For over a decade, the Free Republic of Liberland has stood as a beacon of liberty and self-governance. The foundational vision is secure, but the next crucial stage is building the tangible economic framework that guarantees its long-term success. This is where LSU (Liberland Venture Capital) comes in. As the nation’s first and only venture capital platform, LSU is the community-driven engine committed to mobilizing the capital and expertise needed to bootstrap our economy and rapidly accelerate national development.
LSU is more than just a fund; it’s a coalition born from the settlement, recognizing that no nation can sustain its vision without a resilient engine of commerce. We are challenging the most dedicated Liberlanders—those ready to move from concept to execution—to come and build the future with us.
Founders: Your Funding is Here. Apply to the Pioneer Program.
If you are a founder with a project that can contribute to Liberland’s core infrastructure, essential services, or community assets, the time to act is now. The LSU Pioneer Program is specifically designed for your success.
We offer more than just financial resources; we provide funding and advisory from a global community of seasoned Liberlanders who have expertise in fields from technology and finance to governance and logistics. This is a unique opportunity to test and scale your venture on a truly blank slate, backed by a platform whose success is inextricably linked to yours.
We are actively seeking projects that will define the early economic architecture of the nation. Don’t let your project remain a concept. Head straight to the Pioneer Program application and secure the capital and support you need to turn your vision into a Liberland reality.
Investors: Catalyze the Nation’s Growth
Building a country requires collective capital, and LSU offers the most direct path to participate in this nation-building exercise. By deploying capital alongside LSU, you directly channel resources into the portfolio of ventures building our shared future, simultaneously diversifying risk and gaining exposure to the growth of a nascent economy.
Every contribution is a brick laid. Investors gain participation in property, profit, and a voice in the governance of LSU, starting from a single share. If you are passionate about fueling the establishment of Liberland’s economy, but not ready for an active role, it’s easy to get started. Provide your contact details on the LSU website to share your interest and help us grow our network of committed backers.
The Ecosystem Builders are Rewarded
Finally, LSU recognizes that the nation-building process relies on the network effects generated by its most active citizens. Our program rewards those who aren’t just building projects, but building the community itself. LSU Business Developers—the community leaders who actively bring qualified founders and valuable investors into the LSU ecosystem—are also rewarded for their efforts. By successfully connecting capital with opportunity, they earn valuable LSU shares, ensuring that those who facilitate growth are intrinsically tied to the success of the platform.
LSU is not just waiting for Liberland to be built—we are funding its creation today. Join the movement, apply for funding, or lend your support, and help us lay the economic groundwork for the Free Republic of Liberland.
From the Liberland Press Archives we present this article:
Conor Daly’s name is synonymous with speed. A legacy of agility and adrenaline courses through his veins, inherited from his father, the legendary Irish Formula One driver Derek Daly. But Daly is not merely riding on the coattails of a storied family name. With over 100 IndyCar races under his belt, including standing atop the podium and earning pole positions, Daly has carved out his own niche in the fiercely competitive world of motorsports.
Derek Daly had retired before Conor was born and so he never saw his dad racing – but Derek worked in racing TV and his mother worked at the racetrack so he was surrounded by cars nevertheless.
Daly began karting at the age of 10, which he says is old really. His father had never pushed him into following in his footsteps, but successes came quickly and Daly began his own career in racing. Interestingly, some of his rivals on the karting circuit would also become motorsport luminaries, such as Indy 500 champion Joseph Newgarden.
“Racing is like other sports – it takes a long time before you hit the big leagues and you have to earn your stripes along the way. You start with karting but then move to bigger cars, faster cars and basically it took until I was college age before I made it to professional levels of racing.”
By the time Daly graduated high school, he was racing full time and had already earned several major championships. So, armed with his Irish passport, he moved to London to become a Formula One driver. This was his college education, he says.
He got to travel all around Europe and the Middle East but was very focused on his job. As an elite athlete he was focused on being the most professional and went from race to race without hardly seeing the cities and not living the high life.
While in Europe, he moved from Formula Three to Formula Two, and became a Formula One reserve driver, but it takes a lot of money. When his funding dried up, he had to reroute his career, and coming from Indianapolis the obvious route was into IndyCar.
“Formula One and IndyCar are quite similar. Formula One is only road and street circuits and it’s a world championship. IndyCar races on an oval track so it’s faster than Formula One. It is also very North American focused.”
The Triple Crown of racing is the Indianapolis 500, the 24 hours of the Le Mans and the Monaco Grand Prix.
Daly has won races at almost every level of the ladder system up to IndyCar, and has won three championships. He’s been on the podium a lot. He is also only one of 29 drivers who have done both the Indy500 and the Daytona 500 in the same year.
Asked about the danger of the sport and crashes, Daly is both thankful and sanguine.
“Still, everyone crashes, every driver crashes and I’m lucky not to have crashed in the past six years, and even then, I did not suffer injuries. In my father’s day they were all lunatics and it was much more dangerous.”
Daly is also following in his father’s footsteps into broadcasting and hosts his own very popular podcast called Speed Street. He has dedicated his life to IndyCar racing and motorsport in general.
Daly is very proud of his Irish heritage. He has a lot of family still in Dundrum, Dublin, including his Nana, while his cousin Nicci Daly played for the Irish Olympic field hockey team. He visits often and has an Irish flag on one half of his helmet with an American flag on the other side.
Technical Innovation
“I’m not a tech leader but I love to understand what is going on. When I first heard about Bitcoin, I was fascinated. Web3 is a huge interest to me and I love following the really smart people in this space. This is the future of the internet.
“I got a long message one day from someone within the Polkadot community – It was a very long message. He said that it would be cool for Polkadot to be part of the largest attended sporting event in the world. He used a lot of words that I had to look up, but I knew that to win the Indianapolis 500 we needed sponsorship, so I paid attention.”
Sponsorship is vital in motor racing. Money is required to ensure the car is running at peak performance.
“I’m not an arrogant person but I love Indy500. I also believe that the exposure Polkadot can achieve is huge and opens the door to a whole new audience. At the same time, I discovered my dad holds dot – and I never know. How mad is that?”
Daly earned 290,000 dot or about $2.1 million. As it was a grant, he had to win the approval of the dot holders. This is an honour that he does not take lightly.
“It was a proud day when I received this grant and I will do everything in my power, including winning, to repay this vote of confidence. At the track we are handing out 1000s of leaflets on our hero cards with the QR codes for people to download a wallet and start their crypto experience.”
Daly is now pretty in pink with the Polkadot branding. He sees a huge potential going forward in bringing a whole new audience to crypto through racing.
“My job is to make sure that our partnership benefits everyone – bringing Polkadot people to racing, and racing people to Polkadot. And to win.”
UFORIKA, a pioneering MMO gaming ecosystem, has appointed Nigel Carlos as its Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Carlos’s extensive experience in marketing leadership roles within the Web3 gaming industry makes him a key addition to UFORIKA’s executive team.
With a distinguished background in marketing and a track record of success at prominent virtual worlds and gaming platforms, Carlos brings valuable expertise to his new role at UFORIKA. His appointment comes at a crucial time for the company as it advances its ambitious roadmap – post-token launch ($FORA) on multiple global cryptocurrency exchanges.
UFORIKA aims to foster a community-driven ethos, empowering users to actively contribute to the decentralized, digital asset ecosystem. The company is developing cutting-edge toolsets to facilitate seamless publication and broadcasting of user creations, setting a new standard for interactive experiences.
“Investing in the execution of our ambitious roadmap that aims to evolve Web3 gaming as we know it means we need to invest in the right people to bring that vision to fruition,” stated Simon Brant, Co-Founder and CEO at UFORIKA.
“Nigel’s proven track record at some of the biggest Web3 gaming brands positions him as a valued player in driving UFORIKA’s marketing initiatives forward. His wealth of experience aligns seamlessly with our mission to redefine what players can achieve and create in a virtual gaming environment.”
Carlos, reflecting on his new role, shared, “Joining UFORIKA is an exciting opportunity to be part of a team dedicated to pushing the boundaries of virtual gaming experiences. I’m thrilled to collaborate with such a talented group of award-winning game directors, technologists, and entrepreneurial creatives.”
Carlos’s appointment underscores UFORIKA’s commitment to recruiting top talent and pushing the boundaries of gaming innovation. His expertise positions the company for further development at the intersection of technology, creativity, and community-driven content.
Local Consul, Nicolás Mateos, outlines his progress
1. Tell me a little bit about yourself – career, politics and position. I was born and raised in Henderson, Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’m 30 years old. I studied Economics at Collage and later I studied a Master’s in finance. Currently I’m CEO and Founder of a Fintech startup that is going to be launch this 2024. I’m not involved in traditional politics, I’m an independent soul.
2. When did you first become involved with Liberland – have you ever travelled there? I found about Liberland looking exactly for the same thing, trying to identify a piece of land that does not belong to any sovereign state. When I did my research, I found several places which meet the criteria and that is how I found Liberland. As soon as I found out Liberland and realized they wanted to create a Libertarian country I decided to help. Fortunately, I travelled there twice and meet tons of Liberlanders. My last visit was on August, 2023 luckily when the settlement was taking place.
3. Did you support Javier Milei in his elections? I think Javier Milei was the best alternative among the ones available in the past elections. 4. Do you know President Milei? I do not know him in person. But I’d like to do so we can discuss about Liberland. He mentioned the Liberland project several times in the past.
5. Did you set up the meetings with Liberland officials and President Milei’s office? Not exactly with President Milei’s office, but I did arrange several meetings with the Libertarian party and its authorities in their headquarters. Javier Milei is an affiliate of that specific party.
6. Who met whom – where, how many times? We met The president of The Libertarian Party of Buenos Aires City, Nicolas Emma, now Congressman replacing ex Javier Milei’s seat, as well as other authorities of relevance of the party. We met a couple of times.
7. What was discussed? The meeting was held in the Libertarian Party Headquarter in Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. I told them since Liberland’s inception to the current situation emphasizing on the of international recognition. Also, I told them about my visits to Liberland soil in 2022 and 2023. I stressed the importance of Libertarians to work together and spread the ideas of freedom around the world.
On their side, they were very happy about the Elections Results, with Javier Milei as Presidential Candidate. We talked about how socialism ideas had damaged Argentina as they agreed on the importance of spreading Libertarian ideas. They claimed they are working very hard trying to change Argentinians’ reality and that they are really excited they have a real chance now.
8. What future plans exist – if any? We signed a Memorandum of Understanding which main purpose is “to establish a framework of cooperation and mutual assistance in the areas of international connections, business investment, joint projects, knowledge sharing, and advocacy for recognition and support”. That is the plan.
9. What are the main synergies between the two countries? I can think on Liberlanders investing in Argentina fostering its economic recovery and on the Argentinian recognizing Liberland.
10. Finally, any advice for other ambassadors?
I think some ambassadors are doing a great work worldwide. I understand it is a great challenge for all of us to fight for international recognition, but that is our mission and we will not give up! I would say to them just “keep pushing”! We’ll make it!
Claus Skaaning, CEO and founder of DigiShares worked on Bayesian networks for his PhD. What are Bayesian networks? I asked. I googled it after and found this definition: Bayesian networks are a type of probabilistic graphical model that can be used to build models from data or expert opinion. They can be used for a wide range of tasks including diagnostics, reasoning, casual modeling, decision making under uncertainty, anomaly detection, automated insight and prediction.
Skaaning described it as an AI technology from the old days – which still has some good features – and pointed out that unlike AI, the models derived from this technology were transparent. To which I asked if the transparency of Bayesian networks was what led Skaaning to the transparency of blockchain? No, was the answer. Shame I thought, as it would have been a nice thread to pull.
Skaaning did buy a single bitcoin back in 2014 when it cost around $500 but he didn’t get the technology until much later, around 2017.
While finishing his PhD, he worked for Hewlett Packard (HP) in 2000, living through the dot.com bubble and subsequent crash. As part of that work, he traveled between his native Denmark and Silicon Valley. Turns out, that experience and exposure to startup culture really excited Skaaning and shaped his desire to become an entrepreneur. He got the chance to take HP technology into a spinoff and spent the next ten years growing a company that used AI technology to conduct troubleshooting and diagnostics of complex technical equipment.
“Sounds pretty boring but it is also very necessary technology. And I learnt a lot during the time running the company as CEO.”
As mentioned, Skaaning got into blockchain in 2017. Although we have promised not to mention Vikings, he thinks he inherited an activist, slightly anarchartistic trait from his forebears.
“I liked the fact that you can democratize access to a sort of financial infrastructure, disintermediate middle men, and basically avoid working with existing financial institutions. On a practical level, you can avoid fees, delays and be much more efficient. With a couple of friends we decided this was the space we wanted to work in – we made a conscious career decision to work with blockchain.”
The first project they started was a bootstrapped incubator on chain, allowing anyone to start their own project within hours on their platform. They could then tokenise virtual equity in these projects but it proved a hard project to sell.
“We also learnt that developing a business idea to sell to startups is foolish as they have no money. It didn’t work out but we did learn about tokenization, so we pivoted into that instead.”
DigiShares was the result, a chain agnostic tokenization platform founded in 2018. Currently it supports seven different chains allowing the customer to choose their preferred technology. The business model behind DigiShares is to provide white label solutions, as Skaaning says, DigiShares is a pure tech provider.
“We allow tech companies to tokenize their own assets, and we make it as easy for them as possible, providing all the necessary services for them to get off the ground. Our platform is highly customisable, configurable, user friendly and efficient. We want to make this technology into a mass market platform so that even if you didn’t know about crypto or blockchain, you could still easily use it.”
As part of those services, DigiShares has inhouse legal counsel that helps projects choose the most appropriate locations for their business. Skaaning stresses they are not a legal firm, they cannot provide legal advice, but they can provide high level advice, even as far as working with local legal firms.
DigiShares has more than 150 customers with an emphasis in real estate. One such customer is Equito, a company that tokenises properties in Spain. Equito has a community of more than 100,000 investors and has successfully tokenized 14 different properties. Equito creates a SPV for each property which is a legal entity that owns the property. It then offers each house for sale using its app which is built on top of DigiShares.
“I understand that each property sells out in a couple of hours. They offer shares for as little as $100 which really democratizes access to property investment and provides liquidity to the market. Long term, the company plans to pay out dividends based on rental income and also plan to facilitate trading of these shares. It’s a great use case.”
Skaaning points out that trust is core to such a project but also advises that people should do their own due diligence as with any investment opportunity.
“Tokenization does give transparency but it will not protect against old fashioned fraud.”
One project called InvestBay is based in the Czech Republic and operates on similar lines, while another project called MarketShare in the US is targeting injection of liquidity for their community. MarketSpace tokenized a large multifamily property that already had funding but the company wanted to provide liquidity for its investor base.
Today, DigiShares employs 20 people across software development, marketing, sales, legal and admin.
“We are a very typical software company, with some pretty amazing developers. And while everyone talks about tokenization, we only see between two and three serious competitors in this space. We know we are the biggest in terms of client numbers – we have 150 clients in more than 40 countries.”
Skaaning has learnt in his entrepreneur journey to solve problems for customers who have money to spend. In that regard, he and his team have spotted a gap in products available for tokenized projects – a exchange for the trading of real estate assets.
“So we are building that now and will launch in Q2 of this year. We had hoped someone else might do it but we can’t see anything in the marketplace. Since we have the skills, and identified the need, we decided to build it ourselves. It’s definitely something that all our clients need.”
All these tokenized shares are securities and exist in highly regulated environments. DigiShares is building a normal exchange, except the underlying technology is blockchain. Initially, they plan to partner with a US licenced company called TextureCapital but in time they will obtain their own licenses – this is something they know quite a lot about.
“We are also looking at Dubai which is booming in this space – both in terms of real estate and crypto.”
Also on Skaaning’s roadmap is the development of a decentralized ID standard.
“This is really needed in this space. If you want tokenization and you want it to work in an interoperable ecosystem, then we all need an open standard in ID. It needs to be totally available and not controlled by any central party.”
Looks like Skaaning has really got into entrepreneurial mode – if products are needed and don’t exist then he and his team will build it. Only this time they are building in a market where the customers have money to spend on their products.
Intimate Stranger: His Uncensored Photo Series of Secret Performance Stills
Exhibition: Zachary Balber: Intimate Stranger (the Uncensored Series), on view until February 3. Curated by Jose Antonio Navarette. On view during Miami Art Week and Art Basel Miami
Zachery is articulate, polite and insightful. He knows his craft and is not afraid to shake it up – quite a lot, if posing naked in multi million dollar houses on the sinking landmass that is Miami counts as outrage. Other artists have done the naked protest, typically women such as Pussy Riot, and often the public display of nudity has ended up in arrest, but not on this occasion. Better to challenge Miami high end realtors than Putin, perhaps.
It happened over a nine-year period and I have no idea how he managed to keep it secret. Some genius in the realtor game came up with the idea – why not hire a leading fine art photographer to shoot some of the most expensive homes on the Miami coastline. They chose Zachary Balber whose fine art photography is legendary. He has been tasked with capturing some of the biggest names in art and his secret is to capture the art as it is – not how a photographer might interrupt it. Over the years, his talent in the post production has also been exemplary to the point he often doesn’t light his subjects – person, art or home – as he can work magic after the fact. The news of Balber shooting high-end homes spread like whispers at a seance and all of the other luxury realtors could not get enough of him
Back to the real estate. These houses are owned by big names and cost millions, despite the fact that Miami is scheduled to be 60% underwater by the year 2060, even ahead of known sinkers such as Vienna and Rotterdam. While Balber was engaged to shoot these fragile buildings, the real estate personnel were often taking selfies of themselves in the homes to feed their own property porn Instagram profiles.
Over this period, he was going through a number of tragic personal issues, losing his father, mother and sister in quick succession, and the ridiculousness of these houses and his role in shooting them felt disconnected and out of touch.
That’s when he started posing naked in these rooms. He didn’t dream he dwelt in marble halls; he saw his naked presence there. Hiding, sometimes on furniture, sometimes concealed by it, tea-bagging kitchen tables and sofas, and shimmying into closets large enough to host designer outlets. And nobody knew. No one.
