When Indonesia passed a new law last year to allow foreign professionals to work remotely from Bali for up to 10 years, it sparked a surge in digital nomads. Satoshi21, a collaborative web3 community in Bali, is hoping to attract those new arrivals with CORE, the city’s first purpose-built physical web3 hub.

Helmed by Bali resident Melissa Kurtcan, CORE is a nearly 2,000-strong collaborative web3 community that meets regularly for  networking, events, bootcamps and hackathons. It plans to offer membership through a non-fungible token (NFT) with the goal to become one of South East Asia’s premier centers for networking, collaboration and innovation. 

The web3 community of South East Asia converged on Bali last week for CoinFest Asia. Bali has emerged as somewhat of a gathering place for web3 digital nomads from all corners of the world. The city of 4.3 million inhabitants had the largest population of digital nomads in SouthEast Asia in 2019, estimated to be around 5,000, according to Statista. 

“The essence of CORE is community and reciprocity,” Kurtcan said at the event. The CORE launch also marked the first of the Tour De Fest's Web3 Trailblazers series, a platform bringing influential women community leaders together to explore cross-regional collaboration. 

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A panel moderated by Kurtcan and featuring Ida Mok, founder of Women in Blockchain Asia (WIBA) and Chezka Gonzales, founder of Philippine Blockchain Week, delved into the power of community and emphasized the benefits of working together. Mok spoke of the importance of collaboration “in harnessing the power of community leaders, and leaning on each other’s strength and communities.” 

The Trailblazers series, which travels to cities in Asia Pacific over the coming months, will “show evidence of community and friendship coming together to scale through collaboration,” Mok said. “We are building a support structure for each other by traveling as a group of web3 women founders into new markets. It will enable us to use our networks and individual strengths combined with collaboration to scale in ways we could not do on our own. And we hope that people see the power of this as a model for growth.”

Mok also announced Embolden Ventures, co-founded with Belinda Lim  of the WIBA Singapore Chapter. Embolden is the first dedicated early stage web3 women' s fund in APAC. 

Coinfest attendees

“We want to raise more female leaders for the future,” Lim said.  “Globally, women startups raise significantly less funding at lower valuation. In SouthEast Asia, only 0.6 percent of capital invested goes to startups founded by women founders. We need to change the status quo fast and at the source.”

Lead image: WEB3 Trailblazers session. From left: Melissa Kurtcan (Satoshi21), Chezka Gonzales (Philippine Blockchain Week), Ida Mok (Women in Blockchain Asia)