As a witcher, I will accept coin from someone, no matter where they’re from. Nations are invisible lines that people assign meaning to. A life, however, has real meaning. Its warm skin and a beating heart. It should only be taken as a last resort. – Geralt of Rivia (The Witcher).

To exist, a nation-state has to force people of very different ideological inclinations – democrat, fascist, liberal, Communist, libertarian – into coexisting with each other. Though this might have been a necessity in the Industrial Age – at any rate, nation-states that were unusually effective at this tended to outcompete and devour the weaker ones – it strikes me as a highly suboptimal organizational template for the digital age of transnational mobility and cryptographic sovereignty. Instead of forcing together citizens who otherwise hate each other, why not instead give customers freedom of association and a market-based choice on governance services?

In my view, this is the central value proposition of network states, and one so powerful that I envision a world in which network states built on voluntary shared values and interests largely displace the current world of nation-states built on coerced identities. Consequently, I have made the propagandization of network states one of my core aims, and that involves headlining my travel page with network states developments.

The two main network states in which I have spent any amount of time are Zuzalu (Montenegro, May 2023), Vitalia (Próspera/Honduras, Jan-Mar 2024), and Zelar City (Berlin, Oct-Nov 2024. There are many other such network states and I have an entire page dedicated to tracking and summarizing them, and I love and support almost all of them.  However, Zuzalu and Vitalia are probably the two most “crystallized” network states currently extant [Sep 2024], at least in so far as both have a strong presence in meatspace and a crisp mission statement or “One Commandment”. Zuzalu is perhaps best seen as the decentralized political superstructure of Ethereum, while Vitalia is the network state of immortalists who like funny Internet money (“making death optional”).

I wish to maintain a relationship with both of them and continue exploring and writing about other network state projects as they arise.

In early 2025, investors acquired the Hewes Building – a 16 storey skyscraper in central San Francisco – for a heavily discounted $11M with the intention of transforming it into a “vertical village” for accelerating mad science projects. The now rebranded Frontier Tower has separate floors dedicated to AI, biotech (including BSL-2 lab), crypto, neurotech, and robotics. There are also several floors with common areas such as dining and gym, and there are pending applications to convert part of it into residential space.

The inaugural event, which I attended, was Viva Frontier Tower which ran from Jun 20 to Aug 4. Its lynchpins were three major conferences on longevity, AI, and crypto. Personally, I also organized an IQ/acc event there.

Much like Zelar City, it isn’t exactly viable to expect rich, functioning, First World states to confer extreme regulatory and tax privileges on “network state” projects. However, this doesn’t mean that projects like Frontier Tower – which plan to expand to other major world cities – have no place in this emerging world. Thanks to the surfeit of cheap office space after COVID, such office space can increase access to the network states world, and play an additional role as an embassy of the movement in major world cities.

Zelar City was a pop-up village in the Cooperative Moos, Berlin that ran in late 2024. An offshoot project of Vitalia headed by Laurence Ion and Victoria Forest, it combined the scientific/aesthetic focus of radical life extension seen in Vitalia, but located in a major metropolis with easy access to First World amenities. This effectively allowed us to enjoy the best of both worlds, and laid the foundations for the subsequent Viva Frontier Tower in 2025.

Although a project like Zelar lacks the quasi-geopolitical ambitions of grander visions such as Próspera, it still has a role to play in the emerging network state ecosystem, regardless of whether one views them as glorified group houses or putative embassies of the global communities behind them.

Why here and why now? Vitalia was chosen as a physical manifestation of what some might classify as a Network Society–a decentralized group cooperating and coordinating their energies around a set of unifying philosophies, which occasionally physically manifests– permanently, temporarily, centrally or in a decentralized manner. – Niklas Anzinger.

Vitalia is a pop-city dedicated to the idea of “making death optional” on the tropical island of Roatán off Honduras. Organized by Niklas Anzinger, it is located within the Próspera ZEDE, a special economic zone that offers entrepreneurs low taxes and a favorable regulatory regime, especially in fast-moving sectors such as drones and biotech.

I spent three months in early 2024 at Vitalia, and if I had to reduce what I liked about it to just two things, it would be community and energy. First, it attracts an incredible concentration of unconventional, interesting, and eccentric characters; you can have an interesting conversation about anything from radical life extension to the geopolitics of human intelligence augmentation with most anybody you run into on the streets.

One consequence of this is that though there is wide heterogeneity in personal politics, the common denominator is a kind of classical liberal/libertarian free speech ethos that ensures a space largely immune to “cancelation” while avoiding right-wing “anti-Woke” brain worms. At the end of the day, most of us are here to try to live forever, and hopefully become obscenely rich in the process. This alignment of interests and values coupled with self-selection for intelligence and quirkiness generates the kind of Elite Human Capital concentrations you would otherwise only really see in large technopolises or elite academic cities, while recreating some of the social solidarity you might find in traditional villages but without the “idiocy of rural life” with which it is associated.

Speaking of obscenely rich, the other major point to be said for Vitalia is that isn’t just another transhumanist talking shop, which are a dime a dozen. Philosophy has its place, but the main focus is on BUIDLing new companies and products; just in the time that I was there, several startups were launched and seeded including in the spheres of 3D bioprinting, human augmentation, and accelerated clinical trials.

As of 2024, Vitalia is still in its first stages of existence, and has the typical growing pains of any new country or community (a network state is both). Furthermore, its primary base itself leaves much to be desired. Ultimately, Honduras is a Third World country, with many of its concomitants, such as corrupt bureaucrats, extensive regulatory red tape, dumb personalistic politics, dubious hygiene standards, paucity of amenities, sand fleas, and extreme problems with violent crime. The seas around Roatán, and the walls and armed guards protecting the Próspera ZEDE in turn, buffer Vitalia from the worst Honduran realities. But it’s a fragile and uneasy equilibrium. Finally, and this is of course a personal preference, but I am not enamored of the tropical hothouse climate or the local cuisine.

All that said, I would love to go back to Vitalia at some point, especially when I have something to show for it, i.e. my Nooceleration book and/or Sophia DAO.

My own prediction is that Zuzalu will in part become a structure that has aspects of universities, monasteries, and digital nomad hubs. – Vitalik Buterin.

The Zuzalu pop-up city in Montenegro, where I spent close to a month in May 2023, was my introduction to how network states could work in practice. I enjoyed my stay there beyond most of my other trips, and that was even adjusting for me living in the somewhat run-down village of Radovići a few kilometers from the venue, the grossly overpriced resort of Lustica Bay restaurants with its almost uniformly terrible restaurants.

The killer concept was the concentration of interesting and eccentric people united by their interest in crypto, AI, biotech, zk, and other disparate but vaguely “futuristic” topics. An engaging conversation could be had with almost anybody on the street.

Now to be sure, I enjoyed Vitalia more. It was a smaller, and hence closer-knit, community; about 200 at peak, versus almost 1,000 for Zuzalu. It was harder to orient. However, Zuzalu deserves credit as the event that, more than anything else, launched the network state era and created the template for subsequent pop-up villages. The innovative ZuPass zk-based identity system is now widely across the ecosystem, which includes not only Vitalia but a rich and diverse smattering of more direct Zuzalu offshoots.

Zuzalu has cemented its legacy as one of the building blocks of the coming world of network states, and I am honored and privileged to have been there near the alpha point.