Ethereum localism — global protocols, local power

A panel discussion with Benjamin Life and Sarah Johnstone at EthBoulder 2026 exploring the Ethereum Localism movement, including how Ethereum's global infrastructure can serve hyper-local communities through community currencies, local governance, bio-regional citizenship, and the principle of subsidiarity.

This transcript is an accessible copy of the original video transcript (opens in a new tab) published by EthBoulder. It has been lightly edited for readability.

Introduction to Ethereum Localism (0:12)

Sarah Johnstone: Hello. Can you hear us? Great. Well, it's really exciting to be here. Let's start out with some introductions. I'm Sarah Johnstone. I am a permaculturist, a bioregionalist, and an active Ethereum member. And I'm really passionate about the Ethereum localism community. I'm very excited to be here with Benjamin.

Benjamin Life: Hi everyone. To those who I don't know, my name is Benjamin Life. I am a co-founder of a DAO called Open Civics and also a co-steward of the Localism Fund, which is an Ethereum-aligned project funding local public goods — which we'll talk about more later — and most recently a co-founder and steward of the Spirit of the Front Range, which is a bioregional nonprofit here in Colorado.

Sarah Johnstone: I'd love to just fill in some context for those of you who are maybe attending this event for the first time. It's obviously the first Ethereum Boulder, but we had an event last year called the General Forum of Ethereum Localism, which I'd like to think seeded this bigger event that we're having now. So I'd love to share a little bit of context, Benjamin, about that event and maybe for you to talk about where the movement was born in Portland, your experience, and what we're doing here.

Benjamin Life: Yeah, it's really beautiful to have some of the catalysts of GEL — as the acronym goes — and the Ethereum localism movement here in the house. I want to shout out Christy and James and a few other members of their crew out in Portland who brought a group of us together for the first time. It was actually where I first met Kevin Owocki, even though we both lived in Boulder. It catalyzed a tremendous amount and it kind of set a precedent for what the Ethereum localism community is and what the shared values are. It really brought together a kind of crypto-leftist, but also a more explicitly values-aligned subset of the Web3 community that I think by giving it a name and a space really helped a lot of us find each other.

Values and the Tension of Global vs Local (2:40)

Sarah Johnstone: And do you mind speaking to some of those values that we hold in the ecosystem?

Benjamin Life: Yeah, I think it's hard to talk about the values without first acknowledging the underlying contradiction within Ethereum localism, which is this tension between this global protocol and the lived realities that each of us are actually embedded in specific places. So while we have this global ledger that allows us to coordinate and support open source software and public goods, where is that bridge that actually makes that relevant for local communities?

Those of us who got into the space for the values of democratic participation, community ownership, and peer-to-peer technological architectures that prevent capture by centralized institutions — this idea of combining sovereignty and care, I think, is at the core of it for me. I think this is inherent to Ethereum and why Ethereum is a place where these values are at home. There is this global solidarity, but then the need to apply those technologies in place-based communities where the communities have the sovereignty to define how the technology is used and deployed.

Ethereum localism sort of sits in the center of that contradiction. Instead of saying it's one or the other — it's not hyper-local only, screw the global commons, nor is it trying to create this abstracted global coordination layer that doesn't actually meaningfully connect to people's real everyday lives. By navigating that tension, we look for where can we be in global solidarity. What is light should be global and shared, and what is heavy should be local and self-governed. We're commoning our knowledge and open source software, but making sure that local self-determination and community-led initiatives are stewarding how those protocols are applied at the local level.

The Localism Fund and Consolidating Values (5:27)

Sarah Johnstone: So I'd love to hear — last year we gathered a couple hundred people for two days and it was very dynamic, lively discussions. I felt like there was some exciting movement that happened immediately with ETHDenver and the formation of the Region Commons group. How do you think we're doing as a movement? I know you've had a major milestone with the Localism Fund.

