# The Open Source Network State

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2026-11-11
- Duration: 46:58
- Topics: Balaji Srinivasan, Decentralization, Devcon, [CLS] - ETHIndia, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-jKYSOoUvt6o
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKYSOoUvt6o

## Description

The Network State Protocol is Decentralized Democracy

Speakers: Balaji Srinivasan

Track: [CLS] - ETHIndia

## Transcript

[music] All right, let's go. Okay. Well, uh, great to see everybody here. Um, and you know, DevCon is being occupied with a lot of the how and, uh, the mechanics of building things and so on and so forth. Um, what I want to talk today is about the why and the what, like what what comes next. Ethereum scales, uh, blockchains work, smart contracts work, all this stuff works, and is the only thing that we're going to be doing, slinging coins and tokens all day for the rest of our lives. I mean, that's fine, but it's ultimately, in my view, unfulfilling. It's a means to an end, but towards what end? And uh, given that blockchains work, what do we build? And I propose that we actually want to build in the physical world. We want to start not just new companies or currencies but new communities, cities and even countries. And this is the how and the why of the network state. How to print out the internet. Why we want to do that. So let's let's go into this and then really this is all the tech of today is actually something that you can build this hopefully positive future of tomorrow. Okay. So why do we want to build network states? How do we build them? And then I'll take some Q&A. So why do we want to build them? Basically, this is a lot of text, but essentially the post-war order is the post-war order is a pre- internet order that's melting down. We're in the middle of sovereign debt crisis. Many states are going to fail in my view. And we need a recipe to start new countries, not just new communities or not just new currencies or companies. And to do that, we should look at the original startup country, the true history of America, why it arose to avoid war, and how we can actually avoid war and build peace in part online with some of the technologies like Ethereum. So, um, one of the things just to start with is how America was actually founded because it's founded in a different way than people think. It wasn't founded in the Revolutionary War of 1776. It was founded actually in 1607. And the true founding was actually from peace, not war. There's all these things people say today that America was born fighting. It was born from war. That's actually not how it was born. It was born by people who went and built startup societies. They uh they were not seeking conflict. In fact, you know, some of them went to uh the south and some went to the north, some went to Virginia, some went to uh New England, and you know, they they founded Massachusetts, they founded Virginia. And what they were doing is they were leaving the conflict of England at that time. That's to say, in the 1600s, there was something called the English Civil War. The left and the right were radicalized against each other. They started killing each other. Uh this is a really big deal that many people don't actually know about, but this was one of the biggest things that led to the founding of America. Different tribes in England in what became the United Kingdom eventually decided to go abroad instead of fighting. They didn't want to kill other people in England. And some of them went to uh Virginia, some went to Massachusetts, some went to Pennsylvania, some went to Appalachia. This is very analogous today to the crypto tribes, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, Zcash leaving the zone of conflict and going up into the cloud and they have to actually go and print out onto the land. Okay. And so we're in the middle of a time that's actually very similar to what led to the founding of America. And the key was a new geography, a new place that was conflict-free where you had collective exit. It wasn't just one person leaving. I'm sympathetic to the sovereign individual, but really this was about the sovereign collective. It was a group of people cooperating, migrating together, going abroad. So the metro was started from by collective exit from the English civil war. And understanding this history is important because you understand, oh, it wasn't just, you know, left versus right. It wasn't just two tribes. There were three tribes, four tribes, five tribes, six tribes, many different tribes, many of whom didn't want to fight, but wanted to go and build. And they did so by exiting and building abroad. And so, you know, if you look at community life, this was not about war. It was not about conflict. It was not about political conflict. It was leaving to build the society that they wanted to build with other people who agreed on that vision of the good and doing that peacefully. And you can read about this. There's a book called Albian Seed. And the reason you should learn about this stuff is it's like you know all the monetary history that you learned you know for for building things in Ethereum you need to learn political history for building communities in the same way you need to learn monetary history for building currencies okay so read about this there's this great book Alibab if you don't have time to read the whole book read Scott Alexander's review okay and this will show you how new communities were formed in the past and their variations and which ones succeeded and which Now the thing is I want to emphasize that what they were leaving was actually war. It was they were leaving conflict. Um the first protoamericans basically they left this English civil war. Okay you can read about it and how bloody and insane it was but a significant fraction of the population died. And the funny thing is most people who aren't British you know just a show of hands who had even heard of the English Civil War. Okay like like a few people right yet this is something but you've heard of America right? So the insane conflict that tore apart England in the 1600s, it is important in the sense of it was a foundation for a lot of what came but is also unimportant in the sense that like you know people don't even know that it happened. Okay, you don't realize that the country was torn apart by this and that it led to all these people leaving and so on and so forth. So the protoameans left conflict. they they refused to get