Balber believes most of art is politics but not necessarily in a good way. He likes to question stuff in his art, this in a good way. Identity politics is challenging the world according to him and we are all fighting for what it means to own an identity. Money politics, hacking, crypto is all around and he is seen as the photography hacker – even before he came out of the realtor closet.
“I was documenting two heads of state at Web Summit a few years ago but the photographs weren’t good enough so I staged another shot of two men shaking hands and used that instead. Photoshop can do that and it made the front page of some papers. That’s why I am sometimes called the photography hacker.
“Susan Sontag says that to be photographed is to matter and we don’t photograph things that don’t matter.”
According to Balber, the world has taught us to commodify our everyday existence like the commercials and we’ve all bought into this concept.
“Now, if it’s not photographed it doesn’t exist – but only significant shots remain.”
Balber flip flops between artist photographer and photographer for hire. He sees his camera (and his almost Irish-white looks) as a password to other worlds.
“I see photography as a password, a secret password, like a hacker. And who would suspect me when dressed, a sweet ginger (that irish look) with a buttoned-up shirt, and that I might get naked on your bed when no one is looking?”
This nudity is not frivolous.
“The impetus was from the pain of losing my entire family.”
His parents were both hippies from Woodstock. One treated the resultant Hep C, the other didn’t. Either way it didn’t work out. Then his sister died from an overdose when he was just 23.
“That kind of grief is considerable. It doesn’t just bring clarity it brings urgency. It made me want to question the locus of home – is it located in someone, someplace, somewhere?”
Balber’s secret password has opened doors to new people, including an actual Irishwoman, the famous cyber psychologist, Dr Mary Aiken. They met at MoneyConf 2020 and had drinks, quite a few. At one stage she asked him (apropos of the photographs) – ‘Are you mad at your mother?’
Dr Aiken also pointed out that her profession includes doing assessments and profiles for the US government. Identity came up and she did not think the naked images would help any assessment in his case.
And she also asked: ‘why would you jeopardize your income to make a statement for society that you’re poking fun at’
And Balber replied that it was very much because he is an art photographer. In Miami he sees a shift to where successful artists are making ‘things’ for rich people and that does not sit well with him. He quotes the American artist Theaster Gates whom he heard in a lecture. Gates said he hoped his life was not to make objects for rich people to buy.
“And I never forgot that.”
It is also important to note that despite the nude images being most striking, there are a total of 150 images of which many include Balber in clothing. It is not just the nudity – although that is of course most stark – but he was trying out as a heterosexual man looking to explore his femininity, his inner child or even the juxtaposition of class and photography as a password rather than a printed image.
Back to photography – Balber now questions how he can make a photograph in 2023 matter – given the ubiquitous amount of photography in the world. The rich would have used painting as propaganda, now he sees photography as the homeland for the middle class.
“It’s the same as the internet – information is now easily in the hands of the proletariat. Photography is the champion medium of the proletariat donating equality to all.”
Balber considered the possible impact of his shooting these multimillion-dollar homes. Would people view his Instagram and congratulate him for making it by sheer dint of being there? As a child his father had taken him for drives around the posher areas of Miami and he wondered, if like Cinderella, he might gain access.
Funnily enough, some of what he does is born from his Jewish heritage (the real cause of his whiteness) where he was taught to acknowledge a higher power in his work. Going from the celebrity homes to visit his mum, who was beloved, in hospital was jarring to him.
“A booming real estate market, the city sinking, house prices going through the roof, artists having to flee the city because of said house prices and my mum dying all got muddled up together. The resulting photographs are like postcards of places ordinary folk will never see, but now no one can see those places without my naked body.
“It’s a montage of destinations, vacations, identity, home, aloneness and my personal propaganda.
“I thought, I need to make a body of work that no one’s going to forget that I’m not going to forget. And I think borrowing the aesthetics of wealthy people, of places that will soon be underwater, that in some ways my images will be more permanent than that reality.”
What next for Balber and his guerilla photography? He half fantasied about doing a California series but the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
“I like the notion this collection might live on in the minds of people. That if asking some guy to photograph their home, they might just think – could he do a naked shoot? No way, really?
“Or maybe they might question the actual photographs – are they real or just photoshopped. After all, I do have a reputation as the photography hacker.”
I have the pleasure of knowing Oleg from long ago and interviewed him back in 2022 – please read about his startup here in my founder interview. Then last week, we reconnected again at NEARCon and I was delighted to pose some new, challenging questions to the energetic founder.
1. You said at the launch of Sweatcoin in London that it was inspired in part by the human orgasm. What still keeps you excited about the project?
OF: It is not often that one has an opportunity to work on creating a new ECONOMY. Not a product, not a product category, but a whole new MOVEMENT ECONOMY built around the value of your physical activity. We all know that your physical activity has value to you, to your family, to your healthcare provider, to your insurer, to your employer, to the country where you pay taxes. By creating $SWEAT, which is the tokenized physical activity, we can now power exchanges of value between these parties listed above. Think of it as Attention Economy, which is estimated to be up to 7 trillion dollars in size, but built around physical activity. This will make the world a lot more active for sure!!!
2. Are you in the highest percentile of Sweatcoin exercisers? What is your poison – walking, jogging, running, horizontal jogging?
OF: Sadly, no … I have too much fun working and building the MOVEMENT ECONOMY, but I am for sure not in the lowest percentile. My dog – Bear – is helping me to start my day with being active and often pushes me to leave my desk at the close of the day too!
3. How did you choose NEAR as your blockchain partner?
OF: We have spoken and evaluated 14 different chains and it was hard to make a direct comparison, so we went back to first principles and compared them on what we value as a project:
3.1 Alignment on vision and strategy Many chains were talking about bringing in new users to web3, but only a handful were consistent with this claim in their technology. Many EVMs for example still have transaction costs in the region of 50 cents to 1 dollar. How could this help with mass-adoption?
3.2 Chemistry with the team Every partnership goes through peaks and valleys and it is extremely important to have a team that one enjoys dealing with and can have difficult conversations with. Illia and Alex have managed to build an increadible team that we truly enjoy working with
3.3 Technology
Our project is about making THE WORLD more physically active. And this means that we need a chain that is able to serve hundreds of millions of users without falling over, offer really cheap transactions as the next billion is not going to be reach AND MOST IMPORTANTLY – offer an incredibly good user experience on wallet creation and management. And Near is unbeatable on all three.
4. Were you surprised by the sheer number of Sweatcoin crypto wallets opened?
OF: Yes we were, but we were also pleased because it means that we truly managed to address the two biggest barriers that prevent people from engaging with web3:
4.1 Barrier 1 – Complex User Experience and language. Many users tried to create an account, but bulked at 24-word “seed phrase” and inability to take a screenshot or copy it into a password manager as well as incomprehensible language of “hodl”, “budl”, “non-custody”, “finality” and much more. With Sweat Wallet all that users need to create their wallet is to confirm their email and we worked hard to simplify the language we use. For example instead of “staking” our users use “growth jars” J 4.2 Barrier 2 – need to part with a lot of money to buy your crypto as a first step Mainstream users are used to mainstream media coverage of crypto, which focuses on “hack here” and “attack there” and they feel very nervous about parting with hundreds of dollars of their hard-earned cash at the door. They would far prefer to be able to walk in, familiarise themselves before making a decision to pay or not. This is exactly what we deliver on – we literally let people “Walk into crypto” and get their first crypto from nothing else but being physically active and engaged.
5. Do you think your audience understands crypto?
OF: I do not think the audience needs to understand “crypto” more than they need to understand “internet”, “cloud” or “http”. What users need are products that solve their problems and make their lives more engaging and rewarding and this is exactly what we are missing at the moment – a simple product that appeals to the billions of people and which will bring adoption of blockchain and crypto tech without people even realising what they are using. Internet was brought into everyone’s life and home by the email – an opportunity to send and receive messages for free and in real time. We need the “email for web3” and we believe that tokenization of your physical activity and making it into a liquid asset for you is one of these use cases with appeal to a billion users. After all, the only thing you need to walk into crypto is a pair of legs and a smart phone J
6. Does it matter?
OF: No, it does not. What matters is us focusing on building products, categories and whole economies that engage billions of people. The metric of success should be “active users” not “TVL” and then we will see a lot more innovation in this field.
7. Name your biggest fan crush and why?
OF: My biggest fan crush is our user Phatt One. He installed Sweatcoin in 2016 while he was barely making few hundred steps per day. By 2017 he was making few thousand steps per day and right now he is one of our biggest advocates with the average step count of more than 100k steps PER DAY. I am worried about his knees, but he says that this is really working for him and he loves the fact that we truly helped him to understand how valuable it is to be active. Chris – his real name – has recently got married and I would really love to send him congratulations and best wishes from the whole team at Sweatcoin and Sweat Economy.
8. What keeps you powering Sweatcoin – what are the future plans?
OF: Small point of order – we have two businesses now: 1) Sweatcoin is our web2 Health&Fitness app with more than 150 million users around the world and 2) Sweat Economy – our web3 business consisting of Sweat Wallet with close to 10 million users and $SWEAT – token which is 9th widest-held and 13th most actively used token in the world. Also, Sweat Wallet is consistently in top3 dapps on DappRadar: https://dappradar.com/rankings
So, the next step for Sweatcoin is to continue growing around the world and making more people more active! For Sweat Wallet and $SWEAT the next step is to continue driving token utility, continue being deflationary and to bring in the next 100 million people into web3 to create the Movement Economy where your physical activity has tangible value.
9. Do you think walk to earn will ever tire?
OF: I am sure that “walk to earn” as a term will be superseded by the “Movement Economy”. It is bigger, bolder but expresses what it is a lot better than “walk to earn”. We use “Attention Economy” in our everyday language, not “pay attention to earn” J
10. What do you like about NEARcon?
OF: The energy of the community that loves the fact that Illia is coming back as a CEO and the Board Member of Near Foundation and his vision to make Near into an entry point into web3 for the next billion people. We at Sweat Economy are really excited about our partnership with them and the fact that we are so aligned on the mission! And it is an incredible fun to be spending more time with these people in real life. It inspires creativity and energises me and my team!
11. What makes Lisbon such an attractive conference city?
OF: Lisbon is one of the best places for conferences I have been to because it combines charm of an old European town with centuries of history with incredibly modern infrastructure, short distances that make it walkable and sweatable (you see what I did there?) amazing weather year around and huge concentration of web3 talent on the ground.
12. Where else would you live in the world (if not Lisbon)?
OF: At the moment I can not think of a better place to live than Lisbon and its surroundings, however, this is already my 5th country of residence and I know that few years down the line we might decide to move. Where to is a mystery for now.
Leading blockchain research and development company, Flare Labs, has successfully launched a test version of FAssets on Flare’s Coston testnet. This marks a significant milestone in enabling smart contracts and DeFi for older tokens.
The FAssets system allows non-smart contract tokens such as BTC, XRP & DOGE to be used trustlessly with smart contracts on Flare. By minting these non-smart contract tokens into FAssets it will be possible to put them to work earning yield or rewards in decentralized applications on the Flare network. Once the FAssets are on Flare, they can also be bridged to other networks.
Hugo Philion, CEO of Flare Labs, comments: “More than 70% of the total value of all blockchain assets do not have smart contracts and therefore can’t be efficiently deployed in DeFi. FAssets are formally a Delta neutral synthetic with multi collateral backing. They enable these legacy assets to be represented on a smart contract chain without requiring a centralized third party. For developers, it will be a new and trustless means to access new potential users and a large amount of currently untapped value.”
While an initial private Beta of the FAssets system will be conducted on Flare’s Coston testnet, a subsequent implementation will follow on the Songbird canary network before FAssets are launched on the Flare mainnet.
The Beta will cover all major components of the system with Flare Labs and initial partners adopting all required roles within the system and providing the necessary infrastructure. Test assets will allow the simulation of market volatility to assess the system’s robustness under stress. As the Beta test progresses external participants will be able to join.
Once FAssets are live on Flare mainnet, in addition to earning DeFi yields, users and dapps will be able to earn FLR tokens from the cross-chain incentive pool as a reward for bringing sustainable value to Flare.
Anna and Christian are the first couple to be married in Liberland and this is their story (told by each)
Tell us a bit about yourselves – Career / profession? Jobs / interesting jobs?
Anna is a Swedish-Norwegian singer, songwriter and performer based in Oslo, Norway. She’s been working professionally in the music industry for many years, writing music for herself and other artists. Anna also has a degree in Coaching and Communications, and is also a social and political critic, which has lead to some of her articles being published in Norwegian newspapers.
Christian has been running restaurants and nightclubs all of his adult life, and has worked as a professional DJ for over 30 years – playing at different prestigious clubs in Oslo, Norway. He is currently working as a woodworker and engineer after his nightclub after 17 years had to close its doors in the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdowns.
“It was kind of symbolic – the club was formally closed on Liberland’s birthday – April 13th – a day we actually both were in Ark to celebrate Liberland’s 8th anniversary. It was a surreal day full of both tears and happiness.”
Where are you from? Tell us about your family, your hobbies and so on.
Anna was born in Sweden and her Swedish mother and Norwegian father moved to Norway when she was little. Christian is born and raised in Norway.
“Both of us found happiness in music from an early age, and have followed our dream to create and perform music in our different ways.”
What’s your educational background?
Anna started law school, but chose to quit the studies after the first year in order to work with music instead. Christian went to college for two years, but chose to leave because he was headhunted to the restaurant business.
Where did you meet? How long have you been dating?
Anna: We’d met briefly in Oslo a couple of times at parties in 2006, noticing each other with interest, but nothing happened. The third time however was accidently at Christian’s club, Horgan’s, and we’ve been together since.
Christian: We’ve now been formally together for 17 years, actually on October 27th the day we initially planned to marry in Liberland. We changed the date to October 28th though, due to the weather forecast, which turned out to be a good decision, because exactly at 3 in the afternoon on the 27th, Liberland got hit by a pretty nasty storm, which would have inundated the wedding completely.
On our wedding day the next day though, it was beautiful and sunny, and there was a full moon and eclipse as well. It was totally magical.
When did you discovered you shared libertarian values?
Anna: I guess we’ve always been libertarians, as we’ve strongly believed in freedom and individualism our whole lives.
Did you become citizens together or separately?
Christian: We both stayed in Liberland for 25 days in October as part of the citizenship program, and decided to get married during this stay. The decision was made on Liberty Island 11 days before the wedding. It was our third stay in Liberland; The first time we walked on Liberland soil was actually when the first group of seven people entered the border on August 6th, which was an epic moment, and the second time we visited for 4-5 days in the occasion of Vit’s birthday. We also visited the Liberland community (Ark) in april on Liberlands 8th birthday, and Anna was also allowed in the boat with Niko Omilana and camera crew (as featured in the YouTube video – Sneaking into a Banned Country), trying to land on Liberland – unfortunately unsuccessfully at that point.
Who proposed and when? At what stage did you decide to consider a wedding in Liberland? Was it a humanist wedding / religious/ civil?
Christian: Anna and I were sitting by the camp fire surrounded by our fellow settlers, listening to music, watching the beautiful night sky and enjoying each others company when she suddenly turned around and whispered; “Darling, we’ve been together for 17 years the 27th, and I’ve been thinking – why don’t we get married that day?” I was really surprised, but there was no doubt in my mind and I said: “Yes, let’s do it – let’s go for it!”
It was actually very romantic, because it was so genuine and beautiful. Liberland has brought us both closer, and this was the right occasion and the perfect timing.
Anna: A few days earlier Christian had the idea to start a church on Liberty Island, and we decided to call it ‘The Free Church of Liberland’ and it was built with sandbags in a joint effort by settlers, while I described the belief system. In many early settlements the first building was a church, and the settlers agreed on this first building that was already in progress, to become just that.
I also started to think about a possible wedding during those days, but kept it to myself. In short, the Free Church of Liberland is an eclectic religion and we believe in absolute spiritual freedom and no dogmas would ever interfere with this principles expect three:
harm none,
respect every living creature and
respect that no one owns or holds the truth.
We believe that no world view, religious or non-religious, have a higher rank than another. There might be parts of the truth in every world view. Also, if you are non-religious and still believe in the same values as us; righteousness, empathy, integrity, love, respect and truth, you are welcome in this church.
We believe in always asking questions in the search for human enlightening. To be open minded and ask questions is essential for the goal of this church. The Free Church of Liberland played a significant role at the wedding, and a small part of the ceremony also took place in the church.
Did you write your own vows – what were they?
Yes, we did. If you want to hear our vows, you can visit Liberland’s Youtube channel to follow the ceremony.
Was there a best man and bridesmaids, and who performed the wedding?
Yes, we had four wonderful fellow settlers and friends as our best men and bridesmaids; Veronika, Julie, Mirek and Quentin, and our dear Navid Saberin performed the wedding in a beautiful way. We couldn´t be happier with the ceremony. It was really personal and magical.
Is marriage an outdated concept (I know, funny question to ask – maybe how do you view the institution?)
Anna: We’re not the typical traditional people and believe that people shouldn’t follow the expected norms of society if they don’t genuinely feel like doing so, so some people have been surprised of us wanting to get married. We also think that people are somewhat tired of the old dogmas of institutions that they might feel leave no room for the free, independent individual, and therefore the thought of institutional marriage can trigger negative responses in people and marriage could be viewed by some as an ‘outdated’ concept. We totally understand that.
It is our opinion that weddings first of all should be genuinely personal commitments to another person that is free of stereotyped dogmas, just as we experienced in Liberland. We had our Norwegian ceremony only a month later – on November 25th, in a lovely church in a small mountain village where we live part time, surrounded by our loved ones in Norway – and that too was really beautiful.
We actually chose the traditional way this time for, among other, cultural reasons, but arranged it to be very personal, and we had a very understanding priest who respected our personal beliefs.
Christian: Since Liberland has played such a big part in our decision to get married in the first place, we let pictures from the Liberty Island ceremony run on a TV screen at the wedding venue, it was mentioned in several speeches, and the flag was of course present as well.
Was the day as magical as you thought it might be?
