Onchain governance a real town actually runs on.

Röbel, a 750-year-old town in northern Germany, verifies its citizens, votes privately, and executes decisions onchain. People join, govern, and leave by choice. We build the open tools any community can use to do the same.

Read the Röbel case study →Read the thesis

Verified citizen

Anna K.
Citizen of Röbel

Voting power1 vote

IdentitySoulbound

{ "transferable": false }

Proposal #23

Renovate the harbor promenade

Yes

Your ballotEncrypted

{ "ballot": "private" }

Sent onchain

One tap, fully onchain

Network feeSponsored

AccountSmart wallet

{ "paymaster": true }

Identity

Every citizen is verified with a soulbound identity, so one real person gets one vote. People join by attestation and leave by revocation, which keeps membership chosen and never coerced.

Soulbound One person, one vote

Governance

Proposals are decided by private voting. MACI encrypts every ballot so votes cannot be bought or coerced, and the outcome stays fully verifiable by anyone who wants to check it.

Private by MACI Coercion-resistant

Abstraction

All the onchain complexity disappears. Citizens act through gasless smart accounts with no tokens and no jargon, while passed proposals execute themselves through an onchain timelock.

Gas sponsored Invisible smart account

A real town already runs on this.

Real citizens, real secret ballots, and a real town currency, all read live onchain. Every number below links to its proof.

See the live citizen graph →

Citizens verified, zero documents collected

Live onchain ›

Secret ballots held onchain

Live onchain ›

Röbel Münzen minted, the town's own money

Live onchain ›

Encrypted votes, readable by no single party

Live onchain ›

Gasless for citizens

Live onchain

Built for privacy and security

Sovereignty you can verify.

Civic data is sensitive. The stack is private by design and auditable by anyone.

Private voting (MACI)

Encrypted ballots resist coercion and vote-buying while staying fully verifiable.

Soulbound identity

One verified person, one vote. Non-transferable, opt-in, revocable.

Onchain audit trail

Every proposal and execution is permanent, public, and independently checkable.

Free exit

Citizenship is chosen. Revoke and leave any time, the opposite of coercion.

EU-ready

Designed with GDPR and data residency in mind for European communities.

Open source

AGPL, forkable, no lock-in. Inspect it, run it, make it your own.

“The app is a complementary service for our town, and we appreciate the commitment of everyone involved.”

Matthias Radtke

Mayoral candidate, Röbel

5,000

Residents served

6 mo

Live in production

A 750-year-old town, running on the Netizen Stack

Challenge

Röbel wanted real citizen participation with secret ballots its residents could trust, without asking 5,000 people to learn wallets, tokens, or gas.

Solution

Verified soulbound citizenship, MACI private voting, and gasless smart accounts. Citizens tap to decide and decisions execute onchain through a timelock.

1 person, 1 vote 3-of-5 key federation

100% gasless for citizens

Communities are choosing to govern themselves.

A new kind of community is forming onchain: verified, self-governing, and free to join, shape, or leave.

Verify real membership

Soulbound identity gives every community one verified person, one vote.

Decide together, privately

Onchain voting that resists coercion and stays verifiable by anyone.

A local economy onchain

Businesses reach the community with offers, ads, and commerce.

All of civic life in one place

Clubs run events, the town hall communicates, citizens connect.

Build on real, production-tested infrastructure.

From identity to governance to execution, the stack is already live in a real town. Bring it to yours.

Read the case study ›Talk to us

Writing

All posts →

Jun 2026 · Field notes

The Röbel Münzen economy, end to end

Two tokens, one trust graph, and a closed reward loop. This is the whole Röbel Münzen economy in one place: how a coin is minted and backed, who is allowed to make one, how you earn and spend them, and how to check every claim onchain yourself.

Jun 2026 · Field notes

How Sybil-resistant is this, really?

The whole project rests on one human not quietly becoming two. So how good is the defense, honestly? We grade our own two layers, name the single failure that would sink both, and say what a real second layer would be.

