How to win
the network state game.
Before you crowdfund a single apartment, get the puzzle pieces in place. This is the homework: who should found one, where to put the next node, when to expand, and how to measure whether it is working.
Adapted from Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State and the operating lessons of the popup-city wave: Zuzalu, Edge Esmeralda, Network School, Próspera.
Who should found a network state?
A founding team must cover six puzzle pieces. A solo founder rarely holds all six, which is why most network states, like most companies, are started by cofounders. Score a candidate 0-3 on each axis. Below 12 of 18, find a cofounder before you find a building.
A Strong Why
Is there a moral innovation worth migrating for?
The One Commandment. A single inverted assumption that defines the way of life. Without it you have a co-living company, not a polity. The why is the load-bearing wall; everything else is scaffolding. Bryan Johnson's why is 'don't die.' Adam Neumann's is 'live the life of your life.' If the why fits on a hat, it is strong enough.
Distribution
Can the founder summon a crowd on command?
An audience is the cheapest path to a population. A founder with a million followers can fill a node from a single post. This is why creators, podcasters, and thought leaders make natural network-state founders: they already have the reverse-diaspora's attention. No audience means buying growth, which is slow and expensive.
Capital
Is there money to crowdfund the first nodes?
Land costs money. Even crowdfunded, someone underwrites the first lease. The founder either has capital, can raise it, or has a community that will pre-commit. Andreessen's $350M into Flow is the extreme version. Most start with a single building and a waitlist.
Engineering
Can the team build the digital substrate?
The census, the passport, the treasury, the smart-contract governance. A network state runs on software. Someone on the founding team must be able to ship it, or buy it off the shelf (this is where technodemocracy.app and the Interneta stack come in: governance and identity as a service).
Resources & Ops
Who runs the physical world day to day?
Buildings need management. Events need logistics. Visas need paperwork. A network state has the operating overhead of a small hospitality company. The founding team needs an operator, not just a visionary. This is the most-underrated piece and the most common point of failure.
Social Capital
Is the founder trusted enough to be followed?
Balaji's term is 'recognized founder.' Legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow. Trust is the difference between a community that survives its first crisis and one that forks in anger. Social capital is earned over years and spent in months; a founder needs a deep reserve.
🧬 Don't Die · Bryan Johnson
Read the full pitch at /imagined/dont-die. The open piece, Resources, is the cofounder Bryan should recruit: a multi-node operator.
How to choose your next node.
A node is a place, and not all places are equal. Score candidate cities on these six criteria. The best first node is rarely the cheapest or the most exotic; it is the one where the legal scaffold and the existing community already overlap.
📜Legal scaffold
Is there a special economic zone, a charter-city framework, a long-stay visa, or a crypto-friendly regime already in place? Próspera's ZEDE, Estonia's e-Residency, RAK DAO's licensing. Building on an existing scaffold saves years.
💵Cost of living
Can a citizen live well on a remote-work income? Geographic arbitrage is the engine of early growth. Lisbon, Chiang Mai, Buenos Aires, Tbilisi all clear this bar; San Francisco and Singapore do not, but trade cost for density.
🌐Existing community
Is there already a cluster of aligned people? A node grows fastest where the reverse-diaspora has already gathered. Network School chose Forest City partly because the crypto-nomad flow through Southeast Asia was already there.
🛂Entry & exit friendliness
How hard is it to get in and stay? Visa-free entry, easy banking, friendly residency. The right to exit is constitutional; the ease of entry is operational. Georgia's 365-day visa-free policy is the gold standard.
🕐Time-zone fit
Can citizens work with the networks that matter (usually California and London)? A node eight hours off from its economic center forces a nocturnal life. This quietly kills more nodes than visas do.
🗣️Language & openness
Is English (or the network's working language) usable day to day? Is the local government curious rather than hostile? A government that wants you is worth more than a tax rate.
Score any location on these criteria with the Portal scorecard, or see the world catalog for 30 countries already scored on their legal scaffolds and city sites.
