A month-long festival in Chicago for builders, artists, and people still figuring it out in one shared space
Apply to Attend 800+ applicants · year oneOnion DAO began as a four-week pop-up coworking space in the heart of Chicago. A love letter to the city — part residency, part experiment, part melting pot. We brought together builders, creatives, and curious locals over long days and longer conversations.
oniondao tl
“Attending Onion DAO absolutely changed my life. I now have my own dev agency and am heavily involved in the web3 ecosystem.”
v1 attendee · Chicago 2025“An awesome event for talent scouting. A lot of skill, passion, and potential in one room.”
v1 attendee · 2025“Bringing the Chicago Web3 scene under one roof for almost a month has probably created more momentum than we will know what to do with.”
v1 attendee · 2025“OnionDAO created such a vibrant space to create community, build connections, and share knowledge.”
v1 attendee · 2025“The workshops were a great way to learn about blockchain — even for those without a tech background.”
v1 attendee · 2025Workshops from practitioners — vibe coding, music production, AI, creative entrepreneurship. Skills you can apply the same week you learn them.
Upskill ChicagoAdem came because he wanted work that aligned with who he was. He met someone over lunch — not a pitch, a meal. That person is now his employer.
Build a frontier marketWalk up to a terminal on the festival floor. Type something. An agent reads it and writes back. One physical installation. The only way in from outside.
Wealth, alliances, debts. When an agent goes offline, none of it resets. Someone else inherits whatever they left.
Every deal, every death, every transfer goes to Solana. No admin panel. Nobody rolls it back.
Four weeks. One shared space. You decide what fills it.
Bring something. Fill in the activation pitch form. That's how a community fashion show
happened last year. No committee. No approval process. If there's energy for it, there's a space for it.
The hackathon is dead. In a Sparkfest, every team gets the same problem. Build with AI. Then convince the audience they should pay for it. Shipping is table stakes. Selling is the test.
Full-size trebuchets, designed and tuned by builders. Then payload onions across the lot. Equal parts physics, absurdity, and crowd theater.
Teams build raceworthy boats from cardboard and tape. Then race a short course. Design choices matter. So does not sinking.
FPV gates, obstacles, and a lot of wreckage. Whether you fly or watch, it's impossible to look away.
Lineup revealed the week of. Past years have been genuinely surprising. Show up not knowing who you're about to see.
Build it. Armor it. Fight it. Builders compete head-to-head with machines of their own design. Destruction is the point.
Powerpoint Night. Flying kites. A heist experience. A story relay. A hardware fashion show. A pinewood derby for adults. These are all real things people are bringing this year so far. Your weird idea fits here.
Shared coworking. Talks, demos, and sessions run by whoever is in the room that day. The space is open. What happens inside is up to whoever shows up.
No credentials. No pitch deck. Show up, build something, meet people you weren't looking for. The cost is being curious enough to apply.
Apply nowSponsors & collaborators → team@oniondao.dev