into a political left versus right situation and they just went abroad and this is the broader context of leaving behind Europe's wars to build right they left the conflict of uh you know the the revolutions of 1848 Europe was just occupied constantly with war and a common thing among Americans was leaving behind Europe's wars America was less warp prone than Europe was right it had it did have confict with the Native Americans. I'm not saying that didn't exist. But with the exception of the Civil War, the North American continent was not a place of the total devastating wars like the Napoleonic Wars and all the crazy things that befell Europe. And they were basically seeking peace. And my view is we're now on the brink of a new kind of anarctic internet war, arguably in the middle of it. And one of the reasons for this is western governments are in the throws of sovereign debt crisis. Basically um people talk about the cost of living crisis. There's a lot of political conflict over this. Left blames right and vice versa. But fundamentally decades of borrowing are now coming due. Rates are rising across the western world. They're actually falling in China. Okay, which is bigger than the west combined. But they're rising across the western world. Western governments are no longer a good credit risk. Um and uh that is being felt by the population and they're blaming it on everything other than really themselves and their governments in the sense of you know they're blaming corporations or they're blaming immigrants or they're blaming capitalists or this that or the other. And some of that is real and so on. But ultimately what it is is it's decades and decades of borrowing and spending on warfare and welfare and and and graft and many other things and some real things and some fake things, but it's all all coming due at once. is being paid by devaluing the currency and that's why there's so much conflict in the west because the resources are actually becoming genuinely scarce even as the number is going up resources are going down because western governments are in the throws of sovereign debt crisis scarcity is rising or on the brink of conflict this graph from the economist shows that happiness in English-speaking countries is plummeting okay that unhappiness is contagious everybody here speaks English you're all connected to the English internet and because you're on the English internet you see rising domains of chaos, anger etc. And you know when I say conflict I don't necessarily mean conflict in the state of in the sense of conflict between governments and states. So that will happen but conflict between people argument anger between people is just an everyday scenario. If you could somehow visualize what was happening on X every day it would look like you know WWF or worldwide you know WWE. It would look like the UFC. Some guys hitting each other with a chair. Somebody's, you know, throwing Molotov cocktails. It's just constant conflict online. We don't see that because we don't have the right visuals for it. But we're in already an age of internet conflict. And there's many graphs I can show. I can show this kind of graph showing that in America in particular, the polarization, the anger is at a level that's similar to the civil war. Um, I can show that, um, you know, that the US is declining and China is rising and so there's less resources. I can show graphs like this that show party polarization is at civil war levels. Um, I can show that, you know, Democrat and Republican have seceded from each other and they're basically in their own mental spheres. And I can show graphs like this that show that um now everybody has these openweight AI models and much of the internet is going to get deacto militarized because anybody can attack anybody at any time with very sophisticated u cyber war, right? And so all of these things essentially I mean there's 30 more graphs I can show on this and one of the reasons I'm in the east why do I spend my time in the east is this is a relatively more stable region than the west. It's the opposite of the 20th century where in the 20th century there's a lot of conflict in the east. Lots of wars, lots of conflict from partition to everything else. And the west was relatively stable. Imagine that in reverse. That's this century. So for years this was papered over with money printing. US military is being defeated in Iran. It's going to lose the printer. Um the true US debt, people aren't paying attention to these numbers, but it rose by $18 trillion in one year if you look at the financial report of the US government. Okay? And there's this one sentence over here. It's funny with all the tweets and and so on. This one sentence that made the most important sentence which says that basically the total needed to pay the debts of the US government is actually 193.6 trillion in present value terms. That was in 2025. It's more than that in 2026. That is an incalculable amount of money. Like a trillion dollar $1 trillion is selling a $1,000 iPhone to a billion people. Okay, which that's just revenue. this amount of money, this debt can never be paid and it says in a very understated way that you know this can only be funded through decreased spending, increased taxes or you know something like that. Okay, so this is this completely unpayable absolutely insane debt. It's much more than any debt number that you've even seen. The 30 trillion 34 trillion number is actually one sixth of what the actual true number is when you include Medicare and Medicaid and all of these uh pension commitments, right? That are basically un funded liabilities. Okay. Divided by person, that is um basically uh you know, it's it's just just an absolutely enormous number. But divided by the people who pay federal taxes, it's like $5 million per person. Okay? If you divide by all Americans, it's like $560,000 per person. That means it's actually already bankrupt. It's in this bizarre FTX state where its liabilities vastly exceed its assets. But it's like this ghost ship that's kind of moving forward. And all of that is going to come due and it's going to come due in this really devastating way where resources crunch, right? People think they have a h 100red cents on the dollar and they have 1 cent on the dollar or less. And when all that inflation catches up, I mean, are are these companies actually worth a trillion dollars or is the dollar just getting devalued, right? Um, and you know, there's this new 250 bill with Trump's image. You