Coworking spaces began as hacker dens. Thirty years later, they’ve become incubators for a borderless crypto economy — and cities are competing to attract the people inside them.
One of the first modern coworking spaces, C-Base in Berlin, was launched 30 years ago by a group of computer engineers as a “hacker space” for sharing tech and techniques. Many of the people we first encountered in our anthropological research into digital nomadism in the mid-2010s were from the same world — hackers and computer coders working out of cafés and rented desks in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Nearly a decade later, we returned to see what had happened to these pioneers of the borderless, desk-free life. We wondered whether they had been put off by the throngs of travellers who followed in their sandal-clad footsteps, attracted by glamorous — if often inaccurate — images of the digital nomad lifestyle.
What we found was something quite different from what we left behind.
Yellow Coworking and the post-pandemic wave
One of Chiang Mai’s nomad hotspots is Yellow Coworking, which launched in 2020 as a blockchain-oriented, collaborative escape zone from the COVID pandemic. The later stages of the pandemic were an unusual time to be in the city. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was followed by mass layoffs in Silicon Valley, with Twitter, Meta, Coinbase and Microsoft all making significant cuts.
Yellow saw an influx of former Silicon Valley workers, Russian and Ukrainian coders, and crypto enthusiasts. “Some ex-Silicon Valley employees are here playing around with startups,” one Yellow staff member explained. “It makes sense for them to come here if they are trying to create an MVP” — startup jargon for a minimum viable product, the basic prototype that, with luck, becomes the next success story.
“With its lower costs, Chiang Mai gives them a longer runway,” the staff member added — meaning more time before the money runs out.
People walking into Yellow’s modernist, European-style building raise their hands to sign in via biometric fingerprint scanners. Many are coders or IT specialists in their twenties, taking advantage of fast broadband and western passports to disconnect their lives from any fixed location. They view technology and code as a global language, with no need to stay rooted to a single country. The same instinct for flexibility and digital-first working that drives freelancers in cities like Brighton applies here — except the runway stretches across continents rather than neighbourhoods.
Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum — the decentralised blockchain behind the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Ether — was often a focus of discussion at Yellow’s regular meetups. Buterin has identified as a digital nomad for most of the past decade, claiming to live out of a 40-litre backpack. Like many in the crypto community, he views the borderless lifestyle as making perfect ideological sense.
Crypto on the ground
In Chiang Mai, cryptocurrency use has spread well beyond the expat bubble. During one meetup held in a local bar, the owner took payment for shots of Thai rum in bitcoin. She talked about the borderless revolution she believed was coming and crypto being part of her financial future.
One of the western “crypto nomads” present was trying to launch his own coin — built on Buterin’s Ethereum ecosystem — and recruit investors. A few tables away, another who had invested and lost a fortune in cryptocurrency explained he was now living in Chiang Mai because of the city’s low cost of living.
For every success story, there were tales of loss and potential scams. Some told outlandish stories of crypto startups and projects that were difficult to verify. One person writing eBooks on successful crypto investing was selling courses on how to get involved. Another was writing code to improve the security of the Ethereum blockchain, ensuring it would be safe from hackers. The scene felt simultaneously pioneering and precarious — not unlike the early days of tech startup culture in cities that later matured into established innovation hubs.
From workspace to ecosystem
Digital nomad hotspots — including European cities such as Lisbon — show how the worlds of cryptocurrency, blockchain and digital nomadism are colliding and evolving beyond mere workspace provision.
A collaborative, incubator-like atmosphere is at the core of The Block Lisboa, where you can pay in cryptocurrency and which hosts weekly Crypto Fridays for networking, collaboration and ideas sharing. In 2023, it held the first Ethereum Block Summit, promising to explore groundbreaking advancements in the Ethereum ecosystem. Meanwhile, CV Labs is building a blockchain ecosystem of its own — coworking spaces, events and summits in Lisbon and four other cities including Vaduz in Liechtenstein and Zug, part of Switzerland’s “Crypto Valley.” These spaces are open to cryptocurrency professionals and enthusiasts with professional exchange in mind.
The model has moved well past hot-desking. What started as shared office space has become an infrastructure layer for a new kind of economy — one where the workspace, the payment system, the investment vehicle and the professional network all run on the same decentralised technology.
Cities competing for nomads
Digital nomads are becoming a valuable asset for states to compete for — as Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners predicted in their 1997 book Digital Nomad. “Just as we are already seeing governments competing with each other to attract industrial investment,” they wrote, “we may see governments competing with each other for citizens.”
That prediction has come true. Malaysia’s digital nomad visa initially targeted only workers in IT and digital professions such as cybersecurity and software development. Estonia launched a digital nomad visa alongside its e-residency programme to attract high-skilled digital workers. While these visas typically restrict local employment, many allow nomads to bring family members and offer a path to residency, as in Spain and Portugal.
The competition isn’t limited to visa programmes. Cities that actively invest in their tourism and visitor infrastructure are finding that the same qualities attracting short-stay visitors — cultural vibrancy, strong broadband, walkability, quality of life — also attract longer-term digital workers who spend more and stay longer. For fast-growing cities with strong creative and digital economies, the digital nomad demographic represents an increasingly valuable segment that blurs the line between tourist and resident.
It’s a pattern familiar to anyone watching how travel-obsessed populations are reshaping what cities need to offer — not just attractions and accommodation, but workable broadband, flexible living arrangements and communities built around professional exchange rather than pure leisure.
Coworking spaces started as techno-utopian hacker dens. Thirty years later, they are an increasingly important part of how cities position themselves in a global competition for talent, spending power and innovation — given further momentum by the rise of a niche but influential group of crypto nomads who carry their economy in their laptops.
Dave Cook, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, UCL and Olga Hannonen, Researcher, PhD, University of Eastern Finland
This article was originally published by The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence.