Benjamin Life: I sense that there's a vibe shift in the industry at large. There's a sense that the free money machine — where in the early stage a lot of us who had these pro-social values thought if we just hang out close to this money printing factory we can change the world — has dried up. The marketing budgets of Layer 2s are no longer going to fund the revolution. I think there's a consolidation in the market. The stablecoin success and deregulation creates an opportunity and a risk for our space.

I think Ethereum localism is an attempt to be a bulwark against the rise of more authoritarian aspects of our society. It makes sense that BlackRock is getting involved and we're seeing legislation connecting stablecoins to the US dollar — that's how the system tries to metabolize its own critique. Those of us who got into this industry for pro-social and democratic aspects, it's very important for us to really stay together. We actually have to get scrappier around creating our own economies, because we were still dependent on infrastructure that was just being inflated by institutional investors.

On the positive side, we just distributed $150,000 to 12 different local funding programs that are experimenting with a diverse set of mechanisms, and that's thanks to Gitcoin and Celo Public Goods. Those stories are really exciting because we have real on-the-ground communities on almost every continent. We have a solar crypto-mining facility in Nigeria funding education. We have a network of cooperative businesses in Barcelona creating a whole parallel economy and currency system. We have folks in Colombia doing amazing UBI, creating community hubs that are distributing money to folks living under the poverty line.

Transparency and Allocating Capital (10:01)

Sarah Johnstone: And here in this space, what are we doing in Boulder?

Benjamin Life: In Boulder — it was not part of the Localism Fund round — but we are experimenting with bioregional financing facilities and also creating the Regen Hub as a limited cooperative association. It's a really exciting way for us to create a community venture studio that's cooperatively owned and hopefully will be a catalyst for local economic development and community ownership. All of these experiments are still nascent, but the cool thing about running a program with 12 grants programs spread around the world is that as they deploy capital, we're going to have that learning loop where local experiments push insights back into the global community to help build parallel economies that let people exit capitalism into something else.

Sarah Johnstone: Thanks for sharing on that. One of the things I'd love for you to speak more about is just the process in which you allocated that capital, because there was a lot of transparency and openness in how your collective went about that.

Benjamin Life: Yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share about that. When Gitcoin announced they were looking to fund domains, I immediately thought about the governance and coordination problem of how you bring together experts of a particular domain in a way that's actually community-led. How can we make the genius of the people who all know and respect each other visible?

We ended up working with layer labs and Jake Hartnell to implement something called a trust graph. This basically uses an Ethereum Attestation Service schema to say, "Here are the criteria for what it means to be a member of this network." You seed that network with people who are validators. They attest to the people that they trust, and give it a weight of how much they trust that person. All of that becomes publicly available information.

We use the same algorithm that Google uses to rank web pages based on the strength of their links to come up with a numerical representation of the collective amount of trust that node had in the network. We had over 100 people making over 1,000 attestations, and from that we were able to derive the 30 most trusted people within this network. Those became the evaluators of the local funding programs that applied. Each evaluator reviewed according to criteria, and the total score determined their matching ratio. So we used this attestation-based network of trust to distribute money according to the will of this network of experts.

The Protocol Underground and Social Technologies (15:03)

Sarah Johnstone: Thanks. I'd love to open it up to the group. I see a lot of familiar faces in here and folks that probably identify with the movement. I'd love to hear from folks in the audience who might want to share. Is there anyone from the group that put out the manifesto today who would want to speak a little bit about it?

Audience Member (James): Hi, I'm James. I publish under Exoot. Christy and I and some others were the ones in Portland who threw the first GEL event. That original group kind of fractured — some were focused on bioregional stuff, others on decentralized manufacturing — and I feel like Boulder has really taken that mantle well. In the meantime, our publishing apparatus put together the Ethereum Localism book. We wanted to take a meta look at what we'd done right by catalyzing the initial stage of the movement, and we realized it was about taking different readings of technology from radically different spaces and clashing them together in a provocative way.

