Type: Report
Authors: Gitcoin Research
Introduction
Throughout human history, sovereignty has been inextricable from territory. The Westphalian system, born from the treaties of 1648, established the nation-state as the fundamental unit of political organization: a people, a government, a bordered territory. For nearly four centuries, this model has dominated global politics. But a new paradigm is emerging.
Network nations are digitally-native communities that exercise functional sovereignty without exclusive territorial claims. They are not theoretical abstractions. They are being built right now, across dozens of experiments worldwide, by people who believe the accident of birth should not determine the quality of governance available to you.
This shift is being enabled by three converging forces: the maturation of blockchain-based governance tools, a growing disillusionment with legacy institutions, and the practical demonstration that online communities can coordinate collective action at scale. The question is no longer whether network nations are possible, but what forms they will take and what problems they will solve.
Network Nations vs. Network States: A Critical Distinction
Balaji Srinivasan's 2022 book The Network State popularized the idea of internet-native countries. His definition is precise: a network state is "a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states." The framework is compelling, but it has drawn significant critique for its emphasis on diplomatic recognition and territorial acquisition, features that import the very Westphalian logic the concept claims to transcend.
The term "network nation" offers a subtler framing. As David A. Johnston has argued, the word "nation" refers to a group of people with a common culture, values, and identity, while "state" implies a monopoly on force and courts. A network nation can exist as a coherent community with shared governance, mutual obligations, and collective identity without needing to replicate the coercive apparatus of the state.
The Collective Intelligence Project has proposed yet another frame: "network societies," emphasizing pluralism and inter-coordination. In this model, every person is a citizen of many overlapping communities rather than recruited into a single aligned identity. This is governance as a mesh rather than a hierarchy.
Vitalik Buterin's December 2025 essay "Let a Thousand Societies Bloom" synthesized many of these threads, arguing for "allowing a thousand nations bloom where nation can cover the full spectrum from an internet forum to a literal country, giving people more choice and opening up space for pluralistic independent innovation." The key insight is that instead of membership being an accident of birth, each person can choose to gravitate to communities that best fit their values.
The Landscape of Experiments
The network nation movement is not a single project but a diverse ecosystem of experiments spanning the spectrum from pure digital to physical instantiation.
Digital-First Projects
Liberland is a micronation founded in 2015 by Czech activist Vit Jedlicka, claiming a 7 km2 strip of floodplain on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. While it has a nominal territorial claim, its real innovation is digital: a Layer-1 blockchain built on Substrate (the same framework as Polkadot), two native tokens (LLD for payments, LLM for political participation), and on-chain governance that conducted its first congress election via blockchain voting in October 2024. No UN member state has recognized Liberland, but its digital governance infrastructure is functioning regardless.
SeeDAO represents the Chinese-speaking world's largest experiment in network nation building, using DAO governance to organize a community of creators, builders, and thinkers across national boundaries.
Democracy Earth, founded by Santiago Siri, takes a different approach: building open-source, censorship-resistant governance tools for borderless democracy, including the Proof of Humanity protocol for digital identity verification. Siri views blockchain governance as fundamentally competing with nation-states by enabling "ways of cooperation unprecedented in human civilization."
Territory-Seeking Projects
Praxis has raised over $525 million with the explicit goal of building a physical city based on network state principles. Beginning as a digital society organized through chats, DAOs, and community platforms, Praxis aims to materialize as a real-world city with on-chain technologies, digital reputation, tokenized property, and citizen passports.
Prospera in Honduras represents the charter city model, operating as a special economic zone (ZEDE) with its own regulatory framework, using Bitcoin to facilitate commerce and experimenting with private governance structures.
CityDAO took a more bottom-up approach in 2021, when over 5,000 people collectively pooled more than $8 million to purchase 40 acres in Wyoming. Governed by smart contracts on Ethereum, CityDAO was an experiment in collective land ownership and decentralized governance. While it has faced challenges of coordination and scope, it demonstrated that DAO-based land acquisition is technically feasible.
Pop-Up Cities: The Middle Path
Perhaps the most generative category of experiment is the pop-up city: temporary physical gatherings that test network nation principles without requiring permanent territorial claims.
Zuzalu, organized by Vitalik Buterin in Montenegro in 2023, was the catalytic event. For two months, 200 residents from the Ethereum community, biotech entrepreneurs, and researchers lived together in Lustica Bay, exploring what building new societies could look like. Zuzalu tested network state ideas at small scale, from community governance to longevity research collaboration.
Vitalik himself identified two key challenges post-Zuzalu: the need for a governance roadmap and a clearer framework for what such communities could look like long-term. He also warned that many pop-up cities risk drifting into "long conferences" rather than becoming genuine communities.
Edge City has taken the Zuzalu model and professionalized it. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Edge City organizes pop-up villages lasting one to two months across the globe, from Northern California (Edge Esmeralda) to Chiang Mai (Edge City Lanna) to Patagonia. Each village brings 200-300 full-time residents together with shared meals, daily routines, and open schedules designed to foster deep collaboration. Edge City has become cash-flow positive, demonstrating that pop-up communities can be self-sustaining enterprises.
Researcher Chance McAllister has studied why these pop-up formats are so effective, comparing them to 19th-century fraternal organizations and Mennonite migration patterns. His conclusion: pop-up cities function as "wonderful social tie generators," addressing the epidemic of loneliness and atomization that characterizes modern life. The shared lived experience of building something together creates bonds that purely digital communities struggle to replicate.
How Blockchain Governance Enables Network Nations
Network nations are not merely social clubs. What distinguishes them from meetup groups or professional associations is the presence of governance infrastructure: shared rules, collective decision-making, resource allocation, and dispute resolution.