The day was magical beyond our wildest dreams. We knew it was going to be beautiful, but couldn’t even imagine how much effort that was going to be put into it. It isn’t an easy task to plan a wedding when you´re in the process of starting a new country; It isn’t easy to bring cake, food, rings, drinks, flowers, decorations and wedding garments to Liberty Island in such a short time and on such a short notice, but our amazing fellow settlers and liberlanders really went out of their way to make this day totally amazing – everything was brought to us, and they even made furniture and wedding arch under the harshest conditions during the storm the day before.
They even threw us an unforgettable bachelor/bachelorette party the weekend before. We are humbled and forever deeply grateful to each and every one involved with this wedding. We also want to thank all the guests who showed up to celebrate us, our sponsors who bought us supplies, and all the people working outside of Liberland such as media, administration, organizers, artists, suppliers, drivers, boat captains, etc.
And non the least – we are deeply grateful to the generosity of Vit and the Liberland cabinet who supported us in such an amazing way.
What next for Mr and Mrs (or do you keep your own names)?
Anna will keep her full name, but add the surname of Christan, Ditleff. We will continue our Liberland journey, and keep on making plans for the future there. One part of that is Radio Liberland. We started Radio Lib August 6th, and it was born with the intention of sending the country’s first music radio broadcast from the Liberland mainland. The purpose was mainly to boost the morale of Liberlanders by showing that it still was possible to, without special training, visit the country at a time when the borders were closed.
After August 6th however, Radio Lib was developed further, and more episodes have been broadcasted, and more are planned for future releases.
You can read more about Radio Liberland here: https://liberland.org/en/news/493-tune-in-to-radio-liberland-a-symphony-of[1]resilience-and-unity
You can also listen to the full episodes at https://soundcloud.com/radioliberland, and the official site of the radio: https://radio.ll.land.
We will also formalize the Free Church of Liberland, and we’ve also been thinking about starting a bar or restaurant, but as for now though, we will work for Liberland with whatever is necessary at this stage. We also have a wonderful place in Norway, which we have some future plans for, and we hope to see some Liberlanders visiting us there in the near future – we’ve made friends for life, and look forward to meet many more, and we wish of course to return to Liberland in the near future
After a week of chaos it was time for the Ex-Binance CEO to make a statement and layout his plans for the future. While stepping back from the CEO role, he will continue to contribute as a shareholder and a source of historical knowledge. Founder of the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange posted on X.
The crypto founder said he would take a break, including a phone off break, which is something he has not done for the past six years or more. “I will take a break first. I have not had a single day of real (phone off) break for the last six and half years. After that, my current thinking is I will probably do some passive investing, being a minority token/shareholder in startups in areas of blockchain/Web3/DeFi, AI and biotech.”
He also doesn’t see himself in the driving seat of a startup again. “I am content being a one-shot (lucky) entrepreneur. Should there be listeners, I may be open to being a coach/mentor to a small number of upcoming entrepreneurs, privately.”
Binance Resolves Landmark $4.3 Billion Settlement with US Regulators
The world’s largest virtual currency exchange signed a historic $4.3 billion settlement with the US Treasury Department earlier this week following allegations of breaching anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions laws. The agreement signifies a significant stride towards regulatory compliance for the crypto giant.
Binance’s CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, a towering figure in the crypto industry, took responsibility for the company’s past deficiencies. In a candid admission, he acknowledged the lack of adequate compliance controls during Binance’s early days and announced his decision to step down. “I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility. This is best for our community, for Binance, and for myself,” CZ stated in a post on X.
The reins of Binance have now passed to Richard Teng, the newly appointed CEO. Teng, who ascended rapidly through the ranks since joining as Singapore CEO in August 2021, brings over three decades of financial services and regulatory experience from Abu Dhabi and Singapore. His mandate is clear—to ensure Binance upholds the highest standards of security, transparency, compliance, and growth in its next phase.
In a bid to regain user trust, Teng faces the challenge of steering Binance through a period of enhanced security and regulatory adherence. CZ clarified that unlike Sam Bankman-Fried, facing legal issues and associated with market manipulation, Binance has not misappropriated user funds.
The settlement details reveal the extent of Binance’s violations, including failures to prevent and report suspicious transactions involving terrorist organizations, ransomware attackers, money launderers, and more. The five-year monitoring period imposed by the US government ensures continued oversight of Binance’s books, records, and systems to prevent illicit activities and protect US persons. The settlement marks a pivotal moment for the crypto industry, underscoring the need for regulatory compliance for digital currency exchanges.
acoco, the driving force behind Alien Worlds, the #1 played metaverse on DappRadar, announces at Web Summit in Lisbon a collaboration with revered Science Fiction author Kevin J. Anderson (Star Wars, Dune, Saga of the Seven Suns). Together, they introduce AI-Driven Tokenized Story-Telling, also known as the “Large Lore Model,” a pioneering concept that merges the power of AI with the vibrant creativity of the global community, all governed through decentralized on-chain mechanisms. With over 9 billion plays in Alien Worlds, this feature will be the largest AI system governed by DAOs at scale.
This revolutionary storytelling approach is designed to augment and scale the new and rich lore created by the co-author of the Dune Prequel series through community contributions worldwide. Through advanced AI tools, the decentralized community can leverage this strong lore foundation to build collaborative Alien Worlds games, media, and more.
Saro McKenna, co-founder of Alien Worlds, remarks, “Given the recent Hollywood writers’ strike, we’re navigating a crucial juncture when it comes to AI and media. We aim to safeguard the integrity of creators while unlocking the vast potential AI offers. By governing our AI models transparently via on-chain communities, we’re uniquely positioned to govern this intersection of technology and storytelling.”
She adds, “With Kevin J. Anderson’s masterful storytelling as our foundation, the community has a dual opportunity – they can appreciate and integrate the literary contributions of giants like Anderson, who wrote fan favorites like Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights, and simultaneously harness the formidable power of AI, along with the imaginative contributions of participants across the globe.”
Within the vast expanse of Alien Worlds, six planetary DAOs vie for Trilium tokens. Trilium will play a pivotal role in governance decisions and the management of AI-assisted content for an ever growing metaverse enjoyed by countless participants .
Though AI offers unmatched efficiency, its integration also raises concerns about potential misuse. Dacoco’s use of blockchain technology will explore how communities can address these challenges, facilitating proper authenticity, transparency, and attribution of training data. In this way, Alien Worlds is launching the world’s largest decentralized AI management system.
Kevin Rose, Chief Marketing Officer of Dacoco, added, “The next great franchise will be built by a community, not a corporation. When launched, our AI-driven ‘Large Lore Model’ will only be trained on community-approved lore, whether in games, art, video, or other media. Dacoco’s battle-tested DAO technology will serve as the foundation to support the community as it embarks on this journey. Over time, we will see a community entirely responsible for maintaining the canon of the Alien Worlds metaverse.”
This initiative is the first step in evaluating the need for decentralized governance systems to oversee AI systems, an important topic of debate as AI becomes more integrated into people’s everyday lives. Dacoco’s goal is to ensure AI systems remain accountable, auditable, and true to their intended purpose.
“In today’s interconnected world, storytelling has the power to unite global communities. AI tools can act as the essential bridge that ensures we are weaving a consistent and cohesive universe without requiring direct collaboration between every member of that community. As we meld the time-honored craft of storytelling with the innovative capabilities of AI, we’re not just telling stories; we’re creating universes.” – Kevin J. Anderson
Kevin J. Anderson, a luminary in the science-fiction domain with over 24 million books in print, boasts iconic works, including the expanded Dune series, Saga of Seven Suns, and adaptations for franchises like Star Wars and The X-Files.
Saro McKenna added, “Harking back to the open letter to pause AI development signed by Elon Musk and others, regulation, oversight, and transparency, were all strong themes that need to be addressed for AI to be developed responsibility. Dacoco believes that decentralized governance can play a role here, however, the efforts to mitigate the risks posed by AI through decentralization reveal that the touch points between the two are imperfect, leaving much room for government or collective regulation.
Stay updated with Alien Worlds by following @AlienWorlds on Twitter and exploring the universe at alienworlds.io.
The NEAR Foundation announced today that Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, has been appointed NEAR Foundation CEO to lead the NEAR ecosystem into the next phase of building an open web. As the person who has driven the vision for NEAR from the very beginning, there is no one better to oversee the growth of the NEAR Open Web Ecosystem and guide the constellation of teams building on NEAR to work together towards that common vision. From the earliest days of NEAR, Illia’s vision of an open web has guided the development of the ecosystem and served as a north star for the Foundation. In his new role as CEO, he will be able to realize that vision in a more direct and streamlined way.
Last week, Illia sat down with Blockleaders Editor Jillian Godsil to talk about his vision of creating a blockchain that that worked. Here is his story:
Illia Polosukhin began coding at the age of ten. He was quite the coder Ninja although sadly he does not have much time for coding these days as he runs the busy NEAR protocol with co-founder Alexander Skidanov. He has also left behind his fiction writing: short stories and half started science fiction novels. However, in his early thirties, he is still young enough to return to his creative writing – or at least he will have time when NEAR gets to at least one billion users.
coder Ninja
He stresses two things during our conversation. Firstly, NEAR is not an Ethereum killer (despite several click bait style headlines floating in the ether – he is positively collaborative). In fact, he presses his hand to his head when I reference these headlines, they are the bane of his life. Secondly, while having one billion users is a genuine target he does not care where these users reside – he is happy to share.
A native of Ukraine, he was privy to post soviet society and its volatility. He has lived through hyperinflation and multiple bank failures. These societal restrictions were ameliorated by the influence of his mother, an engineer and maths polymath. He mixed in mathematical and programming circles which led him to competing as a student in competitive programming which is, according to Illia, the Olympics of coding.
“We also have long cold winters so it is something to do.”
long cold winters
Coding is more than a cold winter pastime. To Illia it is a very pure form of logic. “You want to solve a problem, you code and you solve the problem.”
At university, Illia worked part time, coding for a company in Kharkiv which had its headquarters in San Diego. He was fascinated with machine learning, which is another pure form of logic, only this time coding with a machine which learns from practice. He was offered summer work in San Diego and he jumped at the chance.
Originally, Illia was focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence – anything to do with neural networks. In 2012, while he was in highschool, Google published its cat neuron paper, where 16,000 computer processors in Google’s X Lab taught itself how to identify a cat.
“Nobody told it what to look for. It did it all by itself. I knew this was important.”
Illia was fascinated also by natural language which is the way humans express and share knowledge.
“Visual is important (that’s how most species communicate) but language is a lot more intelligent. We need to look at how we actually process language effectively.”
After college, Illia spent some time with Google working in an area afterwards called transformers and which was the precursor to ChatGPT.
He was working on improving data models and trying to develop smarter datasets. At this point, he engaged with computer science students across the world which delivered great data but also a headache on how to pay them.
This was when he cottoned onto the use of Bitcoin as a global payment system. However, as both Bitcoin and Ethereum were expensive to use, he knew he needed a simpler, faster and cheaper iteration.
“Our early ambition at NEAR was to create a global payment network that guaranteed ownership, was accessible, scalable and cheap to use – for billions of users.”
So why did cryptocurrencies only come into their own for Illia at this point. How had the value of Bitcoin not seemed useful before? In a phrase – proof of work.
POW was a complete antithesis to basic human forces of nature.
We all accept the proof of work (POW) aspect to Bitcoin and early cryptocurrencies. We don’t need to explain POW except to new entrants and we have moved on significantly – almost to the point where Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols are confusingly similar. For Illia, however, the POW was a complete antithesis to basic human forces of nature.
“So Bitcoin offered the premise that the more successful you were, the more energy you are using. That’s not natural.”
Then in 2017, Illia learnt about Proof of Stake (POS) and that made sense to him. And that’s when NEAR.AI began to transition to NEAR Protocol.
Right from the start, NEAR Protocol was billed as meeting the needs of builders. It professed to offer the best tools to developers and founders to be successful. The term Open Value Applications was coined to express how users are in control and have access to their data. In terms of creating simplicity, NEAR supports both JavaScript, the most widely used language, and Rust, the most loved language.
“We have tooling for middleware, data aggregation, even for decentralized front ends. We make it easy for developers to fork new applications. We make it easy for developers to onboard users; they don’t need to install anything, they don’t even need to pre fund their wallets.
“NEAR isn’t just a Layer 1 blockchain, it’s the Blockchain Operating System for an Open Web.”
In the future, Illia doesn’t see blockchain distinction being important with boundaries shifting. It’s why he doesn’t mind where the first billion users land.
“From a user perspective all of this will be abstracted. Users won’t have to navigate between different chains and use different wallets. In fact, users won’t even know what blockchain they are on.”
NEAR Protocol is not targeting exclusive, niche areas of crypto. Instead, it is targeting the majority of people: people who need a better financial system, people who need better economic opportunities and people who just need better entertainment solutions.
“We are focused on making access easy, like using your email to set up an account. We are actively working with apps with millions of users already, apps like Sweatcoin, where blockchain complexity is abstracted.”
Back in 2021, the NEAR Protocol raised an eye watering $500 million but as Illia points out – they are building an ecosystem not a product and that takes people, time and money.
That also explains the focus on creators, which includes developers. Illia sees NFTs as a really interesting experiment where creators in all walks of life could control and own their content.
“We want to make sure people are compensated for creating content and to offer a new economy for them – especially people coming from developing world countries. We are leveling the playing pitch.”
NEARCON 2023 is just around the corner and Illia is keen to build on community, generate hype and contribute back into the platform.
“Whether you are building, creating or learning, we want everyone to become part of the community. At the end of the day, NEAR works because everyone contributes and I’m inviting everyone to get involved.”
Bitcoin has recently experienced what experts in the cryptocurrency space refer to as a “Golden Cross.” The pressing question that emerges is whether it’s the opportune moment to acquire Bitcoin or if an impending market downturn looms on the horizon.
Presently, BTC is positioned above its Bull Market Support Band, holding its ground at an impressive $34,000. In the event of a price retracement, the Bull Market Support Band level of $28,907 is the level the bulls want to see hold for a continued move higher.
Bitcoin Bull Market Support Band is sitting at $28,907
The recent occurrence of a Golden Cross in BTC is causing ripples in the financial waters. A Golden Cross materializes when the 50-day moving average goes above the 200-day moving average. A Golden Cross unfolds following a period of upward price movement, it is a lagging indicator reflecting what has already happened, contradictory to its name a Golden Cross historically has been followed by a downturn in price. Nevertheless, it is essential to acknowledge that there have been instances in the past where a Golden Cross didn’t result in a subsequent market sell-off. In the wake of a green September this year, which has only happened on four instances since 2010, speculation arises: “Could this time be different?”
Bitcoin Golden Cross
The price of Bitcoin resonates as an indicator for the broader crypto landscape. An upwardly Bitcoin price mirrors the overall expansion of the market, with many hoping that Alt coins cryptocurrencies should follow suit.
Examining “Total 2,” a chart that reflects the total market cap of the entire cryptocurrency market, excluding Bitcoin, we observe an intriguing pattern. The price trajectory is striving to breach resistance. The question that looms is whether this will be yet another lower high.
TOTAL 2 – total market cap of the entire cryptocurrency market, excluding Bitcoin
The total crypto market capitalization has surged by an impressive 10.34%, reaching $1.28 trillion. Bitcoin’s Dominance has also observed a notable uptick, hitting levels of 54%.
Bitcoin dominance hit 54% before slightly retracing
In conclusion, the recent Bitcoin Golden Cross has ignited both excitement and caution within the cryptocurrency community. Investors ponder whether now is the time to embrace the asset dubbed “digital gold” or brace for a potential market correction. With a surge in total market capitalization and Bitcoin’s dominance on the rise, the cryptocurrency landscape is in for an interesting end to the year.
Kevin Lampon is a long-term advocate for Liberland, having first visited in 2019 at the Floating Man Festival and returned many times since. As an international pilot, work has taken him around the world including Asia, and he now divides his time between Saudia Arabia and Thailand, the latter where he has a family home with his wife and where he hopes to retire.
Lampon has always been a libertarian simply because he believes in freedom. The recent political and social changes in the US have saddened him. “I don’t recognize the country I grew up in,” he says.
He quotes an old friendship which he recently lost due to pollical differences and affiliations.
“I am not sure what has happened. I was brought up to respect other people’s views, but now we can’t even have a conversation. This truly saddens me.”
Ironically Lampon feels he can experience more freedom in the traditionally conservative Saudia Arabia than in the States.
Lampon first heard of Liberland in 2017 but he became a citizen in 2018 and has been actively involved ever since. In 2019, President Vit consulted with him over the possibility of installing a runway in time for the first Floating Man Festival. “There wasn’t enough space but I have been active in assisting and meeting him and the rest of the ministerial team ever since.”
When Lampon discovered about the advanced settlement activities (which has been curtailed subsequently) he reached out again with an idea about education.
“Education is the cornerstone of a community and country,” says Lampon. “And when I considered Liberland and its settlements, I suggested to Vit that home schooling would be a great idea and assistance to the new families.”
For Lampon, homeschooling is a powerful tool and he has many friends who has taken this path. Indeed, Lampon himself availed of a homeschooling route which shortened his primary degree by two years. He had done research on the past and was delighted to suggest the Ron Paul home schooling curriculum.
The fact that Ron Paul is a libertarian and citizen also recommends this particular curriculum to Lampon.
The homeschooling curriculum begins at infants and goes all the way up to year 12 or around age 17 years.
Lampon expressed an interest in bringing the Ron Paul Curriculum to the newly settled Liberland and got the green light from President Vit. What impressed President Vit was the levels of credibility a qualified home-schooling course can bring.
“It’s important for home schooling to be formally affiliated with Liberland – in much the same way families in say Texas are affiliated to the state criteria. That way we can align the content with a credible organization with overview of the schooling. And we need a local school board to administer the course too – to give guidance, credibility and consistency to the schooling,” says Lampon.
Lampon is also keen to reintroduce classes on civics, freedoms and government – subjects he feels are being ignored in mainstream American public schools. Lampon will take up the role of director of the school but is happy in the future to pass on the baton.
Call to Action:
Lampon is calling on Liberlanders interested in education and the future of young Liberlanders to volunteer to help students if needed while they underake the self study home schooling modules.