Jun 2026 · Vision

d/acc, built in a town

Vitalik Buterin's d/acc argues we should accelerate technology, but deliberately favor the defensive, decentralizing, and democratic kind over the offensive and centralizing kind. Most of that conversation lives in essays about AI and biosecurity. Röbel is the unglamorous version: d/acc you can walk around in, running in one small German town.

Jun 2026 · Vision

Can a town's money become real money?

Could a Röbel Münze be worth a real euro? Could it pay a real income? The short answer is that you cannot mint your way there. The longer answer, where value actually comes from, and how community-owned automation could one day fund a genuine income, is the interesting one.

Jun 2026 · Field notes

The first citizen minted the town's money

A few weeks ago the town's currency was a contract. This week it became money in a person's wallet: a verified citizen was invited, joined, and minted the first 48 Röbel Münzen. The gap between 'a currency exists' and 'a citizen holds it' is the whole project, and it just closed.

Jun 2026 · Vision

A dividend for being, a tax for hoarding

Röbel Münzen carry two forces at once: every citizen mints a little every day, and every balance shrinks a little every year. Run the arithmetic and the money turns out to be a basic income and a wealth tax in a single mechanism, with no state in the middle. Here are the curves, and where Röbel's citizen gate changes the picture.

Jun 2026 · Vision

From a town's money to a network of towns

Röbel Münzen are live. Now the interesting questions are structural: does a town run one currency or many, how do towns trade with each other, and how does money minted in a small town ever reach the real world? Here is the architecture, with the parts that are settled marked apart from the parts we are still proving.

Jun 2026 · Vision

Why a town's stack wants one chain, and why that chain is Gnosis

We built the civic stack onchain so a town could verify its people, hold secret ballots, and prove every result. The next layer is money. So we asked which chain the whole stack should stand on once money is part of it, and now the whole stack, identity, governance, and the currency, lives on the answer, with the citizen credential hardened on the way.

Jun 2026 · Vision

The network state, built backwards

Balaji's playbook for a network state is cloud first, land last: gather a tribe online, crowdfund territory later, seek recognition eventually. We ran it in reverse. We started with a real town and built the sovereignty stack on top. Scored against his eleven-point checklist, that inversion turns out to be a feature, and it points straight at what Netizen Labs is for.

Jun 2026 · Field notes

One person, one citizenship: why we won't hash your name to get there

Our whole thesis rests on one human not quietly becoming two. The cheap way to enforce that is to fingerprint a name and a birthdate. We're refusing it, and the reasons are the entire philosophy.

Jun 2026 · Vision

A town that mints its own money

Circles v2 lets any human mint their own money. Röbel already verifies humans with a soulbound credential. Put them together and a town gets a local currency with sybil resistance built in. As of this week Röbel Münzen are live onchain, and here is how it works.

Jun 2026 · Field notes

Anatomy of a private vote

In Röbel, voting feels like tapping a button. Underneath, a soulbound credential, an encrypted ballot, a 3-of-5 key ceremony, and a timelock turn that tap into a provable onchain decision. Here is every step, and every contract.

Jun 2026 · Thesis

Democracy is about to get valuable

AI is collapsing the cost of fake humans to zero, which makes one verified human voice the scarcest asset of the coming decade. Scarce things get priced. The only question is who sets the price: surveillance platforms, or communities that own their own infrastructure. Our thesis, plainly stated.

Jun 2026 · Strategy

From one town to the Netizen Stack

Röbel proved the system. The honest question now is what it becomes: a product, a platform, or a protocol. Our current answer, the market we see, and the two adjacencies we will not chase yet.

Jun 2026 · Field notes

No one can read Röbel's votes alone anymore

Röbel's secret-ballot system used to trust one key on one server. As of today, decrypting a single vote takes 3 of 5 citizens cooperating, and between elections the key does not exist at all. Here is what changed and why it matters.