Prototyping Parallel Institutions: Learnings for Logos Circles
Building a network of hyperlocal communities to revive civil society in the digital age
Bitzu
Sev Bonnet
We are living through overlapping crises, not only political and economic, but a deeper collapse of trust, meaning, and belonging.
In 2024, only four in ten people trusted their national government, according to the OECD. In advanced democracies, nearly two-thirds are dissatisfied with how democracy works. Institutions feel broken, authoritarianism is advancing, and civil society is declining. While Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone showed how social capital has eroded for decades, philosopher John Vervaeke calls this the “meaning crisis”. The result is widespread disconnection and loneliness, so severe that some governments, such as the UK and Japan, now appoint ministers for loneliness.
The Logos community is a network of people across the globe building new ways to collaborate and trust one another. We have learned a great deal about how to run effective activist groups, how to build local trust, organise around shared values, and achieve tangible wins that reinforce agency and belonging.
The Lisbon Logos Circle has been a particularly rich source of insight, showing how structured, values-driven collaboration can empower volunteers and move initiatives forward. We can also draw lessons from other decentralised governance experiments, such as Cardano’s Catalyst, which highlight learnings for organising groups of people at scale.
Berlin’s layered history, from the surveillance and division of the Cold War to the bottom-up hacker and open-source movements that followed, creates fertile ground for civic experimentation. In the sections that follow, we turn to Berlin’s past to understand why these lessons from Lisbon can take root here, and how Logos Circles might help rebuild local agency and collective power in a city shaped by both government complacency and underground creativity.
Cardano’s Catalyst: Learnings from a previous governance experiment
Logos Circles attempt to establish a new type of decentralised governance, with hyperlocal communities solving the issues around them. Cardano’s Catalyst, as with many other Web3 and DAO experimenters, ambitiously tried something similar, with limited success. The lessons below come from first-hand experience contributing to several Catalyst funds.
The new funding mechanism was designed as both an innovation lab and a governance experiment. It aimed to provide a way for the community itself to decide which problems and opportunities deserved attention and to refine the very systems through which those decisions were made. At its height, it became one of the largest experiments in decentralised decision-making in crypto, with millions of ADA directed toward community-driven initiatives.
The idea was compelling: open up the process, invite stake pool operators, builders, and everyday ADA holders to the table, and let the collective intelligence of the network guide where resources should flow. But reality didn’t quite match the vision. Influence quickly concentrated in the hands of a few whales, able to tilt outcomes against the voices of thousands of less well-capitalised participants. Processes were scattered across spreadsheets, chats, and forums, creating a bureaucratic fog that left even engaged contributors struggling to follow along.
Governance itself often drifted into the abstract: debates about procedures overshadowed any focus on solving real people’s problems. And in the spaces where decisions should have been made collectively, politicking crept in through factions, status games, and lobbying that looked more like legacy institutions than a viable alternative.
The lessons from Catalyst are clear: avoid the traps of politics and hierarchy, don’t let influence pool in the hands of a few, and keep decisions transparent and grounded in tangible outcomes. For Logos Circles, that means focusing on small wins that compound over time, rather than getting lost in abstract procedures.
Where Catalyst looked upward, toward treasury management and blockchain governance, Logos Circles turn outward, toward real people and their communities. Their aim is not to perfect voting mechanics, but to rebuild trust, foster belonging, and restore agency through shared victories. Circles are designed to evolve into parallel structures that stand alongside existing institutions and show what cooperation can achieve when it starts from the ground up.
The case for Logos Circles
Circles respond to this governance challenge much like blockchains confronted the oracle problem. In crypto, consensus is meaningless if offchain inputs are flawed: garbage in, garbage out. Governance faces the same risk. Likewise, communities can agree on the wrong priorities if their inputs are disconnected from lived experience. Circles overcome this by being rooted in local life. They surface real needs and actionable data, rather than leaving developers or distant policymakers to guess. The Logos stack – Nomos, Waku, Codex – then enables communities to coordinate securely, privately, and resiliently around those priorities.
Logos Circles are values-driven, hyper-local communities that organise around real problems, restore belonging, and act as living nodes in a decentralised, resilient network. They rebuild agency by tackling winnable issues, the name for concrete challenges that people can solve together, that are small enough to be achievable but big enough to matter.
