Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Anastasiya Belyaeva & Luis Cuende: Nation3 – Creating a Sovereign Cloud Nation

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

For centuries, we have been led to believe that nation states are the only way to organize humankind at scale. But governments all around the world are failing to react swiftly to the severe destruction of our planet from things like war and climate change, and this is endangering our whole species. Nation3 is ready to overturn this, by building a Web3-powered, tax-free, solarpunk sovereign cloud nation. It is structured as a DAO, meaning there is no legal entity, no gatekeepers, and no influence by trad states. The goal is to gradually build or invest in products and services that allow citizens to be actively involved in economic activity. The $NATION token serves as the gateway to participate in the community Discord, participate in governance decisions, receive an NFT passport, and eventually receive services provided by the new cloud nation.We were joined by founders Luis and Anastasiya to chat about why they see this is as necessary for humankind, how the legal, governance and economic aspects will work, and the long term visions for the project.Topics covered in this episode:Luis and Anastasiya's backgroundsThe problem that Nation3 is trying to solveHow the legal system worksThe differences between Nation3 and traditional nationsThe core services Nation3 will provideWhy is the nation tax-free and how will the economy be supported?Issues with selling passportsHow will democracy work?The biggest learnings from AragonWhat is the vision for acquiring landEpisode links: Nation3Nation3 TechtreeNation3 on TwitterAnastasiya on TwitterLuis on TwitterSponsors: Tally Ho: Tally Ho is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/469

This is Epicenter, episode 466 with guest Louis Crande and Anastasia Beliyeva. Welcome to Epcenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and today I'm speaking with Louis Crande and Anastasia Beliava, who are the co-founders of Nation 3. Nation 3 is kind of taking up a topic that's been, you know, discuss more and more this idea of new countries. How do we create new legal systems, new countries, new states? Of course, Balachi has gotten a lot of attention with his description of this as network states.

And, you know, Nation 3 is actually trying to do it. And they're moving ahead with something like this. So we're really excited to speak with them and, you know, dive in. What is that going to look like? So just before that, brief word from our sponsors or Talley Ho. So Tally Ho is redefining the wallet as a public good. But you can think of it a bit like a community-owned alternative to Meta-mask. It has a much smoother user experience compared to many other wallets as an impressive

UI and you can easily see all your account balances at one and swap between assets within the wallet at a much lower price. They also have a great ledger integration and have ENS and UNS domain name support and recently added the first side chain with Polygon. And so Polygon support is now automatic and easy to use without having to do any kind of manual. step by step thing. And yeah, you can also enter the Metaverse with this, you know, with this Web 3 wallet that's fully community owned. So they became the first sponsor for EtherJS, this JavaScript library through a Gitcoin Aqueduct. So go to tally.cash slash download to check it out. And one more thing. So we are hiring at the moment. So we're looking for a community

manager for Epicenter to help us grow our audience and, you know, kind of produce reduce a show at an even higher quality level. So if you're passionate about crypto and creating great content, get in touch. There's going to be a link to the application in the show nodes so you can just reach out there. And yeah, with that, let's get into it. It's so great to have you both on.

I've kind of like, I guess, known you both for a long time, but let's start with some introductions. Maybe Lewis, can you just share a little bit about, you know, who you are and your journey into the land of crypto. Sure, yeah. Not to be here, Brian. And so I got into, I got into crypto after the subprime crisis got started and kind of like

hit Spain where I'm from. And so I discovered Bitcoin in the beginning. I thought it was a scam. But then like the kind of like the whole crisis and how things shape around banks, kind of changed my idea around it. And I just said it's like this amazing tool, software tool for human liberation. So I kind of like got into it with hope that it would. would, you know, one day removed the need for banks in the first place and all the power they have.

And then I found out a couple companies in the space. And then eventually in 2016, I thought kind of like the next step after Bitcoin and after, which is permissionless money, after Ethereum, which is kind of like, this is smart contract, a person that enables to build so many organizations. The next step is to actually build those organizations. And so I started Oregon. And Oregon took down from basically zero dollars in the UN to the first billion. and still powers some heavyweights like core finance or Lido today on Ethereum.

And yeah, and then I mean, after that, it was kind of like Bitcoin Ethereum, then Aragon for Daos. And then the next steps is like, you know, what is the best application for Daos that can possibly exist? And that is, well, that is a place in the nation state. And so that's why I'm working on nationry now. Cool. And then what about you and Estacia? Great to be here, Brian. Thank you so much for having us. So I actually come into the crypto world from the VC side. I was in a couple of different funds like Open Ocean and Firestarter before I co-founded Fabric,

together with my colleague Richard and Max. And it was one of the earliest funds in Europe, investing in the Web3 universe back before it had a name like that. But for me, I come from Crimea. And I've kind of personally seen a lot of things that are broken with nation states and a lot of unfairness and how that affects people. at the level of ordinary citizens. And so for me, the innovation and the tax tag that crypto brings

has always been directed towards that. Like the core goal and the main driver is that we need to be able to recreate and we envision the way that nation states work so that ultimately we can make lives better and higher quality for people. So that's something that has been driving me personally and focusing on nation three made it kind of a little more formal in that sense. Cool. Then let's start with the nation three. What's nation three? And what's the problem that nation three is trying to solve? Yeah. So nation three, it's a sovereign nation estate on the

