Bankless - 181 - Afropolitan's Grand Plan To Start A Country

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

What would it look like to create a new country using crypto as a coordination technology? Join us today as Chika and Eche from Afropolitan detail their plan to begin with an NFT PFP project and end up with a country. ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless  ------ 📣 STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 9:05 Starting a New Country 12:35 Public Perception Of The Idea 14:23 The Nation State Has Failed In Africa 16:49 What Was The Berlin Conference? 19:56 Defining Diaspora 25:43 Explaining Network States 29:52 The Solutions a Network State Provides 32:40 Giving Africans A Voice 38:44 How To Reach Afropolitan Endgame 43:45 How an NFT PFP Project Fits In 53:39 Phase 2 And Beyond 1:00:32 A Competitor To The Nation State 1:05:51 Acquiring Legitimacy 1:12:00 How Does Crypto Fit Into This Picture? 1:15:46 The Afropolitan Currency 1:18:22 Are Eche and Chica About That Life? 1:21:29 Long Term Bull Case 1:26:58 Outro + Risks and Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Eche: https://twitter.com/Echecrates  Chika: https://twitter.com/ChikaUwazie  Balaji's Episode on Network States: https://youtu.be/NEoxETtJ67Q  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

You go try to talk to an African official today and say, hey, these guys are trying to start a virtual country, the digital country, and blah, blah, blah, blah. They are just laughing you out the door, right? And the reason is, yes, take us as a joke. Like, we actually want you to laugh. We want you to keep on laughing because within the laughing period, we are building seriously so that by the time we reveal our leverage and our critical mass, no one's laughing anymore. And I think that was the similar Bitcoin strategy where today Bitcoin is taken as a serious asset. Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity.

This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. What would it look like to create a new country using crypto as a coordination technology? We've explored this topic previously with Balaji Srinivasan. He calls it the network state, the idea of using crypto to create a new digital nation. It's an interesting concept, of course. But can it be done? As Thomas Edison once said,

vision without execution is merely hallucination. So today we're talking about the execution side. We have a project that's seriously trying to build a new country for Africa. They have a plan using crypto. They have a roadmap. What would Africa's crypto nation actually look like? That is the topic today. A few benefits and takeaways.

Number one, why the nation state experiment has failed for black people. Number two, why Africa needs a redrawing of lines and how Web3 can help. Number three, why Africa is actually the best place to spawn a new network state movement. Number four, what about crypto and crypto values are demanded in Africa? What resonates the most? And number five, why Afripolitan, the project we're talking about today, thinks they can begin with an NFT, PFP, PFP project and end up with a country on the other side. David, what's significant to you about this episode?

In crypto, we have a lot of very big ideas. In fact, we have so many big ideas that we don't have very many people actually trying to execute on big ideas. More supply of ideas than we have executors of big ideas. But today, we're talking to some people actually trying to go after one of the biggest ideas that crypto has presented. The idea of building a digital nation and not stopping there and trying to actually manifest that digital nation and the values and the infrastructure that that digital nation. produces into the real world. Possibly one of the hardest goals that exists, but there's some tailwinds here. And I think this is a lesson that can be learned not just about the network state idea, but how and why crypto is going to be adopted in general, is that there are pockets of pent up demand for crypto things, crypto values, crypto networks, crypto services. And we're talking with the two founders of Afrippurpolitik about why there is so much pent up demand across the entire continent of Africa for something new, something new from the way that people are organized and the way that infrastructure is provided to these people. As the arc of technological adoption

sweeps the globe, the word leapfrogging comes about, but we are entering the world of crypto networks. So how do we talk about the conversation of leapfrogging with some of the products and services that crypto networks provide? Things like money and finance, of course, but also things like governance and social coordination. What does the word leapfrogging? What does the word leapfrogging mean in these contexts and why Africa is primed to leapfrog the whole rest of the calcified world into what is perhaps the next story for Web3, but also perhaps the next story for Africa. Yeah, this episode was incredibly exciting and the project is incredibly ambitious. Yes. Of course, going to this, you have no idea whether they can pull it off or not,

but you have to admire the ambition of this thing. And the world-changing nature, if we are actually able to use crypto as a coordination mechanism to found and start new countries. What sort of world does that leave us with? I think a world where individuals are much more empowered. So, David, I'm very excited to discuss this with you in the debrief. Yeah, of course, obviously, redrawing the map of Africa is a very ambitious endeavor. Yet if we are correct on some theses about crypto and what crypto supplies to the world, and also we are understanding the current state of Africa. And Eché and Chica, the two guests in this episode guide us through understanding that. The idea is like, yeah,

Yes, it's super ambitious, but the point about the whole African continent is the African continent is asking for this. There's pent up demand. So, yeah, ambitious, but the idea is that the tailwinds behind this idea very easily triggers it to form into a movement. At least that's the bull case. There's so much more to talk about in the debrief of the episode. I mean, man, we're talking about the idea of Web3 coming to change the landscape of, we usually would follow that with Web 2. but no, we're talking about the landscape of countries that were defined in the 1880s. Like, finally, we're getting some churn in the world. At least this is the ideas that are going to be laid out in front of us today. That would be a very big deal if it happens.

Of course, you guys can access the debrief episode in the show notes. And if you are a bankless citizen, you have access to that on the bankless premium feed right now. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Tika and ECHA. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one crypto exchange, a tool to help you go bankless. Cracken, go create an account. Cracken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto,

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that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-led layer-2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at Mantle and follow them on Twitter at zero X, X, Mantle. Bankless Nation, I'm super excited to introduce you to Echay and Molle and Chica Yuwazi, co-founders of Afropolitan and an ambitious project with the ultimate goal of redrawing the lines of the African continent, first by starting and founding a digital nation, and then

moving into the world of global nation governance, and ending with getting some actual physical land in the African continent. And if this sounds a little bit like the idea of the Bellagian network state, then you're on the right track. Today on the show, Eché and Chica are going to guide us through why Africa is so primed to take a new shape aided by the power of Web3 and the principles that crypto networks have to offer the world. Chica, Echay, welcome to bankless.

Thank you. Thank you for happiness. It's a pleasure to be here. So Echay, you and I ran into each other at Zuzalu. And within a few minutes into our conversation, I was immediately just goosebumps about this potential, this latent potential for both Africa, but also for Web3. There's mutual interest here. And I'm really just struck kind of like by the audacity of the idea.

Like you guys are you guys are trying to found a new country. Yeah. Which is an insane thing to say. But in crypto, I think we are all into the idea of very big, very crazy ideas. But what gives you guys the confidence, the audacity to say that, hey, we're going to found a new country and change the shape of Africa? What gives you the motivation to even do this? Actually, let's start with you. Honestly, I think for me, there are a couple of buckets I think about this.

First, we are descendants of people who did more with less. So it's like we owe it to ourselves to do more and more. And I think it's the technology exists today for us to do way more, right? So I don't think 40, 50 years ago, like when you take examples of other states that have been formed within 50 or 60 years, I mean, thinking about America, right? They were doing this without like the internet. It's like, hey, one of a new country, they had to write pamphableness. The pamphlets, the Federalist papers have for you to get disseminated throughout the rest of the world. But I think for us, we actually also have no choice.

