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First Arc Builder Circle — Buenos Aires, August 15, 2026

That morning I stopped by the Cursor café here in Buenos Aires. It was packed. People standing, laptops on their knees, that particular hum of a city figuring out that building in public is fun. A few hours later we opened the first 

 — ABC — with a pretty different proposal.

Everything came out a little disorganized. And I think that's exactly why the energy was so good.

Café Nómada hosted us, which was a luxury. They and dev3pack have been backing this since day one. Everyone started with a coffee and a table full of arc_fajores, and we went straight in.

We opened with a short presentation on the workshop and the format, talked about agentic wallets, and dropped into the first lo-fi pomodoro block.

The shape of it wasn't clear at first. Mostly because several people showed up two to three hours late and walked into a movie already running. Doors will close an hour after the event begins from now on. But once the dynamic clicked, you could feel the room lock in.

20 min intro to a new technology, with a live demo

 — you declare your goal, then you build

Every 4 sets, a 20-minute break. Quiet, and respectful of everyone else

You can work in teams, but the room splits into micro-nuclei of four projects. Each idea gets tested with immediate feedback and inputs. Peers against peers.

They don't need much explanation. They just need to sink in deep, as a discipline and as an approach to building — so we can construct and destroy our own ideas and our peers'. Adversaries, and at the same time nodes in a shared learning system.

There are two influences behind those rules. One is Professor Robert Gateman, who taught me economics at UBC: discipline, fundamentals, deep learning summed up in three principles:



Assume Nothing
Applaud Humilty
Idolise No One.



I created a skill to use this in your own projects as it's quite helpful I have found to avoid AI hallucination and keep agents focused. . The other is 

 — don't force the action; practice until it flows on its own.

At the launch event we'd run a contest with a single question: what's the official alfajor brand of the club? Three people said 

So we paid them right there, live, from a Claude Code environment — 

, distributed with a natural-language instruction, at 

. No dashboard, nothing signed by hand. You write what you want to happen, and it happens.

It's testnet, so the money isn't money. What is real is the cost, the latency and the UX. Moving a million for under two cents by talking to a terminal in Spanish is the part that matters. And while it ran, between jokes, we walked through Gateway and the different wallet types in the Circle stack. No slides — the infrastructure working in front of everyone.


Then we used the Agent Marketplace API to build a live market analysis: SpaceX, which listed on Nasdaq under SPCX in June, against Circle's own IPO case. Two of the most-watched recent debuts, inside a single query, producing a full thesis in seconds. (What the model spat out is demo output, not investment advice — the point was the surface, not the verdict.)

I packaged the whole thing as an installable skill so anyone can run it:

npx skills add tcxcx/gateman-analysis --skill gateman-analysis

Each micro-nucleus picked its representative — that call belongs to the nucleus, not to me — and each finalist came to the front carrying one of the 3D prints that stood in for their team representing a different Circle product as their team name. Six pitches, six different ideas. The winner is chosen by the whole room.


 — who are building a delta-neutral trading strategy bot.


They take 100 USDC. They said they will use the prize to test the strategies returns. That prize is almost ceremonial, symbolic, except that it's real money. The actual prize is being in the dojo and learning from everyone else. And the pressure. Oh this precious peer-pressure.

But there's a second layer, and it's the one I'm most excited about: they now have two weeks to push the project, and at the next session we hand 

150 USDC to whoever made the most progress

 on an idea born at this ABC. Which means someone who didn't win today, but has enough conviction in their idea, can walk away with more than the session winner two weeks after.


We don't reward the best idea. We reward moving it forward. And if it wasn't the right idea, we move onto the next one. 

The feedback from the room was concrete, and the first item is the one I most agree with:

 Five minutes is enough to say what you're building, but not enough to say 

 — the specific bet, the thing that might not work, the part you want torn apart. Right now the format rewards the summary over the experiment. Next session the rounds get more structure so people can go into real detail on what they're testing, and so the feedback lands on the experiment instead of the pitch.

, so people who can't be in the room can still watch and take part 😅 this is kinda hard

, to share what's happening in real time to improve social media reach as this is an innovative event in the city and few people know the format

, so late arrivals don't walk into a movie already running

I'm a builder who, back in Ecuador, spent his days locked in a garage working with people all over the world without ever meeting a single one of them. This is the club that hermit — obsessed with technology but alone with it, doing ETH Global hackathons since DevCon Bogota — would have wanted.


That was the first Arc Builder Circle. No, it isn't Fight Club. But it has something of it. And it's much better.

🥋 a creative dojo for creatives and builder's of any kind.

Coffee, lo-fi, principled work and discipline. Alfajores, friends and colleagues in the dojo.

Buenos Aires | Arc Builder Circle: Building with Lo-Fi, Pomodoro and arc_fajores

Open to developers, designers, founders, artists, students, creatives and the curious in Buenos Aires. People from Arc and from any ecosystem since we are multi-chain by definition. Bring an idea you're willing to have taken apart. Creative Destruction at it's finest. Should we make ABC a livestream or a global event you can all join? This is something going through my mind and an idea that Marc - one of our first builders suggested. I would use 

 to create rooms for people to work and escrow AI judges contracts. With some type of mechanism to give people feedback. If enough interest is there, why not right? We could try the app in Buenos Aires and once the format is ready - invite you all.




The club I wish I'd had - First Arc Builder Circle — Buenos Aires, August 15, 2026

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