“Allocation Privacy: Shielding the Funding Mechanism”

Martin Štrobl; Lightning Talk

Privacy-of-process with transparency-of-outcome is the model of private on-chain funding we are most likely heading towards. Private and anonymous DAOs will aim to shield funders and voters from liability, so the decision stays hidden and only results go public. This talk argues that comfort is false.

If an allocation mechanism is deterministic, the public set of recipients and amounts is an invertible function of the hidden decision. An adversary who knows the mechanism can reconstruct the process and partly infer an individual's implied liability.

I argue that every deterministic mechanism with transparent allocations leaks information. Hence the open problem on the table: allocation privacy.

I identify mechanism mixing as a promising direction. A second mechanism that injects funds so an observer cannot tell which mechanism, or how many, produced an allocation—adding noise to the core mechanism.

I close with a short example: Draft-to-Funding, a mechanism I designed as a potential candidate for this layer.

“Anarchy with a Religious Face”

Josh Datko; Lightning Talk

The tools of anarchy are built from technology, alternative societies, and dissident politics. But one motivation is often overlooked: religious conviction.
This talk traces a lineage of religious anarchy from 15th-century Bohemians like Petr Chelčický, to authors like Leo Tolstoy and philosophers like Jacques Ellul who opposed the state on spiritual grounds. I’ll also share my own experience in a Quaker meeting. For over 350 years, the Quakers have had governance and consensus without voting — a better protocol than the blockchain! Belief is not required for this talk, but curiosity is.

“ARTivism: Hacking culture to defend privacy”

Bogomil Shopov - Бого; Talk

Decentralization only matters if people use it, but adoption starts with meaning, not code.

This talk starts with art as activism, showing how creative work like the theater project System Err 2052 can turn ideas like privacy and autonomy into something people can feel and relate to. It also connects to cypherpunk culture, where code, art, and resistance have always gone together to protect freedom and challenge control.

It then moves to design and technology, looking at how developers can build privacy tools that people actually want to use. With new research and real examples, it shows that usability is a form of activism, and that protecting user rights is both a technical and a creative task.

“Cypher Atlas: A Shared Map for a Movement That Cannot Be Found”

Tur Tyhyi; Talk

Most of the people this movement needs have never heard the word cypherpunk.

How do they get in? It is a question the movement does not ask itself.

Engineers, lawyers, researchers solving the same problems under different names. Right now you find this movement by accident: the right podcast, the right person, the right conference.

The people already inside cannot see each other either. Five projects solve the same problem. One law takes all five, and they find out separately.

Cypher Atlas is a map of this ecosystem: who is here, what came out of what, and what is coming at it. Built entirely from public sources.

This movement built doors. All of them open from the inside. What happens when a movement that spent fifty years building tools for autonomy finally becomes easier to find, understand and enter?

“Cypherpunk and Other Stuff Transmitted By Relays”

Juraj B.; Talk

I did not like Nostr when it came out. Too basic, not very good privacy, not very decentralized. And yet, I keep building more and more apps for it. Decentralized mapping, decentralized events, scheduling, marketing tools, anonymous microblogs. Others have built things such as decentralized inference, private messaging, etc. Nostr stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. This talk will focus on the Other Stuff and how they bring cypherpunk future into now.

“Decentralization Has a Memory Budget: Running DarkFi on 8 GB”

Reymom; Lightning Talk

A privacy network is only as decentralized as the cheapest machine that can still run a full node. Everything below that line is a promise. But nobody publishes that, we argue about cryptography, threat models and governance, and then assume somebody else is running the infrastructure. Block explorers show what a network agrees on; we don't know in general what are the costs to participate in that network. And when that cost increases, a network centralizes no matter how good its cryptography is — not by anyone's decision, just by who can still afford to be a peer.

I measured this cost on DarkFi: since June I've run a testnet node in my flat on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM, with a Monero miner sharing the same box, and published the telemetry live. It started by killing its own host: memory climbed from 1.4 GB to over 4.5 GB in an hour and the machine stopped answering SSH — powered on, fully unreachable. The immediately obvious fix, systemd memory limits, changed nothing because Raspberry Pi OS ships with the cgroup memory controller disabled on the kernel command line. The kernel accepted every limit I wrote and enforced none of them. That is not a DarkFi bug and not really a Pi bug. It's the general shape of the problem: defaults on cheap hardware are not written for someone who wants to run infrastructure on it.

On the other side, this is what it looks like: darkfid and xmrig coexisting inside hard cgroup budgets, 5.77 GB of 7.87 GB in use, zero swap by design, ~420 H/s at 56 °C with no thermal throttling. Live at reymom.xyz/darknode while you read this.

And then the part an explorer can't teach. For several days both lilith seed nodes refused connections, and my node stayed synced through four peers it had already learned on its own. That is decentralization working, observed from the inside — an event that leaves no trace on any chain explorer, because nothing went wrong on the chain.

