Writing
One connected thesis, told in order: what we are building, who counts, how a town decides, the money it mints, and how it scales. Read it top to bottom, or jump in anywhere.
The thesis
What Netizen Labs is, why one real town is the test, and the worldview underneath it.
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.
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.
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.
Who counts: identity and trust
Proof of personhood, and the keys no single party holds alone. The layer everything else stands on.
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.
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.
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.
Deciding together
Private, provable voting, and why a passing vote can move real community money.
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.
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.
A town that mints its own money
The town's own currency: what it is, the day a citizen first held it, the economics, what it is worth, and the whole system end to end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where it lives, and how it scales
The chain underneath the stack, and how one town's money becomes a network of towns.
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.
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.