cloud. And so we're trying to build this. We're trying to build basically the state that has a jurisdiction, that is its own jurisdiction, its own system of law, which is, kind of a requirement to have jurisdiction. And then we'll also build in a court system, because a court is required to enforce the law, right, and to create this such jurisdiction. And so if you think about it, you have for a smart contract, you have Ethereum, which is a kind of like jurisdiction for code, and that covers a bunch of use cases. And then DFI emerged, and we kind of like managed to get away from the financial, traditional financial system. But then when you think about the legal system, there is no such thing that enables us to

like decoupled from existing traditional institutions that are corrupt, slow, inefficient, and all of that. And so when Nation 3, we're kind of like creating that, like, internet native jurisdiction and system of law where you can come in and you can create an agreement with someone else, and you can transact without the need of, like, having this, like, fair entity that is like a traditional and Eastern State with all the problems they carry. And the way to do that, the way to create such a system of law and jurisdiction, is to actually start an estate on the cloud. And so the idea to first create this internal economy,

gather the citizen base and create a strong system of law. And then, of course, after that, like, you know, down the road, it's very interesting to explore getting land and, like, establishing kind of like specific economy areas in different parts in the world. And then eventually, you know, down the road, you can basically start experimenting with nation states at the speed that we experimented with software,

And then finally reimagining what these institutions that have been there for like hundreds or thousands of years and they are so obsolete can do for us instead of what we can do for them, which is kind of like how it is today. One thing that sort of like stands out to me when you say this, you know, you say like a new legal system, you know, that's like in the cloud. But of course, if you think of the existing legal system, then it seems like a huge amount of the power. power it has is through the enforcement of, you know, this police that's like shows up in your door with a gun and like arrest you or like puts you in jail or like they have all these kind of like means of enforcing power. And of course, we've already had in a way types of like contract in crypto, right, through smart contracts, which just tend to be, you know, enforced automatically by mostly having some

collateral put up and then it gets maybe allocated in some way depending on some events. So I'm curious, like, what does such a legal system look like? Can you have a legal system without the kind of police enforcement? You definitely can. The difference is what you can enforce and you cannot, right? Like in the system we're creating, you can enforce the slashing of some balances, right? So when people enter an agreement, they set the maximum amount of like basically collateral or stake they can lose if they misbehave. And then the court can like rule to change those balances and basically like, you know, like remove some of the collateral from someone who misbehaved.

You cannot send someone to Yale. You don't have like physical authority over them. But you have financial authority over them. And what we are realizing is that most of the time financial authority is fine. obviously this wouldn't work for big crimes and I don't think like a cloud nation could like rule over certain things that are physical of course but you can rule over everything that is internet based

and you know if you look at the GDP of the internet is like the largest GDP in the world by a large extent so we think that this is a very well step in rebuilding the fabric of our society and I think also just to jump into this like you highlighted Brian that you know the traditional nation states they've been militarized and kind of based on this idea of physical violence for a very long time. And those pillars of nation states have existed for thousands of years.

And the reason they exist that way is because back in the day when we operated as tribes, we really needed these kind of notions of patriotism and war and sacrifice and all of that stuff to survive. And the governments haven't really changed their structures since then. it's kind of like this whole Machiavellian thing of the princess or the political parties that own the power. They want to make sure that people are dependent on them for protection, right? Because they control the police, they control the military, and people in theory rely on that type of law enforcement for protection. And so people are willing to give up their rights, their freedoms in order to be protected. And this whole narrative that you need this protection is just so flawed.

Like, we don't really need this in today's age. We could completely rebuild the structures from being driven by this militarized narrative towards something that's economic, right? As Lewis mentioned, you don't need to be able to send people to jail to prevent them from committing crimes. You can slash them economically. And frankly, same applies on a state level. We're today at a brink of a nuclear disaster in the world, and that shouldn't really be happening,

right? Like, if we are much more advanced species than that, like, how primitive is it that there's a maniac someone in a bunker with a nuclear button that can just press it anytime whenever he feels tired of the war? It's just insane, right? Instead of it, we could have states that are operated based on smart contracts and economic incentives where if something goes wrong and if one state is trying to prevent another from behaving maliciously, you can perhaps deploy a smart contract that erases the treasury of that state. you have like some kind of mutual deterrence based on those economic powers and not on physically destroying the planet that we're living in and the lives of people and all of that. It's just insane to me to think that in 21st century, that is what we have. Maybe that's a good sort of segue into going a little bit more detail in, you know,

what are the difference between Nation 3 or maybe other types? of cloud nations that people are going to create and traditional nations the way we know them today. Like what are the most important dimensions in which they differ? So I would say one of the core starting points to differentiate them is the pillars on which the nation state is built. So as mentioned the traditional nation state, they're typically operated on principles of war, sacrifice, pride and nationalism that is defined by territories. where if you're born in a certain territory, you are presumed to have a cultural belonging to that nation and you're expected to defend it with your life and all these completely weird things

that people are supposed to experience, while on that level, Nation 3 is arguing that you can have the sense of belonging and the sense of community based on principles that you choose, for example, on certain shared values, on things that you want to see in your community, whether it's nomadic living or whether it's maybe eco-friendly stuff, it can be values that you choose and that you identify yourself with that you can build a community around. It doesn't have to be based on territory that you were born in and then the passport that you happen to hold.