know, maybe you'll need a $1,000 bill soon. Okay, so you know, I'm just saying, right? And so what we need um seeing that this conflict is coming, one thing that some of my friends did is you know they would just go on to a beach in Dubai and I and I I understand that but I would tell them look like that beach in Dubai is going to get blown up. Okay, we need [laughter] and and and then that actually happened, right? Like with this with this crazy war, right? That that beach in Dubai actually got blown up. And so, you know, then uh, you know, they're they're coming around to my point of view is what we actually need is nothing wrong with money. Money is fine, but we actually need more peace, right? What do I mean by peace? Like, if you have a lot of money, but you're in the middle of, let's say, the Syrian civil war or something like that, you can't just hit a button to buy peace. It's not like something you can buy to check out on Amazon. You want people to be able to get along and to be able to cooperate and yes, have an economy, but also have mutual understanding and cooperation between people. cooperation and that's really what we are trying to do at network school. We have people from around the world who have come together peacefully interacting. It's not about money but about tolerance about internationalism about cooperation and so on and so forth. Money and smart contracts and so on are amazing. I love them. But they're ultimately a tool for cooperation between people, right? A positive vision of the future. What the old America actually was. I think we can actually build that again. We're going to have to restore it from cloud backup. We're gonna have to print out the internet. We're gonna have to build the world that we want to see of which Ethereum and its governance and rule of law and smart contracts and all that stuff provides a foundation for that. We have to realize that we actually need to do things in the physical world and not simply in the digital world. So this is the vision of network school and um that's why we're building. So this is the why. Why are we building startup studies in network states? Um it's for Americans but not only for Americans. It's for Indians but not only for Indians. These are some of the larger populations of network school. Um but really the the vision here is a startup society that bootstraps other star societies because we need internationalism not more negative some nationalism. We need we do need capitalism not you know communism or or anti- capitalism. And we believe what we're doing is important for peace um and understanding between people as opposed to the zero sum scarcity that a lot of the world is going to get plunged into. And if our experiment works, it inspires more experiments. So that gets me to the second part of the talk. How do we build network states? Okay, so that was the why. And why did I go into the why? Well, you know, like Satoshi when he published the Bitcoin white paper, he didn't go that much into the why, but he did talk about the why. said, "Hey, there was a 2008 crisis. Hey, the banks, you know, to to make that work, you have to trust the banks." And actually, we need a decentralized system that doesn't have so much trust in the banks. It's an alternative to the banks. That was the why that started Bitcoin and that started that led to Ethereum and so on and so forth. The why always comes first and then you talk about the how. Okay? You have to have the moral innovation before the technological innovation. And for the last 16 years, we've essentially been developing Satoshi's vision of why we need a digital alternative. Network state is why we need a physical alternative. It's a complement to that. Okay. So, if you agree with the why, if you agree that much of the West is melting down, if you agree that we need to boot up a post internet order just like a postwar order, now let's talk about the how. And we're basically open sourcing what we're doing because again that's my goal is to build a template for other people to start new societies to build network states and so on. So how do we do that? So as I said that was the why is focus on the desiraability of peace. Now let's focus on talk about the tech and the feasibility and the mechanics of how to start new new societies. And again I think this is what comes after cryptocurrency is crypto community. Right? Cryptocurrency is a prerequisite for that but it's a tool. It's not the goal per se. Okay, so theory and practice of network states. So I I wrote this book in 2022 and the idea was to build essentially a physical social network or a series of them by taking the internet and printing it out in the physical world. And here's a visual of the concept of what a network state is. It's a very concrete thing. It's basically a physical social network. In the top left corner is an example of a 4,000 person startup society which has nodes around the world and it's got an annual income and real estate footprint. And below is something where in with the blue and the green that's like Zuzalu. You can think of Zuzulu as like a a proto Ethereum network state or don't die which is Brian Johnson's set of meetups, right? These are things that have aspirations potentially of eventually attaining let's say some degree of sovereignty or a special economic zone and but but even if they aren't you could think of them as a network of these startup societies. Okay, this is a very concrete thing. It's basically like an archipelago of these societies around the world. Okay, this is sort of like what crypto would look like if printed out into the world. If you took the network of all the validators, if you took the network of all the exchanges, of all the crypto people, and they actually lived in a in an Ethereum uh village, just like you'd live in a Chinatown or a little India, this is sort of what that would look like around the world if we printed out the Ethereum community. DevCon is like V1 of this, but you're only meeting together for a few days. If you actually congregated for a few weeks or months or even years, that's what that would look like. That would be the Ethereum startup society. Okay? Okay. And that's feasible. It just that's what Zuzulu is. It's kind of like taking DevCon and having it last for months or or longer, right? Okay. And you know Zuzlu now there's all the sons of Zuzalu. Zuzulu itself is decentralized. But anyway, so we took this we took this theory. Let me see if I can go back one slide. Does that