Zeitgeist is a laboratory for building crypto-native products, protocols, and public goods.

Builders in Zeitgeist are working on a range of projects:

• Abram and Will building 0xSplits - a protocol for splitting onchain income being used by Protocol Guild, Sound, and others.
• David, Matt, and Vignesh building Sound.xyz - a platform to help artists make a living off their music.
• Tracheopetryx, Zach, and Zemm building Coordinape- a platform for decentralized compensation being used in Yearn, Gitcoin, and Bankless.
• Shreyas and Austin building Llama - economic infrastructure for DAOs.
• Adrian building BlockArt - a protocol for NFT co-creation and issuance.
• GVN, ARB, and Rasmus building Moving Castles’ first on-chain game - a tragicomic NPC survival sim.
• Stephen, Ayush, and Mehran building Castle - a smart wallet providing multi-factor auth and identity.
• Raymond and Joel building Canvas - a P2P backend for web3 applications using CRDT’s.
• Nitya, Norwood, and Cody building Capsule - transaction signing infrastructure for wallets/applications powered by MPC.
• Ben building Spec - a database for web3 applications.
• Wei Jie building a cross-chain ZK bridge - the first implementation connecting Polygon and Arbitrum One.

Building a product, protocol, or public good is not easy. We have to navigate a terrain of non-trivial trade-offs and questions, both in technical domains (e.g. building secure smart contract systems) and operational domains (e.g. structuring legal and onchain entities). Moreover, the ecosystem is young and so the right answer to these questions is evolving over time.

So, we build together and dive into the obstacles coming up across the group with the support of experienced engineers/operators who have gone through the journey themselves - folks like 0age (head of protocol development at OpenSea), Santiago Palladino (previously engineering at OpenZeppelin), and Sina Habibian (previously ecosystem development at the Ethereum Foundation).

Quix working on an L1/L2 bridge as a public good

Beacon proxies are new frontiers and online resources are sparse so your advice is insanely appreciated, @0age

0age giving a talk on smart contract upgradability patterns.

Weekly call, doing demo’s and diving into questions/problems with each team.

There have been multiple meaningful collaborations in the group. Sound.xyz used the 0xSplits protocol to launch Song Splits (a feature which enables artists to set on-chain splits/credits for their tracks) and worked with FirstMate to launch the Sound marketplace (a marketplace for music NFTs). Coordinape and Llama collaborated in building for DAOs, and Quixotic and Conquest collaborated in building on L2s. Macro did security audits for multiple teams. Castle integrated with OpenSea’s Seaport protocol based on input from 0age.

The season two expo — a gathering for engineers, designers, and operators from the larger Ethereum ecosystem who were interested in learning about and/or contributing to season two teams.

We believe the crypto community’s geographic diversity is one of its unique strengths, so Zeitgeist seasons run online and are open to teams located anywhere in the world. To date, we have had builders from the US, Canada, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Singapore participate.

We have also learned that in-person time can be effective for building personal relationships, so we meet and have working sessions in person in different parts of the world.

Zeitgeist & friends dinner at Devconnect in Amsterdam.

Zeitgeist & friends dinner at Devcon in Bogota.

To learn more about Zeitgeist and some of the builders in the community, you can listen to Sina’s podcast conversations with Tracheopteryx who is building Coordinape, David/Matt/Vignesh who are building Sound.xyz, and 0age who is building Seaport at OpenSea.