So that's one thing. The other major thing is ability to exit is very different. I think as you're building these digital nations and network states, as Balagie has coined the term for them, the ability to exit is super important. So you can actually enter and exit communities and therefore the underlying services based on what you need in the moment, what stage in life you are in. For example, maybe when you're younger, you want to be part of a nomad community. And so you identify more with a nation state that is focused on that, on nomadic living.

the services that are powering that kind of economy. But then maybe as you turn older and you're starting to have a family, maybe you're focusing on more family-friendly stuff and setting down somewhere and you suddenly care about eco-friendly living and kids' kindergartens or whatever, right? And so you can you can enter and exit, as you will, without the restraints and the difficulties that current nation states try to enforce. Like in some countries, you literally almost cannot lose your citizenship, even if you want to do in some others to get it, you have to prove your loyalty for years and years

by paying taxes and not leaving the country for more than X amount of days a year and all that kind of stuff. But most importantly, it's the way the services are provided. Today, I think most nation states have a monopoly over pretty much everything they do. And they provide their services in a way where they don't really respect the free market. They provide services where where they kind of treat their citizens not as users, but as someone who owes them something, and they're kind of like, all right, we're going to give you the basics just so you can stay here and survive and pay taxes. But you're not really our customer, and you don't really have much say over improving the services or what's going to happen or who's going to perhaps build a

competing service or anything like that. And I think that's the biggest flaw, which Nation 3 is trying to fix, right? What we're trying to create is a very thin layer of state-funded services, if you will, such as the nation's record, which is kind of the most important piece of the infrastructure to power the entire economy, because you need to secure it with a system of law. And then the idea is that you give a way for the open market to then create services and compete with each other that people can benefit from. And so that openness and that idea of competition, healthy competition, and truly respecting the free market. I think it's going to be a pretty paramount difference.

Yeah, I think that's definitely one of the striking things sort of about a lot of countries today, maybe not all of them. I think there's like some differences to the degree of which, but this kind of way of treating their citizens basically as like, you know, cash generating assets, right? And then, and then of course you have, I think for example, the US is interesting in that regard, right, basically like taxing people. regardless of where they are, right? Even if you're not in the US,

not using US infrastructure, or this concept of an exit tax also, right? If you give up the citizenship, well, then you have to basically buy your way out of it. And I think that's like, yeah, the US has that, but that's been not that uncommon. The Germany has something like that. And I would actually think that it's probably,

if there's more power shifting away to, you know, crypto, to the internet, and they kind of, they're going to be even more aggressive, right, than trying to exert the most they can from whoever they can sort of control. Yeah, I mean, that is why right now is kind of like the best time to get started. Because in like five, ten years down the road, they're going to be two kinds of estates. The ones that are the ones that are super unfriendly to this trend and kind of like try to pose

and, you know, taxes are going to be through the roof. I mean, taxes are really high in a lot of societies. And then you have boomers that are retiring in the West. and this like inverted population pyramid and all of that coupled with like all of the exodus of talent that is going to other friendly countries and also use the exodus of assets towards the internet economy.

They have two options. They can either be friendly to this trend or they can increase taxes. And if they do that, then the economy is just going to set up a spiral. Like everyone who wants to produce and do something valuable is going to exit the country. And so they're going to be, I think more and more countries that are going to be friendly to like establishing a specific economic zones, for example, and even welcoming Cloud Nations into their land, right, to kind of like

make them prosperous again. And so I think it's definitely the right timing. Five, ten years are not always surprised if there is no nation estate, for example, in Southern Europe that is on the brink of a bailout. So you mentioned like services a bit, right? So one thing that we talked about a little bit was this idea of like a court system. What else do you think are like the core services that Nation 3 wants to provide? And so one thing we've been exploring lately is UBI. It's something that's been around and spoken about for some time, but no one really has done it successfully. And I think it's something super critical to ensure that every human being can have a quality of life that deserve without really having any dependency on anything. But the way you do it doesn't have to be

parasitic or it doesn't have to be such that encourages people to not do anything. There's certain checks and balances that you can implement to make sure that it's at the end of the day it actually fuels the economy rather than stagnating it. So we're researching and exploring this concept of UBI and kind of coupled with a nation to record. There might be some ways where it could be implemented in such way where it's more of a teach a man how to fish rather than just give a man a fish for a day kind of thing. Luis, I'm stealing words from your mouth. It was actually something that you came up with as a concept so you can secredit to you there.

But I really love that phrase. And it's just, you know, the idea that if you distribute UBI not necessarily in the form of just money that can be spent, but rather, in the case of Nation 3 and its court, in the form of kind of power that they have to enter agreements, effectively in the form of collateral that they're free to use to enter into mutual agreements and therefore participate in the economy, that becomes very interesting. Because now you're enabling people who would have otherwise been left out of the economy to participate in the economy, and that just fuels the growth further.

And that makes them active, that makes them capable of making more money, et cetera, et cetera. It's just one of the ways to do it. Otherwise, of course, could be distributing just pure stable coins or whatever. So we're exploring different ways, but UBI could be, I think, a very interesting public good that we could use. Otherwise, like some stuff that is interesting is, for example, insurance circles for income variability. So, you know, enabling people that are nation three citizens to form these circles and protect each other from having less income in one month than in another month where it's effectively like mutuals, right? And they can take out money from that common pocket if they need to.