In twenty minutes:
- the cost of participation stated in gigabytes instead of in ideology
- the debugging arc, and the rule it produced: verify against kernel reality, never against your config files
- the node-eye view versus the chain-eye view — what only an operator can see
- a live look at the panel, running live while I talk

What you leave with: a resource budget you can apply to any node on any Linux box you own, and an argument — that publishing the cost of participation is itself a decentralization practice. If running a node requires a machine most people can't justify buying, the network is carrying a trust assumption it never wrote down.

I also bring the node with me and would like to show it live in a Project HUB table.

“Do you even shield?”

marek; Workshop (Extended)

Technical workshop covering the shielded protocols in Zcash.

“Enriching cypherpunk culture: Tamers of Entropy novel”

Juraj B.; Lightning Talk

I started writing a cypherpunk/lunarpunk novel. I ended up changing how I look at things. We produced many artefacts - a soundtrack, a visual concept, and an artificial intelligence to go with it.

“EXILE FOR THE FAMILY - Escaping a System You Cannot Opt Out Of”

Caroline from Sweden; Talk

This talk looks at education and raising children through a cypherpunk lens: state monopoly, decentralisation, jurisdictional competition — and exit when consent is impossible.

Sweden is a stark example of what happens when the state claims authority over how children should be raised and educated — and removes the right to opt out.

Homeschooling is prohibited as an educational alternative. “Independent” schools are independent in ownership, but remain inside the state-defined system. The national curriculum sets the values, goals, subjects and much of the content of education, and the same framework reaches all the way down into preschool. At its core is värdegrunden — the state-defined values on which education is based.

For anyone who values individual autonomy, this is an extraordinary level of control. The state does not merely require literacy, numeracy and basic education. It defines the framework through which children are educated, including the values that underpin it, and families are not free to create a genuinely independent alternative.

You cannot choose the protocol.

Sweden’s ideal is likvärdig utbildning — equivalent education for everyone. Difference can be accommodated, but only inside the common framework. Every child, however different, must remain within the same state-defined structure.

For a freethinker, that is a fundamental problem. Children are individuals, not interchangeable units. Some thrive in conventional schools; others do not, particularly those far outside the norm, including the highly gifted. And some parents simply do not accept that the state should be the institution educating their children in the first place. In Sweden, they still have no right to choose a genuinely different path.

This is not an accidental feature of Swedish education. It has roots in Sweden’s twentieth-century project of social engineering. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal advocated moving much of children’s upbringing away from the private family and towards institutions organised collectively. Those ideas helped shape the folkhemmet — the “people’s home” — and a culture in which children’s upbringing increasingly came to be regarded as an affair of society, not simply of their parents.

That thinking became so deeply embedded that state authority over childhood is rarely regarded as an extraordinary intrusion. The system exists not despite Swedish political culture, but because of it.

For us, that was the line we could not cross.

Our objection was not that all schools are bad. Our children have experienced unschooling, worldschooling and private schools, and different approaches have worked at different times.

The principle was much simpler: why should we need the state’s permission to raise and educate our own children differently?

When a system cannot be rejected, competed with or opted out of, there is one remaining exit:

change jurisdiction.

We began searching in 2014, left Sweden permanently in 2015 and eventually settled in Prague.

The method was never the principle. The freedom to choose was. Exile was how we reclaimed it.

The talk will also cover the practical side of family exile: how moving countries with children actually works, what freedoms to investigate before choosing a jurisdiction, examples of countries offering much greater educational freedom, and the developed countries where families face the strongest barriers to opting out.

This is exile as a response to a system that leaves no internal exit: reclaiming responsibility for your family by moving beyond its jurisdiction.

Exile is not merely escape. It can be the decision to stop asking permission, take responsibility back, and build a freer environment in which to raise the next generation.

“Lowest Common Denominator Protocol”

Kermit; Talk

A general purpose peer to peer protocol for 2026, AI friendly, dual-NAT capable. Federated is not anti-fragile to political pressures. Not all NAT is uncooperative, but it's getting worse. Lets work together to keep P2P alive.

https://github.com/kermit4/LCDP

“Monero atomic swaps on Ethereum compatible chains”

hbs; Workshop

This workshop aims at walking the audience through the MoneroSwap UI to perform atomic swaps on Ethereum compatible blockchains using nothing more than a web browser and a Monero wallet. The audience will be able to perform swaps and get a chance to receive real XMR for fake money (a unique opportunity!).

Participants should arrive with a mobile Monero wallet and their choice of a laptop with a web3 wallet (Rabby, Ambire, ...) extension in their browser (Firefox, Brave, Chrome) or a mobile Web3 browser with dApp capabilities (Rabby, Metamask).