It's existential for where we're from, right? Like one of the inspirations for us was when Bellagie said, because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. And we're like, huh, like, that just seems as a quote that encapsulates how we feel as Africans. And what is it going to take for us to really transcend, right? And then the internet enables us today to really dream that big because it's actually. is an equalizer. If this was 40, 50 years ago, we're talking about network state, we're still getting laughed out of the room now, but we're not getting laughed out as much because of the tools that exist today. So I think that it's just the right timing,

and the tools do exist for us to be able to build for that disinclination. Chika, add on to that. That's some perspective here. Yeah, I feel, you know, for someone who, you know, I grew up in the U.S., but then around 2015, I spent about eight years in Nigeria, and this is my second company, right? And I remember how frustrated. I was because I was running an HR software company and obviously it was a need. And because of literally government and governance, it was very difficult to get it off the ground and get it to the scalability that it needs. And I'm sure we're going to talk about this later. But there's a lot of data sets that say that Africa is the next frontier. It's still relatively unexplored. It is the

youngest continent in the world. And probably in about 50 years, probably three or four out of 10 people you meet are going to be African, right? And so we have to get this right. And going back to what ECHE said is existential at this point, right? So for me, I just feel like as someone who actually lived in Lagos and saw all the potential, saw all the different tech founders trying to build something. And literally, a lot of times they were stuck and they were unable to scale because of governance. I feel that we need something that's going to change. And I don't think it's going to be building a new app or building a new technology. I actually think we need to change the foundation of governance on how Africa is operating today.

Chico, what do people say when you tell them that you're like you're trying to found a country? What's their reaction? Right. Because like David was saying, crypto, we're used to big, audacious ideas. But yeah, I mean, to the mainstream, to the public, that just sounds crazy. Yeah. Like, what do people say when you say that? So I typically get two responses, right?

So when I say we are looking to find a new country, it's normally like a, like they pause for a second and they're trying to reflect on like, did I just hear what you said? And then they always repeat a digital puncher. Okay. And then it's like, okay, walk me through that. What does that actually look like? And to be honest, I haven't had anyone write out like laugh, but I do feel that, you know, there are people that are like, that sounds a little far fetch, you know, and I feel that once we start going into the details, then it's like, okay, this makes sense or I understand. Or sometimes, you know, they end the conversation like I still don't get it but I can see why this is needed right so I do feel that there's a lot of education that is needed and I think also when you start sharing historical references

of how other countries were formed it really helps people to really start to understand like oh this actually is possible because this is how other countries have formed in the past yeah so of course we've acknowledged then that this is a big audacious idea and we're going to you know walk into kind of the how. But before we get to sort of the how, let's talk about the why. And let's talk about maybe the state of Africa today. At the Afripolitan website, you guys have published a manifesto, which I think is fantastic. And I'm going to read a line out of it because these two paragraphs really really spoke to me. Scarcity, weakness, poverty. Wherever we look and wherever we are, Africans worldwide are subjects, not citizens. Access to opportunity is scarce. Security is not

guaranteed, for the most part, life is just about surviving, not thriving. The nation-state experiment has failed for black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems. What do you guys mean when you say the nation-state has failed for Africa? Etje, what does that mean? So specifically, when I think about that, we drew inspiration from like the U.S. founding father, So Anthony Hamilton in Federalist I basically says, is it possible for societies of men to form a new government through reflection and choice? Or are we forever destined to depend on our governance through accident and force? And so for us, we're like, no modern day nation state in Africa was created through reflection and choice.

It was always mostly through accident and force. And so when we say the nation state experiment has failed, we're saying the way that experiment was conducted in our African country, context was never actually foundationally sound, right? And it is obviously failed because it was always going to be a feature for it to fail, right? When it's a bug, what it looks like is countries like Singapore or Vietnam or the Vietnamese War ended in 1975. Nigeria as a nation got its independence in 1960. So that's a full 15 years after. But look at Nigeria today, look at Vietnam today, right? Night and day. Singapore, the Singaporean leader, Lee Kuan Yew used to come to Africa to try and draw some inspiration for Singapore because it was still a backwater state. Look at Singapore today. Look at a lot of

the African nations today. Let's not even talk about the UAE, right? In 1990, it was a sand desert, literally. Look at where they are today. Look at where a lot of African countries are today. So when we speak specifically to the nation state experiment has failed, we're saying we've not seen the benefits of it. And in our theory, it's because we never actually got to reflect and choose, right? And that has been the foundational underpinning for why it is felt. I want to go a little bit into the world of history because I think a theme that we're going to bring out in this show is that there is the belief here in the African-politian movement is that there is latent potential in Africa. And that has been building for more than decades for like centuries. And so also, you know, bankless listeners are probably going to be needing some help, some education about the history of Africa in order to fully understand what we're talking about here.

So maybe we can go back to the Berlin conference in the 1880. Eché, what was the Berlin conference? What did it do? And what was the net result as it defined Africa? Yeah, so the Berlin conference was a conference organized by like five or six of the major European powers. So you're talking about countries like England, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, right? And they were basically meeting together to basically decide on how Africa was going to be divided and shared. Right. So all of them were basically having infighting between each other. So I think the German chancellor basically called this conference and says, okay, this is how we're going to divide Africa among ourselves, right? And this was in 1884, I believe.

And it was called the Scramble for Africa. And so by 1904, at least 90% of most of the African land had actually been divided and then colonized by a lot of these European powers. And that set the foundation again for our quote unquote nation state experiment, right? Because you can imagine the Berlin conference, they're sitting in Berlin drawing lines on a map that are actually affecting real people on the ground. So you have tribes that were, you know, together who got divided through those maps. You had ethnicities and religions that were not necessarily supposed to be together who just got, you know, thrown together. Take Nigeria, for example. Like you got amalgamated like 734 ethnicities just put into one map.

And then you're like, hey, get like you guys are forced to work together, right? So you see that the consequences of that conference playing out over time and that has compounded, we believe, for the African. story, right? So again, the Berlin conference, a group of European powers came together. How are we going to share this African cake of a continent? They divided it into pieces. Everyone got a piece, but the way those pieces were divided were not really in the best interests of the people on the ground, and we have suffered the consequences of that even until today. Yeah, and just to really drive this point home, who were the African representatives at this conference? None, none. None. No, none. There were no African representatives at this conference. And I think that has really been what has played out for Africa in general. Like the world always has a plan for Africa and Africa really has a plan for the world. And I think that that's what we're looking to change even with the Afipolitan Networks Day.

And the Berlin conference are the lines that we see on the map drawn today. Yes. And so till that has persisted 1880 to now. So, so 140 years. Yes. That has defined legally, the legal jurisdictions of Africans, but has been in complete disregard for actual cultural boundaries and differences. And so understanding this context moving forward, I think, is going to be key in this episode. But there's also another element that, Chica, I want to get your help on.

This word diaspora, I think, is very foundational to this story. Can you define this word diaspora because we're going to need it moving forward? Yes. And so I think it's important to lay out two things. So number one, many countries have a diaspora, right? And so, for example, China, for example, they have a group of people who have left China and they are in the U.S., they are in Europe, they're in Latin America. So many different countries or ethnicities actually have a diaspora.

So I think that's important to put that there as a foundation. So when we talk about Afripolitan, what we're actually a huge part of our community is the African diaspora. And to specifically define that, these. are people who are black American, right? So they are in the U.S. They can be Afro-Latina or Latino, right? And so they may be in parts of Latin America. Actually, one of the biggest African communities outside of Africa is in Brazil, right? And in fact, you will find a lot of Europea culture, which is actually belong to Nigeria. So there's a huge African-Apra in Latin America.

We are also in Europe. We are in Asia. You know, we're in all parts of the world. So it's essentially Africans in different parts of the world that are outside of Africa that are considered the Aspre. And it's actually quite, there's different types. I think also a lot of people think we're all black and we're not. If you look at Northern Africa, you know, they have different ethnicity. Some of them might be Arab. And then even to be honest, if you look at South Africa as well, there are people who are from Dutch origin who have now become South African and some of them have left and they consider themselves part of the African diaspora. So not only are we multifaceted as far as where we spread across the world, but also ethnicity-wise, we are quite diverse.