This is interesting as well. So some of these services, what we're thinking of as public goods and something that needs to be provided at a nation three level. But then a large amount of services will likely try to fund and encourage other people to build in the open market and just compete with each other and try to provide whatever is best and whatever people choose to use. I guess the UBI thing for me kind of like brings up a like a very interesting question here. I mean, one of the things that was mentioned in this deck I saw about Nation 3 is this, okay,

it's a zero tax nation. Now, of course, there are some countries, like I think very, very few countries that don't have taxes. I guess the UAE, like Dubai and stuff, is the one that comes to mind. I'm not sure if there are others that are basically no type. I think maybe there are some others. But very few. And in general, countries and nation states have relied on taxation. I guess there's many different types of taxation, you know, taxation of corporate entities, corporate taxes,

things like, you know, income tax, things like kind of VAT, you know, where you basically consumption tax. And then there's like, you know, I'm sure like a hundred other smaller taxes that, you know, they come up with all the time. So I'm curious, why no taxes do you think, I mean, first of all, yeah, why no taxes? this is like just the beginning and maybe at a later point if there's like physical land taxes do make sense and how where do the revenues come from for nation three yeah it's a good question so we came at this with a very kind of like clean mind like I had previously lived in in Switzerland and they have very few taxes and the ones that for example they have their wealth tax and it's quite quite low and for example like you know of all the taxes if you

think about where a nation state does, like the large extent it does protect private property and allow this like free market to thrive. And so the more assets you have, you could argue that the more security you need for your assets. And so therefore there's a kind of open for wealth tax being a late-timate tax. And as a resident in Switzerland, I was kind of like, okay, cool. So it's not that I radically oppose any kind of tax. But then when looking at the problem, we kind of just realize that we don't need them if you start with a blank slate and using crypto economics. And so Nation 3 has its own token, which is nation,

and it's kind of like a community currency. And then people kind of take Nation to become citizens, and then it's when they have rights, and they can participate in the system and govern it. And we kind of thought that, you know, the Nation 3,000 owns a big chunk of the nation supply since the beginning. And so if there is demand for becoming a citizen, and then even within that, like, kind of like

internal economy, there are other services that also require nation to be locked. Then over time, there is increasing demand. And there is, you know, kind of like the same supply. And so that would basically allow it out to finance itself through this value accrual. And then further pay for building more services and enhancing the common goods, which would then, again, can generate more demand for becoming citizens, generate more demand for using the services, like interacting in the jurisdiction and using the court. And so in that circle, just start very quickly realizing that it's actually positive for the nation state because they can finance itself,

but also for the citizens. Because when they are locking nation, it's not that they are losing it. It's not that they are sending it to anyone. They are locking it for X amount of time, right? And so at the end of the day, it's still their wealth that they have, just to have it in this token that is locked. So you are not like, quote unquote, still in anyone. And you're also not like making the economy slower because national states are usually quite bad allocators, like asset allocators. So usually the more they take from the economy to like handle themselves the worst. And so you want to not leave, you know, citizens to kind of like have their wealth and allocate it privately as they, as they will, to kind of kick-start the economy.

And so what I'm trying to say here is the citizen in nation of three today, you have to log your nation. And then if everything was well, and you do kind of like work, governance work and interact in the jurisdiction and things so well, you actually do well as well. You can even earn money kind of like by being a citizen, obviously depending on a bunch of factors. But what I'm trying to say here is it's kind of like the opposite to what you have to do today.

Bin a citizen implies that you're paying someone. Here it implies that you are kind of like owning something and you're owning something that allows you to govern it. And then if you do things well and you govern it as well, then it even pays you back. And in principle, that's work. Still, they're not setting stone, but in principle, we don't see any for taxes now. Okay, but like right now, for example, how much, what kind of is the monetary value of the nation tokens that one has to lock up to become a citizen? So right now in dollar terms, it's around 1.4k dollars. It used to be obviously way higher in the bull run.

And so we kind of think that in the beginning, we want people that are obviously long-term aligned. So it's important for them to a nation to have it looked. But obviously, you know, over time, we will hope to introduce kind of like newer kinds of passports in which people can earn their way to become citizens and not only have like a financial or need a financial stake in the beginning. because that's just like the economics here seem to be like I'm struggling to see how that adds up

no because it's not it's not I mean I guess it's sort of let's say now somebody right locks up $1.4,000 worth of nation tokens and becomes a citizen and then they can you know enjoy all these public goods that Nation 3 produces, like forever. I get that there's maybe it has like some positive impact on the nation price because they're, okay, they first have to buy 1.4k of the tokens and it increases a bit the treasury value, but it doesn't seem like you'd be able to produce a sort of income stream from this that will be, you know, sufficient to produce, you know, to do things on a most substantial scale.

Does that make sense? So just to, I guess, clarify a little bit, it wouldn't be financed simply through the citizenship, right? So you can think of citizenship as a membership, right? So membership is what gives you access to certain services. It isn't the entire thing. So once you become a citizen and indeed you're required to buy the tokens and then lock them up,

which takes them out of circulation and already adds a little bit towards the value of cruel. But now, for example, the core service really, the most important sort of thin layer that Nation 3 is building, the court. And the heart of the court is the stake that you need to put up in order to be able to participate in agreements, right? So here, if you think of it, our hypothesis is that the court will be the economic engine for Nation 3, in the sense that, you know, just like Singapore, for example, based itself on becoming the hub for economic activity by providing services that are high quality, low cost, and very secure.

Same way, Nation 3 is aiming to become a hub for economic activity for Internet users, for crypto users, where what you can do is you can get Nation, you can lock it up in agreements. So let's say if you want to get an audit for, for whatever you're building, right? And I'm an auditor, and we want to enter into a contract with each other. Right now, there's no such way to do so in Web 3 in a secure way, unless you use a physical jurisdiction somewhere.