The Homeschooling promise from Liberland:
To ensure a successful home schooling experience, we will:
1. Develop a well-rounded curriculum that includes core subjects such as Mathematics, Science,
English, History, Foreign Language, Physical Education, and elective courses.
2. Implement a structured daily schedule that allows for regular study hours, assignments, and
assessments.
3. Provide ample resources, textbooks, and learning materials to support the educational program.
4. Engage in regular progress assessments and maintain accurate records of academic achievements
and grades.
5. Encourage social interactions and extracurricular activities, ensuring a well-rounded education
beyond the academic curriculum.
6. Comply with any regulations, reporting requirements, or evaluations mandated by the Ministry of
Education.
Home School Guidelines for the Free Republic of Liberland Requirements:
1. Notice of Intent:
a. Parents or legal guardians who wish to homeschool their children in the Free Republic of
Liberland must submit a written notice of intent to the Ministry of Education or the designated
authority responsible for education.
b. The notice should include the names, ages, and addresses of the children being
homeschooled, as well as the names and contact information of the parents or legal guardians.
2. Curriculum:
a. Homeschooling parents in Liberland are required to provide a curriculum that includes the
following basic subjects: reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics, and a course in good
citizenship.
b. The curriculum should be designed to provide a well-rounded education and may also
include additional subjects such as science, social studies, history, and health.
c. Parents or legal guardians have the flexibility to choose the materials, textbooks, and
resources they deem suitable for their children’s education.
3. Recordkeeping:
a. Homeschooling parents in Liberland must maintain attendance records, course materials,
and samples of the child’s work throughout the academic year.
b. Records should include a log of instructional hours or days, a list of textbooks or instructional
materials used, and samples of the child’s work to demonstrate progress.
c. The records should be made available for review by the Ministry of Education or the
designated authority upon request.
4. Assessment and Evaluation:
a. Homeschooled children in Liberland may be subject to periodic assessments or evaluations
to ensure satisfactory educational progress.
b. The specific assessment methods and frequency may be determined by the Ministry of
Education or the designated authority.
c. Assessment results may be used as a basis for evaluating the child’s academic performance
and determining the continuation of homeschooling.
5. Duration and Attendance:
a. Homeschooling in Liberland is typically conducted for the duration of the regular school year.
b. Parents or legal guardians are responsible for ensuring regular attendance and maintaining a
consistent schedule for instruction and educational activities.
c. The number of instructional hours per day or week may vary based on the child’s grade level
and individual needs, but it is generally recommended to provide a minimum of four to six hours
of instruction per day.
6. Additional Opportunities:
a. Homeschooled children in Liberland should be given opportunities to participate in
extracurricular activities, social events, and educational programs outside the home.
b. Parents or legal guardians are encouraged to explore community resources, educational
cooperatives, and online learning platforms to supplement their homeschooling curriculum and
provide a well-rounded educational experience.
Please note that these guidelines are based on Liberland’s requirements and may need to be
adapted to align with specific laws and regulations in the Free Republic of Liberland. It is
important to consult with the Ministry of Education or the designated authority for
homeschooling in Liberland to ensure compliance with local regulations.
Introducing Sarah Woods visionary behind creations like Sarah Words.
Sarah Woods is a unique artist with a focus on art and poems, mixing the two in web3. She can be found on NFT marketplaces such as Objkt, Opensea and more!
Interview with Artist Sarah Woods
Can you tell us a story about what brought you to the world of NFTs? It was during the pandemic, when I was getting a lot more time to create and paint. I kept seeing ‘NFT’ being mentioned on different social timelines and my FYPages. I was listening to other artists talk about how they were using this new technology to sell their work and I wanted to try it too. It was the blockchain authentication and ownership that I was so fascinated with. And in years to come, what that can do for artists’ work being shared, away from socials that are so susceptible to algorithms.
What or who inspired you to pursue your career as an artist? Hhhmmm. My parents always encouraged me to create and enter competitions. My Dad was really into the arts. Writing, in particular. And his brother was an artist as well. I remember being fascinated seeing the work he created when I was younger and being inspired by it.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting NFT projects you are working on now? My main collection is a word/quote collection, called ‘Sarah Words.’ I use closeups of my abstract paintings as the background and place writing over them. Some of the writing and sayings are now part of a phygital collection, also titled Sarah Words, within my apparel brand, The Woo 1984.
I’m trying to incorporate my art as a dynamic nft so that my customers who purchase a sweatshirt or hoodie from this collection will get the art token as part of their receipt. After doing a short course on dynamic NFTs with Transient Labs, I aim to use this type of token to be able to communicate with my customers in the future about giveaways, discount codes etc. Taking communication and announcements away from the promotional email tabs and social posts and straight to the token on their phone/token wallet. Cutting out middle people and algorithms.
Was there a time when you did not believe in yourself? How did this impact your art? Absolutely. I still dip in and out of this thinking tbh. I think this is a common and recurring phase for a lot of artists. Self doubt in your ability and doubting whether your work is good enough is something that can keep you from even sharing your work. The impact, at least in my experience, of not believing in yourself can result in not sharing your work, and sometimes not even creating anything at all, while you’re in that head space. A lot of people think success of their work is sales and how many followers you have. But sometimes, success for an artist can be sharing something you don’t have full confidence in; it’s one of the biggest hurdles you can overcome. Can you imagine all the art; movies, tv, music that we may not have today, if those creators listened to their inner critic?
So, how are things going today? What is your recipe for success? Literally looking at this like a recipe, It’s 3 ounces of persistence. A tablespoon of delusion (to drown out the taste of disbelief in yourself) 2 cups of authentic creativity and a pinch of DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL. I think that the fear of failure keeps people from trying. But if you get used to how that tastes, you’ll eventually cook up a success.
Which tips would you recommend to NFT artists starting out? There’s a lot of resources online to help get started. I’d highly recommend a short course on Udemy by fellow Irish artist and web3 advisor, Niamh Aughney (Check out here:)
Join X spaces and listen to learn from the mistakes others have made.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. The web3 space is moving at a rapid pace and from my experience so far, people are sound and helpful and eager to learn themselves. Nobody is an expert yet.
What are your “3 things I wish someone told me before I minted my first NFT,” and why? The very first time I tried to mint, the gas prices were crazy expensive. I knew that you had to pay a gas price but I presumed it’d be manageable. At the time of late 2021, it wasn’t too manageable. After researching, I found that I could mint late at night/early morning in Ireland to get a lower gas price while the rest of the world was predominantly offline and not driving up the gas fee. So, I stayed up until 2:30/3am one night to mint my first piece for a really cheap gas price.
To learn about different blockchains. When I first minted, I was imbued with information about Ethereum and jumped right in. Now, I mint on Tezos as well as ETH.
To read the small print and research about different platforms that you want to mint on. Ahem, OpenSea…
To look at generating your own smart contract for your tokens so you can retain as much control over your work and secondary payouts. OK, I know that’s more than 3 but why keep it to myslef.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by artists and the NFT industry today? I think the biggest challenge faced by artists and the NFT industry is the general assumption that selling your work as a token is a scam or a fad. At the beginning there were obviously a lot of collections that made huge money and that caused a lot of nausea for this new way of presenting and selling your work. I think we still have a bit of a challenge on our hands to show people that this technology is making the purchase and selling of art a lot more seamless for both sides. And that as artists, we’re getting involved in blockchain to further evolve how we showcase our work and interact with our collectors. Personally, instead of saying ‘NFTs,’ I say ‘Art Token’ or ‘artoken’ as a way of reframing and taking control of the narrative.
How can our readers collect your art or follow you online?
The best way to see all the platforms that I’m on and links to different websites is through my Linktree.
The blockchain for data, Flare, has announced that it will burn 2.1 billion FLR tokens to support ecosystem health. More than 2% of FLR’s total supply will be permanently removed from circulation, preventing dilution of community token holdings and increasing incentives for new users to join the network.
The tranche of tokens that’s scheduled to be burned had been allocated to Flare’s early backers. These tokens will no longer be distributed after Flare reached an agreement with these entities on how the first Flare Improvement Proposal, FIP.01, should affect token allocations to equity shareholders.
198,880,170.19 FLR will be burned immediately with a further 66,293,390.06 set to be burned monthly until January 2026, when the FlareDrop process completes. As a consequence of the multi-year burn, backers will now receive a fraction of their original allocation. These remaining tokens were provided to the backers earlier this week.
Hugo Philion, CEO & Co-Founder of Flare, commented: “We are very happy to have reached an agreement with our shareholders and thank them for their support. It is right that investor token allocations should also be affected by the changes implemented in FIP.01. Without this burn, the investors would be able to claim approximately 3x their original allocation through the FlareDrops, unfairly diluting community holdings.”
“The 2.1 billion tokens we will burn account for almost 40% of the original token allocation for investors. This will reduce competition for FlareDrops and reduce the dilution of holdings of all ecosystem participants. It’s great news for the community.”
Flare’s network tokenomics will be updated to reflect the changes, with the community allocation rising from 58.3% to 59.6%.
FIP.01 was approved by the Flare community in January with 94% in favor. The proposal was designed to broaden access to token distribution and support greater network participation from connected communities.
Following the approval of FIP.01, the 24.2B tokens allocated to the public token distribution are being shared by all holders of Wrapped FLR across 36 monthly FlareDrops over three years. Seven FlareDrops have been completed, with the eighth available to claim on October 13.
Another interesting insight to playing the Upland SuperApp
UCC Dak has a dual career working for non-profits and the tech sector since 1995. He discovered with the former sector that no matter what kind of organization he worked for, the purpose of the organization was very dear to the market it served. It could have been helping universities run better, helping minorities with HIV and AIDS awareness or improving the chemical engineering profession, but the non-profits really cared for their community and the community responded in kind.
“Working for non-profits really showed me that there is so much interconnectivity between organizations – we are human after all. I learnt how one ecosystem impacts other ecosystems around it and when there are good intentions then the impacts are positive.”
In the other half of his career, working in for-profits UCC DAK learnt about generating income and making profit which has also highlighted the importance of corporate responsibility.
“I’m not against making profits and I tell my non-profit colleagues that Revenue is not a four letter word. In the US nonprofits and NGOs are businesses. They have to register with the IRS as a corporation and people may not realize they have more regulatory obligations than ordinary corporations. It’s actually easier to run a for-profit than a non-profit.”
According to UCC DAK, the challenge for non-profits is not just to do good, but they need to be business-like in their approach as they need to deliver on their mission – and for that they need money.
UCC DAK first came across Web3 when working for a Canadian FinTech company entering the North American market. It was a payments company and one of its payment streams was crypto.
“I thought it was amazing – I saw great potential for NFTs and blockchain and started to do some research. I could see the collision of tech and non-profits in Web3 and crypto.”
Such was his interest, UCC DAK set up a Twitter Space called Perpetual Good in the Metaverse as a means to find out more about what was happening in the sector. He wanted to share this knowledge too.
“I really fell in love with the idea of how Web3 tech can really support a more decentralized, geographically dispersed mission.”
Part of his attraction to Web3 also lies in his gaming past. UCC DAK is a huge gamer and has been since he was little. He has even created games with his son.
“I’m just a big kid really.”
UCC DAK sees gaming as helping people develop strategic thinking, creative thinking and analytic thinking.
“Not the shooter games necessarily but the open world games help gamers develop different skill sets, and figure out their own game loops. That is really what is fun about gaming – the strategy.”
Such is UCC DAK’s belief in the power of gaming that he is encouraging his children to look at Blender and Unity and to perhaps start coding.
“User Generated Content (UCG) is core to Web3 – and I love the fact that digital assets created by players, are owned by players and can even be sold on an open secondary market by players. Moreover, you can do this wherever you live – you don’t have to be in New York or another major metropolis.”
UCC DAK became fascinated by play-to-earn gaming with such possibilities. In truth, he was tired of spending hundreds of dollars on freemium gaming models and having nothing to show for the end of it. He is a collector by nature and has accumulated many collectibles over the years, and even redeemed some for a modest return.
He stumbled across an advert for Upland and he was interested.
“Naturally I made all the mistakes that rookies make. Not knowing about FSA properties (low cost properties reserved for newbies), buying on a secondary market and also leveling up too fast (and losing newbie benefits).”
For the record there are many Youtubers giving advice and also Uplanders on Discord are very helpful.
UCC DAK joined in September 2021. He bought into the NFLPA and also started off in Manhattan, which, as an expensive city, was probably not the best location to start with. Initial frustration led him to Discord and he found other Uplanders who were prepared to help him get more out of Upland.
“I realized that I was useless at buying and flipping properties – which is one of the main tenets of this game – but instead I joined the Upland Construction Company (UCC) where my project management skills were put to good use.”
What interests UCC Dak about Upland is the opportunity to take a real-world business model and implement it into the metaverse. Of course, as he notes everything in the metaverse moves at hyper speed. What might take months in the real world can happen in weeks in Upland. A case in point was the UCC discord that went from 200 people to 1600 in weeks. UCC has also built 1000s of properties and transferred millions of UPX to players.
“This is my game loop. To create what is now called a metaventure in Upland – a corporation that can create any inorganic items such as cars and structures. I partnered with MassChef – which is often what happens in Upland – people find their buddy. I’ve never met him in real life but we have started a real-life business together.”
UCC DAK comes up with crazy ideas and MassChef figures out how to make them work. The most recent idea is racing. Together they started Upland Racing League as a marketplace for all things racing in Upland. They are hosting regular races with real prizes. The lines between real life and metaverse are starting to blur with real life businesses sponsoring metaverse activities. UCC DAK gives the example of sponsor HydePark Ninjas which is a Node in Upland that has opened a real-life coffee business.
“I’ve tried the coffee, it’s very good.”
Another example is Anthology Puzzles that makes wooden puzzles and it is creating a limited puzzle for Halloween to support the Creedmore Node.
“I’m hoping to reach out to real world racing and automobile brands to come in and sponsor our events.”
His first proof of concept that PGiM (Perpetual Good in the Metaverse) can be achieved came together with help from Shaktikyn and ThankMeLate. Together the three of them decided to undertake a layer two experience in racing but to make it a charitable event. They partnered with artists to create cool NFT art and the net proceeds from the event was to raise $5000 for the Child Mind Institute, a charity dedicated to transforming the lives of children struggling with mental health and learning disorders.
One thing led to another – and the players in Upland tend to be very philanthropic. As part of UCC DAK’s Perpetual Good in the Metaverse Twitter Spaces, he got involved with an organization called EnDAOment.org, a non-profit Web3 based blockchain that helps non-profits with on-chain transactions, in particular raising funds through crypto and converting crypto to USD. As a result UCC DAK met James Siegal, former CEO and fellow of KABOOM!
KABOOM! was founded more than two decades ago with a vision to provide every child with a safe and engaging play space. It has built hundreds of playgrounds in cities across America especially in disadvantaged areas.
UCC DAK and Segal began chatting and UCC DAK threw out a crazy idea – What if the metaverse could reflect real world playgrounds and raise money for the charity?
According to UCC DAK decentralized engagement is important to community development and they started to figure out how to engage the community, what workflows were needed to be set up and how to match the real world with the metaverse. He got help from Danny Brown Wolf and Mallory Hank-Johnson from Upland. He teamed up again with Shaktikyn. The advice was to break this project into phases. They needed to run the project through a metaventure but they also needed artists to create the digital assets. Shaktikyn partners with TossHed and they had experience in creating designs so the digital playground design was given to them.
“They came back with five awesome assets. I really liked the dinosaur slide, but this was growing into a real team effort.”
Two blocks away from the lot they purchased for the first Upland Kaboom site, is a factory in Chicago where they will build the assets. There is also a showroom in Oakland with others planned in Oakland, Fresh Meadows and Dallas. The showrooms will sell the unique assets.
It is not possible to build an actual playground in Upland but it is possible to create a playground-looking environment. The partnership will look to sell these assets, taking 10% as an administrational fee, with the rest going to KABOOM!. This is just phase one.
“Earning assets this way can be liberating for non-profits as the funds are not restricted. Maybe they can use the income to hire a grant writer or to create training videos. We cannot raise enough to build a real-world playground (typical cost is $150,000) but we can help them achieve it.
“Fundraising is not the only aim, the value proposition of the metaverse is being able to get your message out to communities who may need or indeed support the original idea.”
Layering real world business into the metaverse is very exciting for UCC DAK but at the end of the day it is all about community.
“Upland is a community where I can be creative, strategic and see the fruits of my labor in a very tactile way. I can see my building going up and I can see my Discord numbers going up. In short, it’s a platform where I can create and build.”
Interview with Thomas Maciocco, Trader at Blockchain.com
Thomas Maciocco spent the first three years of his career programming at a traditional quantitative equity hedge fund, before making the jump to digital assets trading, where he has spent the last three years.
Originally, he was hired by Blockchain.com, billed as the world’s leading crypto finance house serving people, projects, protocols and institutions since 2011, as a quantitative trader, and has since held roles in the derivatives, algorithmic and DeFi trading space for their institutional desk.
“The Blockchain.com institutional desk serves clients around the world – providing institutional clients with world-class service in OTC spot, options, and DeFi trading.”
“Over the last year, we’ve been working hard with the team to grow our DeFi trading desk, and we’ve found a lot of synergies with the other parts of our business (spot / options), that have really put Blockchain.com at the forefront of institutional DeFi trading – and more generally, as one of the leading institutional desks in the world.”
“The intersection of derivatives and DeFi happened at an interesting time. 2022 saw two processes running in parallel – the collapse of major centralized financial institutions (Celsius, 3AC, FTX, etc.) and incredible innovation in the DeFi space. The former got all the media attention, while the latter quietly kept innovating and launching new products for users (DOVs, perpetual DEX, exotic products, and many more on-chain use-cases).”
“We found that by trading derivatives and DeFi, we got the best of both worlds; derivatives being capital efficient, and DeFi being transparent, we got a mix of lower counterparty risk, the convex payoff and hedging properties of options, and the decentralization and yield of DeFi.”
“Using options to hedge minimizes our exposure in a more efficient manner and can also provide a nice payoff if it goes the right way.”