So what we just published — it's an open letter to the Ethereum community, not a manifesto — is challenging the Ethereum community to think about how different technologists, not just people who use digital technology but people who use community technology, art, or spirituality, have spontaneously converged around a set of values and principles we call the "Protocol Underground." Protocolization is a really important part of underground culture. People who never touched the digital web also engage in protocolization as a tactic. We're interested in provoking the Ethereum community to think about how these protocolists, who embody core Ethereum values without necessarily touching Web3, could contribute to Ethereum Localism. We want to be imaginative and empathic about how Ethereum solves problems inherent to decentralized technology far outside of digital contexts.

Benjamin Life: I would love to just add to that because I feel like the Portland crew and Open Machine in particular has been instrumental in my thinking about open protocols. For people who are more technical, Ethereum as an open protocol — if you've ever gone into the governance of the Ethereum protocol, you realize that there is none. It's mostly a bunch of nerds fighting in a forum with each other, and that's how they arrive at consensus. But open protocols from a more social, philosophical orientation are really about how information spreads among people.

Looking at underground communities is very instructive. The Open Protocol Research Group and Open Machine have done a lot of great analysis around how the early psychedelic movement, the sex-positive movement have come up with alternative means of protecting themselves and meeting their own needs. A great example is "set and setting." If you've ever done psychedelics, you know that you should keep in mind the context you're bringing into it and where you are. If you can keep those two things in mind, you're going to have a much better experience. That's a very simple, straightforward protocol that just spreads word of mouth — I tell you, you tell your friend.

Protocol doesn't have to just be the deterministic kind of protocol. It can also be these procedural maps of general heuristics that help you do a thing. And with so much not working in our current society, giving people both the permission to take direct action to change that thing in their own community as well as giving them best practices — what has worked well in the past, what other communities have learned through iterative practice.

City Repair in Portland is really worth looking at. This was a community that had a real problem — a kid was killed by a driver in their neighborhood. These protocols emerge from real needs, something raw and human where people say "We don't have a solution for this and the government isn't doing anything." So they decided to shut down the street and create a turnstile in the middle covered with art and plants, so that when people got to the intersection, they had to slow down. They thought, "The city's never going to let us do this." But someone in the neighborhood was a cop. So they went and talked to him and said, "Could you make sure the patrol cars don't come around here this weekend while we're doing this direct action?" And he said, "The city government is so slow. You should do it." So you have to realize that every system of authoritarianism is driven by people who are human. This kind of bottoms-up, community-centered approach to direct action that open protocols open up creates the ability for people to fork that pattern into their own community.

Ethereum Localism is a place where people who are interested in knowledge commoning can take patterns that work in one community at the grassroots level and make them available and visible to other communities. The frame of open protocols is what really makes that possible.

Audience Member (James): Yeah. Just really understand those tactics that you mentioned as technologies.

Benjamin Life: Yes. Social technologies.

Deciding what to build for global impact (20:25)

Audience Member: Sorry, I just came in. But I wanted to understand, how do you decide what open technologies to build? Humans have limited time — how do you decide what is to be built?

Sarah Johnstone: One of the areas I'm spending my time in right now is the humanitarian aid context, because the state of international aid funding cuts is super urgent and detrimental. The last eight months or so I've been on a deep study trying to understand that space, and it's been actually quite hopeful in terms of seeing technology from the Ethereum ecosystem and other ecosystems being applied to real-world contexts like refugee populations and displaced communities or conflict zones with cross-border payments and stablecoins. I feel quite hopeful about it. For me, that's what I'm choosing to spend my time on.

Credible neutrality and subsidiarity (27:16)

Benjamin Life: I do want to respond to what you asked. Something I've been calling "credible neutrality through mechanism design." I'm really working on how we can decenter individual binary decisions — the kinds of decisions that break up communities when you can't come to a consensus and you either have to fork or disband. Usually groups end up at one of those options, and it's very rare that a group has the metabolic or immune system to continuously re-evaluate its alignment to its own stated values.