What you can do with Nation 3 is you can put collateral. Currently, that is planned to be in Nation 3, sorry, in the Nation 3 token. And you put up that collateral, you lock it up, again, for the duration of the contract, and you're then able to enter into that. the agreement and if no contract is disputed, then you get it back. If it's disputed, then you can get slashed. So what we mean by that is that the more economic activity happens within Nation 3, the more tokens will be locked in the contract, and that's another push for value accrual. And as we create more services like the court, the idea is that you're able to

capitalize the economy, capitalize the state, by providing high-quality services that require a financial stake for participation, and then that stake by being locked capitalizes the treasury further. It's a hypothesis. It may well be that as we start testing it out, something needs to be tweaked. Obviously, we're super early, and we're very open to tweaking it as we go. But at least at the scale that we are exploring it right now, it does seem to work. But let's see. It's indeed optimistic.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, like right now, most of the supply, nation supplies are actually locked. And then also like, there's really around $25 to $30 million. So so far at this particular point in time, yeah, it's to be working as I was saying. But yeah, it's super time. I mean, got to keep up flexible mind. So this core system then basically also enables people to do kind of transactions that are, yeah, you mentioned this auditing thing, right? where basically there is a degree of trust, right? It's more similar to the kind of traditional contracts, right?

People create about, oh, I'm going to provide the service to you and then some service provided. And it's not like totally, you know, a smart contract can't verify easily if the service has been provided or not. So I'm curious here. Is this something in the example before, right? let's say we have one party that's the auditor and, you know, I want to buy some service from the auditor. Would we then both need to be a nation three citizen to be able to use nation three courts or is that kind of something that, you know, maybe just one would need to be or maybe neither and we just have to lock up nations to use the court system?

I'm glad you actually ask that. It's a super interesting question that we just last week had an Agora is a new theme of kind of internal sort of borderline philosophic discussion topics that we're doing to kind of like debate and discuss what makes sense as we move forward. And it's interesting. So we're exploring a few routes here because on one hand, there's no reason why you couldn't have a distinction between, let's say, nation three citizens and something like residents or tourists or whatever, people who are able to use their particular. service without having to subscribe for the whole thing, right? So there's no reason why you wouldn't be

able to do that. So we are exploring a way where indeed to make it super smooth, super easy, and people can use just a court, for example, without having to be nation-truth citizens, and they just need to look up whatever nation is needed for the use of the court and for the scale of their particular agreement. If the agreement is very small, then obviously the stake would be corresponding. So it's an option and it's something that our our citizens are discussing now. But I think it would potentially make sense to make it simpler and kind of remove the hurdle of needing to become a citizen for it.

And then as we go forward, we'll see it. It depends on which service is it. It depends on a lot of things. But again, you can compare it probably with fairly successful countries like Singapore. You don't necessarily need to be a citizen of Singapore to be able to use some of the services. that it provides and headquartering your company there or doing business with the backing of Singapore, you can do that by just establishing your entity there, right? And so in the long term,

I think what Nation Tree could do is be something like that for the Internet users where, let's say you're a member of another Dow, let's say you're a bankless Dow member, and you're working on a new project, and you want to build your guild around it, and you need some way of distribution. the salaries to that guild and someone needs to operate that or whatever and you can just you know use the nation three court services in order to be able to execute whatever it is that you're doing which I think would be pretty powerful and so far from discussing it with other dows and other projects it's something that feels in in super high demand because it just doesn't exist as of yet so you mentioned before you know this idea of nation three

as, you know, something that's connected through, you know, the sense of belonging, or, you know, based on like shared values and goals, something like that, right? Whereas traditional nations you have, you know, maybe the, you know, where you're born and this deep cultural connection and language and maybe genetics and heritage, like a lot of other things that are connected. Now, I'm just wondering, like, if you're, if it's basically possible, you know, Like for anyone to like buy Nation 3 citizenship, how doesn't that go sort of against this idea of creating, you know, having a foundation on shared values? Because like how do you know if people share those values if they're just buying the citizenship or buying or like locking some monetary asset to get it?

Yeah, definitely. It's a really good concern. I think being very early here helps a lot. Like, you think about people that bought Bitcoin very early or if they were pretty idyllically aligned. Like I remember the theory community in 2015, and it was even super different to what it is now. And so right now, we're kind of like relying on that. Like people that are into network estates today are quite a niche. And so they are all quite like, you know, libertarian.

Some have had like personal experiences, like bad personal experiences. like bad person experiences with nation states. Some are just like completely sad and fed up of the macro environment that we have today. And so I think relying on that so far makes sense. Of course, over time, maybe there's something else that needs to be done, some sort of like interview process or nothing like that. But also one thing that we want to ensure is we want to ensure that, you know, pseudonymous or anonymous people can also join because we have a few contributors that are anonymous.

And we think that if you start something like this from a script, is to be like, you know, privacy needs to be something deeply respected. And so, yeah, we'll not be good, but so far, so good. And I think it's just worth mentioning, you know, indeed, for right now, it's still so niche that everyone who is becoming a citizen clearly believes in the same values. They believe in the solar punk future that we're all trying to build and they all subscribe to it and it's great. But as we go forward, I also imagine smaller sub-communities being built, right, and

and creating their kind of micro-nations maybe, and maybe using the wider area of services that Nation 3 as a whole provides. Let's say if you're building a physical community somewhere, a city, and perhaps you have, or maybe even smaller than a city, maybe you're building kind of like a condominium of sorts or a space with 20 houses and you're building your community there. And that's where you might want to have some interview process

where you want to ensure that people are shooting. super aligned and subscribing to the same values, but that might be done at a more granular level further down the line. So we'll see how things progress. So let's talk a bit about governance, right? So I mean, democracy is something that has been become more questioned, right? In the last years, you know, you've seen like people like Trump get elected or Bolsonaro or like lots of people that seem kind of, you know, not so sane or maybe unethical people or they're lying a lot and still they get elected, right? And so I think that has definitely undermined a little bit the sort of conviction that democracy is like a well-functioning way for large groups of humans