go back? Okay. We took this theory and uh we put into practice with network school. And this is the first day of network school. We printed out the internet. We brought a large community here in person or there in person and it basically worked and we we proved that we could take a empty place and actually populate it from the internet. Again, crypto printed out into the physical world and we we built this global community with people from more than 80 countries and we had various crypto tribes there. Ethereum obviously heavily represented and um this was this really really awesome experiment and uh then we [clears throat] if you guys might might have seen this on X um we moved to Kazakhstan and uh so we have a uh deal with the government there because they want to turn Estana into the next Singapore Dubai that's the capital of Kazakhstan they want to build a crypto city there in a lot city and they want to turn Kazakhstan itself into a digital state so anybody here who has visa issues who can't get into America or can't get into the West, apply to Never School, we can get you a visa in Kazakhstan. If you can't do crypto in India, apply to Never School. You can do crypto there. So, this is a great place for people who don't have visas or can't do crypto. Lots of Chinese people are coming because it's harder to do crypto in China. There's Russians and Ukrainians who are seeking peace, Chinese people seeking freedom, Americans seeking stability, Indians seeking opportunity. There's different reasons that people want to come to network school, but this is what we've set up in Astana, a zone of peace and prosperity and technology, techno optimism in the physical world. So, we signed this and we held a grand opening. We've got tons of talent from around the world all signing up and um so this is like this is something which uh we're now doing with full state support. We have the ability to issue a coin if we want to do that. Uh we have the ability to issue degrees. We're getting that we're gaining the ability to issue full degrees like computer science degrees especially. I'd love to have an Ethereum degree actually. Okay. Um and so we're basically fusing with the state such that we are helping the locals build a startup society that is a tech hub eventually a crypto city and help turn Kasa into a digital state. So this is not it's it's thesis antithesis synthesis right thesis the state antithesis the network synthesis the network state. That's another way of thinking of a network state where the network is cooperating with the state. Okay. So you put this into practice and what is a theory the open source network state. How would you go and build your own? Okay. Given that now we've come far enough with the book and doing things in practice, we can give a few guidelines that are things that you might be able to copy. Okay. So open source network how would you do your own? So here's 12 of the key ideas that we've realized for for building startup societies. Again I talked about the why why we want to do this. I talked about the how. the fact that we did do this uh to to a fairly large extent and now let's talk about how you might do it. So the first concept is you can compete with cities not just companies and currencies. So this is a fun graphic where you can actually put a valuation on New York City itself. Okay, how would you put the valuation on a city? You take the number of people times the average net worth per person or you take the number of square feet times the average price per square foot. And what you get for New York City is a valuation in the trillions that is like two to three trillion. And guess what? That's like kind of comparable to the big tech companies. Interestingly, you can apply to Singapore as well. You get something like 5 trillion. You can apply to Shanghai. You can apply to Shenzen. And you realize actually China's cities are worth tens of trillions of dollars. Okay? And even if they're number two in tech unicorns, they're far and away number one in new cities. And we haven't actually conceptualized those as things that have a valuation. Okay, but they do and they're expensive and difficult to build, but they are you can build them like Shenzen was built basically in the last 30 years. Okay, so the concept of being able to start a new city and actually put a value on that and get venture capital or global investors behind that, that's a new thing. And I think one of the ways that Ethereum is going to help come into this is we can tokenize the city itself. Okay, imagine if you, you know, rather than being a nimi in SF and holding $500,000 of a house in SF and being against newcomers coming, if you instead held $500,000 of an SF citycoin. Okay, now you'd actually be incentivized to recruit people to that city and you wouldn't own your house. You would own shares in the real estate investment trust that owned San Francisco and now you'd want that city to grow. Okay, so I think that's going to be a critical mechanism. We're going to prove that out in Kazakhstan with tokenizing a LaToa city. We've talked about this and then we're going to do that to actually show that you can build in the physical world. Okay. So, compete with cities, not just companies and currencies. To even conceptualize this as the next step is a useful thing, right? It's something that we can apply all the techniques that we apply to tech but in the physical world. And with the new AI and robotics, like with uh with drone construction, robotic construction, we might be able to build these cities faster than ever before, not in decades, but in years. and we can populate them from the internet as well. And to show that that's possible, this is Aana itself where we're currently based. And you can see it's a hyperrowth city that actually flipped San Francisco 10 years ago and it builds housing at a rate 100x the rate of San Francisco. And it's really beautiful. It's a really really very well-run place. Okay, you have to come there and see. And um this is something which if ASA was an American city, it would be the fifth largest city in America. There's New York, there's LA, there's uh Chicago, Houston, and Aana. Okay, almost almost two million people. And the thing about this is uh it shows that you can build essentially a new city in about 20 years. And uh they're going to do more new cities in Kan like Alto, that's the next one. I think we can bring this down to maybe 10 years, okay? We populated from the internet and we'll have an Ethereum village