CryptoCity

What CryptoCity is

CryptoCity is a privately built residential community on Isla de Margarita, a Venezuelan island in the Caribbean. Its master plan divides around forty hectares of hillside above the shore into some three hundred plots, on which owners build to their own design or to one of the project’s solar-powered villa models, with a beach club, a mini-market, a harbour and a harbour club planned at the centre, and a hotel, a golf course and a port already standing next to the site. It describes itself as the first DAO-governed city: what the community holds in common is decided by a vote of its landowners.

The project was founded in 2022 by four partners, Tim Stern, Bernd Armbruster, Luis Olivo and André Herrmann, and is run by a Venezuelan company with a Venezuelan engineering and construction team. It is aimed at a small circle of freedom-oriented, largely German-speaking entrepreneurs and their families looking for a second home in the tropics and a base for high-value business networking.

Where CryptoCity is

The site is on the island’s dry south coast, on the Punta Carnero headland a few minutes by car from the airport and from El Yaque, one of the best-known windsurfing and kitesurfing beaches in the Caribbean, and about twenty minutes from Porlamar, the island’s commercial centre. Margarita lies some forty kilometres off the Venezuelan mainland, south of the Atlantic hurricane track, warm and dry for most of the year, and the terraces run down to about seven hundred metres of private shoreline.

How CryptoCity works

CryptoCity is organised as a decentralised autonomous organisation. Every plot carries a vote, and decisions on urban planning, infrastructure, security, building and rental rules, environmental standards and community services require a two-thirds majority of the landowners, on the Swiss model of direct votes. Newcomers are admitted by a vote of the members already there, and the project describes itself as a closed community of entrepreneurs and their families rather than an open development. What buying in involves is set out by the project itself.

Currency and law

As the name suggests, the community’s internal economy runs on cryptocurrency, a natural fit in a country where years of hyperinflation have made stablecoins and digital payments commonplace, though plots can be paid for in ordinary currency and nobody needs to hold crypto to live there. Land is bought through notaries and entered in the land registry as it would be in Germany. Margarita and the state of Nueva Esparta have carried free-port status since the 1970s and were decreed a special economic zone in November 2023, covering industry, science and technology, and tourism.

Living in CryptoCity

German and English are spoken inside the community; Spanish is the language of the island and of the project’s own staff. The development is designed to produce its own water, power and part of its own food, and a well and a fibre-optic connection already serve the whole site. The island’s attractions are the climate, the beaches, the wind on the south shore and the company of like-minded neighbours: the project says most people who approach it come for those rather than for the technology.