This article presents Regen Villages, a research exploration funded by Allo Capital that investigates pop-up microeconomies as a mechanism for cosmo-local commoning during global conferences. The experiment took place during Devconnect Buenos Aires (November 16–23, 2025) and explored how temporary, community-owned infrastructures—such as shared treasuries, commitment pools, and cultural coordination—can support trust-building between local and global actors. Using a combination of onchain data analysis and qualitative feedback analyzed through Reflexive Thematic Analysis, the study examines both material exchanges and affective outcomes such as emotional safety, belonging, and learning. Findings suggest that repeated, embodied experiences of commoning can generate cultural capital, facilitate non-extractive global–local collaboration, and offer an alternative to transactional conference dynamics. Regen Villages are proposed as a repeatable design pattern for cultivating cosmo-local communities of practice across geographies.

This article presents a research exploration funded by Allo Capital titled Regen Villages: Pop-up Microeconomies for Event-Based Communities. The exploration began on August 24th, 2025, and culminated in a live experiment held during the Devconnect conference in Buenos Aires, between November 16th and 23rd, 2025.

The research explores whether Ethereum conferences can function as stages for cosmo-local commoning, enabling participants to collectively allocate resources, coordinate shared logistics, and build trust across local and global contexts. The guiding hypothesis of the experiment is:

If Ethereum conferences are used as stages for cosmo-local experiences and shared resource allocation, it is possible to improve the return on investment of participation while simultaneously building trust between global and local actors.

Rather than treating conferences as purely transactional or extractive events, Regen Villages propose a different mode of engagement: a flash experience of commoning, where participants temporarily co-create and steward shared resources, culture, and care infrastructures.

The Buenos Aires Regen Village served as a first case study to explore this hypothesis through lived practice, combining local provisioning, onchain coordination tools, and a deliberately crafted social atmosphere. While limited in scale and duration, the experiment offers insights into how temporary commons can seed longer-term cosmo-local relationships.

Commoning is understood not as a static pool of shared resources, but as a process. Bollier and Helfrich (2015) define commoning as a collaborative practice through which diverse actors co-design and co-produce shared goods and services across scales. Emphasis is placed on relationships, governance, and cultural norms rather than ownership alone.

Within Regen Villages, commoning manifests through shared treasuries, collective provisioning of food and lodging, mutual aid, and the ritualized offering of goods and services into a shared pool.

Cosmo-localism is a framework articulated by Michel Bauwens in The Cosmo-Local Plan for Our Next Civilization (2025). It proposes an economic and cultural model that combines localized, regenerative production with globally shared knowledge commons and translocal coordination protocols.

Bauwens identifies three archetypal actors within cosmo-local systems:

• Local Initiators: Locally rooted individuals responding to place-based challenges through concrete initiatives.

• Nowheres: Highly mobile actors primarily oriented toward personal opportunity, often disconnected from local contexts.

• Everywheres: Nomadic actors who intentionally serve cosmo-local alliances, bringing translocal experience and capital while supporting local autonomy.

Regen Villages intentionally create spaces where Local Initiators and Everywheres can coordinate directly, while minimizing extractive dynamics associated with purely global participation.

Research on commoning highlights the importance of repetition, trust, and shared experience. Feinberg et al. (2023), drawing on a ten-year agent-based modeling study grounded in Ostrom’s design principles, show that cultural capital emerges through recurring interactions that enable social learning and knowledge retention. Their work demonstrates how trust is not assumed but generated through practice.

Similarly, Colding and Barthel (2013) argue that solving ecosystem-related challenges requires cognitive resilience, built through repeated interaction between groups and their environments. These insights frame Regen Villages not as isolated events, but as iterative experiments whose value compounds over time.

This study adopts an action research approach, combining direct participation, infrastructural experimentation, and post-event reflection. Data sources include onchain transaction data, participant observation, and qualitative feedback collected after the event.

The Regen Village experiment utilized:

• A Safe multisig to coordinate shared funds

• Sarafu Commitment Pools for voucher-based exchange

• NFTs representing bedrooms and supporter contributions

• A Telegram group and shared cultural artifacts (memes, visuals)

Post-event participant feedback was analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), allowing themes to emerge inductively from participant narratives.

The experiment was initiated by an Everywhere Nomad (Explorer) who partnered with previously known and referred Local Initiators to solve lodging, food provisioning, and cultural programming. Villagers included Airbnb residents, local contributors, and conference attendees.

In the three months prior to Devconnect, coordination activities included:

• Hosting office hours and group calls

• Creating a multisig and commitment pool

• Launching a fundraising campaign

• Issuing NFTs for bedrooms and supporters

• Coordinating local regenerative products and experiences

Weekly updates were shared publicly through Allo Capital's research forum.

The Village operated from a rented house within walking distance of the conference. Bedrooms were accessed via NFTs, and a shared pantry formed the material base of the commons. Activities included presentations at the Regen Hub, a communal dinner funded by the shared treasury, a bazaar of goods and services exchanged via vouchers, and deep-dive discussions on Revnets and budgeting tools.

Post-event actions focused on analyzing quantitative metrics, collecting qualitative feedback, and convening follow-up conversations to explore future iterations.