When do you launch a second node?
The network state IS an archipelago. A single node, held forever, is a co-living company, not a network state. So the question is not whether to expand, but when.
The wrong trigger is a headcount. “Wait until node 1 hits 1,000 people” is a vanity metric: the first node may cap below 1,000 for reasons that have nothing to do with demand (visa limits, geography, local friction). Gate the second node on readiness, not population. Here are the three signals that actually matter.
A documented node playbook
Can you hand someone a binder that tells them how to run the node? The operating system: how admissions work, what the daily rhythm is, how events are run, how the culture is enforced. If node 1 still lives in the founder's head, a second node will dilute, not multiply.
A node-2 leader who graduated from node 1
The single best predictor of a second node's success is whether its leader already lived the first. Zuzalu spun off ZuConnect, Edge Esmeralda, and Aleph because aligned leaders walked out of Tivat ready to run their own. You cannot hire this; it has to grow.
Pull from a specific geography
Is there a concrete cohort that wants a node somewhere specific and will pre-commit? Demand pull beats supply push. A waitlist of 50 people who all want a Gulf node, or a LatAm node, is a green light. A vague sense that 'we should expand' is not.
Launch the second node the moment all three signals are true, whether that happens at 300 citizens or 1,500. And make node 2 deliberately different from node 1: a different continent, visa regime, and climate. That is how you learn whether the culture travels, or whether it was just the first city. De-risk node 3 through 1,000 by stress-testing portability on node 2.
How do you measure a network state?
The internet is a shifting landscape with no fixed borders, so you cannot map it the way you map land. You map it the way you measure a census. Balaji's triad is the answer: three numbers that together describe any network state, and let you compare one against another, or against a nation-state.
Population. Income. Square meters. The same three axes a nation-state reports, made continuous and cryptographically auditable.
Population
The headcount of aligned, opted-in citizens. Continuous growth is a continuous plebiscite: a successful network state attracts aligned immigrants, an unsuccessful one loses them. This is the primary number.
Income
Aggregate citizen income plus treasury. The internet's GDP equivalent. This is what lets a network state negotiate from strength: a polity with billions in citizen income is harder for a legacy state to ignore.
Real-estate footprint
The total physical territory of the archipelago, summed across every apartment, house, and town. Not contiguous. The square-meter count is the proof that the cloud has materialized into land.
These three KPIs are what the archipelago globe and the GDP comparison visualize. Map the internet by its census, not its coastline.
The seven steps, operationalized.
Balaji's path from cloud to country, with the concrete action for each step.
- 01
Found a startup society
Start an online community around a stated purpose. Publish the One Commandment. Open a Discord, a Telegram, or a Substack. The founder's legitimacy is whether people follow.
- 02
Organize for collective action
Turn the audience into a network union. Run a first collective act: a group buy, a crowdfund, a coordinated move. Prove the community can do something together, not just talk.
- 03
Build trust offline + a cryptoeconomy online
Hold in-person meetups of growing scale and duration. Stand up an internal token or treasury. The handshake and the wallet, together.
- 04
Crowdfund physical nodes
Lease or buy the first apartments, houses, or a town. One building is enough to start. Issue access via a cryptopassport.
- 05
Connect nodes into an archipelago
Link the physical nodes into one network. Citizens migrate between them on a single passport. This is the moment a co-living company becomes a network state.
- 06
Run an on-chain census
Publish the cryptographically auditable count of population, income, and footprint. Make it public, queryable, append-only. The census is the only honest source of authority.
- 07
Gain diplomatic recognition
Negotiate recognition from one sympathetic government, then more, then the UN. Recognition is the last step, not the first. Bitcoin got there by working; so does a network state.
Score yourself. Then start.
If you cover the six pieces, pick a node and a One Commandment, and read the Constitution. If you are missing a piece, find the cofounder who holds it. Either way, the federation is here to give you a passport, a census, and a constitutional home.