansive green landscapes, and tranquil pace of life, the city offered a stark contrast to the hustle of metropolises like Bangkok. Everywhere you turned, water lilies graced the rivers and lakes, symbolizing resilience and renewal — fitting themes for a community coming together to innovate.

Chiang Mai marked the third stop on the Flow World Tour, following ETH Singapore and ETH San Francisco. In both previous hackathons, Flow emerged as the most utilized Layer 1 blockchain, but Edge City Lanna was a different beast. This was not a weekend sprint but a weeklong “buildathon,” characterized by open-ended challenges and an atmosphere of creative freedom.

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The builders congregated at the Mövenpick Hotel which buzzed alive with activity. Purple neon lights illuminated the dark and cool hacking space, local cuisine fueled the participants, and lanterns cast a warm glow over late-night brainstorming sessions. We setup an impromptu “Ment000rs” stage, where the Flow team provided hands-on guidance — not just for our projects but for other streams as well as we quickly realized that we were the only sponsor to have dedicated mentors present. I spent the majority of time at the hackathon but some of my team mates like Antoni were able to sneak off into the forest to have bleeding edge conversations with leading researchers like Andy Ayrey around the convergence of AI Agents like Truth Terminal, memes, social experimentation and web3.

One thing I noticed at all these crypto events is that everyone seems to have a cap (usually black?), at the event mine was inscribed with the question “What Real Problems Do You Solve?”, it quickly became became a conversation starter, sparking discussions about building meaningful solutions that truly improve lives — solutions that make the world “flow” better (pun intended).

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Exploring New Frontiers: Building Social Technologies

My focus for the week was on decentralized social applications. Over 6 billion people use social apps riddled with “dark patterns” that exploit human psychology rather than nurture it. We wanted to explore alternatives that prioritize human connection and community-building. Some prompts we provided to help builders ideate were:

• A platform for group collaboration, governance, and event management.
• Incentivizing constructive and community-driven content creation that can be community moderated through decentralized random juries while also being censorship resistant by a single entity.
• Empowering users to control and securely share their data.

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The Flow track attracted brilliant projects like PaKT, which gamifies task completion with friends to build positive habits and stop bad ones, and My28Days, a platform looking to expand as a decentralized women’s health app revolutionizing menopause care.

Outside of our track there were two projects that especially stood out to me:

• The Future I Want A narrative based AI world-building art project that offers a journey into an optimistic future that emphasizes technology progression, environmental harmony, flourishing community, and the simple, profound joy of being alive.
• Zurvivor — A platform that leverages programmable cryptography, information escrows, and knowledge graphs to empower sexual assault survivors to anonymously report their abusers in a safe and secure environment that eliminates first mover disadvantage and related fears that come with speaking out.

These projects were of course all MVPs, there is only so much you can do in just one week, but I’m really excited to explore how we can help bring them to life post-hackathon.

Beyond Building: Popup Cities as Incubators of New Movements

Edge City Lanna wasn’t just about tech. It was a nexus for emerging ideas like creating borderless, self-governing virtual-first nations driven by shared values that extend into the physical realm.

These discussions extended into panels, unconference style sessions that emerged by the day, and informal chats over Muay Thai classes, morning yoga and lantern-lit dinners. I even found myself speaking on impromptu panels about biotech, memecoins, and community. The confluence of ideas reminded me of the idea behind design thinking and how we can come up with creative solutions to tough problems by bringing together people with vastly diverse backgrounds.

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A Reconnection with the Broader Web3 Ecosystem

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One of the most inspiring moments of the week was witnessing Vitalik Buterin and Dieter Shirley, two titans of Web3, share a stage for the first time. I was lucky enough to sit first row and asked both speakers what technological achievement were they most proud of. Vitalik spoke about his pride in Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake, a monumental shift for the industry. Dieter, co-founder of Flow and inventor of the term NFT, reflected on how far we’ve come from Cryptokitties, the power of creating tools by app builders for app builders that meet them where they are at like Cadence and the vast potential ahead. It was the first time ever that these two legends sat side by side and had a public conversation, and hope it was the first of many to come.

In addition to this epic fireside, Dete did talks with Arbitrum and OceanDAO. Jeff Doyle the head of Wallets for Flow did a fireside with Dan Finlay the Founder of Metamask where they discussed the future of wallets in Web3 and I found myself speaking on 6 keynotes and panels spanning everything from decentralized social media to the future of memecoins and biotech.

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What’s Next for Popup Cities?

As I packed up to leave Chiang Mai, I couldn’t help but imagine what could happen if popup cities like Edge City Lanna became the norm — temporary but powerful hubs for innovation, connection, and human flourishing. These cities demonstrate that when you create a space for creativity and collaboration, you unlock solutions that can really change the world.

So I leave you with the same question I started with: what can creating new purpose-driven spaces in your city do to promote human flourishing? Edge City Lanna was a glimpse into a future of how technology can enhance the way we interact with one another, but technology at the end of the day is just a tool. The will to make a difference and the values we want to promote are discussed and instilled off-chain.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn to learn more about web3, startups, community and tech.

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This is a guest post, first published on Ali Serag's Substack and shared here with permission. The views are Ali's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City.