During the week, 36 vouchers were created in the Sarafu Bazaar Pool, representing goods such as books, food, wine, conversations, and the $VILLA token. Eleven onchain swaps occurred, alongside numerous offchain exchanges. The Telegram group grew to 97 members, and five participants chose to hold $VILLA after the event.

Qualitative analysis revealed nine thematic categories, including communication and onboarding, emotional safety, shared care, embodied learning of commons governance, serendipity, abundance, UX friction, AI as commons infrastructure, and desire for continuity. Collectively, these themes indicate that the Village functioned not only as an economic experiment, but as emotional and cultural infrastructure.

• “I hadn’t really, to be honest, fully grasped what the concept was or that that was happening.”

• “I think some better communications before could have been good and I could have prepared for it a bit more.”

• “Getting communications out into the Devconnect crowd a bit more could have been interesting.”

Future iterations should include clearer onboarding, visible presence inside Devconnect spaces, and more explicit framing.

• “When I came to the Village, it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I was expecting in terms of a safe regen place.’”

• “When I say safe, I’m not talking about diversity, I mean safe as in ‘Here I can chill, here I don’t need to be in founder mode.’”

• “I only needed to be here with friends, with friendly faces.”

• “Devconnect was very stressful for me and the Village was the place where I could actually breathe.”

The Village is functioning as emotional infrastructure. This appears to be one of its most valued emergent functions.

• “Everything was so transparent in terms of how much it costs and where the funds will be applied.”

• “It was a perfect example of how regens can organize themselves to share a space and have activities together.”

• “This wasn’t just a meetup but a community forming in real time.”

Participants experienced the Village as an intentional, shared commons — not a hosted event.

• “It was the first time that I actually experienced a commitment pool in practice, which really made everything click for me.”

• “Compared to learning about it in theory, actually doing it in practice suddenly you kind of just get it a bit more.”

• “Being able to offer my oversupply into a community and trade it for things others had was a really cool mechanism.”

This supports your hypothesis: commons governance becomes intelligible only through embodied participation.

• “It was the kind of place where I could have meaningful conversations with people who are extremely good at what they do.”

• “It was not a popularity contest.”

• “I learned so much and talked with a lot of different people, and that was precious to me.”

• “It felt like the kind of place where serendipity happens naturally.”

The Village created a field of slow time — rare in conference culture — which catalyzed deeper connection.

• “There were a lot of vibes in terms of created abundance.”

• “I certainly felt good community, regen, village-y vibes going on with everyone.”

• “That kind of sharing happens naturally even without the tech, but the hope is that the tech can make it easier and more scalable.”

The Village successfully fostered communal generosity and conviviality.

• “The most annoying thing is the friction of listing the excess and facilitating the swapping.”

• “People need to be able to actually know that I have something available, and I want to be able to more easily know what other people have.”

• “There needs to be a better dashboard or a screen showing things that are on offer.”

UX improvements are the most actionable pathway for growth.

• “There is so much that could be done using AI.”

• “I could voice record everything I have, and AI would automatically create a set of vouchers.”

• “I just review, check it is correct, press a button, and it goes into the pool.”

This strongly validates your intuition: AI-enabled commons tooling is a desired feature.

• “Accessing the building was not easy for people coming alone.”

• “I had to wait for other people to arrive so we could enter together.”

Minor logistical hurdle, easily solvable.

• “I think it could be a really cool stall in future crypto conferences.”

• “If you hosted this at a booth with a live dashboard, you could get a lot of things swapped.”

• “The Regen Village was a place I want to be in the next crypto conference.”

• “I am super ready for the next one, so let me know how I can best support it.”

Strong appetite for continuity and scaling — especially across next year’s ETH conferences.

• “First of all, I loved it.”

• “I am really grateful for you for organizing it.”

• “Thank you for everything. When you want something to happen, you go there and make it happen.”

• “I appreciate you.”

Your personal energy and initiative are recognized as essential to the experience’s success.

The Regen Village functioned as a commoning experiment that created the conditions for commoning during a temporary stay in a new country. Coordination began prior to the event, and participants experienced the outcomes of this collective preparation throughout the conference week. This temporal structure—pre-event coordination followed by in-situ practice—proved essential for fostering a sense of shared responsibility and belonging.

The Village microeconomy enabled both onchain and offchain exchanges. Participant feedback suggests that the number of onchain exchanges could have been higher if the user experience were simpler and more immediate. Related experiments offer useful insights. At ETH Safari 2025 in Kenya, Grassroots Economics explored the use of NFC wristbands backed by a cUSD treasury to facilitate local exchanges (Ruddick, 2025). This approach offers a promising methodology for reducing friction in localized microeconomies and could be adapted for future Regen Village experiments.

However, the cosmo-local dimension of the Village extends beyond the local context. There is value in being able to rely on global support, and it can be healthy for communities to allow external participants to hold stake without exercising extractive control. This suggests the possibility of an interface where the global crypto token economy meets local community economies in a non-extractive way. For instance, if a pop-up NFC-based microeconomy proves successful in a given location, enabling aligned global participants to invest in and support local ventures could strengthen community resilience rather than undermine it.

