A month-long festival in Chicago for builders, artists, and people still figuring it out in one shared space
800+ applicants · year oneFor the month of June, Onion DAO x Null City takes over a venue in downtown Chicago. Four weeks, loosely themed around hardware, AI, cybersecurity, and blockchain — each with workshops, competitions, and experiences built to upskill the people in the room.
Lunch every weekday. Game rooms in the office. A Telegram running live with updates and announcements. The members who get the most out of Onion DAO aren't the ones who only show up for the workshops — they're the ones who stay long enough to build real bonds.
Solder, breadboard, badge hacks. The physical layer.
Agents, x402 payments, workflows people will actually use.
CTFs, RF, red team / blue team. Break it, then defend it.
On-chain primitives, Solana, and the ledger that runs Null City.
Every accepted attendee gets a hardware badge at registration. Most components arrive already on the board — you finish the assembly with a little soldering and it comes alive.
It evolves as you participate — the workshops you attend, the factions you've worked with, what you've contributed. Hack on it. Wear it. Bring it everywhere.
Workshops 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 marketOpen round the clock to accepted attendees. Accepted members get the address — work, build, and grow alongside the other members for the full duration of the festival.
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.
Want to host a workshop? Pick the topic — hardware, AI, cybersecurity, blockchain, or something completely unrelated. Soldering, 3D printing, vibe coding, x402 for AI payments, yoga, mural painting. If it's good, it fits.
Onion 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 · 2025Sponsors & collaborators → team@oniondao.dev