Where the cloud
touches the land.
A network state is cloud first and land last, but not land never. The Portal is the doorway: the moment a startup society chooses where to materialize its first physical node. Choose wrong and the community scatters. Choose right and it compounds.
Below: the twelve variables that matter, a live scorecard to rate any location, and a reverse-engineering of what Balaji optimized for when he chose Forest City for Network School.
Country-agnostic: the rubric is code, each country is data. Add a file under lib/data/node-searches and it appears here.
Every site across every search, put through a conjecture-and- criticism pass: the strongest honest bull case, the strongest honest objection, and the verdict. The tier answers one question: what should be done with the next unit of attention?
The only candidate that pairs a signed sovereign MOU with a codified English-common-law wrapper. AIFC redomiciliation answers the exact instrument NS lost in Malaysia, and the sponsoring ministry is in the same city.
One of the coldest capitals on earth, and the outdoor burn dies for five months a year. Talent is thinner than Almaty, and an MOU with this government is newer and less tested than AIFC's decade of case law.
Execute as the legal seat regardless of where the campus lands. Incorporation here is the floor of the whole strategy.
A Parliament-chartered special regime on greenfield land next to the country's deepest talent pool. The only site that is simultaneously a blank canvas and legally wrapped: the v4 clone-stamp campus with a charter around it.
Trunk utilities only start landing in 2026. A campus that opens before the city does inherits construction-nation risk, and the regime is new law with no case history.
Execute as the campus IF power, water, and fiber delivery dates arrive in writing with penalties. Otherwise hold at Astana and lease in Almaty while it builds out.
The highest raw score of any unsigned site. The only jurisdiction anywhere that gives a DAO legal personality, inside a purpose-built digital-assets free zone, in a country with near-frictionless founder immigration.
No signature, and the UAE courts everyone, which makes goodwill cheap and commitment expensive. Summer kills the outdoor burn, and the emirate itself is quiet: members would orbit Dubai.
One well-aimed conversation with the free-zone authority establishes whether a written campus commitment is available. Highest upside-per-conversation in the set.
The only place on earth where the node joins a lived Bitcoin culture instead of importing one. The state sells residency for BTC, runs a Bitcoin Office, and the security turnaround removed the historic objection.
The IMF deal shows sovereign priorities can bend: Bitcoin acceptance went voluntary the moment $1.4B required it. Capacity is the hard wall: a 1,024-bed campus in a surf town means building it yourself.
The cheapest signature test available: the state's crypto diplomacy is already staffed. Ask, and El Zonte plus a capital office becomes a flagship candidate or the file closes at zero cost.
The strongest immigration primitive in the comparison: 365 days visa-free for most of the likely membership, plus a 1% entrepreneur tax, at the lowest livable-capital cost anywhere.
The March 2026 entry-versus-work split proves the rules move, and they moved against remote workers. EU accession is frozen, the streets are in a protest cycle, and there is no institution equivalent to AIFC to anchor commitments.
Quiet exploratory contact only. If any future government codifies a network-state regime the way it codified the 1% status, Georgia jumps the queue overnight. Do not build ahead of the politics.
Raw is what a site would score if its missing signature landed; final is what it scores today with gates applied. The resource-allocation rule that falls out: execute the signed pair, spend conversations in raw-score order on the unsigned, and park everything that needs more than a signature to move.
Score a location.
KEY criteria are weighted 3x; others 2x. Score is the weighted sum normalized to 100. This is a thinking tool, not an oracle. The location that scores 72 and that you can move to next month beats the one that scores 88 and stays hypothetical.
What actually matters.
Your starting list, expanded. Visas, proximity to capital, cost of living, and distressed real estate are all here, weighted KEY, alongside the variables that quietly decide whether a node lives.
Access & Law
Citizens must be able to enter and stay. A long-stay or digital-nomad visa is the difference between a community and a vacation. Georgia's 365-day visa-free entry is the gold standard; a 30-day tourist stamp is a non-starter.
A pre-existing special economic zone, charter-city law, or free-zone regime saves years of legal groundwork. Próspera's ZEDE, RAK DAO, e-Residency. Build on a scaffold, do not pour your own foundation.
A government that is curious about you is worth more than a low tax rate. Hostility kills nodes faster than cost. You want a state that treats a network-state node as an asset, not a threat.
Economics
Can a citizen live well on a remote-work income? Geographic arbitrage (earn in dollars, spend in pesos) is the engine of early growth. The node should feel like a raise.
Cloud first, land last means you want land that is cheap, available, and ideally already built. Vacant high-quality inventory is the dream: you imprint a culture onto an empty canvas instead of competing for scarce space.
Closeness to a hub of financial capital and human capital. A node an hour from a global city (talent, flights, banking) compounds faster than one in the middle of nowhere. Proximity, not residence: near the hub, cheaper than the hub.
Community
Does the reverse-diaspora already gather here? A node grows fastest where aligned people already flow. You want to channel an existing current, not dig a new river.
Can citizens live and operate in the network's working language (usually English)? Friction here taxes every interaction, every lease, every hospital visit.
Livability
People bring families. A node has to be somewhere a citizen will raise a kid. Safety is table stakes; one incident can empty a community.
Weather, air, healthcare, walkability. The ambient quality of a day. People stay where the days are good and leave where they are not.
Strategic
Can citizens work with the networks that matter (usually California and London)? A node eight hours off its economic center forces a nocturnal life and quietly bleeds members.
Towers, fiber, power, water, an airport. Materializing into existing infrastructure is land-last on easy mode. Building it yourself is a decade-long detour.
🇲🇾 Why Forest City?
When Balaji chose Forest City, Malaysia for Network School, he was not picking a pretty city. He was solving the land-last problem optimally. Here is what the location scored on, in his apparent order of priority.
A $100B Country Garden megaproject, largely vacant. Tens of thousands of finished apartments waiting for residents. The ultimate land-last canvas: built, empty, cheap.
Thirty minutes from Singapore, one of the planet's densest concentrations of capital, talent, and flights. Near the hub, at a fraction of the hub's cost.
A Singapore-adjacent lifestyle at Malaysian prices. Geographic arbitrage built into the address.
Towers, fiber, power, malls, an international airport nearby. Nothing to build; everything to fill.
Malaysia's long-stay options and a government open to a Special Financial Zone make staying viable.
English works day to day across Malaysia and Singapore.
Low crime, family-safe, politically stable. Somewhere you would raise a kid.
The pattern: vacant high-quality real estate, next to a global capital hub, at arbitrage prices, with infrastructure already built, a friendly visa, and English. Forest City is a master class in land-last. The lesson is not “copy Forest City,” it is “find your Forest City.”
Six candidates, scored.
Scores are an interpretation, weighted by the framework above. Load any of these into the scorecard to see the per-criterion breakdown, or to argue with the ratings.
Found the place? Now build the polity.
The Portal picks the land. The Playbook builds the society on it, and the World catalog shows which countries already have the legal scaffolds in place.