Edge Esmeralda 2025: Month in Review
Four weeks of living, learning, and building together in Northern California
Over four weeks in Healdsburg, Edge Esmeralda 2025 brought together hundreds of residents to explore new ways of living, building, and thinking together.
From education to infrastructure, the village explored the systems shaping how we live, alongside the return of favorite rituals like nightly saunas, weekend adventures, and community picnics in the plaza.
Here’s a look back at what unfolded.
By the Numbers
850+ residents across the month
80+ kids and families
66 countries represented
15 thematic tracks
13 community-led experiments
Programming Highlights
Many of the month’s most memorable moments came from the tracks and sessions shaped by our incredible partners and collaborators, each of whom brought frontier thinking, deep expertise, and real generosity to the village. Some highlights include:
Consciousness Week, hosted by Mike Johnson, Ryan Pripstein, and Janine Leger, bridged neuroscience, trauma, AI, and spiritual traditions to explore what it means to design for expanded awareness. Sessions ranged from vasocomputation theory to cross-tradition mappings of enlightenment.
Cities of Tomorrow, curated by Devon Zuegel and Jonny Bates explored urban design, community infrastructure, and civic potential. Audrey Tang also joined for a fireside on digital democracy (talk recording here) and the power of Plurality.
Truth-Seeking AI, organized by Brendan McCord and the Cosmos Institute, gathered researchers and founders to explore AI design grounded in epistemology, autonomy, and public institutions.
d/acc Week, hosted by Aleksandra Smilek and Lou de K of NODES, investigated decentralized acceleration through sessions on privacy, defense, and distributed infrastructure. Joscha Bach also joined for a salon on machine consciousness and existential hope.
Vital Futures, led by Justin Mares and Ben Brummell, explored metabolic health, biotech innovation, and radical self-optimization through daily labs, blood testing, and evening salons.
Neurotech Summit, hosted by Protocol Labs, brought together BCI founders, neural hardware builders, and neuro-AI researchers for a 2.5-day deep dive into brain-machine interfaces and open-source neurotools.
Cybernetic Society Summit, organized by Cyberfund, Gensyn and BBF, focused on distributed machine learning, privacy-preserving AI, and building systems for collective coordination in the age of networked intelligence.
Crypto Academic Camp, co-hosted with Uniswap Foundation, gathered leading crypto researchers for a week of deep, off-record conversation on mechanism design, policy, and foundational problems in DeFi.
Transhumanism Workshop, led by Laura Deming and Fynn Comerford of Cradle, reimagined the boundaries of the human body and mind across biotech, neurotech, space, and somatics. Participants mapped emerging technologies along axes of nostalgia, innovation, and adoption.
Edgeucation, curated by Rina Patel, Kelly Smith, and Courtney K. convened school builders and education reformers to share alternative learning models.
Roots of Progress, led by Jason Crawford, ran daily salons and focused writing sessions on techno-humanism, long-termism, and moral progress as a framework for the future.
Tomorrowland, produced by Cameron Wiese and World’s Fair Company, featured frontier tech demos in hardtech, manufacturing, energy, and immersive experiences—from 3D-printed bikes to AR playgrounds.
Three Deep Dive Residencies
Three long-form residencies anchored the month, supporting builders at the edge of science, tech, and society with structure, mentorship, and a live village to test new ideas.
Long Journey Residency
Curated in partnership with Long Journey Ventures, this residency supported 14 ambitious builders working across synthetic biology, neurotech, AI infrastructure, fertility health, and more. From hands-on bio labs to solar-powered AI rigs, residents used Esmeralda as a testbed for frontier projects — launching experiments that couldn’t have happened anywhere else, and sharing their earliest prototypes with the community. Meet the Long Journey Residents →
World Builder Residency
In partnership with World, this residency invited developers and designers to build apps using World ID, World Chain, and MiniKit, testing ideas in a live, high-trust environment. Projects ranged from collectible card games and storytelling AI to new developer tools and stablecoin payment systems. Three projects received residency bounties for outstanding creativity and integration. Meet the World Residents→
Edge City Fellowship
This fully-funded fellowship supported seven emerging builders (ages 18–25) exploring frontier questions across neuroscience, scientific careers, AI governance, decentralized systems, and human creativity. Fellows participated in all four weeks of village life, hosted workshops, and prototyped projects ranging from accessible brain imaging and incentive design for science to a chess-playing robotic arm. Meet the Fellows →
Experiment Highlights
As always, the village doubled as a testbed for frontier tools, from neural interfaces to new social protocols. A few of the most ambitious experiments:
Constellation, led by Avery Krieger, piloted a daily neural data collection protocol to train the first foundation model of brain state.
Ami, a new social app from Shawn Fanning and Andrew Frame, launched on-site enabling location-based intros and unexpected encounters across the village.
Harmonica prototyped a new format for structured, async dialogue using AI moderation and tools like Polis to surface collective views about human flourishing in the village.
Off-Grid Solar Datacenter — Built by Ben James, this solar-powered, battery-backed system ran on-site to support GPU-intensive projects. Residents contributed hardware and tested new approaches to sustainable, decentralized compute.
Fulcra Dynamics aggregated wearable data into a village-wide wellness dashboard, showing how people were moving, sleeping, and connecting.
Ante launched an onchain crowdfunding mechanism for the next popup village, inviting residents to stake directly behind their shared future.
Keoni Gandall launched a DIY wet lab for biotech automation, running real DNA tests on-site from scratch-built hardware, and culminating in many loaves of CRISPR-edited grape-flavored bread.
Community Life
Much of the month’s magic came from what wasn’t on the calendar. Some highlights from life in and around the village:
Russian River floats, redwood hikes, a beach day in Jenner and other weekend adventures gave residents time to exhale, wander, and connect away from the calendar
Kids Camp at Dragonfly Farm offered daily programming in nature play, art, DJing, and even vibecoding, alongside a parallel “Minecraft internship” where 10-year-old Billy recruited adult residents to help build his dream world.
The sauna returned as a nightly ritual, with friends (and sometimes strangers) gathering for hours of hot-cold conversation and reset.
Long Journey’s Weird Weekdays brought a layer of spontaneity and surrealism to the village, from an urban safari through town to late-night music shares, movie screenings, and a rotating cast of pop-up salons.
Dream Park turned the Healdsburg plaza into an immersive playground, with adults and kids solving puzzles and chasing virtual creatures.
Pomodoro coworking, spontaneous DJ sets, and community picnics kept the rhythm of the village playful and porous.
Closing Ceremony at Hoot Owl gathered the full village for reflection, celebration, and a final night of music and meaning.
Reflections & What’s Next
Edge Esmeralda 2025 was built on a simple idea: that new possibilities emerge when we gather to live, build, and experiment together.
After an incredible month, we’re excited to share what’s coming next:
Bhutan (Sept 14-21): An 8-day expedition into nature, governance, and global dialogue.
Patagonia (Oct 18-Nov 15): A 4-week popup village at the edge of the Andes, designed for deep work and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
To everyone who joined us: thank you for showing up with presence, creativity, and care. To everyone we haven’t met yet: we hope to see you soon.
– The Edge Esmeralda Team ☀️
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