📸 Snapshot

The spring gathering season hit stride with Próspera’s Liberty Acceleration Summit, Logos’ Parallel Society in Lisbon (40+ partner orgs), and Ipê City’s Startup Society Conference III in Brazil—experiments now spanning Honduras, Portugal, Brazil, Malaysia, and Thailand. Alpha City made waves announcing plans to eradicate poverty in São Tomé & Príncipe, betting that a nation of 240,000 is small enough to tackle like a city-scale problem. Meanwhile, Edge City’s new Zee Prime Residency signals the popup model maturing from vibes into structured programming with serious capital backing.

☊ Nodes Pulse

Liberty Acceleration Summit 2026 Wrap-up at Próspera brought global leaders, investors, and founders together. Tim Urban and Agustín Antonetti spoke on moving from theory to action: building communities, attracting investment, and generating prosperity. Próspera framed it as “not talking about the future as possibility, but as reality under construction.”

Edge City Announces Zee Prime Residency for deep tech and crypto founders at Edge Esmeralda (May 30 - June 27 in Healdsburg, California). The program offers a curated cohort of 10+ founders, a dedicated Founders House, and access to 1,000+ builders across the Edge City network. Created with Zee Prime Capital, which backs “infrastructure the world will run on in ten years.”

Ecuadorian Academics Visit Próspera as a delegation from the Escuela Superior Politécnica de Manabí toured the ZEDE to study its development, research, and investment model. Led by Rector Dr. C. Guillermo Félix Mendoza, the visit included academics from UTH Roatán and a session at the Bitcoin Center where visitors opened their first electronic wallets.

Próspera Partners with SENPRENDE (Honduras’ National Entrepreneurship and Small Business Service) to support sustainable initiatives nationwide. Próspera will host a Centro de Desarrollo Arrecife in Roatán to support local entrepreneurship.

Infinite Games 2026 Closes at Infinita City with a closing ceremony following the Limit Break Half-Marathon. The month-long popup in Próspera featured prediction markets, chess championships, and the Liberty Acceleration Summit.

☋ Network Experiments

Alpha City Targets São Tomé & Príncipe with a poverty eradication project. The island nation ranks among the world’s five smallest economies, with 55-67% of the population living in poverty. Alpha City’s pitch: at 240,000 people, the country is comparable to a small city, making it “possible to rapidly create enough jobs to completely eradicate poverty nationwide.” The project aims to achieve this “very quickly.”

Ipê City Startup Society Conference III runs April 10-11 during Ipê Village in Florianópolis, Brazil. The lineup includes Joyce Brand (Ciudad Morazán, Free Cities Foundation) on contractual governance, Igor Marchesini (AI Advisor to Brazil’s Finance Minister), and founders building new cities. The event positions itself as “one-of-a-kind in Brazil, connecting frontier technologies to society’s most pressing challenges.”

🗳️ Governance Stack

Logos Parallel Society Recap from Lisbon brought together 40+ organizations building parallel systems: @abovephone, @Liberland_org, @SealandGov, @torproject, @aboutcircles, and many others. The Decentralised Zone featured distributed governance protocols and real-world applications. Logos framed it as “pioneers working to rebuild civil society upon freedom, trust, and shared imagination.”

Logos Podcast: Pop-up Cities to Charter Cities features James of Ârc discussing the path from popup experiments in Lisbon, Austin, and Singapore toward building a charter city. The conversation covers network states, how they differ from parallel societies, and Ârc’s plans.

Logos Circles Expanding with gatherings in Barcelona (#7) and London this week, adding to the franchise model that allows local organizers to convene around parallel society principles.

📖 Essays & Long Reads

What Edge City Has Learned About Voluntary Interdependence at Scale by Timour Kosters examines how popup villages develop from “finding one’s people” into stable structures. The essay draws on Edge City’s experiments to ask what comes after the early community experience: how does voluntary participation become lasting infrastructure?

A Proposal for UBEE: Universal Basic Energy Equity by Myungsan Jun outlines a blueprint for Dangun City, Korea. The proposal imagines a city designed from scratch to leverage blockchain coordination capacity and value distribution, treating energy as a foundational social contract for an age of AI and robotics.

Republic of Minds by Chor Pharn explores governance when intelligence becomes cheap. The essay engages with proposals to expand rights to include machines, human-machine hybrids, and new forms of personhood, positioning democratic governance as a response to technological revolution.

🧠 The Hivemind

Daniel Thompson at Liberty Acceleration Summit offered a builder’s-eye view from Próspera: “It feels like a tipping point. So many great minds actually working on building new societies. From SEZs to network states this is going to go mainstream. People are waking up to the reality that it’s possible to build something better.”

Samo Burja on Constitutional Convention noted that the 1787 Philadelphia convention “was arguably a centralization and creation of a new power center,” a reminder that federalist experiments involve tradeoffs between distributed and concentrated authority.

Alex Voss on Building the Bitcoin Citadel outlined Autris’ vision for Veritas Villages—intentional communities in Latin America built around the F.I.R.S.T. philosophy (Freedom, Independence, Resiliency, Self-Sustainability, Transparency). Unlike treasury companies that simply hold Bitcoin, Autris earns BTC through real estate sales, mines with surplus solar, and builds communities where Bitcoin is the natural monetary layer. “The Citadel is not a retreat. It is the beginning of the new Bitcoin economy.”

🤔 Our Thoughts

Three years ago, network states were a book. Now they’re hotel bookings, flight itineraries, and zoning permits. The experiments have stopped asking “is this possible?” and started asking “how fast can we scale?” Alpha City betting it can eradicate poverty in an entire nation. Edge City packaging its model for export. Próspera hosting government delegations instead of pitching them. The skeptics are still debating whether this can work. The builders are too busy pouring foundations to notice.