Stories told by the people who live them.
June 10–21, 2025 · Berlin, Germany
✺ Table of Contents
- What is Zk Av Club?
- What is the Recording Station?
- Berlin Blockchain Weeks 2025
- Funding the Commons
- Protocol Berg v2
- Decentralized Media Summit
- DappCon
- ZK Hack
- Live Podcasts
- What We Learned
- Acknowledgments
- Coming soon …
1. Who is Zk Av Club?
Zk Av Club is an ever-expanding, community-powered, privacy-respecting media collective of audiovisual experts and enthusiasts exploring art and creativity with decentralized and open-source technologies. Our focus is on empowering communities through content creation, education, and grassroots event support.
Our mission is to share and preserve knowledge from conferences, meetups, and camps, making it accessible to all. We aim to foster community building, break down barriers, and create opportunities for learning, collaboration, and contribution.
Zk Av Club — Don’t just watch.
2. What is the Recording Station?
At its core, the Zk Av Club Recording Station is:
- Cameras, mics, lights, and 'puters
- Configured to record audio + video in high quality
- Able to livestream, archive locally, or upload to various platforms (decentralized and otherwise)
- Often demoing privacy-first enhancements, like the Shielded Anon Cam, voice filters, or something completely different
- Designed to be set up quickly—on a sidewalk, at a hackathon, or inside a conference venue
It’s intentionally low-cost, portable, modular, and replicable by communities anywhere.
Any group can fork the setup, remix it, and run their own station—whether in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, or an underground venue in Kyiv. We’re building a global, peer-to-peer media infrastructure, not just content.
In short: The recording station is a tool of narrative sovereignty. We don’t just record—we hold space for honest, unfiltered, and self-directed media. It’s how communities retain their voice and shape their future—together.
No gatekeepers. No extraction. Just tools and skills sharing to help communities document themselves.
3. Berlin Blockchain Week 2025
28 recorded conversations + 4 hours of livestreamed event content
Featuring community members from across five events
Supported by Zcash donations
From June 10 to 21, 2025, Zk Av Club participated in one of the most collaborative and energized Berlin Blockchain Weeks to date. Across five core events—Funding the Commons, Protocol Berg, Decentralized Media Summit, DappCon, and ZK Hack—we deployed the Zk Av Recording Station, a mobile media lab built for documenting the conversations, insights, and off-stage energy that define the decentralized ecosystem.
This wasn’t just content capture—it was participatory media-making: co-creating interviews, reflections, and story snippets with the very builders shaping the future of Web3.
Our mission? To support privacy-respecting, cooperative, community-owned storytelling at the edges of decentralization.
“We’re not just showing up and recording people—we’re equipping the community to record itself.” — Zk Av Club
4. Funding the Commons
June 12–13 · Engelnest
We began the week documenting the future of public goods at Funding the Commons. Rather than capturing panels, we focused on personal conversations that conveyed the energy and intention behind some of the participants’ work.
At Funding the Commons, we also debuted the Shielded Anon Cam, a creative hack for anonymity and facial abstraction that converts video into ASCII text in the browser. It turned heads—literally—and opened conversations about privacy, identity, and self-representation in Web3.
Lightning talks, side conversations, and real Zcash onboarding for activists made this one of our most grounded stations.
“@ZkAv_Club is at @fundingcommons today, recording talks on how we can sustainably fund open-source projects.” — @Zerodartz
5. Protocol Berg
June 14–15 · Colosseum Berlin
Hosted by the Department of Decentralization, Protocol Berg was a deep-dive into peer-to-peer infrastructure, identity, and zero-knowledge systems. Our setup focused on the hallway track, where we recorded spontaneous conversations and structured meaningful discussions. Topics ranged from zero-knowledge proofs to decentralized protocols to the increasing need for privacy.
We even deployed a giant whiteboard invitation to demystify our setup and encourage unscripted storytellers. Our station became a meeting point for devs, designers, privacy advocates, and curious passersby.
“@ZkAv_Club is live at @protocol_berg, recording deep dives into blockchain scalability and privacy protocols.” — @Zerodartz
As always, we made it personal—translating dense technical themes into human stories of agency, experimentation, and digital sovereignty.