And they're part of the African diaspora, even though they're not living within the nation-state boundaries of Africa in all of the countries represented in Africa, because they subscribe to the African nation, let's say. One of the foundational, I think, ideas for me and kind of understanding this concept of a digital nation was when Bologi came onto the bankless show, this was, I think, his second episode on bank list, we'll include a link in the show notes, guys, so you can get up to speed on his concept of a digital nation, because I think it's very much influenced the African-Politan movement. But the term nation-state has two separate words inside of it. Like, the first is nation, and the second is state. And nation is separate than the idea of state. So a

nation is a shared culture, a shared set of values. It's almost akin to a kind of a tribe. all right and so that is the actual like cultural identity of a given people group right and that is separate from the concept and the term state so state is almost like the protocol that is the set of laws and regulations so the u.s. constitution that is part of the the nation state protocol of the United States but it's different than the concept of nation and part of what you're saying I think is you know the history of Africa is really this division in terms of arbitrary borders and it's the state type protocol without kind of the nation. And so this is, I think, an important concept for people to really understand is when we open up the idea of entering into

a new nation apparatus, people don't have to live in the same geography. People don't have to live within the same state boundaries. We can redefine the state boundaries to be something else. And that's what you're doing here with the Afro-Politan movement. How many people are are in the African diaspora? So there are 150 million people worldwide. If it was a country, it would be the 10th largest country in the world. Yeah. So we're talking about an absolutely, like a very large population set and growing very fast.

Yes. Extremely large. And I think something also interesting is that, number one, it's a group that even in Africa, they have been trying to figure out and they've been asking themselves, how do we tap into this market? because the interesting thing about the Africa DASPRA is many of them come home, right? Whether it's through the December, you know, we call this the homecoming. Ghana has officially labeled it as the year of return, and we're going to talk about this later. And what's interesting about the year of return is that not only has, for example, Ghana opened it up to Ghanaians and the Diaspora,

but literally the president also has opened it up to either black Americans and said, yes, you know, for, you know, all the reasons you have left, but we're opening this home back to you and you can come here and you have a place and you have a structure. And so I think the African Asper is quite big, but also the African Union has been trying to figure out how can they connect into this group. And I think also because of the cultural elements

that are happening now through Afro beats, through fashion, through film. And you can see this on Netflix. You can see this on, you know, a different concert. I think there's a lot of interest in this specific group as well. Can we talk a little bit about the solution you're proposing here. And I think in order to get to you explaining Afripolitan, we have to explain the concept of a network state. And actually, where were you

when you first kind of heard about this concept? And what impact did it have? And maybe could you help define it for listeners? Yeah, no, definitely. So I remember Bellagio releases his first article called How to Start a New Country in April 2021. And I was in Dakar, Senegal. I remember like I'm up at 5 a.m. reading this and my mind is blown. I think, like I said, the particular quote that really hooked me was what he said, because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. I basically saw what Bellagie was talking about because prior to that, we had done the year of return in 2019, where about a million plus people from the dashboard came to Ghana. And then in 2020, because of COVID, we pivoted into media, but through a social audio app called

Clubhouse. So in Clubhouse, Afriolitan, and between I and Chica, we built a online community on there of about 200,000 people collectively. So in 2021, Rennelaghi says, hey, he's proposing this idea of a network state. He defines it as a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that's able to crowdfund territory around the world and eventually gain diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. It's a mouthful. But how we basically broke it down was to say to ourselves, okay, when we were running our clubhouse communities, we showed a capacity for collective action. We funded things like the Ethiopian refugee crisis during the Ethiopian Civil War. We funded the police brutality

protests in Nigeria. And we organized around Clubhouse. So we were able to even send Bitcoin to the protesters in Nigeria. And we organized that through a highly aligned online community. And so when he then said, okay, you're able to crowd fund territory on the world, we basically likened that to us bringing a million plus people from the diaspora to Ghana, right? And they we're actually physically on land. And then he says, the next part is, like, gaining diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. We're not there yet.

Obviously, that's where we're working on too. But to me, it was like, these are building blocks, right? Like, they're proof of concepts. Where if you start to break it into each elemental identity, you're like, it's not that far fetch. Like, you've already shown a capacity for collective action. You've already shown a possibility to have a highly aligned online community, right? You need to crowd on territory around the world, right?

And you can sort of as something as simple as, like, potential we works, right, in different places in the world. And then you build up those Chinatown type models as you scale. And then the preexisting state recognition is the one that you're really optimizing for because then you ensure your sovereignty at scale. So that was our definition from the network state. There are a few elements that I want to pull out of Abolagis' network state idea that I think can carry us through into the next bit of the conversation. But Abolagis' like network's idea came from like potentially like aligning like minded and like cultured people. And some of the examples would be like, let's make a network state that has the

freedom of research in certain, like a network state without the FDA. And that would allow for certain people to do certain things. But he kind of gave, or like people talked about, the network states in very narrow senses. But we were just going through like some of the, what we're calling the latent potential of Africa as a continent. And the other theme that I think that's been used about Africa and its relationship with technology is this word called like leapfrogging. There was no landlines ever established in Africa. It just went straight until cellular devices, right? And so I think perhaps what we're talking about here and what the African-politian movement is trying to do is we're trying to leapfrog governance. You know,

like we're trying to skip all this. And the idea is like, why can we do this? Whereas like, you know, if we make a network state that's about like, you know, freedom to innovate across like FDA regulations, that's one thing. But what about the freedom to be? To be. And, you know, if we make a network state, a nation that the African continent has never had before. And so I think that this is kind of the energy that we're tapping into. And so maybe you guys can talk about just like connect the need of Africa to have a voice and the solutions that a network state at least proposes as a potential path forward. Chica, you want to take us home on this one? Yeah. So I feel like number one, you know, there's many problems. Like we could be here all day and talk about that. I will talk about

something that I think is probably the most relatable, and it's something that we, not that we necessarily shared where we're in the same space with Zalu, right? So Africans having the just as much mobility as an American, right? And I feel that today in Africa, there are many African citizens who have difficulties not only being able to travel in Europe, in America, right? Because the business is quite long. And to be on, is quite the meaning of all the different documents they require as an African to travel to many of these countries, but even within Africa, right? So for example, if Nigerian wants to travel to Zanzibar, as an American, I can show up to Zanzibar right now and I get in, right? All I got to do is a visa on arrival.

And Nigerian actually has to wait a month to three months, right? And yeah. Yeah, we went to South Africa. Yeah, same thing with South Africa. So we were supposed to travel to Zanzibar. And basically, because of the Nigerian passport, we basically, half of our time that we're supposed to be in Zanzibar was spent still waiting in Kenya to get our visa back. Yeah. Right. And so there's a lot of just like challenges, even with mobility.

And I think kind of the bigger issue here is that Africa needs to trade within each other, right? In order for us to get to our full potential, we have to be able to do things among each other. So I feel that there's a voice that needs to be had when it comes to just simple mobility. Like, I just want to leave bacteria and fly into London, like, as simple as that is. And most people can just wake up and do that. A lot of Africans cannot, right? And so we're hoping that as apropolitans, we're already having many conversations with different government entities around this, right? What does a visa look like for Afipolitans, right?

And just giving that simple ability to move around, right? So I think there's many other things we could talk about, but that's just the one that comes top of mind, especially because me and Etche travels so much. And it's something that's constantly top of mind for us. The bargaining power that a coherent Africa could get from this, I think, is what we're really going after. And really, this falls into the category of what I see this movement going towards is trying to give Africans a voice for the first time. They didn't have it in 1880 when the lines were drawn in Europe about Africa. And perhaps the African voice has been, like, robbed of being actually able to speak because the tribal boundaries and the tribal groups have been divided. And there's been a friction, a lack of residence between the legal topology and the cultural tribes.

And so how do you see this whole, like, pursuit of a network state movement and the relationship of Africans having a voice? Actually, do you want to take this one? Yeah. So, and I think you really nailed it on the head, David. So, again, it's about organizing around shed values and purpose, right? So a lot of tribes in fight among each other saying, hey, you're not from my tribe so I can't vote for you, right? But no Africans take and point to the benefits that anyone has gotten from voting from somebody who's from their tribe, right? Like, it's not like, oh, hey, we're from the same place.