One of the ways I think we can make it easier is instead of having binary decisions — we either do this or we do this — we embrace functional pluralism where the decision can actually be plural. We don't have to pick one direction or another. We can pick different directions proportional to the amount of interest people have in pursuing those directions.

Audience Member: I would say if it's more from a guided emergency point of view, then everyone can find alignment because this problem is highly urgent amongst 10 other problems.

Benjamin Life: Totally, and that brings up another important idea in the Ethereum localism space, which is subsidiarity — this idea that decision-making should be nested at the most local level to where that decision has an impact. Part of the reason the Localism Fund was funding grants programs as opposed to giving out grants directly to projects was we wanted to give $20,000 to Regenerate Cascadia, which is a nonprofit that has its own network with indigenous nations and local communities, and instead of us picking what projects should be funded there, giving them the full autonomy to determine how to distribute those resources. It's not passing the buck; it's distributing agency.

Value Flows and Universal Truth in Ethereum (30:17)

Audience Member: Is there a central truth at the heart of Ethereum that you all are chasing? There doesn't seem to be alignment on a universal truth behind Ethereum as compared to the current currency system. Does that make sense?

Benjamin Life: Yeah. I wrote an essay a while ago trying to understand if there are universal ethics or values that bridge across all subsets of communities within Ethereum. Part of its identity is that it is really just a neutral substrate. But I think pluralism as a value means we believe in a free society where people can determine for themselves, instead of authoritarian structures imposed on them from above.

That's what keeps me in Ethereum. There are other blockchains you can write smart contracts on now. Why stay in Ethereum? Because Ethereum represents the belief that we all have a right to consent to how our society is organized, and it's a space where we can experiment and iterate on that collectively.

Audience Member: I'm wondering how you think of value flows from local to, let's say, national or global? How much of that could and should be about keeping value within the community?

Benjamin Life: I would say that is maybe one of the most important and underdeveloped aspects of Ethereum localism. I know that Citizen Wallet had some really promising stuff, and Burner Wallet was doing some point-of-sale work. Basically what we need to accelerate community currency adoption is that it's very hard right now for a non-technical person to issue a token, define the governance of that token, and enroll enough people in utilizing it. You need a point-of-sale interface. You need to onboard local businesses. There's a ton of traditional community currency knowledge that we can apply here.

Scott Morris, who was at all the GEL events, is one of the world's leading experts on this and has identified ways to get around regulatory constraints where community currencies are just called "coupons" — it's not money, it's just a coupon. You could still have a token that represents a coupon. I don't know if that legal loophole will hold up in court — I'm not a lawyer — but there are some success stories of community currencies really keeping value circulating in their local community. I would love to see someone really take that baton and create the "Salesforce" of the decentralized community-owned currency space, because it's that ease of onboarding people and creating governance around the token that has been a learning curve. I see that as one of the highest-leverage things we could do, but I don't actually know of anyone who's really driving it forward the way I think it should be.

Global Citizens with Local Responsibilities (35:03)

Audience Member: Pulling on some threads from throughout the conversation — the tension between the global protocol and local networks. We have friends and family distributed around different bioregions that capture our hearts. How do you think about the fact that we are more mobile than ever, want to be localists, but are involved in networks not all in the same place?

Sarah Johnstone: I think one thing that comes up for me when you ask this question is recognizing our privilege. We are privileged to travel internationally and show up at events around the world, and I think it's important for us to stay centered in place in our bioregions and use local learnings to inform work on the global scale.

Benjamin Life: That was my main pushback to the "network state" idea. Forming global networks is fine, but we are people of place. That really matters. Just because we are global citizens doesn't mean we can ignore our responsibility to our bioregions. I wrote an essay suggesting that citizenship isn't just something conferred by the state, but actually conferred by your peers as a recognition of taking on responsibility and care for some collective — your neighborhood, your Discord server, your family. We can split our identity and recognize we wear many different hats. We must do our citizen duties at the global level while taking on bioregional citizenship simultaneously.

Sarah Johnstone: I think we're at time now. Come join us tomorrow at Riverside 1 to 5. We're excited.