“The hallway track is where things get real.” — anonymous builder
6. Decentralized Media Summit
June 13–14 · w3.hub
At the Decentralized Media Summit, organized by CTRL+X, we served as the official livestream partner. Hosted at w3.hub, the summit featured talks from leaders in the space. Topics included censorship resistance, digital provenance, decentralized archiving, and building media tools with minimal trust assumptions.
Our participation here ensured global access to these important discussions, with real-time engagement from online audiences. For our crew, this was our most visible role—bridging global viewers to a conversation about decentralized media futures.
The stream includes representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, Civil Media, Filecoin, Arweave, Titan, Olas, Protocol Media Labs, Aave, DL News, as well as independent journalists, and CTRL+X founder Arikia Millikan (formerly of WIRED) was the MC of the two-day event, cohosting with Christine Mohan (formerly of NY Times, Wall Street Journal).
“The @DeMediaSummit was definitely a highlight of @BerBlockWeek and it was an honor for @ZkAv_Club to livestream the event! Awesome alignment
” — @AdjyLeak
7. DappCon
June 16–18 · Radialsystem
For three days at DappCon Berlin at Radialsystem. With a park-like setting, our outdoor recording station became a hub for conversation, reflection, and creative storytelling. We hosted dozens of walk-ups, recorded spontaneous interviews, and facilitated conversations on everything from DeFi to DAO tooling, on-chain privacy to decentralized streaming and the ethics of data visibility.
We took the opportunity to speak with attendees about a wide range of topics including zero-knowledge identity, security auditing and risks for cryptocurrency users, the social layer of decentralized networks, art therapy for war-fatigued children, and much more!
It was loud, honest, and messy — in the best way.
8. ZK HACK
June 19–21 · w3.hub
We closed out Berlin Blockchain Week(s) at ZK HACK, blending hackathon energy with deep introspection. Our station offered a quiet moment for hackers to step back and reflect on what they were building—and why. From privacy UX to zk-native apps, we recorded a wide slice of the ZK builder mindset.
We also highlighted Shade Agents from Near and Proximity—cross-chain autonomous agents combining AI and privacy—and discussed the challenges of funding zk-native apps and tools. Conversations ranged from Zcash use cases, FHE integration, and UX challenges in ZK apps, to reflections on cypherpunk values and maintaining focus in a hype-saturated space.
9. Special Edition Live Podcast
To tie it all together, we released a two-part livestreamed Special Edition Podcast, after the first week and during the final stretch. This was made possible thanks to Zcash donations received during a short crowdfunding campaign. The mini-series stitched together highlights, live reflections, and raw insights from the field.
“We’re here to help communities document themselves. Because the hallway track matters. The conversations matter.”
Catch the replays on YouTube
10. What We Learned
Berlin Blockchain Week 2025 reaffirmed what decentralized media can be:
- Interactive — spontaneous walk-ups and scheduled discussions, not just stage-gated soundbites
- Collaborative — we didn’t just record about events, we became part of them
- Purpose-driven — media grounded in the real needs of communities: privacy, governance, and collective memory
The recording station works. And it will scale. One node at a time.
11. Acknowledgments
THANK YOU to the production crew — @robmarn, @squirrel, @Autotunafish, and @zerodartz — who pulled together through many days with long hours to help shape something entirely new.
To the Funding the Commons team, Protocol Berg crew, Decentralized Media Summit, DappCon organizers, and ZK Hack team: Thank you for your trust and support!
The Zcash community came through for us in a big way. To my Zeal, for your unwavering support in our weird experiments, you have our undying gratitude.
Everyone who:
- Invited us to your event
- Joined our space
- Donated ZEC or snacks
You made this possible!
12. Coming soon …
We’re already planning the next stations, workshops, and streams—always focused on helping communities capture their own narrative, before someone else does.
This is how decentralized media gets made.
This is just the beginning.
Zk Av Club — Don’t just watch.
Follow the Club:
- 𝕏: @zkav_club
- Bluesky: zkavclub.bsky.social
- YouTube: @zkav_club
It’s great to have you on our side!