I vote for you. Now we have access to facilities or healthcare or whatever. It's not working. So now it's like, how do we go back to now organizing around shared values and purpose and this cuts across borders, right? So I think when we read Bellagis Network State, the first critical part was that highly aligned online community. Like, hey, guys, we're not aligning just based on race or tribe or sex or gender. We're aligning based on our shared values of where we see ourselves in the world. And I think, again, the internet enables us to do that at scale.

So imagine if you were on Facebook as a country with its own currency. But this time, instead of an online passive network, it's a digital republic. And the citizens are organized around those shared values and purpose. That's the way I see it. What do you think some of those shared values are, ECHA? What do you got to zeroing in on? One of the first ones was, like I gave the context of because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. Remember in our manifesto you spoke about the scarcity, right? One of our biggest ideologies is an ideology of abundance, right? And I'll tell a quick story around why the ideology is one that we chose. I grew up among the first young African

immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area to be. break into tech. So my friends were folks who worked at Facebook or Google or Netflix or whatever, right? And they were the first ones in their families to earn six-figure salaries. And the change in their family life or even in the community was very noticeable. So over time, we would maybe go out for dinners or for lunch. And folks would be rushing to put their card down to pay for everyone's mail, right? And that's because they now lived in an environment of abundance. In terms of, like, my community, you would see people say, hey, I'm a plant dad. I'm a plant mom. But those same people in Africa would not have time to be plant dads or moms because they were in a state of survival,

right? And so like one of my friends Stanley, like, I'll go to his house. He would wake up in the morning and pick up a water bucket and water 63 plants in a patient manner. This is. I'm laughing because this sounds like David right now, David, are you a plant dad? I've not heard that But would you identify? Oh, my God. One of his children. Z plant. Z plant.

Z plant. Yeah. So my friend Stanley, though, that's a same man. Put him back in Nigeria or put him back in Africa. He would not have time or even the thought process to care about the welfare of a plant. And so for us, abundance allows us to aim for absolute human flourishing. Like, what does that actually look like for us as Africans? And it seems like for a lot of us, we have to flee Africa to tap into that.

And I think for us, that's the narrative that we want to change through Afriolitan. And one of those core values is an ideology of abundance. Like, how do we have an abundance mindset? How do we play long-term games and long-term people? Right. And I think folks like Naval have also helped like underline our philosophy with the movement as well. So yes. You know what's really interesting about this idea of abundance that you're talking about, ECHA,

is it reminds me of kind of the memes of the United States. of America, right? This land of opportunity. And you might agree or disagree on whether America has kind of lost that and the reality is not quite what the meme appears to be. But that is the underlying philosophy. That is why America has been a place for immigrants over the decades and over the centuries. It's because it has provided through its nation and through its state, through its culture and through its set of opportunities that the protocol provides, like the Constitution, it has provided an economy, a land of opportunity. And it strikes me that if digital nations want to attract a population, they're going to have to embrace that idea of

abundance. And they're almost going to need to maybe create opportunities, create economies. I'm wondering how you think about that. And this gets into what the shape of Afripolitan actually is, because I am hook, line, and sinker. Like, I love the ideas that Bologi presents in the idea of a, of kind of a network state, right? And, you know, I've read the network state. We've had Bologian, he's kind of explained it. I'm just, I love it. I hope, like, I'm there. The one question that I have in my mind is, okay, Bologi is one of these people who kind of lays out the vision, right? And then kind of like, disappears and he's like now everyone go do it right and so now we're on this execution point and it almost seems like a you know step one start an online community dot dot dot dot found a country at the

other at the other and i'm like how do we get from online community to country it's all it's these dot dot dot dot these ellipsies in the middle that i haven't quite seen executed and i feel like afrepolitan you guys are actually trying to fill in those dots you're trying to take this staged approach to what it actually means to start with an online community and evolve to an actual, let's talk about the end destination. Remember that ambition that we talked about? The end destination is some sort of UN recognized, world recognized, legitimate territory with some land somewhere. That's the end state. But how do you get there? What are the stages that you guys have laid out for the Afripolitan movement here? Yeah. So I could talk about stage one, because that's the stage,

we are in that we've completed. And it's an ongoing stage and Etche can talk about stage two. So when we were saying, okay, we need to start an online community. As Etch mentioned before, me and Etch are quite successful in starting many online communities, right? And the most recent one before this one was actually our clubhouse community. And we were able to show that, okay, not only do we get on clubhouse and talk about, you know, what's happening on the day, we actually can move towards collective action.

but when we relaunched Apropolitan with the manifesto, what we realized is that, wait, actually, we need to make sure that the people who join us are actually aligned to this vision. And yes, we have this huge community with us, but everybody can come in this first phase, right? And it was very important that we said we built a network, right? And this network is very close-knits, right?

And so when we were looking at how we were going to actually apply this, in the Web3 space, what we actually saw was NFTs, right? And, you know, you've seen a lot of these NFTs, they're great tight-knit communities, and there's a lot of them that are doing different things for the collective actions. And we felt that for onboarding a group of people who may or may not have interacted with Web3 before,

this was probably the easiest way to do it. And so we decided on 500, right, 500 people who would represent our founding citizens. And what's interesting about it was, it was a very collective group of how we even onboarded these 500 people. So we first said, okay, we're going to do NFTs. And we wanted to make sure that the art pulled a story. And it was quite connected to the African abundance experience.

And so the first step was we reached out to an Afro-Politan member. Her name is Joy. And she actually created a whole story for us, right? And this story was just these gods and goddesses. And if we were to create this new world, what would it look like? And she created that storyline for us. And now it was kind of the underpinning of the art. And so once we have the story, we're like, okay, who's going to create this art for us?

And honestly, how we found the artist, Agosa, I love him. Dad, he's 21, very young, just fresh. We actually saw him on Twitter. So I was just on Twitter and someone retweeted his art on my timeline. And I was like, my God, this is it. Like, it just like it was this very, like, April, like, goddess, like, it was just beautiful. And so I was like, this guy gets it. So we spoke to him and we sold him on the vision and he was like, I love this. I want to be part of this. And so we spent

a few months just pulling out the different art pieces. And I think for us what was very important was that the art represented the African diaspora, right? And so if you actually look at the different NFC pieces, it is from like white all the way to very dark. Right. And even those with Betteglow and also just different, you know, characteristics of the African diaspora and also the clothes as well. So we made sure that North Africa and Southern Africa and West and East, all of those pieces were represented in the art. And then we basically had an application process, which is quite concert-intuitive to most NFC projects. Typically, there's a lot of FOMO and it's like, oh, we're selling, it's this amount, and there's like this quick bid to buy. And we said,

no, we need to make sure everyone's aligned. And so we had an application process. We had thousands of people apply. And as a community, because we actually have community members involved, we actually, one by one, looked at each application. And those who were accepted were able to submit. So today we have 500 people who are Afro-Politan citizens. You can see it on OpenC. It is one of the few NFC collections where basically everyone is holding because they really believe in our vision. And I think for us now, we've been doing a lot of community networking. there's a lot of specific events and programming that we do for the Afropolitan community. But that's really phase one, was just getting pure alignment.

And I think the NFTs they serve as our passport. So people have a sense of pride of holding those NFTs, and it's a way for them to show that they're actually citizens of the station that we're building. Are you a Metamask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless, so of course you are. The wallet you know and love just got a whole lot better. Metamask portfolio is the ultimate one-stop shop for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains and multiple addresses all at once.