A dynamic in which global and local actors support each other as commons remains largely underexplored. Conference-based pop-up experiments such as Regen Village serve as sandboxes in which these dynamics can be studied and refined. In this case, the Village was made possible through a prior commitment between the Explorer and Allo capital, whereby whatever treasury was available would be used to support shared cosmo-local experiences. Through the monetization of lodging and NFT sales, the Village established an initial treasury that funded breakfasts and a communal dinner.

Feedback also highlighted areas for improvement, including stronger communication, more effective facilitation of onchain trades, and clearer promotion of events and workshops. These challenges must be understood in context. The Village unfolded during a short stay in a new city, with Local Initiators who were themselves not from Buenos Aires, limited certainty regarding Airbnb hosting constraints, and participants navigating demanding conference schedules. Rather than competing with the conference, the Village intentionally occupied the in-between moments of already busy days.

Digital tools played a crucial role in enabling participation. The seamless creation of NFT vouchers emerged as a particularly meaningful moment in the microeconomy. For many participants, this was their first time explicitly creating an offering and placing it into a commons. Observationally, once participants completed this act, their relationship to the Village appeared to shift. Having contributed, they could fully enjoy the shared space without the feeling of passively consuming community resources. This moment of contribution functioned as a threshold into belonging.

Repeated flash commoning experiences of this kind may provide the contextual density necessary for building cosmo-local organizations. This approach contrasts sharply with the individualistic startup culture that dominates many crypto conferences. Research on commoning consistently emphasizes the importance of repetition for building trust and cultural capital. The coexistence of shared history and future expectation allows traditions to form, shaping how participants engage with the present.

Feinberg et al. (2023), drawing on a decade-long study using agent-based models grounded in Ostrom’s design principles, observed that “the construction of cultural capital requires recurring interactions that provide means of adaptation to the natural environment by adding social learning and the retention of knowledge.” Similarly, Colding and Barthel (2013) argue that “solving ecosystem-related issues requires cognitive resilience building, which is also the result of repeated interactions of a group of individuals with a local ecosystem.” Seen through this lens, the Regen Village can be understood not as a single intervention but as an initial iteration in a longer process of cultivating cosmo-local trust, learning, and collective capacity.

The Village was a flash pop-up created with the purpose of facilitating cosmo-local commoning. Local Initiators pre-arranged and committed to a set of pantry items and cultural activities, while Everywheres committed funds and participation. From these initial commitments, the Village emerged. 

The growth of the Village was organic, with participants joining primarily with the intention of sharing. There was no swag, airdrop, or extrinsic incentive beyond spending time with people already present. While a preliminary agenda of activities existed, it was continuously adapted. Still, the Village managed to offer a curated local gastronomic and cultural experience—one that would have occurred even if participation had remained limited to the six Airbnb residents.

From this first iteration, several design patterns emerged:

1. Pre-event office hours for co-organization

2. Local sourcing of food and beverages

3. NFT-based lodging commitments

4. Transparent shared treasuries

5. NFT supporter sales

6. Explicit microeconomic intent for exchange

7. Curated cultural experiences

8. Public recognition of contributions through IRL and online interfaces

This research explored allocation mechanisms for common use through cosmo-local exchanges embedded within a conference context. Repeated over time, such practices have the potential to generate social learning, cultural capital, and trust between global and local actors. Regen Villages suggest a pathway toward cosmo-local enterprises and communities of practice grounded not in extraction, but in shared stewardship.

A number of individuals and organizations were key to make this exploration happen. From organizations that funded or built the tools that we used to individuals that bought the Supporters NFTs and those that shared resources in person. I am grateful for all of them for the willingness to commoning:

• Allo Capital - for their dedication in creating the ARQ Research Exploration and improving funding allocation

• Grassroots Economics - for building a tool that makes easy to create wallets, vouchers and pools

• AgroforestDAO - for investing in a Rooted Society and bringing me to the web3 world

• Regens Unite - for hosting our Bazaar and sharing our side events

• To the Regen Village Supporters that raised the treasury by buying the Supporters NFT: Joshua from Desci World; Eric Miki; Monty Merlin; Ramona from Solarpunk Futures; Mihkel; Paul Glavin from Gardens

• To the Local Initiators Penelope, Max y Lejito that shared the dream since the beginning

1. Bollier, D., Helfrich, S. (2015). Patterns of commoning. Commons Strategy Group and Off the Common Press

2. Bawens, M. (2025). The Cosmo-Local plan for our next civilization. Ethereum Localism - Grounding the Future of Coordination. The Public Machine.

3. Feinberg, A., Ghorbani, A., Herder, P. (2023). Commoning toward urban resilience: The role of trust, social cohesion, and involvement in a simulated urban commons setting. Journal of Urban Affairs.

4. Colding, J., Barthel, S. (2013). The potential of "urban green commons" in the resilience building of cities. Ecological Economics, 86, 156-166.

5.Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2019). Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 11(4), 589–597

6.. Ruddick W. (2025). ETHSafari x Grassroots Economics 2025 - How Festival Bracelets Became Living Wallets. Available online.