to coordinate and make decisions. So I'm curious how you see that in Nation 3. How are people going to, How are decisions happening today and how do you see that evolve as Nation 3 potentially, you know, scales and gets to like significant numbers of people? It's a very important point. Like if you think about providing a system of law and a jurisdiction, the very basic thing you need to get right is your own governance because your own governance can then change laws and then can basically like, you know, if things are not well done, it can destroy such jurisdiction. And so the governance system, it's really important. The checks and balances,

it said the governance system are even more important because it takes and balances ensure their overtime. If there are turbulent times in which some, you know, some people leverage the weakness of the times. For example, you know, Trump winning the elections was leveraging certain weaknesses that the U.S. was suffering both culturally and economically and so forth. And so when those things happen, you have to have some governance process that is strong enough and with checks and balances to make sure that you can course correct and kind of even improve the system from there. And so for us, governance is something that we're taking very seriously. Obviously, from my experience at Aragon, I learned a lot about how to govern those. And we kind of

like rebuilt this governance process from scratch in which it's a whole proposal. process like what is the governance proposal um what has it entail we also build some tools to make sure that all governance proposals adhere to a specification that actually is written in code so like you have germans of subjectivity from the governance process and it's possible and improve understability um mostly because i've also seen in doubts that there's so much objectivity and so many people are working what talking more than working really like just writing and writing writing and writing, but not really doing things. And so we're trying to stay away from that and kind of like encourage builders.

And so keep a governance process that is simple and is predictable and attracts people that want to actually get things done and not just talk about how to get things done or like in bureaucracy. And so we've been kind of like just building all of that governance process. And today how it works. I mean, in an actual, basically you have citizens. Citizens can make governance proposals. And then it goes through multiple stages.

It's kind of like until the proposal is frozen, and then after it's frozen, it can go to a snapshot vote, and then citizens vote. Right now it's a token weighted, so it's only citizens that can vote that have the NFT, but then it's token weighted to their nation stake that they have locked. And here, you know, let's see how it goes over time. It's kind of like a good enough compromise

between one person, one vote, and just token weighted, because right now NFTs are a non-transfer, And so only externally owned accounts can have them. So we kind of have a good sense that each passport corresponds to at least a person. And so we can only have that system now because it is true, a democracy has been quite under. Wait, how do you know each passport corresponds to a person? Well, I said that we kind of have like an understanding. Like we're not sure, but like we are sure that there's no smart contract that owns.

Because you know, we're using the V token system. So we have V-Nation that needs to be locked in order to get a passport. And so smart contracts cannot own it. So at least from that perspective, we kind of have like a good sense that it's people who are owning them and not like smart contracts or institutions or pools or whatever. And then they are non-transferable. So it's not like people can like buy them and then speculate with them. So so far that's been working.

But it's going to be quite a challenge because it is clear that one person, one vote is not working very well at the macro scale. So we might need to move. away from that only. Maybe it's like I would check some check and balance kind of like maybe you can have a system in which you have both financial interests at heart and kind of like

token weighted, but then also that one person one vote, then is to ratify it. It is still kind of like a thing that we are working on and seeing that we're mostly focusing on the governance process itself. Like how do decisions get made? How do you track them? And then what do you need to do in order to improve

the system itself and the checks and balance surrounded. What are your biggest learnings from Aragon that have kind of shaped the way you're approaching this? I know one of them probably the first one actually is that DAUs are super chaotic and dysfunctional today and I realize that like you know once once we start the Argon we saw very clearly that there was not a lot of like a strong demand for DOS in 2016, 2017, 2018 but then 2019 and kind of like up until now, it's been growing. And last year has been massive for DAO's, but they are so chaotic. And so it's organized.

And most of them are not really decentralized. They are not really organized either, and let alone autonomous. And so one of the learnings has been, all right, focus on getting things done. A lot of those out there just end up being sort of like worker unions in which people slowly depleted treasury without really doing any work. So like really focusing on keeping. keeping the governance process not bureaucratic, but actually kind of like focus on builders

and attracting builders, has been very important learning. And then within that there is, of course, making proposals very objective and actionable, and not subjective in creating a process that encourages that, to remove kind of like side effects. Because we have a lot of this at Aragon. We kind of like started our own governance process for the Aragon Network Dow.

And then people made proposals. And then there were, once they passed, there were a bunch of side effects, because it was a blob of text. And proposals shouldn't really be that. This should be almost like code. Like, all right, what does it actually do on chain? And so, yeah, that's been a really big learning.

And then another big learning has been that, like, governance tooling today is so kind of like fragmented, that you have to be okay with it. You have to be okay with the fact that you're going to use, like, many, many tools. And governance is not only the place in which you vote. It's the place in which you start discussing. And then obviously how you're notting on chain, but it's like a wide range of tools.