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So if you want some help in navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to Toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the description below. I want to hang on the subject really quick just to, I think there's like an optimistic way of talking about this, and then there's the cynical way of talking about this. So phase one of more, of which we're going to go into, so phase one implies a phase two, and we'll get to phase two in a second. To me, maybe this is like establishing the digital community phase, but like the cynical take is like, okay, we're going to start a network state,

There's so much latent demand and purpose for doing this in Africa. And now we're talking about an NFT, PFPP project. So that's the cynical take, right? And then the ambitious take that I would like to lean into is like, well, NFT PFPs. These are the icons of your digital representation. These are the badges of your digital cultural self. This is the identification of an in-group and an out-group, right? Like, this is our tribe.

This is our community. We've talked about this in the context of other PFPs. But I think Afri-Politans, is taking this and actually putting rubber down onto pavement with this, which is like, hey, all of the Azuki tribe that is going to have some drama on Twitter. And the crypto punk, like, blurry lines of a tribe, these are all tribes. But you guys are taking this into the actual, hey, we are going to establish our digital online nation and we're using these PFPs.

But overall, like, how does this PFP strategy fit into phase one? And like, again, please define phase one a little bit more for us. like the establishment of the online footprint of the Afro-Politans. Like, overall, like, color and the rest of the picture here. I think it was very important because you could start a digital nation. You don't need to utilize blockchain further. But why PFPs or start off with NFCs in the first place? Remember from our African context, we have scarcity, we have corruption, we have a low-trust society.

And I think those principles that blockchain enable us to have, whether it's accountability or transparency or immutability was what we wanted to bring to the community, even from a governance perspective. So we're like, hey, your identity will be on blockchain. It can be tracked. It's transparent. Your community treasury will be on blockchain. You can see where the wallets go, where the money is going to. Again, using those building blocks to show people like, hey, this is going to be different from our status quo because you want a governance structure that's going to be held accountable. So I'll tell you a quick story. My family sold some land to like the Mormon church in Nigeria. And they wanted to build a building.

roads in the town. And then the government is like, hey, no, just give us the money. We'll do it. Mind you, the government doesn't ever do anything. So they're going to steal the money. And so the church is like, no, we should do it because we know we're going to actually do it. And then they're like, no, just build the road up to your church. And then that's it. So when you go to the town, all you see in the Mormon church is the tarred road really paved that starts at the beginning of the church and ends right outside of the church, right? And then the rest of the road that's owned by the government is just in Tatters, right? And the example that I give with blockchain there is imagine a community has its treasury on the blockchain.

And you make it a milestone thing where, hey, if we say the government gives this contract to this contractor, we can ensure it gets done because before the funds get disposed fully, they have to show proof of work or potentially proof of stick. These are some of the principles we're looking to bring to the governance side of things. And that was why it was very important that we said to our community. like, hey, we're going to go use blockchain. And because on the blockchain, we believe that we can increase transparency, accountability, and also obviously the immutable aspects of it to help engineer that trust, where it's like, don't just take me and Cheka's word for anything.

Verify, right? Like, we want to really ensure that that trust is built from a nation-building perspective. And so I can understand the skepticism when people are like, oh, now we're talking about PFPs. It's not to say that your PFP eventually has to be your actual passport for entry. the reason we chose the art passports was when we decided to go on this project, David, you have to understand where we are starting from. Most Africans are disconnected from our history, right? And so for us, it was like, we can't know where we're going until we have a firm understanding

of where we're coming from. And most great civilizations in the world have built off mythology, have built off art when you think about Europe and Renaissance. So we were basically just recreating that within our story, but utilizing blockchain and NFTs to tell that story. And that was why phase one had to be us attracting the best of the best. Africa and our diaspora and even our allies had to offer across board through multiple sectors. Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely willing to lean into the optimistic element of this.

Like one thing I'll say is I think the NFT brand name is tarnished from, you know, 2022 kind of shenanigans. But let's look at this from a base principles perspective. All right. So this is a piece of on-chain property. Yes. that no nation state, no colonialists, no group of the United Nations can actually take away from individuals, okay?

That's number one. Number two, it's borderless. Yes. Anyone can access it. There's no permission required. All you need is an internet connection. Number three, this can be a form of identity. So the idea of an NFT being some sort of passport in the future, of course that's necessary.

if you want to achieve governance, if you want to vote, that sort of thing. And then the last point, which I think you were getting to, Etchie, is NFTs can also serve as a unit of cultural expressions. And think of, like, the memes that forming a nation requires, right? You think of Betsy Ross and the Star-Spangled Banner, you know, her sewing these stars and kind of a flag. And someone could dismiss that and say, well, it's just a piece of cloth. But it created such symbolism in the narrative of an early name. of the United States, that it kind of stuck and people rallied around it. So of course an early nation state would need some sort of cultural expression and cultural units. And that's what an

NFT can provide. So that is maybe the bull case for all of this. Does that resonate at all? Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, it does resonate. The part that I heard that I really want to draw out is the commitment to blockchain values. And I think maybe the PFP has in the grand arc of Appapapuritan overall a minor role in the whole thing, except what it really does is it plants a flag and saying, hey, we are committing to the values embodied by the blockchain. As some podcast co-hosts, if you adopt crypto protocols, you adopt crypto values. I say that. So that's the part that I really heard out of Etche is like, yeah, be overly cynical and

call it a PFP, but it does the job of committing to certain values that are embodied in Web3 and commits that as like, hey, this is a part of our digital nation. DNA. So you've got that as the base. You've got the NFTs. That's part of phase one here. So now let's fill in some of the rest of the dots. So now you have an on-chain community with some sort of identity assigned to it, some sort of cultural expression, right? What does phase two look like? And then also fill in phase three and phase four. How do we get from NFTs all the way to a country? So the idea for phase two, what we're calling it is government as a service. But the way we're thinking it through that is eventually it's this platform that allows us to unlock internal economy among this digital community.

So the African diaspora today sends home $70 billion worth of remittances back home. How can we help facilitate that even within this platform? You can think things like risk capital, things like self-serving ID. Again, like why I'm so drawn on this. the network state phase two aspect of it, is if you're able to utilize crypto, the way I see crypto from an African perspective, it's a backdoor to financial freedom for a lot of Africans, right? The traditional financial ecosystem does not work for us. Basically alienates us at scale, but through crypto or crypto principles, we're able to reimagine a financial ecosystem that actually

allows us to become insiders for the first time. So we are systematically locked out, whether it's like from freedom of mobility, whether it's freedom to transact, crypto brings us into the conversation. Like you said, crypto gives us that voice. So with phase two, where we envision it is, hey, there's a potential super app. You're able to do things like get loans, defy loans, or you're able to send money back home. You're able to get yourself serving ID within that ecosystem as well. Similar to like the E-E Estonia play that Estonia was able to develop, we're looking to build that

within phase two as well. And then going into phase three, what we're calling that is the minimum viable state, which is how do we build up the credibility needed to be viewed as a country one day? Like Chica said, like when you tell the average person like, hey, we want to go start a new country, there's always that look of, I thought you were a serious person. Now I got to know where I can put you with it. But the thing is, how do you build up that credibility?

And so for us, last September, we got recognized by the New York Stock Exchange as the first ever internet country for the Afghan diaspora. So we basically went up there. We got to ring the bell. we brought our community together. That level of access, the New York Stock Exchange is a 200-year-old institution. So think about them recognizing your movement. Tomorrow, it could be the United Nations.

So it's a perception place. You're collecting stamps of approval. You're collecting legitimacy as you grow, right? And also, we provide visa and arrival services for a lot of African citizens today to four African countries. So Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. Again, the way I like to position phase three, it's almost, most like an Amazon Prime type of thing where Amazon says to me like, hey, we're going to charge you $20 extra for your Amazon Prime membership.

I'm like, yo, go ahead. Because you have shown me so much value that I can trust you where you're always improving. And I think for us, we're positioning ourselves for that level of legitimacy where people should, our citizens should come to trust us that we're operating in their best interest. Where if we then say to the world, like, hey, we have delivered this much value to you in phase three, when we're then going for recognition from preexisting states, you don't have critical mass and leverage to make that argument. So then phase four for us is where the land piece comes in. Well, we want to innovate on that piece because today, when you think about a nation state, you're thinking about a four-corner border.

