Giveth House

Story

Giveth was founded in 2016 by altruists who emerged from the early Ethereum ecosystem with a clear mission: build open, decentralized infrastructure to fund public goods and reward those who give to society and the world. A year later, Giveth House opened its doors in Barcelona — a physical anchor for a global, borderless community.

The house came from a practical problem. In 2017, the Giveth team held a retreat in Berlin. Renting the space cost $5,000–6,000 for the week. Griff Green did the math: in Barcelona, that same money could rent a house for four months. What started as a logistics insight became something else — a permanent base for a decentralised community that had no fixed address.

The first house was near the Sagrada Família. The neighbours assumed it was an illegal Airbnb. The team eventually moved to Sants — a working-class neighbourhood with a cooperative culture that felt more aligned with what the house was trying to be. It has been there ever since.

Nine years later, the house has quietly served as a meeting point for contributors across the decentralised ecosystem — people arrive for conferences, collaborations, or a few weeks of focused work, and often leave with new friendships, new projects, and a deeper connection to the community.

Why Barcelona

The choice of Barcelona was deliberate. Inspired by firsthand experience of the Catalan struggle for independence, Giveth's founders wanted to establish a haven that represents freedom of thought and freedom of choice — a physical space to exercise those freedoms in practice.

Giveth House is open to and inclusive of all walks of life that carry equality, safety, camaraderie, and freedom from hierarchy in their philosophy. The Sants neighbourhood — historically rooted in workers' movements and cooperative culture — felt like a natural home for a solarpunk, blockchain4good community.

Community

Giveth House is the physical home of the Giveth Galaxy — an expanding community of interconnected projects and DAOs bound by a shared sense of common good. Over the years, the house has welcomed people connected to projects like Ethereum Foundation, Arbitrum, Starknet, Dappnode, Fuel Labs, dOrg, Vocdoni, Talent Layer, General Magic, and many others. Some stay for a few days, others for weeks — the common thread is a shared curiosity about building new systems for coordination, cooperation, and collective impact.

More than just accommodation, the house acts as a Schelling point for the Web3 ecosystem — a place where collaborations, friendships, and new ideas emerge naturally.

Values

Giveth House is not a polished coworking space or a startup office, but a deliberately human place shaped by:

• openness and freedom of thought
• cooperation and camaraderie
• regenerative economics and public goods
• solarpunk optimism — building better systems together

Many people describe the house as solarpunk — optimistic, collaborative, and oriented toward building better systems together. It is a place where the values behind the code become real.

Stewardship

Since 2022, the house has been stewarded by Franco Ruiz, who coordinates guest stays, maintains the space, organizes activities, and supports collaborations between residents and visitors.

The house has grown over the years — most recently expanding to a third floor with a rooftop terrace, a long-dreamed-of open space for the community to breathe, gather, and enjoy Barcelona. In 2024, the neighbourhood demolition that had threatened the house was officially cancelled. Giveth House is here to stay.

Support the House

Giveth House exists because the community chooses to support it. Donations from contributors across the ecosystem help cover the practical realities of maintaining a shared space — rent, utilities, maintenance, and operations.

The long-term vision is for the house to remain a free, open resource for the Web3 ecosystem — a physical place where the Giveth Galaxy lands on earth, and where the next generation of builders finds community, collaboration, and a warm place to land in Barcelona. Every contribution helps keep this small but meaningful corner of the blockchain4good world alive.