With this, our third update, we’re able to do something pretty significant: we’re bringing you the names of the first three projects we’re supporting. Two of them we outlined in an update at the beginning of August. Now we can reveal those two in full, and also tell you all about our third project.
- New Cryptographic Imaginaries: from Cypherpunk to Sapphirepunk
Wassim Z. Alsindi is the name behind a six-month project, New Cryptographic Imaginaries: from Cypherpunk to Sapphirepunk. The project will result in a new series of digital and physical works, including prints on glass and wax sculptures, alongside texts exploring the concepts and imaginaries behind them. It continues Wassim’s long-running investigation into cryptography, decentralization and the cultural imaginaries that emerge around technology. Wassim is an artist, researcher and writer working at the intersection of technology, philosophy and creative practice. He is the convener of 0xSalon, co-founder of MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems journal and currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths School of Computing, University of London. His work has been exhibited, performed and presented internationally.
- Minor Index
The second of the submissions initially outlined in August is Minor Index, by REINCANTAMENTO and selfservice.studio. This project explores what it could mean for communities to build, own and govern their own AI infrastructure. A single-board computer, scanner and screen are placed in a community space, where members can contribute books, zines, recordings, notes and other materials. The data remains offline and under the community’s control. Our grant will support two deployments, one at Trust in Berlin and a second venue to be confirmed, building on prototypes developed during the Wyvern Residency and presented at Transmediale 2026. The project will result in replicable hardware and software, together with an openly published toolkit documenting the technical setup and governance processes.
- Bankanga InterTropical
And now we unveil a brand new project. Bankanga InterTropical is the most recent project to meet the standards required by the curators. It has completed the first stage of onboarding, and although funds have not yet been released, we are delighted to introduce it here.
Bankanga is an artistic research laboratory and evolving social experiment led by Berlin-based designer, researcher and media artist Juan Pablo García Sossa. The starting point is simple: most of today’s thinking about decentralization has been shaped by blockchains, distributed ledgers and cryptographic protocols. Yet communities across Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific have long run a system of trust that has nothing to do with this technology. Instead, these communities know a tradition of rotating savings circles, mutual aid associations and collective labour exchanges, all with localised naming conventions and variations. They coordinate trust not through computation but through memory, reciprocity and shared responsibility, and many of them operate to this day. Bankanga treats them not as historical curiosities but as living technologies, and asks what today’s decentralized cultures might learn from them.
A Summary: Where we are after eight months
Both Minor Index and Cryptographic Imaginaries have already started receiving funding, while Bankanga remains in the onboarding phase. The project has already communicated how it plans to channel the Initiative funds it will receive - and we will explain more on this in due course.
Since the Initiative was formed in late January, we have received 44 proposals in all since. These get periodically and carefully reviewed by all the curators in batches. Sometimes, we ask additional questions before making a final decision, and we debate the merits of each in a collaborative way. There is a necessarily high bar of entry, demonstrated by these figures:
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Approved: 3
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Pending final vote: 4
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Rejected: 37
We received nine new proposals since the start of August, which shows that the steady flow of applications we saw after our July social media campaign has kept going. We would rather back a small number of projects that are relevant to our core ethos (and are also well planned and ambitious) than spread our resources thin.
What comes next
Finally, as the structure of Kusama Vision is changing, we are pausing the wider public communication of the funded projects for now. We will continue to announce their progress here on the forum, but will hold off on sharing them across our social channels until there is more clarity around the future structure of the program.