We want our border to stretch across the entire world. What would that look like? We want to combine two concepts together. One is an embassy and the other one is a Chinatown. So take for example, maybe the U.S. embassy in Ghana, for example, is a sovereign territory and a host government. In Chinatowns, they have their own post office, their own malls, their own banking, their whole like just little commerce within the town. You want to combine an embassy plus a Chinatown for a sovereign Afro town, right?

And so then let's zoom out just to summarize, right? You're an Afriolitan citizen. You navigate the world with your Afriolitan passport. You're able to make payments for goods and services using the Afriolitan cryptocurrency within the Afroletan platform. You're also able to get physical entry into Afrotown, sovereign AfroTowns located in a car. the world. And that is in a nutshell, the phases that we're going to. Each phase obviously has nuances involved. So in something like phase three, you can start off with a free trade zone before you actually get to the Afro town. But you're putting down building blocks before you get to the overall

final version of a fully recognized sovereign country. Let me see if I can summarize this and see if I got this correctly. So phase one, we talked about that. We'll move straight into phase two. Phase two, you're calling it government as a service. Yes. My interpretation is like grow utility to Africans. Be useful to Africans. And maybe you're saying like, hey, Web 3 and Crypto does a lot of useful things for Africans. And we are simply going to figure out how to be like a service provider, consultant, assistant, to connecting the dots between the value that Web 3 can provide to the Africans that need Web 3.

And then the idea is like, all these Africans are like, oh, this was really useful. This African-Politan thing is kind of cool. I'm going to stick around and grow, and I'll ascribe myself to the part of the African-African digital nation. And so you get legitimacy from Africans, the people, right? And so that's phase two. Phase three is, okay, now that we have our digital footprint, our online footprint from phase one, we have a growing population of supporters and people legitimizing our value that

we're providing them from phase two, we go to phase three, and which is minimum viable state. And that is acquire recognition and legitimacy from authorities. Just get external powers that be to give like the thumbs up to, oh, Afripolitan, that is a real thing that we are going to contend with. They have power. They have legitimacy. We are going to acknowledge their existence and their influence. And they will have this. Here is their seat at the table. Afripolitan, please sit right here. Next shoulder, shoulder with the rest of us. And so that's phase three. And then phase four is like acquire land. anywhere, anywhere where you can get it, anywhere where it's appropriate, anywhere where it's relevant,

put an embassy there, create a Chinatown version of Afripolitan, and then all of a sudden we don't have, it's not about producing one central hub of Afripolitan. It's about many, many, many satellites, wherever African culture emerges, Afropolitan wants to be there. These are the phases? Yes, these are the phases. I think for me, two questions kind of arise that might be in listener's mind right now. is one is do I have to forsake my citizenship of my nation state in order to join Afripolitan or can I be a dual citizen? And maybe the second question kind of dovetails with the first, which is, is Afripolitan trying to replace the services of a nation state? I mean,

are you guys going to take like, let's say, health care or court system, you know, like rule of law? Obviously, crypto gives you some of that, you do the property rights layer, but is this a competitor to the nation state or is it more like a supplemental type of status? Yeah. So, yeah, how do you think about that? So to the first question, like, let's say we were all citizens of Switzerland on this call and I said, hey, David, hey, Ryan, we want to start a new country. Your first thought is, why?

What's wrong with this one? Yeah. It's like you already have stuff that works. For most Africans, when you propose this idea, they're like, no, we don't even know what good governance or even like being in a functional nation state actually even looks like. So for us, what we're saying is nation states need competition. In every other business, right, companies have competition. Nation states don't have competition.

And so what then happens is you can be a citizen of Nigeria. Your government has no incentive really to really come through because where are you going to go? Right. You can't just go to the U.S. easily. They're not going to give you visas. You can't just immigrate out. Like it's really one of the top 1% that get those opportunities. to even be... You're stuck. You're essentially geoloced because of the place you were, you were born.

You're born. And so for us, it's like, how do we introduce a hedge where you're like, one of the reasons you migrate out is for a better opportunity or optionality, right? What if that opportunity and those optionalities can come to you via the internet, right? And then you can then point to your government and say, hey, how come African-Politan citizens get this? Why don't we get that? Right. And you're seeing those benefits go to people who actually look like you versus us being there and saying, hey, I'm not. Americans get these benefits or the French get these benefits and we don't, what's going on? So if you're able to introduce some sort of competition where folks on the ground can say,

hey, I'm an African-Politan citizen and I get access to this, this, this, this is and this, why are my government not doing the same? Now, in terms of work, whether we're looking to be supplemental versus competitive, I think there's a balancing act, right? You don't want to really be too antagonistic from get-go. What you are saying, though, is can we act as a supplementary arm to what your government is unable to do for you? today and really execute it on a high level, right? So for example, there are partnerships that we could have with the governments of Ghana, where they're like looking to attract like

maybe tourism or FDI, which is how we started off for the year of return. That is a win-win relationship. But the idea for us is you shouldn't have to forego your opportunity and optionalities in your life just because of what you happen to be born into. Like that is just even a ridiculous like starting point. And so for us, it's the Afropolitan networks they can serve as that hedge where it's like, hey, if it's a dual passport, yes, but if you get to choose which passport is working for you in this particular situation. So sometimes you could use your Amex, sometimes you could use your visa, right? Like, it's like, what points are you actually going to get from producing this particular passport at this entry point? So maybe there are spaces in which

being a Nigerian or the Nigerian passport gets you better access or maybe there are more spaces where having an African-Politan membership and an Afipolitan passport gets you more access. The idea is get optionality and opportunities into the ecosystem because that doesn't really exist at scale within the nation state framework. Yeah. And I just want to add, because I am a dual citizen, right? So I have American citizenship. I also have Nigerian citizenship.

And to be honest, I love having both. And I like having the optionality of both. There are things about the U.S. that I have been able to benefit off of, I think probably number one is education, right? But then in my recent part of my adult years, I really have been able to take the opportunity of having a Nigerian citizenship. And it's as simple as because Nigeria is part of ECOWAS, I am able to travel across, you know, all of West Africa with my one Nigerian passport.

So I see an Afro-Politan passport is the same thing, right, where we don't want people to feel like, oh, I have to give up, you know, my passport. But again, there's additional benefits that you can get from the Afropolitan passport. Something as simple as payments, right? Because today, payments across different African countries is quite brutal. It's not fun. It's not friendly. And I feel that if we are able to solve for that and people are able to leverage that,

then they can say, oh, yeah, like when I'm traveling across Africa, I can easily do payments. But also, when I'm back in the U.S., I can do a payment into some African country. So I think it's being able to utilize both, right? Yeah, Chica, let me just do a big plus one on that. I have a dual citizenship as well. I'm a duly. So Canada and the United States. And it's fantastic.

