zo house bengaluru: As Zo House turns one, a look at the co-living space where Web3 creators huddle, work and play

As a food delivery executive waits outside the door of a penthouse on the 12th floor of an inconspicuous apartment complex, one of the many in Koramangala’s first block, on a sunny afternoon in Bengaluru, he can’t help but be puzzled as he looks for a calling bell of some sort to ring.

In a few seconds, a resident of the flat opens the messaging app Telegram on his phone and types in a command-based text in a group called Channels. Voilà, the door unlocks. This is one of the many features enabled by the internet-of-things (IoT) in the pad.

Residents use commands on their Telegram group to holler for water, housekeeping and towels. It is all automated.Security is non-negotiable at flats S-1 and P-2, which double up as a hacker home on some weeks, an artists’ lounge on another and so on.

Zo House BLR at Anaa Infra’s Signature Towers is a home away from home for an elite group of 405 members who hold nonfungible tokens (NFTs), including actor Lisa Ray, former Unacademy chief of design Abhinav Chhikara, Polygon cofounder Sandeep Nailwal, Uber India founding member Akshay BD and influencer Tanmay Bhat. Its members are primarily Web3 creators who use the luxury co-living space to work, collaborate and create new projects on the blockchain, party, or just crash.

Zo House is part of Zo World, a club for NFT artists, founded in 2022. “Zo World aims to unlock the digital assets economy for the masses. We envisage Zo World as the first point of entry for new NFT artists, collectors and enthusiasts,” cofounder Dharamveer Singh Chouhan had said earlier this year.

Art House

Currently, Zo House BLR is hosting Manifest, a five-week residency for NFT artists, creators, developers and builders that will last till December 19. The IoT-enabled screens across the place showcase works of artists from across 20 countries.

When ET visited the place on Day 1 of the residency on November 15, some of the residents were coming in and an orientation was being planned for the evening. In the following weeks, the creators would socialise, collaborate, work, eat, play and tour across Bengaluru’s famed dosa eateries.

The front door opens into the Creators’ Studio, which houses computers, a podcast setup, a shelf adorned with 3-D printed showpieces and a 3D printer within its soundproof walls. Busy in the studio is Shivansh, part of Zo House BLR, who is trying to see if he can connect all the speakers to make sound-enabled interactions between devices.

Beyond the studio, the walls of the house are covered with frames of NFT art that the community members own. These art pieces on the blockchain trade in cryptocurrencies and are worth anywhere over Rs 1 lakh. One can look up details of the art pieces by scanning QR codes attached to them.

Across the dining table is a Bored Ape portrait owned by community member Srini, an Indian Navy veteran who now prefers to go by his first name. It is a special piece as it is the first Bored Ape owned by a Zo community member. Bored Ape Yacht Club, a cult collection of 10,000 unique Bored Ape NFTs, is built on Ethereum blockchain and is trading at about $60,000-70,000.

The workspace adjoining the dining table comes with a high chair for babies. The four rooms on the common floor of S-1 are private ones with some having facilities like walk-in wardrobes. A non-member, who can only book through a member, has to pay Rs 5,500 for a night. These rooms are often booked out and have weeks-long waitlists, says Zo House BLR director Samuraizan, who genially assures that it is his real name.

The same floor also has a soundproof pod, where lights turn on automatically, modelled on the phone booths of WeWork. Upstairs, rooms give way to the more communal dorms. There is a smart mirror room, enabled with augmented reality, and a Degen Lounge that has a bar and loud music at one’s disposal.

In the crypto community, ‘degen’ is short for degenerate, a descriptor for those involved in high-risk, speculative trading or investing in cryptocurrencies. The Degen Lounge has a large glass display of the famous Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, which was the first piece introducing it as a currency and explaining the foundations of blockchain technology.

Further up, resembling a ship deck is Black Pearl, the highest point in the building, where co-working desks are installed. There is a gym, laundry area and a co-working space.

The terrace has a corner with graffiti art of GM, the crypto community lingo for “good morning”.

Black Pearl offers a bird’s-eye view of residential buildings around Koramangala. “It gives perspective on how to look at things while building products… that’s very necessary. You can’t be cooped up in a room and build massive products,” says Samuraizan.

And perspective it does offer. From this clubhouse, techies have developed projects in artificial intelligence as well as machine learning, beyond blockchain.

Graviton, a Web3-focused accelerator for emerging markets, and Polygon Labs, which develops Ethereum-scaling solutions for Polygon protocols, host their events at times at Zo House BLR. Everything built is open source.
Superteam India, a crypto community, had organised a two-week residency in the venue earlier in the year.

The objective of Crosschain Clubhouse was to get the best builders in the cross-chain messaging platform Wormhole and blockchain platform Solana to learn and build together. It was a “hacker hostel” where aspiring entrepreneurs jam together for a short period. Superteam India has since created similar hacker hostel experiences in other cities.

Prakyath Reddy, who attends hackathons regularly, was part of a similar hacker hostel in Dharamshala. He says he is currently being readied by Solana, the organiser, for venture capital pitches for his project that looks at solutions in the agricultural sector.

While a leading hacker home has yet to emerge in India, the concept isn’t new. A hacker home in San Francisco typically refers to a communal house where tech workers, entrepreneurs and programmers—often early in their careers or working on startups—live together. These homes serve as both living spaces and collaborative environments, where residents can work on their projects, share ideas and network with like-minded individuals.

As per TechCrunch, Y Combinator founders would move to Palo Alto in the accelerator’s early days, split a two-bedroom with five others to save money and engage round the clock with roommates.

Zo House BLR has much to offer in this space and expand, which is why similar setups are waiting to be unveiled.

“We plan multiple properties in the city to create a global youth lifestyle, the ‘Zo lifestyle’. In the current Zo House we do not have enough open spaces. The aim is to create open play areas for sports and other outdoor spaces in Bengaluru,” Chouhan told ET.

While Zo House BLR has about 400 unique members, the number of people who have been involved in its events and activities are over 10,000. The house, which will turn a year old on December 24, has 15 members staying there on a regular basis.

The larger community, meanwhile, creates similar hacker hostel setups with support from Zo House and Polygon-like projects in over 50 cities where techies and creators eat, work and play.