Having a technical background is also really helpful in studying options. As Maciocco says, anyone can buy or sell an option – but understanding the math behind it and what can go wrong is critical.
Options pricing and technological innovation
Maciocco is constantly looking at how to refine options pricing strategies.
“I’m constantly learning how to price derivatives. The theory behind the pricing is very complex and it helps to understand it.” The cornerstone of derivatives pricing theory is considered to be the Black-Scholes method, which has been refined over the years to price ever more complex derivatives.
“Pricing options without knowing the theory is like entering a dark room trying to find what you’re looking for. Pricing options knowing the theory is like entering that same dark room except now you have a very dimly lit candle to help you make your way around. It provides a small helping hand.”
About three months ago, Maciocco was introduced to Bumper.fi, a novel derivatives platform which launched on Ethereum mainnet at the start of September. Maciocco did a deep dive on the platform.
“Bumper has a unique design in which option premium is paid out and received based on realized volatility over the term of the option – contrary to premium’s exchanged based on implied volatility in traditional derivatives markets.”
“Overall, I think this makes derivatives markets more efficient, it closes the gap between speculators and hedgers and assigns a fairer mark to the value of the options – what volatility they actually realize over the duration.”
Regarding the yield offered by Bumper for holders of USDC to provide liquidity, Maciocco applies the same rules as he does for his other investments.
“It comes down to risk-reward and what the alternatives are; treasuries pay around 5% at press time, on-chain stablecoin pools can pay up to 8% for the added smart-contract and stablecoin risks, on-chain exposure to volatility can be an attractive investment based on how the yield compares to other alternatives. Users should always do their own research.”
“Ultimately, I think someone who appreciates trading volatility and derivatives will be impressed with what the Bumper team has built. Mechanically it’s a complex protocol, and certainly a great read for fans of DeFi and derivatives.
Innovation in Derivatives
Other innovations in the derivatives market are the Option DeFi Vaults or DOVs, which gained traction in 2022. The beauty of DOVs lies in its simplicity. Investors simply ‘stake’ their assets into vaults which deploy the assets into options strategies. Before DOVs, option strategies were only available to accredited investors through over-the-counter (OTC) trading or by self-execution on option exchanges like Deribit. Also in 2022, the rise of on-chain perpetual DEXes, like GMX, came onto the scene offering traders to use up to 50x leverage on futures on the exchange.
Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie’s financial career began as a quant engineer where he served in different investment banks in the credit derivative space notably Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers.
“I was there in the run-up to the subprime crisis, which is really a horrible part of financial history, but post 2008 my role involved some of the clean-up in the the aftermath of the crash, valuing legacy structured credit positions, then working in valuation control to help keep the pricing of those old trades in line with what little there was left in external price benchmarks. It involved looking at market risk, stress scenarios and restructuring. In addition to my MBA, this lived experience gave me the confidence to become a founder.
“In fact, it wasn’t my original ambition to solve the bank account problem for the crypto industry – I was just looking to provide a credible crypto brokerage service for high-net-worth individual investors, people who knew what they were doing but didn’t want to do the technical heavy lifting specific to crypto.”
The result is BCB Group, Europe’s leading payment service provider for the digital asset economy and the first UK regulated payments institution dedicated to crypto and blockchain.
While von Landsberg-Sadie’s ambitions were limited in the beginning and they relied on banking partners NatWest bank in 2018 to provide accounts for trade settlement, the UK bank changed its mind virtually overnight, giving von Landsberg-Sadie 90 days to find a new banking solution.
“In just 90 days, instead of merely seeking another banking partner, my co-founder Oliver Tonkin and I figured out how to provide the basic banking infrastructure for ourselves and our trading counterparties by obtaining a payments licence.”
von Landsberg-Sadie’s experience as a quant engineer and working through the crash greatly assisted him in setting up the technical aspects of the business including the web app and API.
“But it snowballed very quickly as we stumbled upon the thing that the market needed way more than crypto liquidity, which was a way to move money in a regulated and credible way. So, while this was the result of a strategic pivot, our platform has become systemically important in the crypto industry.”
BCB Group’s primary service moved from OTC trading to payment accounts, or to use another term, to providing crypto ‘bank accounts’ where the holder of the account has the usual sort code and account number setup – or IBAN in the case of some currencies – and can move money in and out in the crypto industry exclusively.
Moving from TradFi into crypto posed some very serious challenges for the fledgling bank. Within TradeFi the regulations governing financial institutions are very well defined and moreover consistent across different jurisdictions. These rules have had decades to be refined and are mature in their current forms.
Crypto on the other hand is barely 12 years old and is only in recent years gathering the attention of regulators, but there are important discrepancies between them, especially where crypto assets are described and categorised, and where they fall in or out of scope of the definitions of securities.
“Progress is being made but slowly and there is a lot of disconnect across regions. So, the first big challenge in this space is some sort of globally consistent regulatory framework.”
The second biggest challenge is the infrastructure.
“There is still a lot of scepticism and cynicism about the industry which is one of the main reasons some large institutions haven’t really engaged as yet. They don’t have the time or the risk appetite, and have little incentive to engage at the expense of already profitable activities in traditional asset classes.
“It’s a risk issue and a massive education curve.”
The third challenge is the volatility of the marketplace where the ecosystem and the individual assets are all over the place. Funnily enough, over the past 12 months Bitcoin has been a counterexample where it’s been mostly horizontal while the rest of the world’s digital assets and traditional assets have been going up and down.
“With regard to the volatility, I can see a platform like Bumper providing a critical service. Let me explain from my perspective. BCB’s job is to provide durable infrastructure for the crypto economy. Number one requirement, medium term, is payment rails, but beyond that it is to offer tools that can manage risk, including price volatility. There is a growing number of platforms set up to manage market risk, through options for example.
“But many of these are pretty much copy and paste solutions from TradFi and they don’t always translate that well – instruments such as crypto options, futures, and other leveraged derivative instruments are flawed, with assumptions that arose from the specific ways that TradFi takes a directional view, hedges it, margins it, settles it, clears it and accounts for it.”
von Landsberg-Sadie argues that large institutions like a hedge fund or a bank can’t take on a large crypto position without the instruments to risk-manage it.
“What the market needs is a crypto native solution with a fresh approach, rather than a copy and paste solution.
In TradFi, derivatives pricing leans heavily on the Black Scholes options model and, within it, the Monte Carlo process to simulate randomness. But these models derived from an industry that had designated physical moving parts like a clearing house, a bank, a centralised exchange, and back in the day, traders in brightly colored, striped jackets, open shouting at each other across a trading floor – and for that conventional setup it largely worked. The model priced in the frictions and costs inherent in this physical system.
“But in crypto, we have an entirely different market, one that doesn’t need a central marketplace or a clearing house. And it is accessible to everyone, not just institutions, making accessible risk management even more critical. So, it is reasonable to think that solving the risk management problem needs a different approach.
“When Jonathan (DeCarteret, founder of Bumper) first showed me the white paper I was very impressed and thought a Black-Scholes pricing alternative is a bold move, but this works. It has taken out assumptions that are irrelevant to the crypto industry and added in assumptions that are.
“For example, Bumper also takes into account protocol risk where hackers are constantly looking for opportunities to exploit the protocol and run away with millions in crypto. This happens all the time in the constant arms race between crypto innovators and crypto criminals. Bumper manages this particular risk in the way it ensures solvency, for example. It can mitigate the kind of DeFi attack that simulates a rapid price move (gap risk) to yank premiums or margins out of kilter, which could liquidate large positions or bankrupt the entire protocol.
“And that is part of the genius of Bumper – it’s a crypto native solution.”
Reckless destruction of houses and removal of belongings takes Liberlanders by surprise
MATEOS MARINA, LIBERLAND, SEPTEMBER 22 – On the morning of Thursday, September 21, a private company acting on behalf of the Croatian Forests (Hrvatske Šume d.o.o.) accompanied by police made an unannounced extraterritorial incursion into Liberland and demolished and removed Liberland property. Liberlanders living on the land were threatened with arrest if they interfered. An unspecified number of Liberlanders were arrested under the vague charges of “failure to comply with a lawful order.”
Croatian police escorted the demolition crews who committed this act of indiscriminate destruction. This assault was committed without warning and without the forest company or police issuing any reasons or justification.
Persons present were not given any time to gather their own personal belongings, much less their equipment. Thankfully, no one was injured, but our property was damaged and confiscated.
This has occurred on the International Day of Peace, of all days.
Some of our buildings and equipment that were destroyed and/or removed:
Two well-constructed garden houses and one marina house
One well-constructed and fully functioning field kitchen with multiple refrigeration units and stoves
Generators and electronic equipment
Starlink antenna and router
Quad bike, bicycles and other transportation
Food and other supplies
Personal belongings
Croatian law enforcement officers and employees of Hrvatske Šume d.o.o. involved in this operation have acted unprofessionally, and have been insulting and obnoxious to our people. We asked for a written notice or report and we were told there is no report and there won’t be one.
We have documented this incident and the individuals involved with photos and video, and we are already pursuing legal action against these acts on several levels.
The settlement heroically remains on the land and is resisting these attempts at breaking their will.
Videos from today
Croatian demolition of Liberland structures goes back to September 2017, when the original hunting lodge (lovački dom) was demolished. In 2023, we established Jefferson Square in front of the old house and began excavation and rebuilding of the old lodge and its basement.
The old hunting lodge in Liberland, demolished by the Croatians in 2017Architect’s conception of redesigned lodge
The Free Republic of Liberland was proclaimed on April 13, 2015 on this parcel of land, Gornja Siga, in accordance with international law regarding terra nullius and bona vacantia, as the land remained unclaimed by either Serbia or Croatia for over 25 years. Liberland has the ability to bring significant investment, jobs and tourism to this economically depressed region.
Our legal position supporting our claim is clear: that the territory has never been part of Croatia and falls outside of its borders. This has been confirmed in their diplomatic correspondence with Serbia as well as its complete absence in all official published maps of Croatia. The Croatian border police are duly authorized to conduct activities aimed at safeguarding both Croatia’s national boundaries and the broader Schengen borders within Liberland. We not only acknowledge this authority but also welcome it, as their efforts contribute to enhancing the overall security of our own nation.
Location of Liberland
In addition, Serbia has relinquished its authority over the territory. There are no competing claims to land in Gornja Siga other than the Free Republic of Liberland and this land has no state affiliation with Croatia or Serbia.
We seek to work with the Croatians to find a peaceful, mutually beneficial solution for our countries. Liberland officials have always acted in accordance with international law and to avoid confrontations with Croatian border police. Our position is that people of Liberland should be able to visit and live in the area without harassment or arrest. Our citizens are not building on Croatian soil, but in their own country, the Free Republic of Liberland, and we are not a threat or risk to Croatia in any way.
Sergio Bianchi Hotel Design
Liberland wishes to become a good, reliable partner with Croatia. The settlement will be rebuilt immediately. Plans for the next months include the construction of a hotel [link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEa9CQVsjik ], children’s park, adventure tours, boating, cycling and much more. We also look forward to working with the Croatian state forest company, Hrvatske Šume d.o.o., on future harmonious cooperation and to avoid conflict.
Our project aims to be one of the biggest opportunities that Croatia has to bring investment, jobs and tourism to a region that has been languishing economically for some time. We have already spent considerable funds in the local economy in Osijek-Baranja County and this can only grow as more people want to visit the area – with the approval and participation of our closest neighbors, we can develop those opportunities together.
Just some of the buildings, equipment and things the Croatians destroyed or took away:
Bumper, a decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol, has launched an innovative options platform. The management team claims its options pricing model is both cheaper and more efficient than the traditional Black-Scholes option desks. The Bumper team claims that their protocol will disrupt the $13 trillion options market, notably attacking current options leader Derbit.
Bumper’s innovation is the culmination of a three-year research and development programme, backed by $20m in early funding, and collaboration with the Swiss Center for Cryptoeconomics, known for work on Synthetix, and coded by renowned developers Digital Mob, who previously worked on protocols such as Barnbridge, Gnosis and Filecoin.
Bumper is challenging the 50 year old Black Scholes model. Authored in 1973 it is one of the most important concepts in modern financial theory. This mathematical equation estimates the theoretical value of assets based on implied volatility, taking into account the impact of time and other risk values. It is to this day regarded as the one of the best ways for pricing an option contract.
The Black-Scholes paper went on to win the Nobel Prize for economics and has proven so precise and reliable that it has given rise to a $13 trillion market of options in traditional finance. The difficulty when attempting to move this premise to crypto, especially decentralized finance (DeFi), which is trustless and permissionless. Moreover, there are properties in DeFi that do not exist in TradFi such as pooled liquidity and running complex smart contracts.
Jonathan DeCarteret, CEO of Bumper, explains the difficulty of migrating the Black-Scholes directly onto crypto.
“Crypto typically has low latency and high frequency of liquidity which poses certain complexities for the model – and yet the key point of the Black-Scholes formula remains – it’s set up like a baseline speed of light, you can’t beat it.
“Option desks make great use of pricing risk, but have to add their costs on top. We wanted to find an evolution of this algorithm in a totally new and innovative approach that would give us the same baseline as Black-Scholes but in a much more efficient and fairer manner. We raised $20 million in funding in 2021 to create a superior crypto equivalent.”
The resulting Bumper protocol undercuts traditional options desks by one third, while paying between 3-18% APR to Liquidity Providers (LPs) that supply USDC to the protocol. Early adopters of the protocol will also share in $250,000 worth of incentives, by either protecting their ETH or earning on their USDC.
DeCarteret says “Bumper removes the downside volatility of a user’s crypto tokens, paving the way for them to take leveraged positions with zero-liquidation risk. That in itself is a major breakthrough, but when you consider it’s on average 30% cheaper than the market leader, the value proposition becomes crystal clear.”
The protocol charges a premium which is calculated incrementally during the term, based on a combination of market conditions, protocol rebalancing and proximity to the user’s floor. This generates real yields for liquidity providers who realise returns ranging between 3-18% APR on average without the need to sell option contracts.
Until now, the methodology for calculating the price for hedging risk relied on the fifty-year-old Black-Scholes model, which has fuelled the $13 trillion options market.
“Fifty years is a long time in tech and although Bumper uses completely different inputs and a novel rebalancing mechanism, it is surprisingly correlated with Black-Scholes, but more efficient, even under the most volatile of market conditions,” said Mr DeCarteret.
Bumper has been deployed to the Ethereum mainnet, and is currently accepting deposits in ETH and USDC, with additional ERC-20 tokens and multi-chain support slated to be added to the protocol in rapid succession.
For more information on Bumper, including their early user rewards and incentives for rival DeFi options protocol users visit bumper.fi.
After the exciting news about the opening of Liberland and early settlement activities, the next upcoming milestone is to celebrate President Vit’s 40th birthday on this land he claimed eight years ago.
Previously, despite claiming the terra nullius as the Free Republic of Liberland on the date of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday on April 13, 2015, it was near impossible to step foot on the land. This was mostly due to the Croatian authorities vigorously guarding the land with armed officers. The land had been overlooked after the fall of the Yugoslavia but neither Croatia or Serbia claimed it. The small parcel of 7 kilometre square uninhabited land lies on the edge of the Danube, but moving borders and the river bed channel meant it belonged to neither. The Serbian authorities were not too bothered but the Croatians were still challenging borders and so this tiny piece of land became a hostage to politics.
Over the past eight years, attempts were made to land on Liberland but those who got through the armed guard ended up being arrested and put into a Croatian jail, even if only for one night. It was enough to make Liberlanders worry about possible settlement in the future.
However, over the past eight years President Vit and his team did not lose hope. They held annual conferences to celebrate the anniversary of the launch of the country inviting big names such as ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Roger Ver and former congressman Ron Paul to speak to the growing Liberland community. The now famous Floating Man festival was created in 2019 and this water-based festival continues to grow year on year (despite Covid) in the middle. President Vit and his ministerial team travel extensively, speaking at conferences and spreading the word about Liberland to the far corners of the world. National teams have been set up in sport, music and even beauty pageants to compete in international competitions.
The international Liberland community grows daily. There are weekly meetings for citizens to talk about policy and hear updates. The constitution is being designed with governance operated on its very own blockchain. The Liberland Aid Foundation, the charitable arm of Liberland, is concerned with assisting those less well off in troubled areas such as Haiti. Last year, President Vit and his ministers travelled to El Salvador to discover how President Bukele is running a Bitcoin-based economy and donated aid to Benjamin Bloom Children’s Hospital resulting in President Bukele publicly thanking the delegation.
From being just an idea, the dedication of the president, ministers, staff and supports of Liberland were creating a groundswell of noise, interest and excitement.
Then in early 2023, Croatia joined the Schengen region which allowed for free travel of citizens in this political block without the need for visas. This opened up a free passage from Hungary to Croatia and onto Liberland without the need for visas. This route was trialled successfully by YouTube influencer Nico and witnessed more than nine million views online demonstrating the popularity of the subject.
Shortly afterwards, President Vit Jedlicka held a formal meeting with President Milanovic of Croatia and after that it was all go go go.
There are now several formal border crossings into Liberland (see details here) currently restricted to walking, biking or via boats. The Croatian police patrol the border crossings but are polite and respectful, although Liberlanders are advised not to have a Liberland stamp in their passport as this is seen as a red flag.
Liberlanders hailing from outside the Schengen region must apply for a visa to enter Liberland but this is a formality.
Now, to celebrate President Vit’s 40th birthday invitations have been sent to citizens and supporters. There are only 150 places available and it is by invite only.
The birthday celebrations will take place in two venues: the Liberland Marina Mateos and Jefferson Square.
Jefferson Square is the site of the first settlement on Liberland: a ruined building that the Croatians demolished and then removed all the stone back in 2018. However, to everyone’s surprise a fully intact cellar remained which is currently being used as a storage area. This is formally known as Liberty Street 1 and will in time become the seat of Liberland Congress.
Liberland Marina Mateos is the beach area and is ideal for landings. There is no prohibition from Croatian on this site and already there are a number of house boats arriving and mooring at this location. This will be the site of the main party.
The party itself will features refreshments, music, a live DJ and food. Attendees will be helped to find accommodation in nearby hotels.