It's great. It's just like a fantastic fringe benefit. it. And I would love to join other digital nations. I think everyone should be a dual citizen. I want to ask you guys another question here, because David was talking earlier about earning that seat at the table, earning legitimacy. And for, I think, a lot of early nation states, that has actually required violence. That is actually required revolution. That has actually required war. I know Afripolitan, of course, is very much, this is an opt-in movement. You're certainly not calling for any of those things. But I guess my question is broader is, do you think that if nation states are

threatened by what network states are essentially doing, do you think they're going to let you in to the club here? Yeah, you guys don't even have a tank. Yeah. I think the strategy is you want them to take you as a joke, right? Like if I went to the Nigerian, that, hey, we're trying to do a digital nation and digital country. They laugh you out the room. Yeah. And the reason you want to do that is the same reason he wanted them to laugh at Bitcoin, right? It was a ha ha ha ha. You're buying pizza with Bitcoin. Ha ha ha. It's a joke. It's a gimmick. 14, 14 years later, no one's joking. No one's laughing. Right? And it's like, you want to leverage their laughter in the years that they're laughing to really build in a serious way, right? Because

even like, you're saying like, aren't you giving your strategy away? I'm telling you, like, you go try to talk to an African official today and say, hey, these guys are trying to start a virtual country, the digital country, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They are just laughing you out the door, right? And the reason is, yes, take us as a joke. Like, we actually want you to laugh. We want you to keep on laughing because within the laughing period, we are building seriously so that by the time we reveal our leverage and our critical mass,

no one's laughing anymore. And I think that was the similar Bitcoin strategy where today Bitcoin is taken as a serious asset, but 14 years ago, they're laughing you out of the door. And I think that that is the same strategy here, which is we don't want to have frontal assault. We don't want to go get tanks. We don't need to do that. The historical context I draw with this is back in the day, Harriet Tubman had like the Underground Railroad, right, which you got the slaves to freedom in Canada through the Underground Railroad. With a network state, you're building the Overground Railroad, right? Which is like, hey, the internet serves as that cloud service.

And you don't need to go protest physically. You don't need to go say, hey, pick up a gun or do whatever. Just opt out to opt in to this network state. And then let's amass our critical mass and leverage through the network state hard. I think that is the strategy here. I don't think we need to have tanks, but you want them to laugh at you. In fact, you encourage people to laugh at you because you're focusing on the folks

who are actually aligned with you and building with them as you go. So, yes. But also, I want to offer another angle that I feel a few people are talking about this, but I think it's even more relevant to what we're building. So I think even before COVID, if you were trying to have a conversation around how can a country and this organization partner together, it might have been like, what are we talking about? Once COVID happened, a lot of countries realize like, oh, we cannot rely on tourism.

We actually need human capital people coming here into our country and adding actually productive hours to our GDP. So what's been interesting on our journey is quite a number of countries have actually said, we're actually interested in having conversations of what that looks like with Afripolitan, right? And even if it just starts off as simple as, you know, being able to issue visas, right, which solves a lot of problems for many of the African citizens, right? It's a start. So I actually think that a lot of countries, because of what's going on in the world, they're actually more interested in being open and having a conversation. And a lot of countries in Europe are getting older, like they're aging.

of right and africa provides this young fresh human capital of people and so i think that's also the advantage that apropolitan has is like hey we have young smart minds of entrepreneurs builders innovators let's have a conversation of what that looks like in order to bring this group of people your country right so i think that's another angle to think about this yeah i think that's a brilliant angle i mean let's not forget that another you know equivalent path to you achieving legitimacy rather than kind of like, you know, monopoly on violence type of thing is the strength of your economy. And it is true that Africa has a massive amount of energy potential right now. And there's so much latent potential. You just look at kind of demographics and population growth compared to

much of the rest of the world. And it's completely massive. I want to talk about crypto for a minute. So crypto in Africa, of course. One of the things I was thinking of going into this conversation is like the services that a nation state provides citizens. I mean, yes, we are geographically bound and we are all born into a nation, but the bargain we have with our nation state is that they provide a set of services for an individual. And in return, in exchange, we provide consent of the governed. Yes, I will kind of opt into this and we will pay taxes. We will pay for these services, right? And some of the services they provide are a money system, a fiat system, a banking system that's often tied together, a property rights system.

that if I own a specific piece of physical property, someone can't take it from me. They provide civil rights. So the Bill of Rights would be an example. It embedded in kind of the Constitution. They provide security, which we talked about. They provide rule of law. They provide a way to express societal consensus through governance. So in a Democratic Republic, of course, that is a vote, one person, one vote, of course.

And it strikes me that at least some of these boxes can kind of be checked by, crypto infrastructure. So, I mean, you're on the bankless podcast, right? We got the money and banking thing that we've been working on for a long time. And it strikes me that a digital nation like Afripolitan can just kind of tap into that. So can you explain a little bit more? Obviously, we've talked about NFTs, but how else does crypto fit into this picture? So I remember watching Bellagie come on here and talk about the whole Bitcoin, like, get your money out of the U.S. system, the whole thing.

and if he had like, if he had been speaking to a Nigerian audience, we would have just been like, we'd already been done that, bro. Yeah. Where have you been, right? And I think it's because a lot of people are always wondering, why is Nigeria, one of the top countries where crypto adoption is taking place, is because we fundamentally understand as a people that we have leaders we can trust, institutions we can trust, and money we can trust.

So, Chica could give an example when she first moved back in 2015, the Naira, which is our local currency to the dollar was 150 to 1. Today, it is 800 to 1. So if you are in Nigerian and you had kept your savings or your investments, you have seen that decimated across the board. And so it's something I hope Americans or even Canadians never get to experience where you wake up and you see your money half. I mean, that has to be such a breach of trust.

It is a huge breach of trust. So when crypto or Bitcoin came to the party, I doubt that average Nigerian has read the Bitcoin white paper. But they understood intuitively what type of time this was, which was like, look, this is a hedge against the nonsense of the government. This is a store of value I can actually put my fake in. So it's almost like it went from in God we trust on the Fiat paper to encode we trust, right? Because they're like, look, I can trust the code because what happens is when Bitcoin goes down by whatever percent, it affects everyone equally in the world. Right.

So if Bitcoin is down like 5 percent today, if you're in New Zealand, if you're in Ghana, if you're in the U.S., we can all see it and it's transparent. But in our system, in a traditional, you know, fiat system, you don't know the policies that are made, and a lot of it is convoluted. But what you do know, though, is your money has just basically been poofed overnight. And so for us, it was like, crypto enables us to really ensure that freedom to transact, but the transparency that comes with it as well, because you're willing to say, okay, if this is happening in Bitcoin and it's happening everywhere in the world, that's a fairer process.

But you can't be in Nigeria where you might have worked doubly hard or you've even gotten more revenue this year, 10x revenue. And then your currency gets devalued overnight and you're like, yo, what just happened? Like what is going on? And you have no ability to even affect or even to change that. Because again, by virtue of where you're born and what it does is it limits your upside to be able to tap into financial freedom or even financial services at scale. So with crypto, like I said, it acts as a backdoor for a lot of Africans and even Afipolitans to that financial freedom. Because in crypto, you're not judged by the color of your skin or by where you happen to be born into. It's just download a wallet and get access into the financial ecosystem.

And I've seen that happen with creators within our ecosystem where before maybe PayPal or Stripe won't process payments in Africa for whatever reason, right? But now because they're accepting payment through Ethereum or through a crypto wallet, that no longer stops them from having a freedom to transact. And so for us, the cryptocurrency or even the principles of crypto are very important to the movement because the idea is like their three core values, the freedom of mobility, freedom to transact and then freedom to thrive, not just to survive. And I think that that's something that, I mean, everyone in the world deserves, but Africans especially even deserve more because of where we're starting from. One of the things that you said in phase two, Ech, about government as a service, you dropped the very, very small line of a Afro-politian cryptocurrency. Yeah. What is the thought behind that? Or we're going to make a currency for the African-Politian? What's the theory here? So again, the idea is like we want money that we can trust and access a store of value. Bitcoin obviously serves like is an example of what that can look

like. I won't say that we have developed that out yet extensively today. But the idea is leveraging those principles, right? And I think for us is just across the board. Like, for example, if I go to Kenya with Nigerian money, I can't change that money for Kenyan money. money. I have to change my money to dollars first and then use dollars to change into Kenyan Chilings, right? And so even in intra-Afican trading, we don't trust each other's monies for very good reason, right? And so for us, it's like, how do we actually reimagine? It's not just a governance play, but it's also a financial ecosystem play, which is if you can leverage crypto, it allows for more borderless transactions. Today, if I want to send money from Nigeria to Ghana,

it first has to go to New York, city bank or whatever, get charged fees before it gets to Ghana. These rules don't help us, right? Or the way the system is currently set up really actually keeps us out as outsiders. And so for us, crypto knowledge enables us to reimagine this

where, like, you no longer have to go to a bank and worry, hey, I might not receive a loan because I'm black. I might not receiving refinancing because I'm black? No, just trusting the code. And let the code make that decision versus the current systems that we have, which again is why we're also big fans of bankless.