within within Alatto, this crypto city. Okay. So, number one, you can compete with cities, not just companies and currencies. Number two is with something like Hilton, you can take that concept of a city and then you can have a network of these cities around the world. So, you don't just have to have it in one place. You can have it in a bunch of places. It can be neighborhoods if not full cities like Chinatowns. Okay. Second concept, to build a star society, you want to think cloud first, land last, but not land never. The internet is the single biggest thing in the world. We've got these gigantic online networks. You shouldn't start by picking out the land. You should start by picking out the cloud. Build a community online that actually wants to build offline. Again, you can do that with some Ethereum subculture. All the NFT groups are good sort of proto startup societies like nouns or or board ape. Something that has survived through the NFT crash usually has some community aspect that keeps it going where the NFT is almost just a marker of club membership, right? That whole kind of thing can now be printed out into the physical world. Cloud first land last but not land never. Third concept pop-ups are the new startups. Okay, so this is um you know like a table of different pop-ups. There's like the cursor cafe anthropics clawed pop-up in New York. Angelist open a cafe. Coinbase did base camp. Uh we held like a Zcash network event and then there's Zuzaloo which many of you know from Ethereum, right? Pop-ups are the new startups because pop-ups are actually fairly hard to do, right? They're like a conference, but you have to take care of, you know, bedding and food and community events to an even greater extent than a conference. It's like a conference, but a long conference. However, a long enough conference becomes something where you have to start thinking about, I don't know, haircuts and and grocery stores and things like that that you don't have to worry about in a conference setting. Okay. So, pop-ups are the new startups. And if you can do a pop-up, um that's a logistically complicated exercise. If you can do a pop-up for a month, you can start thinking about doing a permanent doing a startup society. Okay? And uh this is what I mean by printing out the internet. And one of the things an important concept is when you're doing these pop-ups, you can accumulate a weight list in the cloud and then add capacity in the land because the land is expensive and slow, but the cloud is frictionless and fast. Okay? So you accumulate this weight list in the cloud and then you do it offline. Okay? So the online and offline have a have an interplay here. That's what I mean by cloud first land last but not land never. You accumulate the weight list then you build in the physical world. Next concept the the network seats about distressed real estate. Um you don't want to try to do this in let's say downtown New York City where it's very difficult to build. But if you actually get a true deserted island that's very expensive to build. You know, there's uh like people who want to do it totally from scratch. I understand where that comes from because in a startup you build totally from scratch from a plain text buffer. However, you don't want to do that cuz it's very expensive. It means that you're putting out hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to build up your desert island before you have your very first customer. Instead, what you want to do is look at all the failed real estate projects around the world. Ghost towns, abandoned cities, entire this this article is entire villages and towns for sale that you can buy. Okay, there's lots and lots and lots of distressed real estate, college campuses, abandoned villages in Japan where with some cryptocurrency with some ETH, you can actually go and basically buy the whole thing with a community, not just as a solo person, okay? You can basically crowdfund distressed real estate. And you know that's in Japan, IKEA, you know, Japan has these empty houses, okay? A million empty homes. You don't have to build completely from scratch. And in fact, you shouldn't. That's a huge shift from how people think about tech. In tech, you think about building totally from scratch. In real estate, you shouldn't do that. You should actually start with something that's built and it needs a coat of paint. Now, what that also means then is you need people who are willing to tolerate the fact that your real estate doesn't completely work at the beginning. In the same way that code doesn't work at the beginning, it has bugs. Your real estate might have real bugs or it might have frozen pipes or it has some issue and you go and fix that issue. This is gets to my next point. Frontier not fancy. Okay. Once you get distressed real estate, you need the right community for it. Just like tech people want to build things in the digital world and they want to fix bugs and even the Linux kernel has bugs that are constantly being fixed and it's a constancy state of development. You want people who can endure that and who want to do that in the physical world. That means they're not coming for a luxury retreat. Okay, it's a difference. You're not promising them that this is going to be like, you know, some four seasons resort kind of thing. And a lot of people come with that mindset that they're a customer and everything is built for them and they, you know, oh my god, it's a hotel and so forth. That's not what a startup society is. Uh that that's like the equivalent of joining Google as opposed to a startup. If you join Google, you've got the massage beds and the 401k and and all that kind of stuff, right? With Google, you're joining something great. When you join a startup, you're building something great. Okay? Similarly, if you are going to like some four seasons kind of thing, you're coming and you're paying money in order to have some really nice experience. Okay, fine. Okay. But if you're building a startup society, you're coming there as a producer, not as a consumer. Okay, that's why I call it frontier not fancy. You're not It might become quite nice over time. Okay, but you're coming there to build, not to consume. It's not E pre love. It's like, you know, it's not just I'm just saying it's not relax, right? It's I mean you can relax a little bit but it's build right okay so it's meant to be improved and if you take a look at the things that need to be improved you realize you're coming there with the