TLDR
ETHRome wasn’t built in a day. Our flagship event is getting an exciting upgrade that we think the industry will love! It will evolve into something much more compelling, for both sponsors and builders: Urbe Village! A 2-week popup village, focused on Web3 builders, blending the ETHRome hackathon with hands-on learning, mentorship, and community-building activities. To accommodate this expanded scope, we have decided to move the event to October 2025. Hence, ETHRome will not occur in April 2025.
As always, urbe.eth remains committed to fostering Web3 talent through developer training both abroad and at Urbe Hub - our brand new co-working and events hub in one of Rome’s most vibrant areas. Our values remain Pragmatic Cypherpunk, aiming to create a more impactful and sustainable Web3 ecosystem that connects Italy with the world.
What Are Popup Cities?
There have been many flavours to date, but generally they are: between 2 weeks and 2 months long, consisting of co-working, co-living and events, with one or more focus areas.
These gatherings usually have a foundational structure that acts as a scaffold, with the rest of the schedule being co-created by participants. From a superficial perspective, they can be seen as work / summer camp / tourism. However, if we look deeper we can find in pop-up cities a true proliferation of culture and values. Builders upskill, companies run experiments, entrepreneurs meet future co-founders or collaborators, startups beta-test and iterate their features.
Many popup cities aim to attract a high density of builders and have hackathons as side events. However, 2024 has seen little overlap between the Web3 hackathon crowd and the popup city crowd. Biased perspectives might claim:
hackathons are just for mercenaries and popup cities are for real entrepreneurs, or
hackathons are for real builders and popup cities are just for observers.
Reading between the lines, is it possible to have the best of both worlds?
Having hosted the ETHRome hackathon for 2 years already, we are starting from ETHRome as the foundation and creating an event that expands the scope and value for both sponsors and participants, through an entirely new format.
A Meeting Point Between Web3 Hackathons and Popup Cities
To date, Urbe has organised ETHRome twice, bringing together tens of sponsors and hundreds of builders from across the world. We delivered Urbe Campus (a bootcamp to onboard beginner developers to the Web3 ecosystem) 7 times, at home and abroad, refining it each time to become the ideal preparation for beginners. We delivered Urbe Hacker House (2-day deep-dive workshop) 6 times, helping advanced developers to effectively understand a sponsor’s protocol or dev tooling. Furthermore, we’ve always sustained strong friendships in our community. You might remember the legendary ETHRome closing parties. We have fond memories with many of you, at dinners, parties, happy hours all over the world!
In October 2025, we bring all of this into one: Urbe Village. Over the course of 2 weeks, participants will have opportunities to learn, build, and share side by side with urbe.eth builders and sponsor mentors. The program will blend work activities with social and recreational experiences, fostering a sense of community and collaboration.
Urbe will provide the foundational schedule, with ETHRome at its core, Urbe Campus bootcamp, plenty of Urbe Hacker House workshops, aperitivo demos, planned Rome excursions and trips!
Beyond the foundation, Urbe Village will be made by You! We have many rooms and event spaces, which will remain available for community-owned scheduling. Whatever you are building, whether it be a Web3 app, a Cryptography conference, or Marketing meetup, come build it at Urbe Village and you’ll find a high density of skilled Web3 builders, all logistics taken care of and of course pasta carbonara.
We will announce further details at the Urbe Hub Grand Opening, on February 15th! We look forward to seeing many of you there! https://lu.ma/70ekocr3