Because within that, we no longer have to rely on the benevolence of whether a person is good or a president's bad. We just all submit to the code. And if the code works today, cool. But we know it's not because they're trying to keep us out. It's just it applies to everyone equally. And that's what we want. There's a line in deep bankless lore that we've invoked a number of times. And it comes from Van Spencer when he asked about certain defy protocol founders if they're about that life.

And this is in contrast to founders that want to form an equity company and potentially go public on a public, you know, the NASDAQ, if you're going to be a DFI protocol founder and issue a token, you've got to be about that life differently. And so I want to invoke that question, but inside of this brand new context, because you guys are doing something completely different than just founding a DFI protocol. Yeah. Y'all are trying to found a country. So I don't even know how you know the answer to are you really about that life. but it's a question about ECHA and Chica as founders. Why you two? How do you guys know that you guys are able to ultimately spawn a movement that redraws

the lines of Africa? How do you know that you're about that life? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things about me and Eché. So we've been building community for over 10 plus years, right? And I think funny enough, someone talks about this, like, how can you build a community when you haven't brought people together at a dinner table? So if you have not been able to do that, you have no business finding anything of this nature, right?

And me and ECHA have convened people, all walks of life, different ethnicities, different types of people over and over and over again over 10 plus years. I think we take community building seriously. So this is the reason why even as we speak right now, our community members are creating a whole DNA initiative projects and figuring out what is the DNA of Africa. because it's very important that they are part of the identity. But I also think for this to work from the African diaspora perspective, you have to find two people who are about the actual diaspora, right? And it's not just a Nigerian thing. So me and ECHA, yes, we are both Nigerian,

but it's very keen for us that we find people from Egypt, from South Africa, from Kenya, from Ghana. And literally, like, we've been almost like these ambassadors, we're flying over to all these different countries, and we're actually connecting and meeting those people. And every time we go to a new country, we say, hey, Afropolitics, and those who are not Afropolitans, connect with us, right? So I think it's very important that, you know, the type of people that do this thing

actually go and travel and connect with people and also realize that if you're talking about the diaspora, you actually actively recruit people from all parts of Africa. I think that's the only way this thing is going to work. And I think the other thing is that me actually would talk about, like, this is a lifetime thing. Like, we're not trying to, I mean, some may say like it's a life. You bought this energy and like you just out like we're not doing that right like we're here we from beginning we docs ourselves you can see our faces we're real people and i think for us because this is like a lifelong mission for us it's not something that we sold an empty project and there was a ruck like we actually have continued building and we are going to continue because this is so important guys as we draw to a close here this has been just fantastic it's cool to see so close to kind of the inception of an idea of the network state, talk to a group of people who are actually doing the hard work to fill in the ellipsies to actually, like, form a digital nation and a digital country. It's so exciting.

So we'll certainly be monitoring what you guys are up to and keeping track of this project, as well as many of the other ones on bank lists. But I want to ask you this kind of question. If you could sort of zoom out, and Chika, you were just talking about being kind of long-term focused here, right? And I want you guys to get long-term focused on this maybe two-part question. Like the first is, if we look 10 years from now, what does in your ideal world, if Afripolitan is massively successful, if it's what you hope and dream, what does that look like? And that's part one of the question. And the second part of the question is, what does the world look like when nations like your community and like yourselves, when there can be nation founders, like nation startups. What does that do to the whole world? Because I find myself excited by the possibility. but also finding it difficult to imagine what that world looks like. So maybe you could kind of close us out with that, Eché. What would you say? I think for me, it's like it goes back to that ideology of abundance, right? So if you can imagine like 20 years ago, like if you, if Netflix didn't

exist, right? But you open up Netflix now. You get to see storytelling from the cultural perspective of maybe Korea or from India or from this or from that. And it doesn't seem to take away from even the storytelling from the U.S. or even from a Western lens. We're just saying we're adding more to the tapestry of humanity, right? And so for me, when I see, when I extrapolate into the future, it's when Belagia talks about four frontiers that exist, space, sea, land, and the internet, right? In space, there may be like 10 people up there on land. A lot of Africans are that allowed to really fully move on land in the sea. You know, black people don't swim like that.

I'm just saying. On the internet, they're like 3.5 billion people with more people still to come online, right? And with advances in Starlink or like a whole bunch of other infrastructure, there are more people coming online. And what you've then seen is African culture then being exported in a borderless manner, whether it's through our music, whether it's through our movies or whether it's through whatever other cultural aspects of it. And so when I extrapolate into what that world looks like, it's a world in which we've really brought everyone into this. abundance, right? And it begets more abundance. Like, why do we have to even move from scarcity to begin with? And that's very important where if we can align around those shared values and purpose, and maybe if our ideology is one of abundance, when we come to the table, maybe we sit

down and figure out what a win and help win looks like versus, you know, zero-sum games where I win and you lose, right? And I think that that's very important for us, even from a community building perspective, which is we're always trying to figure out what is the win-win here, and we need to get more creative in figuring that aspect out. So when I sit back and imagine 10 years from now, it's like you're an African-Politan citizen, right? You navigate the world with your African-Politan passport. You have a sense of freedom that the same child in San Francisco has, whether it is the child in Kenya as well, right? Like, you feel like the world is your oyster.

And you also have the freedom to transact. You're able to get paid for the value and the productivity that you put out into the world. And you're not judged by, you know, where you've been born or the color of your skin. you show up and you are judged in a fair manner. And I think we're not asking for a unicorn or people are like, is this a utopia? No, we're just trying to raise the baseline of competence for our people so that when we show up in the world stage, if there's another Berlin conference, now you know you have African voices actually speaking up for their own interest, and that's very important for us.

Yeah, and I would simply say this because recently I saw a video of the Paris climate summits, right? And I believe it was the president of Zambia and also the president of South Africa, right? And so both of them were given an opportunity to speak and address this wide audience. And basically they were saying we're tired of being beggar, right? Like we want a seat at the table. And the fact that in 2023, a president of an African nation is saying we want a seat at the table is a challenge, right? And so I think if we were to look forward in the future of African politics and 10 years from now, what it looks like is a president not saying that anymore, right?

And saying we are here, our voices are heard, we are considered, we are invited to the G20 summit, we have an equal vote at UN. It doesn't look like Africa has a smaller vote, and it doesn't look like we're begging other countries to come. And even in the context of when we talk about China and the U.S. and even Russia, the conversation is about Africa is still, oh, well, they're coming to get something versus it should be the other way around, right? And so I think for us, a future state of apropoliton is we're aiding in those conversations. And, you know, people are able to see Africa from a global perspective and being included. I think that the inclusivity would probably be the number one thing I would love to solve through

Apropolitan. It's fantastic. And it's very cool that we're doing this in this new frontier of the internet where a new table is forming and anyone can have a seat. And, you know, it's fantastic to see what you guys are doing. So, of course, we are supportive helping the. world to go bankless. And we are very excited about these digital nation, these network state ideas that are flourishing and super excited to see what you continue to do in the future. So thank

you so much for sharing it. Etche, Chica, to the bankless nation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Action items for you, Bankless Nation. You got to watch or listen to the episode that we did with Bology, which we've referenced a few times. It's called Rise of the Network State. We'll include a link in the show notes to that. Also, I read from portions of the Afripolitan manifesto today. It's fantastic. You've got to read it in full. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. Got to remind you as well, of course, this crypto thing is risky. So is building digital nations, I guess, but this is definitely the frontier and we are headed west. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.