Again, it plans to be an amazing event and not to be missed. Citizens and supporters wishing to attend, please RSVP on this link invitees must have legal access to the Schengen region (hint if you are Irish you do not have access).
So even if you cannot attend the birthday party on the 9th of September, I know you will all wish the President the happiest of birthdays.
Dmitry (Dima) Buterin, avid supporter of Ukraine, serial entrepreneur and father to Vitalik
Dmitry Buterin has always been outspoken and prone to using humour to make his point. He has lived through great change in his native Soviet Union before relocating to Canada in the 90s. There he has openly criticized the brain washing of the old Soviet era and increasingly the dictatorship of Valdmir Putin. It has not earned him many friends back in Russia where even high school peers condemn his views as traitorous. In fact, what is interesting when speaking with Buterin is that he is not nationalist or even jingoistic at all. At one stage I ask him who is his tribe and his answer is: “Humanity is my tribe.”
This thread of uniqueness runs through our conversation. At the end, I suddenly realise this is the gift or the legacy Buterin has given his son, an ability to view things in new and innovative ways. There are no set nations, cultures or even people in Buterin’s worldview but a series of individuals all rubbing along in their own little bubble. Perhaps the birth of Ethereum hinges on everyone and everything being unique.
Growing up in the old Soviet Union created some very definite memories for Buterin. He remembers the hypocrisy and the poverty.
“The state owns everything and provides its citizens with jobs, housing and healthcare. It sounds like a paradise. However, everything was of extremely poor quality and it was impossible to live in those conditions. The state does not care about individuals, except for perhaps the handful at the very top.”
Buterin remembers being five years old in kindergarten when a joke was made about Lenin and he was absolutely clear that this joke was being made about a sacred cow and how he felt the sheer terror.
“We were all held together by a tissue of lies. Lies that we worked. Lies that we were paid. Lies that we weren’t stealing to feed our families. Everyone needed a garden to grow vegetables just to survive.”
There were also gapping inequalities in the name of communism where some people would train and study to become teachers or doctors but they paid significantly less than a factory worker or laborer.
“The system kept on breaking down. Shops might have some basics like canned fish, but items like toothbrushes would come and go. Toilet paper was often not available with people using newspapers. By the time I was a teenager I could see through the lies.”
In order to get into university or to go up the value chain, young people were expected to join the Youth Communist Party and Pioneer Movement.
“These were all feeders into the Communist Party but I could see the system had started to fall apart and while my high school teacher persuaded me join, I actually sold my Youth Communist party membership card as a souvenir a few years later for $5 in Prague.”
The hard part was the loss of savings, the currency collapsing and people losing their jobs and their livelihoods. People were wiped out when the state apparatus no longer employed them working in factories that produced goods that no one needed.
On the flip side, Buterin was excited with the thought of being able to travel and to watch foreign TV.
“Before the collapse, it was a crime to watch a foreign film and neighbours might report you and you could end up in prison. Now there was a window of freedom – something new being born out of that corpse.”
Buterin laments that there was barely ten years of freedom before organized crime and a new form of state apparatus choked off the green shoots and he believes the new party is worse than before, while noting that Putin has been in power possibly longer than anyone else. Buterin expresses his opinions strongly, comparing the treatment of activists against the war with Ukraine unfavorably with those who participate.
“This is where I get most of my grief and my old friends say I am being paid to say terrible things about the regime.”
When asked if this upbringing, living though the old Soviet Union and witnessing its collapse before relocating to the west, has marked him, Buterin replies in the negative.
“Every human being is unique. We all have our own particular family, environment and upbringing. Even siblings and classmates brought up in similar environments are all unique. There is no label.”
Buterin embraces his newly adopted Toronto, not least for its multicultural melting pot of nationalities, cultures, ethnicities and religions all coexisting in the same place. It is also where he is raising his two daughters, aged 12 and 15, neither of whom are overawed by their big brother Vitalik nor likely to join him in tech invention. The elder has a talent for art, the younger is just discovering herself and Buterin is in no hurry to push them out into the world.
“They are both unique human beings at a unique point of time.”
Katya and Misha Buterin
So now I question how someone from the old Soviet Union has embraced capitalism so easily, exiting at least three businesses successfully to be retired at fifty. There was no concept of entrepreneurism growing up, everything was done by the state. However, Buterin fell into entreprenurial like activities through necessity. His parents had lost all their savings in the collapse of the regime and while education was free, living expenses were not. Buterin and a number of his friends took upon themselves to buy up old Soviet trinkets and sell them in Prague, then part of Czechoslovakia.
Buterin was studying software engineering at university but when he became father to Vitalik he needed to earn money while still a student. He worked for a bank and then an American consultancy helping companies in Moscow. With two colleagues he set up a small business and found it agreed with him. Shortly afterwards he moved to the West and began his entrepreneurship in earnest.
While it might seem obvious in hindsight that Buterin was always destined to live in the West, it was more coincidental than planned. A love of foreign languages and a very open emigration policy, especially for software engineers, in Canada, made the move easy and the rest is history.
As the father of the father of Ethereum, it might be expected that Buterin drove the interest early to his son, but in fact Bitcoin largely left Buterin cold. He could see it was an interesting technology but it was Vitalik that dragged Buterin into the sector.
“At the start Bitcoin only resonated as a cool technology and I could not imagine the implications. It was only as I moved more into a libertarian mind frame that I could start to see its use in terms of politics and society.
It was at this stage that I asked Buterin if he had found his tribe in the world of cryptocurrencies and he replied: “Humanity is my tribe.”
He pointed out that there are all kinds of people in this space, some pretty awesome ones, but there are also some pretty rigid communities.
“Bitcoin doesn’t interest me as much now – the community is too rigid. My personal belief is that technology has to evolve. The world is constantly changing and evolving and so too must technology.
“I learnt a lot from the beginning watching the messy, crazy, disorganized, decentralized process and there was a lot of beauty that came out of that.
“At the same time, I compared it with big centralized systems – such as the state and the church – but they are all incredibly fragile, depending on the leaders at top. Well, sometimes the leaders are smart, but sometimes they are scared, sometimes angry, sometimes reactive. It’s like a human body, this very complicated, incorrect, sometimes fragile and beautiful, overall a messy system.
“To me, decentralized systems work much better because they are based on human consensus. And if you look around the world these systems are evolving, nothing stays the same and some appear to be working better than others. This to me is beautiful, this messy life, finding better ways to work in the flow of life.”
As a retired father of two teenage girls, he is very busy. He also dabbles in AI art and finds technology endlessly fascinating. He also mentors entrepreneurs. And he is learning Turkish, a language that is not easy to master despite his interest.
He is enjoying a playfulness, perhaps not available to the young man growing up in the old Soviet, and still reads extensively, mostly books on philosophy or at least books that try to explain what it means to be human.
“To be honest, I have my own very unique peculiar perspective that very few people can understand or even fathom what the fuck I am talking about. All I know is that I am less attached to knowledge than I was. Everyone’s perspective is unique and I have very different views from my friends, my son, and other people but that’s perfectly fine because I am not them.”
With that in mind, I finally ask what advice he might give to a mentee or even his sixteen-year-old self, and he answers.
“It’s all basically bullshit because there is no one answer. Sure, read business books and look for models that might suit, but everyone is unique and the advice would not suit. There is no right or wrong way. I would have been disciplined but what about creativity, what about sensitivity, and opening your heart to your life? There is no one way, every way is unique.”
If you ever feel useless, think about the guy or girl that writes terms and conditions.
Nobody in the adequate state of mind would think about reading anything like that… right? Well, even though 99.9% of the world’s population would toss the ToS to the side, there are dozens of us who will go through all that legalese trouble to be in that 0.1 percentile.
Enter the madlad/ladette from Reddit who did the unthinkable and read the terms of service from all the major crypto exchanges so you guys wouldn’t have to. Not all heroes wear capes, and today I’d like to highlight his/her work, while adding some of my thoughts on the matter.
It will be an eye opening experience for some of you, I can guarantee that.
Why Would Someone Read The Terms of Service?
Terms of Service, eh? Nobody has time for them.
Can’t even click ‘Accept’, you can only agree with them and hope that nothing bad will ever happen to you or your assets when we’re talking about exchanges. Well boo-hoo, because it appears that in some cases customer assets do not actually belong to them. Oh, it’s true!
Celsius ‘Earn’ assets belong to a bankrupt crypto lender, for example. The judge read the ToS papers from Celsius which clearly stated that Celsius took possession of crypto assets deposited into its Earn product.
Suffice to say, that line in the document dealt a blow to the hopes of customers who planned to recoup funds from the company. Celsius held around $4.2 billion in various cryptocurrencies in its ‘Earn’ product, with $23 million of that being in stablecoins.
This little incident motivated the researcher to look into insurance and the ownership of assets specifically.
You Won’t Like What’s Coming Next!
The situation is ‘bowling shoe ugly’, one could say.
In the year of our Lord 2023 we have a buttload of crypto exchanges, most of which have millions of users and a gazillion of funds. Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, Crypto.com, OKX, MEXC, Gate.io, Huobi, Nexo, ByBit… We also had the fallen Mt. Gox and FTX that were subjected to a post mortem study of terms.
From the aforementioned list, only three exchanges clearly state that the assets are yours, and only two exchanges provide some semblance of insurance. The overlap of those ‘perks’ happens only on one occasion. Can you guess who are some of the good guys without looking into the cheat sheet? I’ll give you a minute to make your bets. Gamble responsibly… Ready?
Three companies that respect your ownership of assets on paper are: Coinbase, Kraken, and I shit you not, FTX. This is awkwardly funny. When it comes to insurance, Coinbase specifies that user assets are insured by up to $250,000, as long as they’re in USD format within your wallet.
Crypto.com states that insurance only comes in motion for unauthorized transactions limited to $250,000. Quarter of a mil is a magical number for exchanges, it seems. Even then, clients have to open a request and submit proof, and the exchange reserves the right to determine whether a transaction was unauthorized or not. Plus Crypto.com exempt themselves from paying you if the services are closed for any reason whatsoever.
So even with insurance, you could be S.O.L.
They Have No Shame, And That’s OK
The situation is dire, absolutely, but this should not shock us as much as it does.
Biggest crypto exchanges in the world have no care for your financial stability, they write those Terms of Services to protect their own backside in court. Think about it the next time you’re logging in to make a deposit.
But wait, who’s the main villain? We need a scapegoat. Is it Binance, the market leader who claims that they have no obligation towards us when we’re using their services? The company that spams you with ‘gain 10x on your investment’ emails even though it asks not to treat any of their communication as financial advice? Nope.
That’s not the worst offense, sadly. Enter OKX!
Are you ready for some ‘irreconcilable shortfall’, sunshine?
When the OKX Platform is unable to operate properly and the user is unable to access the Services or place or cancel an order, they assume no liability for damages.
On the ownership side, even if the assets are considered to be in your name, you’re not entitled to anything in the case of a default insolvency. OKX reserves the right to register your funds in either their or a custodian’s name. That sounds fun!
Then again, what could we expect? Some of us who have been in crypto since Mt. Gox might know that the infamous fallen giant had no ToS whatsoever and was ‘protected by Norton’.
This is the reality that we live in, folks. Exchanges can change their terms anytime, so it is not a place where your funds would ever be safe. Use exchanges as exchanges, buy a cold wallet and move your funds there when possible.
All the crypto heads know the phrase ‘Not your keys, not your crypto’, but they still think that their exchange of choice is too big to fail. Nobody is! Be sensible, do not put too much faith in companies that write black on white that they don’t own you a thing.
Interview with Thomas Walls, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Liberland
August 2023 is an amazing time for Liberland, with a formal border crossing set up in cooperation with Croatia for the first time ever. Thomas Walls, Minister of Foreign Affairs, speaks to the Liberland Press about the experience of crossing into Liberland for the first time.
“Access is via roundabout way. You cannot cross from Serbia, and you have to go to Croatia but the amazing thing is that Croatians are letting us in, not without some difficulty, but they are letting us in,” says Thomas.
Basically, Liberland citizens and visitors must drive to Croatia to Batina or Zmajevac, park the car and then continue the crossing on foot or via bicycle. The actual road into Liberland has been closed to cars. There is also a shuttle boat going twice a day from Batina to the Liberty, moored on the Croatian shore just north of the entrance to Liberland. Border guards will then check the passports before allowing people through.
“This is the first time since the foundation of Liberland that we are allowed to enter Liberland.”
Thomas is truly delighted, although he advises would-be travelers not to get Liberland immigration stamps in their passports as that might cause some delay at Croatian border crossings.
“We don’t recommend at this time that you get a Liberland stamp in your passport.”
The de facto border crossings are manned by Croatian border police. Another way to enter Liberland is via the river.
“You can board the Liberty, or indeed one of your own boats, and park up just past the 17-kilometer sign – this has been agreed by the Croatian police – and then go ashore.
“This has been my dream ever since I got involved, and my second dream has been to bike across Liberland, both of which I have now done.
“I haven’t run out of dreams yet,” says Thomas with a big smile on his face.
The settlement was only established the week before. The place chosen for the settlement is actually the site of the old ruined hunting lodge that was there in the beginning. Over the years, the building fell down and then the stones were towed away in 2018, but as President Vít Jedlička and the other settlers set up camp, they discovered they had chosen the self-same spot.
This discovery was prompted by another: It transpired there is a fully complete basement still on the site, it was built like a bomb shelter and survived attempts at demolition. To celebrate this find, President Vit placed a bottle of good Croatian wine in the cellar and declared it the first wine cellar in Liberland. The Liberlanders plan to restore the old lodge in good time, as the foundation stones are still there.
Liberland has also acquired a small fleet of bicycles for visitors to enjoy to travel across the seven square kilometers of land.
Caption: Jan Purkrabek (CZ) and Nicolas Mateos (ARG) accompanying Thomas Wall on a bike ride across Liberland
While Croatia is allowing Liberland citizens and friends to access the land, they are also imposing Croatian law over the settlement. Some of these laws forbid closed tents or open fires.
“So, we have open tents; a mess tent for the kitchen and a meeting tent. We have even set up the internet so that people can work, check their emails or even livestream from Liberland.”
To facilitate this service, Thomas was joined by Chief of Staff, Petr Krovina, up a large tree to find the optimum coverage for their wireless router. There is also a grill, a gas stove, chemical toilets and a generator. However, the recent arrival of solar panels will be erected to alleviate the need for the gasoline generator.
“There are no hot showers as yet, but we are working hard to make it as comfortable as possible.”
Thomas does warn non-EU citizens to register with the Croatian authorities. In a hangover from communism, anyone visiting who is not staying in a hotel or approved accommodation must register with the authorities or face a fine and possible eviction.
“I was treated well, paid my fine, exited Liberland and was then allowed to return. We advise all people visiting to be polite and respectful of the Croatian authorities even if the rules seem a little strange. Also, when exiting Croatia, please avoid talking about Liberland; it’s just not helpful at this stage.”
When asked how this has been achieved this year, Thomas points to a couple of milestones. Croatia had always considered the land of Liberland to belong to Serbia and has policed it as such, but earlier this year, Croatian joined the Schengen group of nations allowing free transit without visas for member countries. Then President Vit had met with the UK Youtuber, Niko Omilana, famous for his pranks and parody videos. Niko decided he wanted to enter Liberland (before the new border crossings allowed for this) to gain his Liberland citizenship. He made this successful attempt into a video complete with images of the Croatian police chasing him. This video racked up more than 7 million views.
Then President Vit met with President Zoran Milanović of Croatia. Nowadays with a more open dialogue between the two countries, Liberland is looking at ways of being more friendly and perhaps working together on tourism opportunities – after all, some 700,000 people from across the world have expressed an interest in becoming a Liberland citizen.
For Thomas, this is a more than exciting moment in the history of one of the smallest new countries in the world. When President Vit first claimed the terra nullius that was to become Liberland seven years ago, Thomas immediately was interested and it turns out they had friends in common. In addition, Thomas had collected studies on landmines left over from the breakup of Yugoslavia in the region.
“Luckily there were none abandoned in Liberland.”
Thomas also had some diplomatic experience as an American working in Hamburg, Bonn and Berlin, Germany and was invited to become the representative for the United States.
“I worked for the late Richard Holbrooke when he was posted as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Later he brought the warring former Yugoslav Republics together at the Dayton Peace Accords. Our politics differed a bit, but he was a great man to work for and a true diplomat. When Liberland came about, I was delighted to be offered such a great opportunity and work with another great man, my friend Vit. I was very keen to help promote individual freedom on an international scale. As Liberland sought to expand its international relations, I was invited to become the Minister of Foreign Affairs, a post I readily accepted.”
Thomas works closely with the Liberland Secretary of State, Dr Tariq Abbasi, in creating a movement to secure international recognition for Liberland. In the last couple of years, things have moved on apace with a delegation sent to Bitcoin-friendly El Salvador, where the Liberland Aid Foundation made a generous donation to the children’s hospital, acknowledged with gratitude by President Nayib Bukele.
“But having access to our own land is a crucial achievement for Liberland. And to have set up a settlement with amenities is a huge step forward. We have our own constitution, drawn up border laws, police laws and even established our own blockchain.”
For upto date instructions on how to enter Liberland – keep an eye on the offical government website
Sean Rach, co founder of hi.com in conversation with Liberland Press editor, Jillian Godsil
Two years ago, Sean Rach was speaking from his serviced offices in Hong Kong about an idea he had to bring easy-to-use cryptocurrency to the masses. Lots of ideas were flown with ease-of-use dominating the conversation.
Initially, Hi.com was looking to grow customers without anyone having to download an app. The founders looked at the Telegram platform, preferred by Web3 aficionados, and employed gamification techniques especially with regard to referrals.
“What if a user on the Telegram channel could come on and say ‘hi’ to a bot and we would give them tokens – would they do this every day?” Rach remembers. He stresses it had to be easy. Users would open accounts and then just interact in Telegram. The rewards were building up in their accounts – which over time made them valuable – and at that point to extract the value the customer had to complete KYC.
By November 2021, the member numbers had grown organically to 2 million (today there are more than 3.5 million). There was traction and Rach and his team gambled on releasing an app.
