= conference, movement, and book

The Movement

Characteristics

Monty Merlin Bryant:

"The Ethereum Localism approach responds to several fundamental challenges in the current relationship between blockchain technology and local communities:

Ethereum is too abstract for local economies — For most local communities and residents, Ethereum remains conceptually distant from everyday needs and concerns. Ethereum Localism bridges this gap through tangible applications: local payment networks, community currencies, and participatory funding mechanisms that demonstrate immediate, practical value.

Public goods are underfunded and invisible — Current Web3 funding systems predominantly support digital projects, venture-backed startups, and speculative DeFi applications. Yet Ethereum technology can fund not just software but local infrastructure, cooperatives, public spaces, and community resilience projects, while creating verifiable impact records that attract municipal, philanthropic, and impact investment.

Web3 capital doesn't circulate locally — Today, much of Web3 local community funding quickly exits through centralized exchanges and conversion to fiat currencies. Ethereum Localism aims to empower systems where new capital is on-ramped and value circulates within local Web3 economic networks, supporting ongoing economies instead of one-off grants.

Shifting narratives and expanding Ethereum's addressable market — Ethereum's future growth depends on demonstrating real-world relevance. By addressing and solving local challenges, Ethereum evolves from a speculative finance protocol into a comprehensive substrate for civic participation, economic activity, and collective governance across diverse communities worldwide.

Putting this into practice, Ethereum Localism seeks to make Web3 technology accessible and valuable to local communities with three core strategies:

Creating Real-World Utility — Deploying Ethereum-based innovations that can address tangible community needs and empower local capital flows: participatory funding mechanisms, local currency systems, decentralized credit networks and more. Making Web3-based platforms tangible, useful, and indispensable for local communities, from rebuilding local supply chains to financing cooperative housing, organizing community-owned energy, and restoring local ecosystems.

Building Sovereign Economies — Developing the infrastructure for communities to self-organize, govern resources, and circulate value without excessive dependence on centralized institutions, thereby grounding Ethereum’s vision into everyday community life. Enabling Cosmo-Local Collaboration — Connecting communities globally through knowledge commons and resource sharing—allowing governance models, funding approaches, regenerative practices, and open-source tools to spread horizontally while being adapted to local conditions and needs."

(https://blog.refidao.com/ethereum-localism-x-regen-coordination/)

Book

* Book: Ethereum Localism: collection of perspectives on ethereum localism. Collated and Published by the Open Machine with the suppport of Kevin Owocki/Gitcoin, 2025

URL = https://greenpill.network/pdf/ethereum-localism.pdf?

Conference

= conference in Portland, Oregon, held in October 2023

URL = https://mirror.xyz/ethpdx.eth/kjpsLAAC2Si0XDmr_aFp0F5esPNH4DoPB4lOTlFbR5M

"We believe the Ethereum machine is untapped until its creations are touching soil on the level of the local, just as our cities and communities are squandering their singular gifts if they aren’t contributing to the global conversation. The urban center especially, with its dense entanglement of networks, its magical collision of artificial and organic, is a radical testing ground for any technology, and these same entanglements announce loudly the need for coordination tools and positive sum games. There is still so much discovery to be done, so many answers to the question: “what can a blockchain do?”

Our intention for this convening is to create a container where the Ethereum community can elaborate for itself, in a plurality of directions, what an experimentalism of the city can mean and look like for web3. While we know the cultural imagination will outdo us, some examples might include:

DAOs as a tool of the urban commons – economic solidarity blocs for individuals (housing protection, unions, grassroots campaigns) and businesses (as mutual safety nets to protect against extractive megacorps), issue-specific grassroots fundraising sprints, and commons infrastructure management.

Ethereum-enabled monetary localism – mutual credit networks, community tokens, circular economies, and other exotic programmable solutions to the problem of extra-local economic extraction.

The premise that local food and material production systems are aligned with the Ethereum ethos of decentralization, security through redundancy, economic autonomy, and applied systems thinking, and should be supported as our natural allies.

It seems much of the web3 world is waiting for some nebulous global catalyst to deliver blockchain to the masses. Many seem to think speculation will save us - the return of the bull. This not only violates the natural processes by which technology sees adoption, but it is antithetical to the bottom-up nature of decentralization. Bull or bear market, the work has always been done by passionate technologist anons experimenting without sanction or promise of financial gain.

Disruptive technological adoption is driven by practical material solutions – technologies aren’t real until they matter. This mattering means, above all, foregrounding simplicity and backgrounding complexity, a task that can be as difficult as developing the tech itself. It’s why adoption occurs long after a proof-of-concept exists. It’s also the window when the battles of capture and decentralization are fought; too often, the generative work happens at the grassroots level, the fruits of its labor then captured by centralized entities.

By design, web3 is inoculated from that threat - or so the story goes. We are here to say that this immunity can’t be assumed, but must be assured through practice. We know from history that the kind of technological simplicity that precedes real adoption requires local application, in all its experimental plurality. If this is so, then every site of novel local use is a potential inoculation site, a defense against capture. If the logic of protocols is a first breath of resilience, community use is its conclusion. Localism is an anticapture technology.

This is why PDX DAO is embracing a grassroots approach by using Ethereum tools for solving existing problems at the local level - that is, for mattering. We want to connect and merge tomorrow's end-users with today's tool-builders to begin iterating now on technology solutions that solve practical problems for communities while inventing new use cases for the globe. In this infinite garden of feedback, localism is globalism, and this conference hopes to underline that break in the binary."

(https://mirror.xyz/ethpdx.eth/kjpsLAAC2Si0XDmr_aFp0F5esPNH4DoPB4lOTlFbR5M)

More information

Regen Coordination

Ethereum Localism

Contents