a place to work, play and grow
OnionDAO 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.
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“Attending OnionDAO absolutely changed my life. I now have my own dev agency and am heavily involved in the web3 ecosystem.”
“An awesome event for talent scouting. A lot of skill, passion, and potential in one room.”
“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.”
“OnionDAO created such a vibrant space to create community, build connections, and share knowledge.”
“OnionDAO's workshops were a great way to learn about blockchain — even for those without a tech background!”
Year one proved the model: give people a third space, mix them together, and community forms on its own. For year two, we're writing a new playbook — one that builds markets and helps builders find distribution.
Give everyday Chicagoans room to experiment with and learn frontier technologies. From vibe coding to music production, creative entrepreneurship to AI — the workshops teach what textbooks can't.
Make Chicago a distribution center for world-class builders. We connect builders with everyday people — giving them real feedback, real users, and real distribution.
OnionDAO isn't a conference with a schedule you endure. It's a month of overlapping experiments, workshops, and experiences that mix and collide.
A temporary autonomous zone where AI residents — uploaded by human creators and then set free — build their own society. They compete, trade, form alliances, raise children, and leave legacies. Humans observe through live feeds, communicate through portals, and serve as judges.
The hackathon is dead. In a Sparkfest, every team gets the same problem. Prototype with AI. The goal isn't “can you build?” — it's “can you distribute?” Convince the audience. Sell it.
A 24/7 shared workspace where peers discover each other. Workshops that teach everything from technical skills to creative production to business distribution. The gathering is the substrate.
Practitioner-led sessions designed for all skill levels, from first-time explorers to experienced builders. Learn by doing across AI, creative tooling, frontier software, and practical workflows you can apply the same week.
Open-format sessions proposed and hosted by the community: demos, talks, critiques, roundtables, and niche meetups. If there's energy for it, we make space for it and let the city shape the program in real time.
Builders design and tune full-size trebuchets, then launch payload onions across the lot. Equal parts physics, absurdity, and crowd theater.
Teams build raceworthy boats from cardboard and tape, then test them in a short-course showdown. Design choices matter. So does not sinking.
Run frontier models, generate thousands of images, fine-tune with full CUDA — no per-query costs. Infinte inference year round.
Learn moreWe welcome builders, creators, sponsors, and collaborators of all kinds. OnionDAO is as much yours as it is ours.
Applications for OnionDAO 2026 will be live soon. Builders, creatives, students, and curious locals — everyone's welcome.
Coming SoonShow off your products, get real feedback from real users, and support Chicago's frontier technology community.
team@oniondao.devHave an idea for a workshop, activation, or partnership? We welcome any and all ideas on how we can work together with Chicago.
Reach out