expectation of improving it and you know for example this this college over here is closed with 129 acres for sale right and and this is the kind of thing where people have talked about hey what if I gather a group of friends and buy a college like this what if I gather a group of Ethereum people and we crowdfund this would be what a DAO would look like in the physical world if you go and buy it. However, what you don't want is the like the constant governance conflict of a DAO. You want to actually elect a president and a government and so on and then take over this is this uh this uh campus and crowdfunded together and then you don't have political conflict in the physical world, right? Okay. So, and to show you this is possible, this is like the before and after of a Chinese city and what it what it looked like and what it looks like now. That happened in 40 years, but with the internet, I think we can do things much much faster than that, right? But this is what I mean. Frontier, not fancy. You want to recruit the people that look like the top image and then they can build what's in the bottom image. Okay? And that's only a fraction of people, but they need to understand that they're building something that they're not consumers. Um, and the thing is, just as a warning, the more western people are, not all obviously, but the more spoiled in some ways they tend to be because western cities within recent memory have not been built from scratch. But the more eastern you go, the more you see cities completely built from scratch. and an ascent within you know the current uh lives of those living and India's improved China's improved Eastern Europe has improved but those places have a living memory of actually building the physical world from scratch rather than simply inheriting it and assuming that's the way things are right so the frontier not fancy mentality of course there's westerners who are like this I'm just saying as you build your society you want to filter for people who understand frontier not fancy okay a bit more basically your internet community it's going to concentric circles. You're going to have a core team. You're going to have like holders, like long-termers, and you're going to have visitors. Just like any crypto, you have like levels of commitment. And you want to design it with the idea of levels of commitment, concentric circles. Um, you want to have some direction, some one commandment that's a reason for your society to exist. It's a vegan society. It's Sanskrit immersion. It is um, you know, like a it's like CrossFit or something like that. You have to have some purpose for it. That's not really a monetary purpose. It's a moral purpose. I call this not, you know, ten commandments, but one command, one reason your society exists. Otherwise, it's just a Starbucks lounge, right? It's just it's just a wei work. Nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't have anything differentiating it from the outside world beyond coffee tables, right? What you have to offer is ultimately moral, spiritual, a purpose beyond just, you know, make money or or have a nice nice place to to live. And you want to bring people in. You want to assimilate them to this you know like Stanford you know has this essay that you have to write like on the values of Stanford. So you want to actually set a direction select people who agree with that direction and assimilate people towards that direction such that they actually have the values that underpin your new star society. Next concept at least what we did we call it society as a service. We actually bundled a bunch of services together in the physical world because people moving from around the world can't put together their own cell phone plan meal plan. this plan, that plan. So you put all that together, it's a new SAS society as a service. So it's turnkey and then you can just kind of like join it and and and get acculturated to it. Next concept, identity is community is security is territory. Again, all of the things I'm talking about, things that Ethereum has laid the groundwork for with ENS, with NFTTS, you can actually have with with NFT clubs and so on, you can define a crypto identity. that crypto identity you can check whether somebody has an NFT then that determines if they're a member of a community whether they get past security and whether they can enter the territory okay this means you can basically create the equivalent of digital passports that essentially just like you know getting into devcon now you presented your thing and you got past the security and you got in okay this is how you prevent free riders this is how you actually have a true community without random people strolling through okay Upside offsets utility. The way that you bootstrap a startup society. When you start out in the lower left corner, the network is going to be very small. If you get to the upper right corner, the network is large and valuable. WhatsApp started like this. It started as a small network. It became a large network because it had equity to offset it. Ethereum started as a small network, became a large network because it had crypto equity in a sense. I know I guess post 2024 we can say that, but it had cryptocurrency to offset that. Okay. And so similarly, if you bootstrap a company with equity and you bootstrap a a currency with cryptocurrency, I think we're going to bootstrap a city, a community with a token, tokenization of real estate. And then the earlier you go, the more upside you have. So you come to a small town, you come to a small community, and you have a vision of making to something larger, and you get some crypto for doing that. And that that crypto may or may not be worth something. That's a risk you take, and that's why you come to a small city as opposed to a big one. metric. The metric of success is man months. So if you take the number of people times the duration they're in your startup society, that's the new in my view coin market cap. Coin coin market cap measures the number of coins times the price per coin. If you instead measure the number of people times the time they're in your sharp society, that's the number of manments that are there. And that's a way of measuring the strength of a sharp society. And the thing about this is the uh this is better than it's like a modern census. If you have digital nomads that are there on your campus for three months a year, that's three man months. That's more than that's more than zero, but it's less than 