“Monero Exit Routes: Buying Real-World Assets in the E.U.S.S.R.”

Martin Arness; Talk

Monero gives you private money. But private money is only useful if it can still buy the things that matter: property, businesses, medical care, energy, or services that do not accept crypto.

That is the unresolved final mile. Through KYC, AML, debanking, and Operation Chokepoint-style pressure, governments have turned banks into the gatekeepers for large purchases and real-world ownership.

And if your capital can only be used in a handful of crypto-friendly jurisdictions, then your freedom is smaller than it looks.

This talk examines how private equity can be used as a bridge between XMR and real-world ownership. The key is not to make Monero acceptable to banks directly, but to route capital through private-market structures in jurisdictions where crypto payment rails are more commercially accepted.

Private equity is useful because institutions back home understand the business model: pooling capital, buying assets that conventional big investors often avoid, and taking calculated risks in jurisdictions they would not normally touch.

This creates an exit route where you keep your capital working in freedom-oriented countries, while building the asset-protection structure and paper trail needed to re-enter first-world financial systems when needed.
That is financial freedom: choosing when, where, and how to use your own money.

“Not Your Keys, Not Your Body: A Cybernetic Test for Transhumanism”

Kieran Zimmer; Lightning Talk

Transhumanism is often presented as a dichotomy between flesh and machine. This axis has aesthetic value but neglects self-custody - whether it increases or reduces your dependence on third party systems. This talk leverages cybernetic systems theory to translate the "don't trust, verify" ethos to human enhancement. The test for any intervention is not whether it is natural or artificial, but whether it integrates into an agent's sensorimotor loop or whether it installs a second controller which cannot be audited or disciplined by the primary agent. Applied to cases from coffee to Ozempic and gene edits to Neuralink, this offers a principled control-theoretic framework to analyze the cases dramatized in the movie Upgrade or Scott Alexander's short story The Whispering Earring.

Regenerative medicine and eventually control over morphogenesis are presented as the self-custody branch of the longevity movement, and "do not dull feeback - strengthen response" as the biological instantiation of the cypherpunk ethic. The goal state is an organism that keeps its own keys.

“Parallel societies from 0 to 1.”

Kirsten rebuilds society; Talk

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“Pubky: Identity Without Accounts Using DHT and Public Key Routing”

Severin Bühler; Workshop

In this hands-on workshop we'll build a working application where users authenticate, publish, and own their data using only a cryptographic keypair. No accounts, no platforms, no sign-up forms. Everything runs on Pubky, an open protocol that turns public keys (Ed25519) into routable domain names.

Pubky repurposes the DNS record format and Mainline DHT, the Kademlia-based network behind BitTorrent and the largest, most decentralized network on the planet. Your key becomes your address. PKARR (Public Key Addressable Resource Records) handles publishing and discovery on the DHT, PKDNS makes it compatible with the regular web, and Homeservers store your actual data. If a server goes down or censors you, you update one record and move on.

We'll walk through the full stack: generating keypairs, publishing and resolving PKARR records on live DHT nodes, standing up a Homeserver, and wiring it all into a working app. We'll also address why this architecture is fundamentally more scalable for the decentralized web than the approaches taken by other current protocols.

“Secure your digital legacy”

Michal Altair Valasek; Talk

Congratulations, you are dead and now everything is their problem now. All your secret died with you. All your passwords, passphrases, encryption keys, bitcoin wallets... Or not? In this talk I will show you some strategies you can use to disclose all (or at least some) of those secrets to the ones you left here when you die.

“The 21st Century Agora”

Shadrach Smith; Lightning Talk

Marx saw the tech; Konkin saw the agora. Neither saw both. A tour of the crypto-anarchist stack — money, Nostr, web of trust, mesh — and the local circular economies it makes possible.

“The End of the Internet - film screening”

Dylan Reibling; Film

A screening of the feature-length documentary THE END OF THE INTERNET.
A film about the invisible operating system of the modern world. From an anarchist squat in Berlin, to a futuristic landscape in Taiwan, to a remote village in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, we encounter a series of figures from the internet decentralization movement. These radicals are confronting internet infrastructure and the unexpected ways it exerts pressure on their way of life. A journey through infrastructure, power, and history with the dissidents trying to hardwire a new path forward.

“The Small Web”

Aral Balkan; Talk

Big Tech is helping usher in a new age of fascism, complete with its complicity in a live-streamed genocide.

Small Tech is the opposite of Big Tech and the Small Web, what I’ve been working on building for the past six years, is the opposite of the Big Web.

Imagine a web where each of us has their own place. A place where we can be public if we choose to be, follow each other, and, crucially, communicate privately when we want to – actually privately, i.e, end-to-end encrypted privately.

That’s the Small Web.

It’s a simple concept.

The hard part is making is not only usable but a great experience for everyday people who use technology as an everyday thing.

