Funding the Commons Forum Berlin

This roundtable discusses the intersection of the network state movement and Web3 communities to uncover, examine, and critique its neo-colonial character. While popup villages, edge cities, and local nodes are perceived as bottom-up initiatives by the Web3 community, their interlinkages with the network state movement evoke a critical perspective. Venture capital-backed network states not only claim territory from nation states in a neo-colonial fashion, they also seek legitimisation through subjecting ocean states to a discourse of exoticism and vulnerabilities. Bringing together scholars from the humanities, event organisers, and Web3 practitioners, this discussion aims to inform the audience with a critical and multifaceted view on the network state movement in and beyond Web3.

This roundtable is a discussion that takes a deeper look at the political and economic realities of building blockchains with technical veterans in the space who will share the realities of it. If blockchains are ideally one of the most resilient technical infrastructures that facilitate economic interaction we have, it’s important to understand how it interplays with the political economic context we live in.

Today, we’re seeing blockchain used in the real world to deliver humanitarian aid, support sustainable development, and pilot decentralized funding models. From digital wallets for displaced communities to SDG-aligned funding and municipal innovation portfolios in Eastern Europe, these experiments are emerging across radically different systems.
But what makes it possible to innovate across infrastructures and institutional cultures that were never designed to work together?
This panel explores what it means to deploy decentralized tools for public benefit—and what kinds of structural, financial, and cultural bridges are needed to make those tools stick. We’ll discuss how successful pilots move beyond technical integration to become part of a broader systems architecture and what lessons about risk, legitimacy, and institutional readiness emerge from cities, agencies, and ecosystems already doing this work.

Proposed questions:
Ievgen Kylymnyk:

• What are the real enablers of change that determine whether innovation sticks or not?
• What are the mechanisms, partnerships or critical people that make innovation work in public context?
• What are the most common challenges?
• What makes municipalities effective spaces for systemic innovation?
• What kinds of civic infrastructure—people, processes, relationships—enable cities to move from one-off pilots to adaptive systems?
• As new digital public goods like blockchain and Web3 tools emerge, what would it take for them to become part of a city’s portfolio—beyond  tech experiments, and as part of long-term civic infrastructure? What kind of “bridging work” needs to happen to make these connections real, and what are the examples of institutional readiness?

Johanna Sieben:

• What kinds of mechanisms, processes, roles or people are essential to public innovation, but often invisible?
• What connects legacy systems and new ideas?
• Public institutions carry legitimacy and risk in equal measure. What does it mean for how they host experimentation?
• How do you combine risk-taking, innovation and accountability, without eroding trust? Can bureaucracy be both accountable and imaginative?
• What kinds of cultural infrastructure do we need to make Web3 interoperable with public institutions—what narratives are missing?

Alexandre Maaza:

• What makes a blockchain pilot actually gain traction in high-accountability environments like the UN or the humanitarian sector?
• In partnerships with legacy systems, what helps unlock new possibilities instead of hitting institutional walls?
• What are some of the challenges with Web3–public sector interoperability —both from a technical and systems perspective? What kind of roles or mechanisms are still missing?

This roundtable is a discussion between Simone Robutti (Tech Workers Coalition), Sam McCarthy (DAOstar and LaborDAO), and Magdalena Ziomek (SMART Coop)where we will discuss the current realities of labor in building out alternatives to exploitative working conditions. Keeping in mind the theme of Adaptive Resilience, we are interested in seeing how alternative labor structures like cooperatives, worker councils and DAOs can or cannot offer more solidaristic relationships with work.