12. They're not there permanently, right? So, if you have a startup society with people coming in and out, digital nomads, this is how you can measure how much traction you're getting. How many man months, how many man man weeks, man days. And finally, one of the things people always ask me about this, they'll say, "Oh my god, Banji, you know, you don't understand. the government has guns and and you know you're they're going to just invade and you're gonna all die, right? And you know, we actually had a conflict with the state earlier this year and we showed that there's a nonviolent alternative to the military which is mobility. If you can collectively move, if you can collectively exit, even when a state is coming after you, you can rebalance to another node. Okay, that is what crypto is in the physical world. Okay. And so we rebalance to another node and we're thriving there. Okay. Now we've got a partnership with that new government. Right. So a lot of what I'm talking about, you know, is is something where it is some of the values of Ethereum printed out into the fiscal world. It's tolerance and internationalism. It's peace. It is mobility. It's nonviolence and so on and so forth. And this is a recipe for taking all these things we're doing technologically and materializing them physically. Okay. So that's it. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, applied never school. It's at ns.com. And uh thank you very much. Want to do some Q&A [applause] >> questions will be on the screen. >> I'm sorry. >> There'll be questions on the screen for you. The Q&A questions. Sure. Sure. Mircat. Uh >> [snorts] >> I don't see any questions. Should I advance? Should appear. Okay. Oh, there we are. Okay, great. Best way of sharp size is to approach governments. Which ones are most open to partnering? Okay, great question. Um, the first thing you should do is uh you should actually build your community. Okay. Um, well, actually there's two ways. A, if you actually know people politically in some country, you could approach them. Um, sometimes your followers on X or or if you've got a large enough following often there's politicians or uh mayors now who are into crypto into Ethereum those are actually always good people to talk to. Okay. Or local real estate people. Often those real estate people will know political people. Um I I think I would not start by talking to a government. can, but um I would start by actually building your community and holding events like holding a Devcon like thing, holding a popup builds your muscles. Then you take photos of that and you take videos of that and then you approach various politicians that want tech to come to their country. Which politicians want tech to come to their country? Well, you can use AI and you can find who has posted uh who who who has crypto laws, who has who has DAO laws, who has talked about tech, which politicians have done that and you get in touch with those like example Palao has like RNSD. Okay? And you have different kinds of countries have done different kinds of things, right? Um so that's the ones that are most open to partnering small countries. Okay? Small countries. Most people think of China and India and big countries and sometimes they will do deals. I'm not saying they won't. But most countries are small countries. Most UN members have less than 10 million population. About 20% have less than 1 million. Okay? Most countries are small countries. And the smaller the country, the more benefit you provide to them. Palao, the Marshall Islands, El Salvador, right? They're also they've also the right ones have a startup mentality. Not all, but the right ones do. You can, you only need some. By the way, if you if you're interested in this, by the way, the short answer, come to Kazan and I can put you in touch with a lot of these people, come to network school and I can I can I I know a lot of these guys. There's more than a dozen governments around the world that want to have a node for network school. So, the simplest way of doing this is if you speak a language, if you speak Arabic, you speak Spanish, you speak Japanese, you speak something like that, come to network school, hang out, understand how we do things, and I can probably maybe help you help set a network node somewhere. Um, okay. You've had the Indian government notice you publicly. If young founder network wanted to get the same attention, would you open that door? What would you need to see from us first? Um, well, I would say if you came to network school, then I can kind of get a sense of your character and and you know, your ability to build things and you can do some projects and so on and so forth. And then I do want to open up network school nodes in India. Um, the you know, I've talked to the government about doing this. They want to do it. It's just the right timing. The main issue as you know like there's a lot of great things about India. I think his crypto laws could be improved a little bit. Um and uh so that's not that's not all the way there yet. Lots of other kinds of things, deep tech and so on. Actually India is very good for that. So I want to sort of start in AANA build that up to a certain scale and then we would have pop-ups held in India and then we see what happens. And I I don't I think we want to do is you want to achieve things offline and then you broadcast them online and you go back and forth like this and you you assume like a government has the slowest sales cycle so to speak and but you you work with real estate players you work with others and you don't assume anyone government is going to close on any short-term time scale. So the short answer is uh yes but only if I would open the door but only if you show that you've built something. You don't have like today with AI you can just create a slide deck. Anybody can create a slide deck. dynamic created demo execution and showing you can actually organize something you have the staying power that's that's actually what I want to be able to see um next question has enough local integrations contributed to local community well yeah the big difference is um Malaysia didn't want basically Malaysia thought we were quote Zionists or something um they had elected a new government that basically was a fundamentalist allied government in Johor on July 11th um and and that's basically said okay so I was like okay I I never want to be somewhere that were not welcome. Okay, government changed, policy changed, started yelling at us, okay, picked