Belonging in Web3: Mayeli on Community, Inclusion, and Human‑First Events
@MayeliAmore with Funding the Commons at Berlin Blockchain Week on belonging, public goods, and why Web3 needs more than just devs. It’s a candid, practical guide to inclusive community-building and real-world impact.
Path to crypto: Mayeli’s story speaks to women, LATAM, and LGBTQ+ folks who feel “not technical enough.” Show up, join a DAO, ask Qs, ship at hackathons—and find peers who translate the jargon. Includes her Devcon “first night → hackathon win” story.
Hot takes inside: AI × blockchain (agent era needs human-first UX), DePIN (weather, connectivity—think WeatherXM—where tokens align users + infra), and RWAs (tokenization beyond the hype). How clear design + language unlock actual adoption.
Funding the Commons is evolving → an incubator-style pipeline for public-goods projects—bridging community, builders, and partners. If you’ve ever felt like a “muggle” in crypto, this convo gives you next steps.
We sat down with Kirill Pimenov (@kirushik) at the Decentralized Media Summit (@DeMediaSummit) during Berlin Blockchain Week to ask: Has crypto been captured by VCs and convenience? “Early adopters weren’t chasing price. They were chasing deeper ideals.”
Bitcoin ≠ private. Kirill breaks down why pseudonymity isn’t privacy—and how that misunderstanding fuels surveillance on transparent chains.
“Tech is political. Cryptography reallocates power with math.” If that’s true, are we comfortable with who benefits from today’s crypto UX defaults?
Messaging ≠ money. Privacy needs differ between comms and payments—and Telegram ≠ private by default. Kirill maps threat models without fanboyism.
Outside the money box: “Not everything is GDP.” Reputation, coordination, and weird experiments deserve ZK tools too—libraries, protests, communities.
Hardware that won’t narc: Kirill demos Kampala—an air-gapped, radio-silent, NFC-powered e-paper wallet with clear-signing goals for EVM.
“Cost of experiments is falling.” Let’s use blockchains for global consensus beyond balances—governance, identity, and coordination (with privacy by design).
Did VCs win—or do we keep blockchain weird?
Jump into the full convo with Kirill Pimenov and tell us where you stand.
Whistleblowers + journalists need credibility and anonymity.
Privacy UX isn’t a nice-to-have—it decides whether ZK lands with real users. At ZK Hack during Berlin Blockchain Week 2025, Dana discusses a ZK whistleblowing app, the UX tradeoffs, and where privacy goes next.
This prototype enables:
• org attestations via ZK-email
• on-chain, time-stamped signals
• public feed now, private forums on the roadmap
Client-side proving takes ~28–30s today ZKVerify for verification Deployed on Arbitrum testnet at the hackathon
Beyond whistleblowing: private credit proofs, institutional transfers, DeFi privacy pools, and agent execution without strategy leakage.
If you’re a journalist, researcher, or grants team contact Dana to collaborate.
What are “intents”? You state an outcome (e.g., “swap ZEC → NEAR”) and a solver network fulfills it—abstracting bridges, hops, and quotes into one flow. Feels like magic; it’s Pub/Sub + on-chain settlement.
Shade Agents = autonomous, verifiable agents that can hold/control assets across chains by combining TEEs with NEAR’s Chain Signatures. Backbone for private payments + automated swaps.
Follow ZecHub and try CrossPay: install Zashi and click the Pay button to convert into shielded ZEC, then make private cross-chain payments via NEAR Intents.
Just spotted a Recording Station video in the wild
Nice surprise! One of the conversations we recorded at the ZK AV Club Recording Station during Berlin Blockchain Week 2025 has been published by the creator
In this conversation from DappCon, we spoke with Olena, Director of the 3MIST project, an art residency program for children growing up during the war in Ukraine. The project brings together artists, art therapists, and musicians to help kids express themselves through drawing, storytelling, music, and a final exhibition of their work.
The goal is to create a safe space where children can process their experiences through art while also getting a glimpse into what it means to participate in a creative project from start to finish.
At Funding the Commons in Berlin last year, I sat down with Morgan, a frontend developer and longtime open-source contributor, to talk about Drips, a protocol that lets anyone fund any GitHub project with cryptocurrency, no signup required.