Blockchain technology provides several critical capabilities:
Identity and membership. Proof of Humanity, soulbound tokens, and on-chain attestations create portable digital identities that can travel across communities. This is essential for a world where individuals belong to multiple network nations simultaneously.
Treasury management. DAOs allow communities to pool and allocate resources through transparent, programmable mechanisms. Conviction voting enables continuous resource allocation without the overhead of traditional elections. Quadratic funding allows communities to democratically determine funding priorities while counteracting plutocratic tendencies.
Decision-making. From simple token-weighted voting to sophisticated mechanisms like futarchy and conviction voting, blockchain governance offers a menu of decision-making tools that can be composed and customized. Participatory budgeting on-chain combines the legitimacy of direct participation with the transparency of immutable records.
Commitment pooling. Network nations can use commitment pooling mechanisms to coordinate collective action, solving coordination problems that plague voluntary associations. Members can credibly commit resources contingent on others doing the same.
Interoperability. As described in "The DAO of DAOs," network nations can interoperate at social, technical, and governance layers, creating ecosystems of mutual support rather than isolated communities.
The GreenPill Network Nations Series
The GreenPill podcast devoted its entire Season 10 to the theme of network nations, producing 15 episodes that explored the concept from multiple angles. The series featured an extraordinary roster of guests, each contributing a distinct perspective.
Vitalik Buterin reflected on the Zuzalu experiment and the broader question of how communities can move beyond being "long conferences" to become genuine societies with shared fate and mutual obligation. Primavera De Filippi, researcher at CNRS and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and author of Blockchain Governance, explored "new network sovereignties" and how communities use blockchain to claim sovereignty through bottom-up coordination rather than top-down authority. Santiago Siri discussed how blockchain governance tools enable borderless democracy and what it means to build governance systems that compete with nation-states on legitimacy. Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human, brought a critical humanist perspective, arguing that technology must serve human solidarity and connection rather than further atomization. Jordan Hall contributed his "Game B" framework, exploring how network nations might represent a transition from competitive extraction (Game A) to collaborative coherence (Game B), with sovereignty understood as "the maximum capacity to consciously respond in an effective way to an increasingly diverse number of contexts."
These conversations revealed both the promise and the tensions within the network nations movement: between digital and physical, between individual sovereignty and collective obligation, between innovation and inclusion.
Challenges and Open Questions
Legal Recognition
No network nation has achieved formal diplomatic recognition from existing states. The Westphalian system does not have a category for non-territorial polities. Liberland's blockchain governance functions, but its territorial claim is contested. Prospera's ZEDE framework in Honduras has faced legal challenges. CityDAO discovered that Wyoming's DAO-friendly laws do not fully address the complexities of collective land ownership.
The Inclusivity Problem
Critics argue that network nations risk becoming gated communities for tech elites. Praxis's $525 million raise comes primarily from venture capital and high-net-worth individuals. Pop-up cities like Zuzalu typically cost thousands of dollars to attend. If network nations reproduce existing inequalities behind a veneer of digital democracy, they will have failed their own stated ideals.
Physical Infrastructure
Nation-states provide public goods that digital communities cannot easily replicate: defense, courts, police, roads, water systems, hospitals. Network nations that operate purely in digital space outsource these functions to the host states where their members physically reside. This creates a free-rider dynamic that is philosophically uncomfortable and practically fragile.
Dispute Resolution
Governance systems are only as good as their capacity to handle disputes. Smart contracts can encode rules, but they cannot exercise judgment. Network nations need mechanisms for adjudicating disagreements that go beyond "code is law" while maintaining their decentralized character.
The Exit Problem
Network nations promise easy exit: if you do not like the governance, leave. But exit is never costless. Social ties, sunk investments, reputation, and identity all create switching costs. As these communities mature and members invest more deeply, the promised fluidity of exit may prove illusory.
What Network Nations Might Become
The most likely near-term trajectory is not the replacement of nation-states but their supplementation. Network nations will provide governance for domains where territorial jurisdiction is a poor fit: digital identity, cross-border collaboration, global public goods funding, research communities, and cultural production.
Over time, the most successful network nations may develop enough functional sovereignty to serve as legitimate governance alternatives in specific domains. A network nation focused on longevity research might coordinate clinical trials, fund basic science, and establish safety standards more effectively than any single territorial jurisdiction. A network nation focused on open-source software might govern contribution, licensing, and compensation better than either corporations or traditional foundations.
The vision is not one nation to rule them all, but a pluralistic ecosystem of overlapping communities, each governing the domains where it has legitimacy and capacity, all interoperating through shared protocols and mutual respect. Not a new Westphalia, but a post-Westphalian mesh.
As Vitalik wrote: let a thousand societies bloom.
Conclusion
Network nations represent one of the most ambitious experiments in governance since the Enlightenment. They are imperfect, incomplete, and in many cases, still more aspiration than achievement. But the volume and diversity of experimentation is unprecedented. From Liberland's blockchain parliament to Edge City's pop-up villages, from Praxis's city-building ambition to Democracy Earth's borderless governance tools, the outlines of a new paradigm are becoming visible.
The fundamental insight is simple but powerful: sovereignty is not a property of territory. It is a property of communities that can make and enforce collective decisions. Blockchain technology, for the first time in history, gives communities the tools to do this without territorial claims, without armies, and without the permission of existing states.
Whether this leads to a more pluralistic and humane world or merely to new forms of enclosure and exclusion depends on the values embedded in these systems from the start. The technology is neutral. The design choices are not.