up and left. And that's actually part of the theory of network state and more than 10 governments around the world bid on us and we went to the one that was the fastest and wanted us the most. And Kazan wants to have the next Singapore, the next Dubai. That's a big difference. See, the thing is, if you have a lot of foreigners quote unquote, in your country, you can be negative on that and say, "Oh, that's a foreign enclave and they need to all get out." And Southeast Asia is having an immune reaction against this now. It's not just Malaysia, but Thailand is is, you know, making it much harder for foreigners to be there. Indonesia, foreigners can no longer organize events in Bali. Right? Southeast Asia is having an immune reaction against digital nomads, but other countries like Kasan have actually figured it, hey, we want to recruit them and we want to have them integrate into our tech community. Right? So that's a short answer. The answer is the Kazan government wants to do this and is setting out to do this. El Salvador is setting out to do this. Dubai is setting out to do this. Governments that want you there, you should go there. Governments that don't want you there, you should not go there. Okay, next one. Um, how do we avoid never say becoming autocratic regime or set to follow government? Well, it it's uh the thing is many people can't distinguish between dictatorship, leadership, and receiverhip. Okay, a leader lets you leave. If you have free exit and uh nobody's compelling you to stay there, then in no sense is it a dictatorship. Stalin would throw you in the goolog, right? Hitler implemented an exit tax, the right flight tax for Jews who tried to leave Germany, right? North Korea, Cuba, they shoot you for trying to leave. If you don't have the right to exit, that's a slave state. That's a prison state. Okay? If you have the right to leave, then ultimately you are free. Okay? Conversely, in in America, many states are becoming deacto one party states. Elections are held in California, but the party always wins. It's not democracy in the sense of it doesn't have competitive multi-party elections, right? There's been, you know, one party has controlled state government for many, many years. So, if you have a de facto one party state, there's no democracy, and you don't actually have choice. And I think this is actually happening around the world. Blue states, red states, and China are all becoming one party states. And what that means is democracy is going to be between states rather than within them. We're going to have hopefully a thousand different star societies around the world. and you can choose between them. And if you actually want to change, it's a more costly vote, but it's a true vote because you're voting with your feet, your ballot, and your wallet at the same time. Moreover, the vote actually binds both the society and you because you sign a social smart contract and that's on chain and that's versioned and it's provable to people. By contrast, when you quote vote in the West, you vote for a symbol and you can vote against like the Iran war and then you get the Iran war, right? votes in the west like political contracts aren't binding contracts in our current implementation of democracy but in a digital decentralized democracy they would be binding social smart contracts so in many ways I believe most fundamentally in consent and in contract I don't believe an autocracy can work because it doesn't have consent but if everybody's consented to be there and can leave then you actually have free exit and entrance and I'm not saying free entrance you have you have you have admissions obviously you have selection just like Harvard has selection any university has selection you anybody can apply to enter and you can leave that alone is the the ultimate check and balance I think in the post internet order okay so next one um have ownership and voting power this customer I think this is going to be if we go to the next question um I think this is going to be a continuum right I think you have some contribution of capital some contribution of labor some contribution of time some contribution of community and just Like if you joined Apple today, are you on the executive team with Tim Cook? No, you're not. Right? Like can you just go and yell FU to Tim Cook and remain at Apple? No, you probably cannot. Okay? Some people would try doing that, but it's probably not a smart thing to do. Okay? Because fundamentally publicly attacking Tim Cook within Apple is a leadership challenge. You're saying, "This guy sucks. I can do better." Okay? And uh and often people are doing that leadership challenge without even thinking they're doing a leadership challenge. They are um they're not taking the responsibility. They just want to exercise power without responsibility. The leader should do this, the leader should do that, the government should do this, the government should do that without taking any responsibility for the outcome themselves. Once you actually are moving to the government that you want, you have skin in the game as well. Okay. all kinds of people for example you know in retrospect they say oh they opposed this war or that war but they voted for the politicians that caused that war and uh you know so where's accountability on both sides for the politicians that caused it or the people who voted for them the answer is if you actually vote with your feet your belt your wallet both sides are accountable and if you've got tenure you've got duration you've got capital you've got community there then you'll have more say in the community whereas if you're doing the equivalent of a flash loan where you just buy a bunch of coins and then you vote and then you liquidate those coins, you wouldn't have you shouldn't have as much of a say. So, it's it's a multiffactorial thing and different startup societies will be different, but in general, the more you contribute, the more more say you'd have. Um, so yeah, colonialist whatever it's anti-colonialist, right? The whole point is network state is rejecting essentially western dominance of the entire world, right? The dollar is colonialism, right? The American empire everywhere is colonialism. If you want to have something which is not that right which is actually a star of society that's independent of Washington DC that's independent of any existing government sovereignty of a collective is actually decolonialism it's independence. Let's go to the next one. All right. So, [music]