We start with the basics: what is a dependency, anyway? From there we get into how Drips builds a living graph of connections between open-source projects, so that funding flows through to the infrastructure beneath the projects you actually know about.
Morgan also walks through Drip Lists (batch donations to up to 200 projects in a single transaction), the upcoming Ecosystems model, retroactive public goods funding, supported chains, unclaimed funds, recurring streams, and the idea of a browser plugin that surfaces funding options as you browse.
Along the way, he traces his path from Apple and LinkedIn through a string of startups into Web3 and what it took to find his footing in an industry that was already ten years old by the time he arrived.
This is a conversation that truly makes funding the software you depend on feel finally possible.
Rüzgar introduces Free Association, an economic framework developed through PlayNet that proposes a fundamental alternative to how value, recognition, and resources flow between people.
The conversation begins with recognition power: the right to express what you value, which is currently embedded in money and tokens that can be transferred, accumulated, and concentrated. Free Association makes that power inalienable and non-transferable.
From there he moves through mutual recognition as a peer to peer system of social validation, why gift economies fail to scale, and how surplus can become a verb rather than a thing.
The philosophical core: we already live in a cooperative production process together. We are already materially dependent on each other. We are simply failing to organise our economies on that basis.
Hudson Jameson has seen crypto funding from multiple angles: as a grantee, a grants committee member, and VP of Community at Polygon.
At ProtocolBerg in Berlin, he sat down with me to share what he has learned across a decade in the Ethereum, Zcash, and Polygon ecosystems.
What do non-technical projects need to think about when applying for grants? Hudson covers incentive alignment, creative pitching, and the social capital that sustains long-term funding.
But underneath the tactics is a harder question: how do you build reputation and trust when your community values anonymity?
Hudson is honest about the tension between privacy, presence, and the very human risk of being seen.
He moves between past and present: the early days of the Ethereum Cat Herders and the Zcash Grants Committee, including the decision to fund the Rust rewrite of Tor, and where things stand now with Polygon’s AggLayer and ZK interoperability.
Someone who has been in this long enough to be honest about what works, and still genuinely excited about where it’s going.
Worldbuilding as Infrastructure: The Cultural Layer of Web3
We’re excited to share this conversation, recorded last year when @dayvan first stepped into the Zk Av Club Recording Station.
Since then, Dayvan has joined Zk Av Club as a Storyteller, helping us listen for the threads inside community conversations, frame the context around them, and turn recordings into free and open source media for others to watch, share, learn from, and remix.
At ProtocolBerg in Berlin, Fotis and Dayvan find each other at the edge of the technical culture they inhabit. Both speculative fiction writers, Fotis reaches for frameworks while Dayvan reaches for the room.
The conversation moves between naming new phenomena and sitting with what still has no name. They trace how speculative fiction and gaming culture built the imaginative foundations of Web3, why collective dreaming tips toward the utopian while the dark psyche goes unaddressed, and what the intelligence addiction, our compulsion to make sense of everything, might be costing us.
They point to something new: a way of life this culture demands but has not yet learned to reflect on. Deriving meaning from the internet, building life decisions around technology, and navigating placelessness.
For the outsiders: a non-linear dialogue where the physical keeps revealing what the digital misses.
Designing the Commons: Beth and Josh on Community and Political Infrastructure in Web3
Beth McCarthy, Program Director at Web3Privacy Now, joins Zk Av Club in Berlin to reflect on an event built entirely without keynotes or a stage, and the significance of being the first place we ever ran the Recording Station.
Beth’s community weaving spans cities, from Bangkok to San Francisco, bringing the people building decentralized infrastructure into the same room as the people building decentralized communities. What does it look like to bring a relational graph to life in physical space?
Josh, known as the Blockchain Socialist and co-founder of Bread Cooperative, joins partway through with a different register. He breaks down political economy as a design space rather than an ideological battleground, explains how Bread Cooperative builds applications from a post-capitalist lens, and discusses why most crypto use cases default to financialization.
A conversation about building infrastructure people can actually stand inside.
Hot takes inside: AI × blockchain (agent era needs human-first UX), DePIN (weather, connectivity—think WeatherXM—where tokens align users + infra), and RWAs (tokenization beyond the hype). How clear design + language unlock actual adoption.
Watch & reply:
Client-side proving takes ~28–30s today
ZKVerify for verification
Deployed on Arbitrum testnet at the hackathon
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