A powerful winnable issue has emerged from the Lisbon Circle that could benefit from collaboration across the Logos community.
The Cape Verdean neighbourhood of Talude, in North Lisbon, is a largely self-organised and informal community. It’s currently hosting a summer residency by the local art collective Mais Uno +1, in partnership with AMRT, a grassroots cultural group working out of a small community centre in the area.
While visiting, we connected with a local Grogue distillery (Cape Verde’s traditional rum). It’s a small family-run operation with deep roots in the community. The founder was warm and open to support. As you can imagine, their operations are entirely informal: no clear brand, no compliant bottling, and certainly no easy route to market.
This visit uncovered a clear opportunity:
Build a decentralised, privacy-preserving marketplace that supports informal entrepreneurs like this one, starting in Talude.
This would directly respond to:
The income inequality challenges posed by Portugal’s large informal economy.
The need for safe, community-owned tools for marginalised groups to access economic opportunity without exposure or surveillance.
A real-world test case for Logos infrastructure applied locally and in partnership with trusted community actors.
Proposed Tech Stack & Marketplace Specs:
Core Needs
Easy-to-use listing + discovery system for local products/services
Reputation layer (pseudonymous but verifiable via trusted intermediaries)
Private peer-to-peer messaging and coordination
Optional escrow or trusted intermediary for payments
On/off ramp flexibility (cash, crypto etc.)
Suggested Tech
Waku for encrypted messaging between buyers and sellers
Codex to store listings and reviews in a decentralised way
Pseudonymous credentials TBC
What’s Next
This could be a powerful and tangible use case for a Logos-aligned Circle to prototype locally.
We’re aiming to gather a small team to:
Co-design with the community
Explore branding and packaging support for the distillery
Build the marketplace MVP or test environment
Host a music/culture event as a launch and first sales opportunity
Below are some ideas for how you could contribute, although any collaboration is welcome!
Tech & Product
Help define the technical specs for the marketplace MVP — what features, flows, and safeguards we need
Build the MVP using Waku, Codex, or other decentralised tools (front-end + back-end dev welcome)
Design lightweight onboarding flows for sellers who may be low-literacy or new to tech
Explore credentialing systems for local trust
Branding & Creative
Design a brand identity for the Grogue product that reflects its Cape Verdean roots and community values
Create bottle labels and packaging suitable for market-ready distribution
Help visualise the marketplace UI/UX, posters for local outreach, and event branding
Please leave a comment if you would like to help contribute in any way!
One key objective at this point is to produce a one-page document that everyone agrees upon before any code/design takes place. This should include strict boundaries for scope, and the most minimal mvp definition possible.
Ideally we can narrow down on this asynchronously, if needed we can schedule a call in the Logos discord with participators.
Love the idea:-) I believe building a general marketplace/craigslist/… of sort has been on the radar for some Waku folks for a while, so this could be a great opportunity and motivation:)
I’d love to participate:)
I am curious how do you imagine the flow to work - let’s say I want to list my liquor (or any other product) for sale - I can list it anonymously/pseudonymously, but when I want to actually sell and deliver the goods, it could be police waiting for me taking me for fraud and for not having proper licensing etc.
Love the marketplace idea. Seems to fit also with the agorist mindset. This marketplace could also allow for various types of experimentation in social organization to emerge as a byproduct. I am keen to see how this plays out and happy to provide any additional ideas to support feature design.
I think we can also expand the scope of the marketplace to allow freelancers to list their services, wdyt? It was brought up by another Lisbon community here: Supporting local creatives in Quinto do Mocho, Lisbon
I need you privacy experts to help with that haha. I think you would need to ship the goods by post, right? We can recommend buyers use a PO box too maybe.
This looks perfect. When we have the one pager I’ll go back to the grouge factory and make sure it meets their expectations, but all of the features we discussed are covered here
