The urbe.eth Manifesto 2.0 📜 Urbe.eth is a community of builders and a non-profit association, formally established in Rome in April 2023. It started in Rome around a simple idea: people interested in Ethereum and emerging technologies need places where they can meet, learn, build, and collaborate together. Over the years, that idea became a real community. Today urbe.eth brings together developers, founders, researchers, designers, lawyers, students, and technology enthusiasts who share a common curiosity: understanding how technology is transforming society and helping shape that transformation for the better. Ethereum remains at the center of our story. It introduced many of us to ideas such as decentralization, self-sovereignty, and programmable coordination. But the questions that brought us together have grown larger than any single technology. Today, we are equally interested in the broader ecosystem of technologies redefining how humans create, communicate, and organize: open-source artificial intelligence, cryptography, decentralized systems, and other frontier technologies that expand human capabilities while preserving individual freedom. In February 2025, the community found a physical home in the Urbe Hub in Testaccio, Rome, the first space in Italy dedicated to frontier technologies and open technological research.

If you are in Rome next week, join us for an open discussion on RWA Tokenization on Ethereum! 👉🏻 luma.com/gvzg802n

Wall Street Slot 🎰 the first fully onchain RWA slot machine Built with @Frankc_eth at @ETHRome: a 3D-printed slot machine that pays out real-world assets on @base mainnet. Prizes include tokenized $Apple, $NVIDIA, $Alphabet, $Amazon, $SpaceX and gold, plus @ensdomains registrations and @urbeEth Hub day passes. In the video the player hits Apple (AAPLc). Every spin is a USDC transaction, every result is revealed by the contract and verifiable on BaseScan. Onboarding is @privy_io end to end: scan the QR, sign in on your phone, and you are playing. No seed phrases, no friction. Every confirmed spin is also indexed on @arkivnetwork: a live seasonal leaderboard, a game explorer with every past round and its Base receipt, and a personal stats summary for each player. The physical side runs on the @arduino UNO R4 WiFi: a PIR motion sensor wakes the cabinet, a real lever starts the spin, an LCD and LED strip react to every win. Open Source repo and additional info coming soon!

The 4th edition of @ETHRome was unforgettable. 🏛️ Watching builders ship code while sharing our custom brew at @urbeEth Hub was pure magic. Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by, hacked, and raised a glass with us. Keep building. Cheers! 🍻 #hackathon #craftbeergeek

See you this week in Rome 🏛️ 🗓 11 Sept · 16:00 📍 UrbeHub Right before @ETHRome hackathon we gather to explore how privacy is approached, overlooked, and potentially strengthened within hackathon environments. Register now: luma.com/kpcrvvlm Organized with @urbeEth 🐺 family

We're happy to welcome @arkivnetwork as a sponsor for ETHRome 2026! 🇮🇹 Web3 databases with blockchain features and guarantees. Arkiv brings queryable, tamper-proof, wallet-owned data to our 40 builders. Grazie @arkivnetwork and see you in Rome! 🏛️ Apply here 👇

The Bank of Italy, in its latest paper "Are Stablecoins Efficient for Remittances?", has just stated that on-ramps and off-ramps are the real friction when comparing TradFi rails with using @ethereum for remittances. Ethereum is not the problem. The rails around it are.

🏛 ETHRome started at Città dell'Altra Economia back in 2023 Three editions later, we're back on that same ground, this time inside our own house @urbeEth Hub: Italy's Ethereum Community Hub, running every day since February 2025 40 builders. 1 house. Apply now 👇

This year, our international hackathon will be hosted inside our home, the Urbe Hub, Italy's official Ethereum Community Hub. If you have a cool project to work on, join us! APPLY NOW 👉 luma.com/huhelf53

Introducing synthetick.org 🔍 Convinced AI or Ethereum will reshape entire industries? Turn your conviction into a screened list of public and pre-IPO stocks, ETFs, crypto and Polymarket bets. For v0.1, I'm giving everyone 10 FREE CREDITS, which can be used for up to 5 analyses and PDF investment reports. For your thesis (e.g., "I believe in the future of the nuclear sector"), you can write it, share a link, an X post, a YouTube video, upload a file, or record a voice note. ⚠️ SyntheTick does not tell you which assets to buy. Instead, it helps you identify the assets that best align with your investment thesis. It is not a source of financial advice but a discovery tool designed to support the first stage of your research.

You should come by @urbeEth if you're in Rome there's a bunch of people building in agents space

Yesterday at Urbe Hub we spent a full day on one question: will the AI that matters stay in the hands of a few, or can it be accessible to everyone? We came at it from two sides. Afternoon, hands-on: the @tether team ran a workshop on @qvac , their solution for running open-source models locally, without giving up privacy or control. Evening, zoomed out: talks and a panel on open source vs proprietary frontier models. Chinese open models closing the gap, chips and compute turning geopolitical, European sovereignty, safety, and who gets access to what. Then the terrace, aperitivo and talk till late. Not even 35°C stopped the conversations. Thanks to @tether and QVAC, the EF dAI team @DavideCrapis, and @_pieroit_ for joining the panel. And to everyone who stayed for the last question. At Urbe Hub, these conversations are always on the table 🐺

Open-source vs Closed-source AI Forum: Takeaways✍️ Yesterday, I moderated a panel at the @urbeEth hub on open-source AI and the global AI race. Thanks to the speakers from @qvac (@tether), @_pieroit_, and @DavideCrapis from the dAI team at the EF. These are some of the takeaways from what I consider the best meetup we have organized in four years: ・Open-weight Chinese models (like @deepseek_ai and GLM - @Zai_org) are rapidly closing the gap with frontier closed-source AI from @AnthropicAI and @OpenAI ・AI is becoming a geopolitical issue as competition between the US and China reshapes access to chips, models, and computing infrastructure ・From 2022, US export controls limited China's access to advanced chips (@nvidia) and semiconductor technologies, pushing Chinese companies to develop more compute-efficient AI models. ・China responded by investing heavily in domestic AI infrastructure (@Huawei) and semiconductor independence, while optimizing models to run on less powerful hardware. ・@nvidia's moat lies in both cutting-edge chips (via TSMC) and the industry-wide adoption of CUDA. ・Access to frontier models is increasingly shaped by geopolitics. Geo Restrictions, export controls, and KYC requirements are emerging as new barriers, raising questions about who will be allowed to access the most powerful AI systems in the future. ・ The EU remains a global leader in AI regulation, but must overcome fragmentation and invest in sovereign infrastructure, open ecosystems, and innovation to remain competitive in the global AI race. ・Local AI empowers users and organizations with greater privacy, sovereignty, and control over their data and infrastructure. Thanks to recent advances in open-weight models and solutions like @qvac, running powerful AI locally is now increasingly feasible. ・A significant part of the panel discussion focused on AI safety, guardrails, and the trade-offs of open access. As increasingly powerful open-weight models become widely available, important questions emerge around misuse, responsibility, and how to balance openness with security. A huge thank you also to @Marcello_AI for his talk and to everyone in the community who actively participated in the forum with questions and insights.

AI Forum: The New Cold War - AI, Chips & Global Power Great meetup at the @urbeEth HUB with the urbe team and the involvement of the @qvac team. For someone the best panel ever ...

AI shouldn’t live only in centralized cloud and today you can build with QVAC from @tether 🤖 @qvac Developer Day by @urbeEth 🏛️

If you build local AI, come meet the team. We're in Rome June 30 at @urbeEth for a hands-on afternoon, hiring inference engineers. 30 spots, by selection. Apply below.