On July 4, 2022, Balaji Srinivasan released a book. Choosing American Independence Day was deliberate. The title was <The Network State>. Its central claim was simple but radical. A nation does not begin with territory. People first come together online, build shared values and an economic system, then acquire physical space. Diplomatic recognition comes last. He called this a new sequence for building a nation. Not a nation that begins with gunfire, like the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but one that begins with a line of code, like Bitcoin’s genesis block. The term "Network State" was itself a declaration of war. To borrow the word "state" is to declare that you intend to face the world as an equal.
Balaji had carried this idea for a long time. With a PhD from Stanford, a stint as a general partner at a16z, and a role as Coinbase’s CTO, he followed the established Silicon Valley path while always looking beyond the existing system. Someone who speaks with the depth of a philosopher, the precision of an engineer, and the practicality of a founder. He was one of the few Silicon Valley thinkers I had been following since 2015. When he said he was writing a book, I already had a sense of what it would be about.
When the book came out, many people said the idea itself was interesting. But history had already shown something, even without Balaji saying it. Nations have always been built first on imagination. Jewish people lived as a distributed network for two thousand years, with the Torah as their shared code. Synagogues were everywhere, and the founding of Israel came only at the end of that long journey. The same was true of early Christians. For three hundred years before Constantine officially recognized Christianity, they were already operating as a parallel state within the Roman Empire. Community came first. Land followed. Balaji is not trying to invent something entirely new. He is translating an old approach into digital language. The idea of forking a nation on digital territory.
I have spoken about something similar. Onstage at the EastPoint conference and Korea Blockchain Week, I discussed this shift, using network states as an example. Nationality is moving from something we are born with to a membership we acquire. A nation is no longer defined solely by physical territory, and the center of gravity of sovereignty is shifting from hard power, such as military strength and economic scale, toward the soft power created by communities and networks. Even without mentioning Balaji by name, anyone in the crypto ecosystem has likely felt this shift firsthand for more than a decade.
The experiments are already underway. In the spring of 2023, a small village appeared on Montenegro’s Adriatic coast. Its name was Zuzalu. A pop-up village run directly by Balaji, it brought together roughly 200 participants for two months. Crypto developers, philosophers, synthetic biologists, and longevity researchers gathered in one place. Vitalik Buterin was there too. Zuzalu was not a nation. But it worked like one. There were shared rules, its own passport, and economic contributions. Just as medieval Florence was both a refuge and a spark for Renaissance artists, Zuzalu was a creative laboratory for digital nomads.
Similar experiments followed. Edge City carried on the Zuzalu format, running pop-up villages in different cities, while Próspera in Honduras is a longer-term experiment. Operating as a special economic zone since 2020 and developing its own legal and tax systems, Próspera received funding from crypto investors and gained actual residents. Another nation is growing inside a nation. Much as the medieval Hanseatic League shaped Europe through an economic network alone, without territory. Yet the Hanseatic League ultimately dissolved with the rise of modern states. The shadow of the crises network states may face is already visible in that history.
The year before last, Balaji announced that he had bought an island. In August 2024, he wrote on Twitter, "With the power of Bitcoin, we now have a beautiful island near Singapore." The name was Network School. Zuzalu’s pop-up village had moved its stage to an island.
But the island’s identity is interesting. Balaji chose Forest City in the Malaysian state of Johor, across from Singapore. Built by the Chinese property giant Country Garden as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, it is a city of artificial islands created by reclaiming land in the Johor Strait. It was originally meant to house 700,000 people. But the pandemic and China’s property crisis converged, and the plan fell apart. With only 15% of the planned development completed and an occupancy rate of 1%, it became a ghost city. Balaji opened Network School on those very ruins. Not a purified utopia, but an experiment begun amid the remains of a failed empire. Islands have long had two faces: places of exile and ideal worlds. Voluntary exiles, and pioneers of a new center.
The location right next to Singapore is strategic. An hour by shuttle from Singapore, an Asian financial hub with no capital gains tax and clear digital asset regulations. It follows the same logic as Próspera’s clever use of Honduras’s special economic zone law. But there is an irony here. Proclaiming freedom and decentralization while settling in the shadow of the most stable state power. Drawing a boundary is always also an act of exclusion.
The number 200 is no small detail either. It is slightly above Dunbar’s number of 150, known as the upper limit at which a community can function on informal trust alone. It is the threshold where rules and roles become necessary, the point where a community begins to call for institutions. Even if the experiment fails, the 200 people who spent those 90 days together will know one another for life. Even if the island sinks, the network remains.
History is full of similar attempts. There was Owen’s New Harmony, and there were Israel’s kibbutzim, but most failed. Internal power struggles, depleted resources, and ideological conflict were the reasons. The moment a free network becomes an institution, it begins to resemble a state again. The rhizome eventually puts down roots. Every revolution becomes conservative the moment it succeeds. The more Network School succeeds, the more its founder’s vision becomes a constitution, and dissenters become heretics.
I am more interested in what this experiment becomes if it succeeds than in how likely it is to fail. Ninety days. Barely an instant for a nation to be born, but hot enough to fire the genesis block of a new civilization. When the 200 worldviews fermented on that island return to their everyday lives, the world will never again be able to return to its old grammar. Ideas drifting in the cloud have finally dropped a firm anchor in the sea.
This week, Ryan, Hashed’s Singapore partner, and Daniel from one of our portfolio companies called me on video from the site. They carried the camera around and showed me different parts of Network School. I could feel an unfamiliar energy in this lively space full of builders. With them, the ghost city was coming alive. This summer, we plan to hold the Singapore edition of Hashed Vibe Labs in collaboration with this very Network School. Soon, we too will become part of the experiment.