Cool. Well, maybe let's talk about the question of land. So when will it make sense? So when you think it would be the time for Nation 3 to acquire land? And how could you see that? What would this look like? So one of the big issues we're seeing with some of the attempts at building a network state or a Cloud Nation elder is that they try to get land

or into the land space a little bit too early. And we're trying to avoid that. Because the minute you enter into the land territory, you're starting to encounter so many issues from a legal regulatory perspective. You start clashing with the parent state directly and all of that. So you need to be really ready for that stage before you enter it. So the way we're trying to approach it is, you know, step one,

build a functioning legal system, right? And the system of law that governs. it. Super important to have the governance system right so that people can make decisions in an informed way, in a super clear way, not get stuck in democracy, everything that Lewis mentioned. Now, with both of these things, build a strong economy, right, and build a strong treasury. That one literally cannot stress how important it is to have that before you enter into the land space, because if you're starting to challenge the traditional state system without having a critical mass of both funding and people, you're screwed, right? And so for us having these two

as the, I guess, numeric signal is super important. So, you know, as soon as we feel like we have the treasury that is competitive with an average EU nation state, for example, as soon as we have the population that is also sizable enough that, you know, once you enter people on the international scale or the states on the international scale, they kind of have to take you seriously. They don't really have another choice, right? Like if you have large population, a large treasury, and you have a functioning legal system and functioning process, the very least they have to do is to deal with you as an opponent, right? And so that's something that we are getting ourselves ready for. But then our position is not to actually challenge

any state head on, but try to find the ones that are willing to partner and willing to provide the space and the land for especially economic zones and for cloud nations, just because they are understanding that they need to survive, right? And there's already a few of them in Europe even that we have spoken to that have incredible natural resources, beautiful, amazing spaces. And they're just

realizing that they're kind of at the brink of dying out if they don't do anything about it. And so they're starting to kind of get comfortable with the idea that they might need to partner with these more technically advanced communities and cloud nations. And so our hope is that more and more of these will emerge. And we're going to make sure that we have our foot in the door and we're ready to do by having these conversations to effectively base ourselves in one of these special economic zones where we have a blank slate for taxation and for a bunch of other things.

And of course, we will make sure that on the legal front, you know, nations, 3 is compliant with the international law in the sense of the most basic things like, you know, criminal activity and everything like that is obviously pretty important to give people peace of mind. And also one thing that we're focusing on kind of like the system of law, it's when you talk to a traditional jurisdiction, I would create in a special economic area having like a lot of flexibility around run laws. It is very important that you have proven yourself before, right?

So if you're a cloud mission, like we are, focusing on that very core layer of jurisdiction and creating a system of law, it's so important because then you prove yourself as a community that is able to run itself in a legal way and then transitioning that into midspace, you know, makes sense. It's way easier and way better than just getting a community that has no experience whatsoever in doing so. So in Balichie's book, he talked there. about this idea of having, called it as archipelago, basically like a sort of,

you know, amalgamation of like many different, like pieces of land across the world. Do you have an opinion on that? Do you think it will make more sense to have, you know, kind of one, especially economic zone somewhere where you build something up? Or do you think this idea of like

just basically buying a bunch of land in like different places does that make sense to you? And definitely having multiple special economic areas that are widespread across the globe makes a lot of sense. Decentralization, right? You know, they can destroy a node

but they cannot destroy them all at the same time. So it's kind of like the same principle applied to an Asian state. It would make worse way harder and less profitable. And I guess what we mean by establishing in the first place in some economic zones is just starting small

and experimenting in much. one piece of land first before you start building out that archipelago of territories across the world. So I think you used the word sovereign before. What does sovereign mean in your eyes? Like, how would you define it? Well, it's fully independent, right? It doesn't depend on any other entity that can control it or be above it. And so there is a nation three.

it's sovereign and kind of like it's a sovereign nation is because another nation has authority to shut it down. Like the nation 3,000 is in Ethereum and there is no nation states do not have jurisdiction per se over Ethereum. Although the US says that there are Ethereum nodes in the US, therefore Ethereum is just in the US. We don't believe that that's the case.

And so if you run on the internet, as you're kind of like jurisdiction for code, then as a doubt, you can be your own sovereign entity. And based on that, we believe that nation three is a sovereign nation state. And do you think recognition from existing nation states is that important? Or what role does that play? In my opinion, and maybe it's not the most widespread opinion, but in my opinion, it shouldn't really matter.

If you are trying the incumbents to recognize you, you're playing the wrong game. Like what we're building here is something new, right? It's something that some of them might like, some of them might not, but at large, it will replace them. And so it is very hard to, you know, it's kind of like saying that as an automobile maker, you need recognition from the horse carriage industry to sell cars, right?

Like, just don't. You just focus on making a car that works fast and people will use it, right? So we're trying to do the same here. And maybe one thing we could also talk about is a little bit on, I mean, we talked a lot about, you know, the concept, the way of organizing it, the way of structuring it. And of course, those are in essence really the core questions here. But I'm curious also about the technology. Like, what does the Nation 3 tech stack look like? Yes.

Right now we have a couple apps. Like the, what is Nation 3 like in itself? today, we have the service for governance, which is the same can engage. We have also the passport instruments, and then we have the courts that we're working on. And there has been a first governance proposal for a UBI system. So those are kind of pieces that we're building now. There's, of course, kind of like a larger stack that needs to be built and that we're not going to build. And I think I can talk a bit more about the kind of like stack you want.

Yeah, definitely. We actually have something that maybe your listeners can take a look at. It's a tech tree that we built, which is kind of our vision of the Nation 3 stack, as it needs to be built out over time to achieve the fully functioning, super prosperous solar punk state that we want in the end of the day. And our vision for it and actually how the whole idea of a Nation 3 started in the first place is that you do that by investing in the capable teams that help build it out. and kind of creating a Nation 3 VC effectively.

So it's sort of how the idea of a Nation 3 as a Cloud Nation was born in the first place. First, we thought that, hey, this clearly needs to exist. So why don't we start a VC fund to back teams and projects that are building the infrastructure pieces and the tax stack to enable that to happen? And that we realize that there isn't a better way to do so then kind of dog fooding these products for something you're building yourself, right? And so it makes sense that building a community around it and trying to build an attempt at creating a nation state makes sense.