“We didn’t have to chase people at this stage and in a short period we had more than 2 million downloads, and nearly 1 million of those were KYC’ed.”
Rach stresses that they were not just in the business of building a wallet. “We concentrated on Europe where IBANs allow for the easy transfer of fiat money. We partnered with a licensed bank and we are growing a platform where all the best features of both crypto and fiat are available on the same platform.”
One of the hardest challenges for online financial platforms is to provide a debit card, as opposed to a prepaid card. Rach points to the achievement that Hi.com can offer a true debit card that is tied to the wallet and can use a range of different tokens or stablecoins as the user balance.
“You can select what is the reserve balance and we look after the conversion. This makes it so much easier on users who no longer have to go off and convert their tokens via an exchange and move the money to a wallet or card to make it spendable. This all happens within the app.
“We brought this crazy idea to Mastercard and they loved it. We went one step further – we allow users to personalize their hi.com debit cards using NFTs that are certified to belong to the user.”
It was this move that led them to Animoca Brands. Rach and Yat Siu already knew each other as both were based in Hong Kong. Today Animoca Brands has a huge ecosystem with popular games and communities. Part of the investment programme allows for Animoca Brands to list popular tokens from its ecosystem on the app, and allows the community to spend their tokens such as SAND or APE easily.
“We’ve come a long way,” says Rach. “We now consider the hi app a Web3, Crypto Neo Bank – it’s online, includes crypto and NFTs.”
Partnering with Animoca Brands is a huge step for hi.com. “Yat Siu and Animoca Brands have carved out a really impressive reach and ecosystem in this space, especially in the gaming and NFT space. The equity investment is important but even more is their experience and ecosystem while we can provide utility for their communities and tokens.”
This is the first big equity play for hi.com. Up until that point, the company had been bootstrapped and then participating in a select token sale with a number of institutional investors.
“This is our first partner,” says Rach. “The funds will be focused on product development and we have lots of core features coming down the tracks.”
One upcoming feature is a Buy Now Pay Later function, only in hi.com it’s called Buy Now, Convert Later.
“A user, who might be a hodler, believes bitcoin will still increase in value, so they use their asset to buy now and we basically offer them a line of credit for a small fee. In turn, they can convert their bitcoin later on, and if they are right, they’ve increased the value of the asset while still having purchased the item previously.”
hi.com also has plans to offer financial services to small and medium sized businesses through a series of partners.
The official overview of the partnership, and it is still in MOU and subject to agreement on definitive terms, is that Animoca Brands will invest US$30 million in Hi.com and collaborate on a number of exciting initiatives. The two companies’ shared vision aims to amplify the utility of fungible tokens and NFTs within the Web3 space. The partnership is expected to lead to deep integration between Animoca Brands’ ecosystem and hi’s innovative services that are driving Web3 mass adoption. With a strong focus on boosting the hi ecosystem, anchored by the hi App – a cutting-edge financial super app for Web3 – and the hi Protocol (hiP) – a scalable, EVM compatible, Sybil-resistant layer-2 sidechain for Ethereum – the two companies will work to provide developers with a unique-human authentication mechanism through hiP’s groundbreaking Proof of Human Identity (PoHI) solution.
Yat Siu, the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said: “We are looking forward to investing in and partnering with hi, which is committed to bridging the gap between the fiat and cryptocurrency worlds. As part of this partnership, we will collaborate with hi on its continued development of the hi App and the hi Protocol to drive positive impact for the broader Web3 ecosystem.”
Maria Matyushina, Unique Network, shares her journey into Web3
Maria Matyushina does not do comfortable. Instead, she enjoys pushing herself in new experiences and challenges. This is reflected in her hobbies where she thrives on extreme activities such as paragliding and parachuting. Next on her bucket list is diving with manta rays.
“I don’t do these activities every week but I love a challenge and a new adventure,” she says.
The same love of adventure has turned her career on its head from a legal beginning to managing a team of engineers at a top Web3 NFT company.
“You know, when I was growing up, girls were not expected to do tech so I chose a more ‘suitable’ profession like law, but I was always interested in tech – and learning.” Today Matyushina is an ambassador for Women in Tech but it wasn’t a straight road.
“I want young women to know they can do anything. It’s very important that they can see choices – like they can wear yellow instead of pink.”
She earned her degree in business law before obtaining a crisis management certification. For eight years, she worked as a high-level bankruptcy lawyer and manager, always seeking to incorporate modern instruments into her and her fellow co-workers’ day-to-day work.
Her interest in technology led her to pursue a LegalTech director course and her career journey took an exciting turn when she pivoted towards the role of IT business analyst. There, she embarked on a mission to construct an ERP system from scratch, showcasing remarkable ability in the tech arena. However, she yearned to expand her expertise in more innovative spheres.
As part of this decision, Matyushina redid her CV and emphasized her passion for technology. She also scoured for jobs in new tech and saw that analytic roles came up all the time.
“I wasn’t familiar with analytics but I know I am smart so I could learn it and by a series of coincidences my CV ended up in the hands of a CTO who wanted an analyst to conduct research with lawyers. Of course, with my degree and work I already knew some answers so I was hired.”
Matyushina’s advice to other people wanted to move career is to do similar:
“Find a connection between what you know and where you want to work – for me my career in law opened the door.”
Funnily enough Matyushina first heard of Bitcoin on the popular US comedy, Big Bang Theory, but when she researched the area, it seemed too hard at first.
In 2021, after spending a considerable amount of time researching various technology fields, she stumbled upon a podcast episode discussing NFT technology. She was fascinated and decided to delve deeper into blockchain technology.
By incredible chance, a few weeks later, she received a job opportunity to work as a project manager for a global startup building an NFT blockchain. Despite lacking prior experience in this field, she eagerly accepted the invitation to interview.
“It can be confusing with wallets, hashes, private keys etc but I was so lucky in my next job to join an amazing team that was eager to help me learn.”
She was hired as project manager at Unique Network – a blockchain company developing advanced NFT technology in the sophisticated technology ecosystem of Polkadot. In this role, she spearheaded the effort to craft an innovative blockchain infrastructure, leading a team of developers. Her exceptional leadership and guidance propelled the company’s impressive growth, cementing her status as a key player in the ecosystem. This paved the way for her swift promotion to Director of Engineering within 1 year.
As for the future of NFTs, Matyushina is practical.
“If anyone had a clear answer, they’d be rich. But I can see a development from simple NFTs, such as the Bored Apes, to increased utility. I love what we are doing at Unique – we are building new, advanced use cases.
“The world needs to catch up – can we trade NFTs, can we pay taxes with it. If you want to tokenise your apartment and see it for bitcoins as an NFT – can you do this?”
There are two main current challenges facing the NFTs according to Matyushina. The first is the aforementioned lack of advanced use cases.
“And the second is the lack of legal regulation so we can push through.”
You can take the woman out of the law, but not the law out of the woman. Watch this space.
Fascinated by NFTs, Abel Sebhatu decided to fix the issue of complexity and difficulty surrounding their production. In short, he wanted the process of creating an NFT to be as easy as sending a message.
His background is technical, having studied mathematics and mathematical engineering, and for the six years prior to founding his NFT platform, he worked in a mixture of sectors, some outside crypto and some directly related. His non-crypto work was with a start-up in the Netherlands helping small farmers in the developing world become more productive. In the crypto world he worked with decentralized storage, DeFi and NFTs.
His interest in crypto stretched back to college where his software engineering teacher told him about Bitcoin in 2017. He gave the class the project of building on DuckCoin in the middle of the ICO hype.
“I was really interested. He taught us about the philosophy of money and after the assignment I did some research. I started with Bitcoin, then moved to Ethereum and was basically hooked.”
At the heart of Sebhatu’s platform Atriv.ai is the vision to make NFTs simple. Artists using the site are introduced to a studio where they can experiment with prompts to make art in the form of NFTs.
“The push is to use technology to simplify the tokenization of art.”
Users start their journey on the platform by experimenting with prompts to create unique artwork. Once they’re happy with the results, they can generate multiple pieces based on the final prompt, forming a collection. The next step involves setting up their smart contract needs and uploading this collection to IPFS, generating metadata in the process. This metadata is then linked with the smart contract, which is ready for deployment. Once the smart contract is live, users can set up their own mint page to display their artwork. A special URL is created for this page, which can be shared with friends. Alternatively, users can choose to list their NFTs on our marketplace using a process known as ‘lazy minting’. Atriv.ai provides a simple, comprehensive solution that enables users to transform their creativity into NFTs with ease.
“Atriv’s NFT Marketplace.”
Atriv’s all-in-one NFT platform is designed to realize the full potential of digital art by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). The platform acts as a comprehensive solution for artists, businesses, and collectors, simplifying the process of creating and issuing NFTs.
“Artists can send the custom URL to their friends and community and encourage them to mint and purchase their NFTs. We want to make it so easy that even your grandmother can do it.”
Sebhatu chose to partner with Flare blockchain for his project. Asked why, he is very clear.
“Flare is a very interesting blockchain with many great features. Its focus on thrustless data acquisition from other chains and the internet was a big factor in our decision to come to Flare. The core protocols enable interoperability and we want to help our community create anywhere and have the ability to collect payments in different currencies.”
By making art creation and tokenization more accessible, Atriv.ai will encourage a new wave of digital artists and collectors to join the Flare community. Its integration with Flare will bring powerful NFT capabilities to the Layer 1 network and enable creators to devise unique NFT collections with no technical experience required.
Furthermore, Atriv.ai will be utilizing Flare’s cross-chain technology by integrating the State Connector. This will allow users to mint an NFT on Flare with payment on another chain, e.g. Bitcoin, Doge, Litecoin.
Hugo Philion, CEO & Co-founder of Flare, commented, “We are excited to welcome Atriv to Flare to push the boundaries of AI-generated NFTs and harness Flare’s native interoperability protocols to enhance cross-chain accessibility.”
At the same time, Atriv.ai has been accepted onto Google’s Web3 start-up programme which is a huge feather in their cap.
Asked about the roadmap and future plans, Sebhatu says it is busy:
“Currently, we are doing a lot of development in our dashboard. We are also working on personalised minting pages and the marketplace will be in phase two.
“We are at the forefront of experimentation, focusing on the automated generation and creation of in-game assets using AI for developers interested in web3 gaming. Our mission is focused on simplifying the process of creation and tokenization of digital items in this rapidly evolving space,” he concludes.
Introducing Barciocco visionary creator of NFTs such as The Dip Collection.
Barciocco’s art style is based on the research of holographic special effects, unusual points of view and fresh and dynamic animations.
Interview with Artist Barciocco
Can you tell us a story about what brought you to the world of NFTs? I have a crypto-trader friend who, knowing my creative skills, encouraged me to discover NFTs at the end of 2020. I didn’t listen to it right away but when Beeple auctioned it off with Christie’s for 21 million, my nerves shot up.
What or who inspired you to pursue your career as an artist? Before NFTs I believed digital art could only be a machine for likes and engagement. I started to mint on Tezos because it’s cheap and seeing that I was able to sell a few editions my enthusiasm skyrocketed.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting NFT projects you are working on now? I love doing collaborations with other artists and think it’s the best way to connect in this world. I also like to create a safe space for beginners who want to discover the potential of this technology, which is why I created and manage the Italian NFT spaghetti community (@nftspaghi).
Was there a time when you did not believe in yourself? How did this impact your choices? self-esteem is an asset, especially for artists. So, when things go wrong, I treat myself like I treat my investments, resisting the urge to sell out. HODL!
So, how are things going today? What is your recipe for success? I’m not so important that I can lecture anyone. But I have spoken to several big players in the sector and what they have taught me is to always remain humble and keep working head down.
Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you first entered the NFT space? Over-minting for sure. When I started selling some editions I was seized by euphoria and minted many works that going back perhaps I would not mint.
Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that? Minting a token is an irreversible operation. Even if you own all editions and decide to burn them, the blockchain history will still be tainted with your decisions.
Which tips would you recommend to NFT artists starting out? Take all the time you need to study the market, understand what works and why. Ask many questions to those who you believe know more than you. None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story? I thank my friends Nico Granz, RagingTaz and Maver0 who have supported me over the years in creating and managing the NFT spaghetti community.
What are your “3 things I wish someone told me before I minted my first NFT,” and why? Minting a token is an irreversible action. Do it with extreme awareness. Don’t let the fomo pinch you. In the web3 space many opportunities are created in a very short time. Analyse everything well. Don’t be discouraged if no one buys your NFTs, you have to be patient and get involved in the community.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive? My artworks are a unique cocktail of introspection and special effects. If you let them, they will speak directly to your soul. My Italian community is one of the few that doesn’t ask anyone for money and doesn’t offer financial transactions of any kind. We are a healthy group of online friends who help each other out and I am very proud of that.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by artists and the NFT industry today? The scepticism of those on the outside. NFT technology is still hand in hand with cryptocurrencies and therefore every scandal that overwhelms them also affects this sector. Perhaps when it can be minted on a globally trusted blockchain, the NFT market will become truly sustainable.
All my socials and marketplaces links can be found here.
Now in its ninth year of existence, the country of Liberland is being joined by a digital version, the Liberverse. Designed by Mirek Kaspar, developer and entrepreneur, he is providing the citizens of Liberland with a means of engaging with the new country without necessarily having to travel in person to the country.
Mirek is using Unreal Engine, which is used in the development of video games and is quite possibly the most advanced real time rendering technology available. It allows developers to create images in the most photorealistic, interactive manner, so much so that it is hard to differentiate between photography and the images created.
To access Liberverse, please visit Liberserse.net. There are options to download the software or alternatively to stream directly from their browser: the browser does not offer full features but is an easy way to get a quick feeling for the metaverse.
Today we can announce another new development in Liberverse – the Expo – and I decided to explore this new facility in the company of Mirek. He is currently based in Greece (his nomadic life is covered here) and I am in Ireland. So, we started a zoom call and he shared his screen to show me how the Expo works.
It is better to download the software and once done you can personalise your avatar with a range of colours – there are plans in the future to bring in meta-humans which as it sounds can actively and accurately resemble real people.
In the demo, Mirek changed his avatar into the colours of Liberland and then showed me how to move his avatar towards a transport platform.
Confession – I tried initially to do this myself but only using the streaming version, I found it more difficult to move my avatar and after some very funny stoppages where I managed to freeze my avatar, we agreed to let Mirek demonstrate on his screen.
Mirek moved confidently up the ramp onto the platform. There were two choices – Meeting Place and Houseboat Showcase. He opted for Meeting Place and waited for the next pod to arrive. This duly happened in less than 60 seconds and he (we?) boarded onto the pod and soon were sailing through the air to another pod. Looking down it felt familiar. I did visit Liberland in 2019 for the Floating Man Festival and the scenery was just like the rich green vegetation and the blue Danube I remembered.
At the next transport platform, we dismounted and moved to a new platform, marked for Expo. Again it took less than 60 seconds for a new pod to arrive, we boarded the new vehicle and soon again sped across the land until we reached the Expo area.
This is a collection of brightly coloured blocks where Liberlanders can post images or videos of their business or passion. Anyone can just email Mirek on mirek@liberverse.net for more details and he will post the images (512 pixels by 512) on the booth.
Currently it is free but there are plans to charge going forward
It is a great way to showcase the passions of Liberlanders and Mirek has many more features to unveil over the coming months.
For the past month, Mirek has been focused on making the application available to all platforms, enhancing the streaming options and also working on mobile versions. In the future he plans to add an NFT marketplace, create a meta quest using VR as well as allowing developers to create their own apps for the platform (for devs go to the Liberverse.net site and click on the Creator button).
“Anyone can create an app, quest, game for Liberverse and we can integrate it. It’s also very code neutral so you don’t have to be a total dev to have a go,” says Mirek.
Mirek has also mapped out the land into equal segments which are going to be minted into NFTs for people to own. These land parcels will be minted onto the Liberland blockchain and people will need to hold a polkadot wallet to hold them.
“We haven’t quite worked out the details but we encourage people to get involved early,” he says.
Fidelity, a prominent player in asset management, is nearing the completion of its application for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). This move places them among numerous issuers who are eager to be the first to introduce such a product to the market.
After being denied by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in early 2022 for their previous attempt with the Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust, Fidelity is making a second endeavour in the form of a bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Bitcoin ETFs
Since their inception in 1993, ETFs have gained significant popularity among retail investors as they provide a convenient means to invest in a diversified portfolio of assets. For instance, if an investor wishes to gain exposure to the 500 largest American companies simultaneously, they can achieve this by purchasing shares in an S&P 500 ETF.
Similar to traditional ETFs, a Bitcoin ETF operates in a comparable manner. Investors can acquire shares in the ETF through their preferred brokerage, just as they would when purchasing stocks like Apple or Tesla. These shares can be traded in a similar fashion, providing investors with the flexibility to buy and sell them as desired.
Why don’t people just buy Bitcoin? Many ordinary retail investors perceive Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as inherently risky. Apart from the ambiguous regulations surrounding them, owning Bitcoin involves the responsibility of managing a Bitcoin wallet and placing trust in crypto exchanges. These aspects are unfamiliar territory for individuals who lack knowledge and experience in the field, necessitating a certain level of self-education.
By investing in a Bitcoin ETF, individuals can alleviate concerns related to private keys, storage, and security. Similar to traditional stock investments, investors own shares in the ETF, enabling them to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency market without the need to navigate the complexities of purchasing and holding cryptocurrencies directly.
However, there are notable distinctions between a Bitcoin ETF and other types of ETFs.
Firstly, certain ETFs, such as those tracking the S&P 500, encompass equity shares. Consequently, investors receive a portion of the dividends paid by the companies within the ETF. For example, if an ETF includes Tesla and Tesla distributes dividends, shareholders of the ETF would receive a proportionate dividend. In contrast, Bitcoin operates in a decentralized manner, so a Bitcoin ETF does not offer the opportunity to receive such dividends.
Secondly, akin to other ETFs, investors are required to pay fees to the ETF provider. In the case of a Bitcoin ETF, a portion of these fees would be allocated to cover the custody and management expenses associated with the acquisition and safekeeping of the underlying Bitcoin held by the ETF.