From Lisbon to Berlin
Lisbon, like Berlin, carries a layered history that shapes its civic life and makes it fertile ground for experimentation. Under Salazar’s Estado Novo regime, civic activity was tightly controlled until the Carnation Revolution of 1974 restored democracy through grassroots mobilisation. That experience left a lasting sensitivity to authoritarianism and a cultural memory of how ordinary people can reclaim agency. In the decades since, Lisbon has reinvented itself as a hub for digital nomads, crypto entrepreneurs, and open-source communities. Yet beneath the tech boom – and actually accelerated by the gentrification it brought – stark inequalities remain, showing up in housing shortages, precarious work, and communities struggling with rising costs of living.
The Lisbon Circle turned these challenges into direct, hands-on experimentation. In Quinta do Mocho, a marginalised neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of the city known for its deep creative roots, the Circle worked alongside local community leaders to create opportunities for creatives to participate in the Rare Effect festival and produce a local documentary-style short film (currently in early stage production) to raise awareness of the community's struggles and rally support for grassroots initiatives.
When local government failed to deliver on its promise of a community space for Mocho residents after months of waiting, the Circle organised a meeting with the freguesia to advocate for residents, only to find the government office shut that day – a concrete example of why advocacy and persistence are needed. By helping residents articulate a shared vision of greater neighbourhood autonomy, the Circle continues to use grassroots coordination to pressure local authorities and empower the community to reclaim agency.
The Lisbon experience also reinforced core practices for effective organising: bringing the community in early, meeting people where they are, sharing responsibilities, and balancing broad outreach with focused working groups on tangible issues. Leadership naturally emerges once relationships and context are established – volunteers and Circle leads often step up within days when ownership is clear. Small, winnable victories compound trust and momentum, showing that meaningful change is possible even with small groups of volunteers.
Berlin’s history carries its own lessons. Scarred by division, the city naturally leaned toward cypherpunk ideals and activism. The Stasi’s dense surveillance network, which monitored roughly one-third of East Germany’s population, left a reflexive distrust of mass data collection and state overreach. On the other side of the wall, West Berlin incubated a contrarian, DIY culture: squatters, alternative media, and hackers who wielded technology as a political medium. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC), founded in 1981 by Herwart “Wau” Holland and others, became Europe’s most influential hacker collective, emphasising ethics, transparency, and security. Its 1984 “BTX hack” publicly exposed flaws in the state-run online service, returning siphoned funds on camera to prove a point: secrecy and control are no match for transparency and accountability.
After reunification, Berlin’s hacker and maker culture flourished. The c-base hackerspace became a hub for builders, artists, and privacy advocates. Community-driven projects like Freifunk, a citywide mesh network organised from c-base starting in 2003, embodied citizen-owned infrastructure and open protocols. Political engagement followed naturally: Berlin became home to Germany’s Pirate Party in 2006, translating hacker priorities such as civil liberties, transparency, and access to information into political action. Early adoption of Bitcoin, from Kreuzberg’s Room 77 in 2011 onward, further demonstrates the city’s openness to experimental, decentralised solutions.
Berlin’s layered history of division, surveillance, and grassroots innovation makes it an ideal ground for a Logos Circle. It’s a place where civic experimentation can flourish atop a tradition of bottom-up, values-driven activism.
Join a Logos Circle
Logos Circles are not crypto meetups. They are working groups for collective action, run on open-source principles, where activists and builders prototype parallel institutions. If they succeed, Logos Circles could become a model for building blockchain communities with a purpose, showing how groups can reclaim agency in the digital age, turn strangers into neighbours, and cynicism into solidarity.
From Lisbon’s neighbourhoods to Berlin’s hacker roots, the vision is the same: connect open-source tools, grassroots culture, and shared victories to prove that people don’t need permission to shape the world they want to live in. In Berlin, this is already beginning. The first Circle is forming around a small but committed community, including projects like the Sats Stoners ordinals collective, which explores the intersection of Bitcoin and cannabis to close education gaps and raise awareness.
Join the first Berlin meetup on Friday, October 17, 2025, at 18:00 CET at Cafe Holzmarktperle, a trusted gathering spot for the Bitcoin community. Sign up here.
Not in Berlin? Check the Logos events page to find a Circle near you. Don’t see one close? Start your own! Contact @amelia__cares on Discord.