And then as you do that and you realize what infrastructure pieces are missing, what pieces of the tax tax are needed, then you can establish a VC fund, which we're still intending to do if the community decides that it's a worthwhile activity. And, you know, same as the kind of app store model. Instead of having to do everything, all of the apps, all of the services yourself, you allow for people to create them in the open market, but you back them. Basically, you select the ones that you believe in the most,

and you select the most capable teams, and you try to advance it forward. I think it's way better than doing grants system. I personally don't believe in that much, just because I think people use much less kind of like selection and less care when they pick teams to give grounds to than when it's a VC model because you're much more invested into it

and it works better. So that's something that we're exploring. And hopefully, you know, engaging a wider community into building these things will bring this future much faster. So, yeah, I would encourage all the listeners to check out the tech trees

on the website. And if there's anything that they want to build from that, please definitely reach out. Cool. Well, maybe, so what you see as the roadmap? Like, how, if things, if everything goes well, what do the next, you know, five years look like for Nation Three? Yeah, so I mean, right now we're focused on the, on the jurisdiction, right? So building the very core components of the jurisdiction.

And having something that works will happen very, very fast. Like, we're targeting you next month to release the first version of the court and start testing it out. But then you have to obviously build trust. on it. So that's both like attracting capital to kind of like interacting the economy. And then also just selecting great judges that can be part of this court. And then kind of like writing a constitution for nation three and getting citizens ratified and then gradually introduce some law that is needed for or next defunction. And then there is of course kind of like once you have that, you can start acquiring more citizens and creating a critical

Elmas and maybe providing some other services like UBI. And then in that process, you're going to strengthen your governance system even more. And then at some point, like one thing that is, of course, really important. This is kind of like backing other plays and other kind of like startups and networks that are working on these issues. So kind of like launching some kind of VC fund if community approves or some kind of like venture arm in general, it seems very important. And then you can focus kind of like on the synergistic relationship between one and the other. You can find things that are great to create a better kind of like jurisdiction in a better place for trade on the internet. And then as trade emerges and you build a stronger treasury, you can even fund more tools, more common goods, more teams working on key stuff.

And then at some point is when you start kind of like having leverage to negotiate a specific economic area. And then you do that and then you start literally landing. on land and can bring in all the learnings and all of these like, you know, solar punk estate you have built from a blank slate into land. And then there are a bunch of other challenges that arise, right, when it comes to land and a bunch of other things you need to fund. We need, of course, some kind of open source modular architecture. You need like, you know, better education systems and so forth. And right now we're kind of like focusing on the very, very, very meta. We also created our own kind of like super set of markdown for legal agreements

that we think is going to like make legal agreements with better and more understandable and introduces kind of like open source concepts like dependency tracking or imports to legal definitions so that you can import a legal definition done by other practitioner or you can use reuse agreements as like open source packages. And so we're focusing on this very meta layer that then you can build a bunch of stuff on top and hopefully in five years. You can use a can start actually leveraging the system but on land and actually building things that are way more efficient, like 100x more efficient, better and with better checks and balances, or people can actually live.

Cool. Well, thanks so much. It's very exciting. I think this is like a super important area, and this is going to be, yeah, an area where I'm sure we're going to see a lot of activity and it's needed, right? I think it's very clear, right, that nation states today are kind of. not really cutting it. And so I'm super excited that you're both working on something new and something different.

And I hope you'll be able to take it forward. I mean, one thing here, I think not cutting it is definitely, it definitely touches the point. But I think it's even way more than that. Like, if we don't do anything right now, the default state of the world is oblivion. Like the default state of the world is that our institutions are completely decadent. They cannot even handle stuff like climate change. They cannot handle like stuff that is going to literally make our whole population extinct. So if they cannot even handle that, of course, don't ask them to like handle all their stuff.

And, you know, if you think about Southern Europe, I'm from Spain and the same in Portugal and the same in like half of the, you know, quote unquote first world in Western Europe. Like things just don't work. Like they just don't work, period. But it's not even about like user experience or having a smooth experience. No, is that we are like at the brink of destroying the planet and burning it. And we are at the brink of a nuclear war. So like how we have gotten ourselves to this is completely mind-blowing. And right now there is no answer than to work and renewing these corrupt institutions.

Like literally if we don't do anything, we are default dead. And we want to be default alive. So if you want, you know, to see humankind prosper. this is the only rational thing you can really do. Question is, Brian, are you moving to the nation three territories once we have them? Have we convinced you? I mean, I may. I'll definitely consider it.

Well, next year, that it's going to be warm and nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be great. Yeah, exactly. Well, it has been super fun. Thank you so much for amazing questions. And I'm glad to have you as an incoming citizen once we have. have the territories and everything.

Yeah, as Louis said, I think it's super important to focus on this now, and we don't really have another choice. So that's that small task ahead of us. Absolutely. Thanks so much for coming on. I'm looking forward to following it. And of course, if people want to check it out, right? So it's a, I mean, we're going to put a bunch of links in the show note,

but it's also Nation3.org. And then I guess it can become a citizen, right? which is pretty affordable at this point. So what's the status right now? Like how many citizens do you have and what does the community look like? And we have 178 as of today. And the community is really cool.

There are very cool philosophical discussions. There's a lot of building going on, like open source contributors. We are the second largest doubt on DORC where it comes to bounties and kind of like people just contributing. So yeah, it's quite nice. cool fantastic well thanks so much louise and anastasia for coming on it was a pleasure to have you

thank you and thanks so much for listeners for tuning in if you want to support the show make sure to leave us in iTunes review helps new people find the show and yeah then we look forward to seeing you again next week thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv.tv. Subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us,

guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. And please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show, and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.