Hey everyone, I’m Fazil, co‑founder of XFounders Accelerator. For the last three years we’ve been running four‑week offline bootcamps around the world to help founders build resilient, revenue‑driven companies. On top of each bootcamp we run a Pop‑Up City residency as our community engine — and we film a Netflix‑quality docu‑series that amplifies our startups, our brand and our partners. This year we worked very closely with the Starknet Foundation and delivered two month‑long editions in El Salvador and Bali.
We do this because long‑term IRL is the fastest way to build deep partnerships. Four weeks under one roof with founders, nomads, C‑level operators, developers, builders and passionate contributors creates real trust, shared context and momentum. To make that happen, we rent large venues for 100–300+ rooms for a full month and turn them into living startup villages.
Recently I came across Eli Ben‑Sasson’s tweet about the synergy between Zcash and Starknet. His framing clicked for us: Zcash as the safe‑haven money and privacy; Starknet as the programmable city built inside that safe haven. Our Pop‑Up City is literally that “city” in real life — what’s missing is Zcash as the default cash layer actually used every day.
Thought 1 — Utility first.
Technology only compounds when it becomes routine. In Pop‑Up City, utility means paying rent, meals, wellness and coworking in ZEC; tipping, splitting bills, reimbursing contributors; merchant on‑ramps and off‑ramps that just work; micro‑grants and bounties that land privately in minutes. When dozens of such repeatable use‑cases run in one village for a month, privacy moves from a concept to a habit — and we can measure it (wallets, tx counts, merchant retention) and publish a public playbook others can copy.
Thought 2 — Relationships > impressions.
XFounders is built on deep IRL partnerships. Four weeks of co‑living compress months of online coordination into days. Founders get hard feedback, ecosystems integrate faster, and communities cross‑pollinate in a way a one‑day conference never can.
These two ideas come together in what we want to propose for 2026 with XFounders × Starknet × Zcash:
-
In 2026 we run 4 month‑long IRL bootcamps + Pop‑Up City (2× Bali, 2× El Salvador) that are already planned with Starknet.
-
We bring Zcash in as a privacy & payments layer, keeping Starknet as the core programmable / L2 stack — Starknet for programmability and scale, Zcash for resistance‑money privacy and everyday payments.
-
40 seed‑stage startups (AI, web2→web3, fintech, neobanks, B2B SaaS, consumer apps) go through the program; a significant part of them build cross‑stack use cases: Starknet for logic and scalability, Zcash for shielded payments and user privacy.
-
Inside Pop‑Up City we run a “ZEC‑native city” experiment — people can pay for living/food/services in ZEC, and we treat the whole village as a privacy UX lab: wallets, transactions, merchant experience, user feedback — all distilled into an open playbook.
-
For each bootcamp we reserve 20 fully covered spots for Zcash community members (80 over the year) to run privacy workshops, meetups, merchant onboarding and connect regional communities in one physical hub.
-
Through XFounders Production we document the journey: a docu‑series season + ~100 short videos about Zcash, Starknet and the Pop‑Up City, plus a downloadable “ZEC‑native city” playbook any Zcash community can reuse.
This can be legendary. If we want to compete with ecosystems like Solana, Base and others, we have to out‑ship in the real world: not just online buzz, but thousands of real ZEC payments, dozens of merchants, and 20+ products shipping Zcash features. Let’s set the benchmark for privacy‑first adoption — and open‑source the playbook so every Zcash community can replicate it.
Check our socials to see how previous editions looked; the full story and impact speak for themselves. Here is one pager as well: Notion
In the next comment I’ll share the full grant application (with milestones, metrics and budget) that was submitted to Zcash Community Grants. Zcash native Pop-Up City · Issue #140 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants · GitHub
For now I’d love to hear your first reactions:
-
Does this ZEC‑native Pop‑Up City idea resonate with you?
-
What would make it most valuable for the Zcash ecosystem?
-
Which Zcash teams / tools / communities should definitely be involved?
Happy to answer any questions and iterate together.