(That’s why it’s taken me six years of work and constant iteration and rewrites to get it close to launch. Needless to say, we don’t need yet another alternative that no one but enthusiasts use because it’s too difficult to do so.)

Where Big Web is venture-capital funded, Small Web is non-corporate and not for profit. Where Big Web is either proprietary or “open” (as in open for business), Small Web is free (as in freedom). Where Big Web is fascist, Small Web is anarchist. Oh, and it’s also inclusive, accessible, and friendly. Did I mention we have kittens?

In this session, Aral will introduce you to the Small Web – a free as in freedom peer-to-peer web that is topologically decentralised yet doesn’t require technical knowledge to get started with.

“The Underrated Potential of WebXR for OSS: Extended Reality Without Gatekeepers.”

Ryta; Talk

Spatial computing is at its prime — and we are just handing it straight to Apple, Meta, and Unity without a second thought. Meanwhile, a W3C open standard sits quietly in every modern browser, letting anyone publish a virtual or augmented reality experience from a plain URL. No approval, no fee, no account, no install.
WebXR is one of the most underused tools in the open source world. Ryta (@rytadecrypt) will make the case for why OSS devs should care — and show several live demos of the open spatial stack in action, merging decentralized identity, bitcoin/crypto payments, WebXR and AI: one link, any device, any reality. Same (unified) experience — from flat screens on mobile or desktop to immersive VR & AR on headsets.

“Verification Mythology: Why High-Assurance Cryptography Is Just Engineering”

Nadim Kobeissi; Talk

High-assurance cryptography has a mythology problem. The field presents itself as an arcane discipline where wizard-scholars produce machine-checked proofs that place code beyond reproach. The reality is more prosaic: it is software engineering with a proof step, and the proof step has the same failure modes as every other step — copy-paste errors, dead code, untested configurations, and documentation that drifts from reality. This talk draws on concrete evidence from two systematic studies of formally verified cryptographic libraries and the verification toolchains they depend on, spanning post-quantum primitives deployed in Signal and Google, the Rust-to-F⋆ extraction pipeline, and a comparative analysis of verification boundary practices across projects, to argue that demystifying formal verification is not merely a cultural preference but a prerequisite for making it actually work. The talk concludes with a lightweight auditing methodology that requires no specialized tooling and a set of structural practices, drawn from both negative and positive findings, for closing the gap between verification claims and verification reality.

“What Would You Build With the Freedom to Experiment?”

Linda; Lightning Talk

Many meaningful ideas begin as experiments. They may be too unusual, too early, or too difficult to support through traditional funding. The Cypherpunk Vision Fund is being created to support art, culture, technology, and social experiments connected to autonomy, privacy, freedom, and decentralized futures. This talk will introduce the fund’s vision, the impact it hopes to create, and the kinds of projects it wants to attract. It is an invitation to turn unconventional ideas into real-world experiments.

“Workshop: Self-Hosted Monero Payments: Build a POS Backend + Android client”

ajs-xmr; Workshop

This workshop focuses on a hands-on deployment of a self-hosted Monero payment stack using Monero Merchant (https://moneromerchant.com). Participants will spin up the Dockerized backend, configure environment variables, and connect an Android POS client. By the end of the session, participants will execute an on-chain transaction, demonstrating the full payment flow from QR generation to detection and confirmation.

Participants should arrive with a preconfigured development environment including Docker Compose, Git, Make, and OpenSSL. An Android device is required. For those building the client from source, be sure to have Android Studio installed. A Monero wallet with a small amount of XMR is recommended for testing.

“Your Keys Never Leave the Card (Except Once): Hands-On Air-Gapped Signing”

mmlado; Workshop (Extended)

Every hardware wallet ships the same promise: your keys never leave the device. On a Keycard it is false exactly once - and that is where this workshop starts.

We build an air-gapped hardware wallet from open source parts: initialize a Keycard with Keycard Pal, catch the mnemonic in the one moment it can ever be seen, then watch the seed get sealed into the secure element with no way back out. Pair, derive addresses, and sign transactions carried across the air gap as animated QR codes to a watch-only wallet that broadcasts them. After the guided round, groups build their own wallets and send transactions to each other on hardware I bring (Keycards, mobiles, and Keycard Shells) while I walk the tables. The applet is MIT licensed, the app is open, the chip is not - the trust boundary has not vanished, it has moved and shrunk, and you will see exactly where it sits.

Participants need nothing to take part - the hardware rotates, and every key in the room is a throwaway; nobody's real seed enters this workshop. The most useful things to arrive with: a laptop, which becomes your table's watch-only and broadcasting side; an NFC phone, Android or iPhone, to run Keycard Pal yourself; and a wallet that speaks UR QR (Ambire, Sparrow, Rabby, MetaMask, BlueWallet). No smart card knowledge assumed.