Additional reporting by Washington D.C. Representative Pranav Badhwar
The Free Republic of Liberland proudly opened its representative office to the United States in Washington, D.C. on May 23rd, 2023, marking a significant milestone in the country’s journey. This event cemented Liberland’s position in U.S. politics and served as a testament to its commitment to international engagement.
The opening ceremony was attended by esteemed government officials, including President Vít Jedlička, Vice President Bogie Wozniak, Minister of Foreign Affairs Thomas Walls, Minister of Finance Navid Saberin, Deputy Interior Minister Daniel Flora, U.S. Representative for Liberland David Molineaux, Washington D.C. Representative Pranav Badhwar, and Liberland Aid Foundation President Steve Wood, along with First Lady Jana Markovičová.
Rabbi Yoav Altman, representatve of the Dominican Republic, also spoke and said that Liberland is a 21st century evolution of governement and freedom.
Their presence, alongside a gathering of dedicated Liberland representatives, citizens, and e-residents from around the globe, highlighted the broad support and influence that Liberland has garnered.
Vice President Bogie Wozniak expressed his enthusiasm, stating, “We are thrilled to establish our presence in Washington, D.C., a critical step towards fostering collaboration and the exchange of ideas at the highest levels. Our new representative office will enable us to refine our diplomatic efforts and engage with our most important international partners.”
The evening was masterfully orchestrated by Jenna Kady who enthused, “It was an absolutely magical evening! The Liberland Representative Office in Washington, D.C. represents a pivotal moment in our pursuit of sovereignty and decentralized governance.”
Michael Andrew, a board member of the Liberland Aid Foundation, praised the support provided by Brock Pierce, co-founder of Block.one/EOS, who facilitated the establishment of the office and offered invaluable assistance from his Foundation staff.
Washington D.C. Representative Pranav Badhwar addressed the gathering with the theme of Liberland’s motto “Live and Let Live”, highlighting the significance of consent as Liberland’s moral foundation, noting his pleasure at returning the torch of liberty to the nation which birthed it in modern times.
Foreign Minister Thomas Walls said, “It’s amazing to welcome so many Liberlanders, along with esteemed Congressional and Embassy staff, to our opening. We are thrilled to express our national identity in the presence of such honored guests—an identity founded on individual freedom and decentralized technology. This truly marks the dawning of a new era.”
Adding to the grandeur of the occasion, world-renowned musician Scott Page graced the rooftop reception with his mesmerizing saxophone performance. Page, known for his exceptional contributions to legendary bands such as Pink Floyd, Supertramp, and Toto, enthralled the audience.
The opening of Liberland’s United States office in Washington, DC, follows the successful establishment of the Liberland Representative Office in Mexico in February. These milestones signify the country’s dedication to international collaboration. With the unwavering support of a global community united by the ideal of peaceful relations between all people, Liberland eagerly anticipates forging new alliances across the world stage.
Kevin Jones of KJA Agency tells his story about how he went from being an artist to managing more than 500 artists. Anyone wanting to explore more can purchase tickets to the Digital Assets and Web3 Garden Party on Thursday 23rd June, London – visit website here
Backstory …
Kevin’s story is fascinating – moving from artist, and acclaimed illustrator to manager of some 500 plus artists happened almost by accident. It wasn’t something that Kevin Jones planned but sometime in the middle of his 30 year plus career he realised he was managing other artists rather than creating himself. In a career dedicated to art this wasn’t such a bad thing he decided and carried on to create one of the top illustration and animation agencies in the UK: the KJA Artists Agency.
His own career holds many plaudits. Back in the 1980s he was commissioned to illustrate the cover of the controversial spy novel, SpyCatcher written by Peter Wright, ex MI5 officer, which had to be published in Australia rather than the UK where it was banned by the British Government. The book went on to sell millions of copies making Wright a millionaire and Jones’ work one of the most viewed covers at the time. He was also responsible for the redesign and illustration of the Batman imagery for the relaunched Tim Burton films. Under the direction of Anton Furst, the production designer, Jones illustrated the now iconic modern Batman logos. Furst went on to win an Academy Award for overseeing the new film designs and Jones had the pleasure of seeing people mob bus shelters to break the glass of advertising signage and steal the Batman posters with his logo.
Closer to home and more recently, his young son was playing Rocket League, a video game, which offered up the Batmobile car with Jones’ logo as an asset to buy. “Possibly one of my most proud moments when my son realised, I created that logo,” says Jones.
Sadly, these successes also included the signing away of IP of the designs.
“Otherwise, I might be now extremely wealthy. However, I was well paid back in the day, so I don’t really have any regrets. It also helped that I was a huge Batman fan from the ‘60s.”
Jones has only ever worked in art and illustration. “I think it’s because I couldn’t do anything else. The change from sitting in front of a drawing board – because that was before PCs – to project managing many talented people was hard to give up but also the right decision.”
It helps that Jones has an eclectic taste in art and is always on the lookout for new talent.
“I naturally like new, bright, shiny things. I like modern work and I love colour and vibrancy. I am, as it happens, very well suited to being a curator and agent and I love my job.”
While Jones doesn’t really like to pick favourite artists, he mentions the late Edward Hopper and his 1942 ‘Night Hawkes’ painting.
“I fell in love with that painting the first time I saw it – the dark brooding lighting and voyeurism really spoke to me.”
Another artist, living this time, Chris Offili and his use of lacquered elephant dung in his art, really appealed to Jones. “It was just so unusual in the UK at that time and I guess that is what appealed. Often artists have to do crazy things to get noticed.”
For Kevin, art is important in that it reflects the culture at that time. He sees it as a time capsule.
“Art can have a profound impact on businesses and the economy. Overall, art has the power to enrich culture, contribute to business success, and enhance brand perception by fostering creativity, emotional connections, and a sense of aesthetic appreciation.”
Moving over to digital art and NFTs, Jones points out that his introduction to blockchain and cryptocurrencies had a somewhat jaundiced start. His company was attacked by the Wanna Cry virus in 2017 which scrambled more than 40,000 images on the KJA artists site.
“The malware operator was asking for a ransom in Bitcoin – which I had never heard of and didn’t pay. And it took us a years to recover.”
The entry of NFTs was far less frictioned with some of his more recent clients asking him about creating the art for their NFTs.
“But they only wanted to pay a few Dollars each for the artwork so that wouldn’t work. They also missed out on the fact that they really needed to build a community – otherwise nothing would sell.”
Instead, Jones headed off on a discovery journey to find out how they could help his artists directly both in the generation and curation of collections – as well as the sales. It has taken the guts of a year, but he is now in a position to announce his own NFT launchpad and a pipeline of artists about to launch their own NFT collections..
“It’s all about our experience of working directly with our artists and understanding their strengths. We want to raise the bar from the more frivolous and cheap digital art. We want to bring meaningful and beautifully executed art to the world of NFTs.”
The first artist to be featured on WhiteLightNFT.io, the launchpad created by Jones, is Guy Stauber who has been with KJA Artists for many years. Stauber has an amazing repertoire of art and has worked with giants such as Disney (Star Wars, Lucas Film, Avengers, Mandalorian, Black Panther etc), Fox and The Wall Street Journal. His collection is called the Digital Punk NFT collection and there is a total of only 999 NFTs.
“I call it a fusion of Sex Pistols swagger meeting Tokyo Futurism.”
For Jones this launch is only the beginning.
“The attraction and use of NFTs is unfolding daily. Ultimately, I see NFTS as a means to authenticate anything physical. The digital will validate the analogue. In time, I think NFTs as art and collectibles will involve more sophisticated platforms, enhanced digital experiences, increased integration with virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.”
Jones also sees a future role of NFTs to tokenise real-world assets.
“NFTs can facilitate the tokenisation of real-world assets such as real estate, art pieces, and luxury goods. It could enable fractional ownership for people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. In fact, the potential applications and impact of NFTs are vast, and we can expect continued innovation and exploration in this space. It’s a cliché to say but the only limit to NFTs is our imagination.”
A conversation with the co founder of Upland on his career and how he came to create one of the busiest metaverses today – Upland.me
Aged 16, German native Dirk Lueth spent a gap year in the States and was really impressed with the concept of the school yearbook, which was not common in Germany. When he returned to finish his schooling, he took this idea with him – launching both a love of writing and entrepreneurialism that would mark out his career.
While he claims not to be a good journalist, his track record shows a love of the written word both from his PhD research in private and state-controlled currencies or the fact that he co-founded the German edition of the Financial Times. In 2012 he also became advisor to an online publication called Fair Observer, a non-profit media organization that engages in citizen journalism and civic education.
Fair Observer is an interesting exercise in neutral reporting. The organisation relies on citizen-curated reporting but emphasizes 360-degree reporting where all angles of a situation or subject matter are collected and represented. An interesting counterpoint to the agenda-led, entertainment-focused, pop-culture shows popularised particularly in the US.
His writing began with a typewriter and coincided with the beginnings of the internet. Lueth knew that the internet was going to be big from the get-go.
“My first job was with a media company that was also very interested in technology. I knew that the internet would deliver entertainment and information at a fraction of traditional media’s cost and in a much faster way. That was where the idea for launching an innovative version of the FT with a strong online department in Germany emerged.”
A proud boast indeed, as it had to be funded via strategic investors namely the publishing houses Financial Times of Pearson and Gruner & Jahr of Bertelsmann as it was also before Venture Capital funding was commonplace.
Being an entrepreneur is core to Lueth’s passion, whether in writing or business. He became the lead mentor in the German Silicon Valley Accelerator and helped grow numerous startups in tech.
“I could see very clearly that the internet was going to change how we communicate and when combined with smartphones we were going to witness a lot of innovation.”
Lueth is not ashamed to admit he made some mistakes – but then that comes with the territory when one is ahead of the party. For example, he opted for Flash technology but was scuppered when Steve Jobs said it was useless for mobile.
“Our company at that time actually was just about starting to see product-market fit with good customers such as Lufthansa but I was forced to pivot to continue providing services to them.”
For Lueth, he came to digital currencies through gaming, which fed in nicely from his PhD. He was fascinated that games had their own currencies and the fact that value could be exchanged over the internet. In 2011 a friend told him about the Bitcoin whitepaper and while he did not see at this time why this approach to cryptography was more promising than others, he was interested.
“I bought some bitcoin in a back alley from someone in San Francisco and the seller literally handed me a piece of paper with all access information written on it – which I misplaced shortly after I tried it out. I’d love to find that piece of paper today but at that time it was more of a learning curve for me.”
“It was a little later that I discovered digital money was not limited to Bitcoin and that the concept of decentralisation was key to this new technology.”
Back in 2013 Lueth found himself pitching to Venture Capitalists – which had long time become more commonplace in Silicon Valley – but when he started talking about that in the future the transfer of value in the internet will be decentralised he could see their eyes glaze over.
“There are many times when I have been early and that was another such time.”
Lueth started attending Bitcoin meetups, where he met small groups of nerds like himself. At the time, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast.
By 2017, the rest of the world had started to catch up with Lueth and his fellow decentralisation advocates. He shared an idea with two friends who went on to become co-founders and the concept of Upland was formed.
“Initially, we took the inspiration of Monopoly because everyone knows the board game which means that fewer explanations would be needed and developed the basic idea of property trading into a digital format. We also had the hypothesis that most people have an emotional connection to the real world, which is why Upland is based on it, and we also realised that we had to go mobile first to make the game attractive and accessible to a mass audience.”
Another interesting choice was registering the platform under the website www.upland.me in 2018 where the ME stood for metaverse. However, Lueth and his co-founders did not use the word metaverse when pitching to investors and consumers because they thought it would be hard for people to understand.
“We just spoke about a parallel world or a virtual world to keep things simple.”
It worked and the trio successfully raised $18 million to build their digital world. Then in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg changed his company name to Meta, and suddenly it was okay to use the metaverse word openly.
But even the Metaverse needed and still needs repetitive explanations to the world. That was when he decided to go back to writing and co-author the book “Navigating the Metaverse” which became a best-seller on Amazon in 2022.
At the same time Upland started to grow very quickly. Going mobile first was a key advantage for Upland.me in gaining adoption, according to Lueth, and using the familiar and simple access method of email and password helped to onboard users with much less friction than other blockchain-based games where users need to deal with wallets, passphrases, and other complications.
“The third winner was to allow customers to use fiat to buy digital assets by using Paypal, credit cards or in-app purchasing.”
Being too decentralised at the beginning of a game or metaverse project can be risky because not everything can be thought of from the get-go. There is a cost curve of centralisation and one of decentralisation.
“We are looking for the intersection of those two cost curves and where they meet is the optimum for an economic system. Over time, when there are more people engaged in the economy the equilibrium shifts and it can make sense to introduce more decentralised control. This is what we call progressive decentralisation. It’s all a question of size, and the larger the community, the easier it becomes to devolve power.
“Now we’re in Super-App mode. The first and core feature Upland was buying and selling virtual properties – “think again: Monopoly”. But then, over time, we started adding more and more features for the owners and the visitors of the properties. Today we have so-called metaventures which are player-run shops to sell digital goods to other players. But the properties also function as hubs to other places in the metaverse, where developers can provide access to their own experiences connected to these properties. This includes building immersive spaces on those properties to add value to others – perhaps in the form of a café, an art gallery or a separate app where players can play an exciting game while bringing their identity from Upland and digital assets with them. These are real value add that will encourage new players into the wider Upland ecosystem.”
Building the wider ecosystem includes for Lueth also working with other metaverse platforms to make them interoperable, meaning that users can easily move between different worlds. To advance this vision, he co-founded and is now chairperson of the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 (www.oma3.org) where over 1,000 companies have registered and a subset is collaborating in working groups like “asset transfer” or “portaling and mapping”.
Important to note, like with all web3 games, there is a very strong emphasis on working with its community which is highly engaged in the Upland metaverse. Users gather together in so-called nodes in one of the virtual cities that are open in metaverse – even if they don’t live in these – and develop their neighbourhoods to their likening. They socialize on Discord, the in-app communication tool or in real life during local meetups and the in-person conference called “Genesis Week” in June every year.
Upland acquires users via traditional marketing and word-of-mouth. But also partnerships with the NFLPA, FIFA, Unicef and many others are key to attracting more people to the metaverse. Upland is certainly on the way to becoming the world’s largest metaverse with ten thousands of daily active wallets according to DappRadar.
“It’s not too late though for newbies,” Lueth emphasizes. “We have built-in what we call the Fair Start Act or FSA where less expensive properties are reserved for new players, especially as we open up new cities.
“We are currently live in 23 cities in the US, we’ve opened up London, Birmingham and Porto with more cities to come in Europe and we have a few cities open in Brazil and Argentina – oh and the first Asian cities are coming soon as well.”
Luckily for potential new Upland users they don’t have to be early adopters – unlike Lueth there is room for lots of stragglers yet to come.
Mirek Kaspar is a developer and entrepreneur. He is also the designer of Liberverse.net, a digital version of Liberland, which is intended to provide the citizens of Liberland with a means of engaging with the new country without necessarily having to travel in person to the country.
Kaspar is from the Czech Republic but for the past 10 years he and his girlfriend have lived as digital nomads all over Western and Southern Europe and the Canaries. They spent traveling and living in a converted van for over 3 years. Recently they moved onto a sailboat to travel farther and work onboard with the help of Starlink internet.
Kaspar really loves this lifestyle – the best part according to him is that if they get bored of where they are – they can just so easily move to another location.
Karpar first discovered Liberland by accident, when he saw President Vit Jedlicka on TV back in 2015 and he was really impressed. In 2021 he entered the bi-annual architecture competition to design the country. He didn’t win but it brought him closer to the country.
In 2022 he attended the Floating Man Festival in Liberland and met Vit properly.
“Vit realised I had some experience in using Unreal Engine, a popular real time rendering technology, and suggested we did something together,” says Kaspar.
The project that evolved turned out to be the Liberland Metaverse called Liberverse which aims to be a digital twin of Liberland, a place for anyone who wishes to connect with Liberland to visit digitally.
“We are just building now, and we are thinking how it might work going forward. We want to spark initiative and are looking to explore more ways to use the Liberverse as an application that would be useful for everyone.”
Kaspar began design by replicating the landscape of Liberland as it is now – largely uninhabited. There are many architectural designs from previous competitions, but he hasn’t decided yet how to approach it.
“We are keen to use our imagination and the design may not directly reflect the actual Liberland topography – we could come up with some super visualisations based on both reality and imagination.”
Kaspar is using Unreal Engine, which is used in the development of video games and is quite possibly the most advanced real time rendering technology available. It allows developers to create images in the most photorealistic, interactive manner, so much so that it is hard to differentiate between photography and the images created.
To access Liberverse, please visit Liberserse.net. There are options to download the software or alternatively to stream directly from their browser. The browser does not offer full features but is an easy way to get a quick feeling for the metaverse.
“We are still in building mode but are very excited about all the new features planned, including the ability to set up avatars and interact with other players. We encourage all Liberland citizens and fans to get involved,” says Kaspar.
On March 25th, Friends, Citizens and Supporters of Liberland can join the Liberland Cruise to celebrate the 7th Anniversary of free Republic of Liberland’s foundation. The cruise will run from March 25 until 28th, beginning at Budapest, visiting Liberland and concluding in Belgrade.
Following the cruise, Liberland will host its virtual annual conference in the Metaverse on April 13th where remote citizens and supporters can join a host of world class speakers on various topics related to Liberland’s (near) future development.
The principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, Mr. Patrik Schumacher, will present Liberland’s urban design, both for the real world and the metaverse.
We will discuss the construction of the Liberland diaspora villages with the famous developer Michal Cobb.
Roger Ver, the CEO of Bitcoin.com, will guide us through the world of investment, particularly the investment into Liberland.
Follow the full itinerary of the cruise with pictures below or sign up for the virtual event on April 13 on our Anniversary page.
Liberland Anniversary Cruise – March 25 – 28, 2022
DAY 1. Friday 25. 3. 2022 Budapest
14.00 – Boarding open.
Welcome drinks
Presentation
18:00 Dinner
21:00 Cruising departure from Budapest with Budapest night sightseeing.
DAY 2. – Saturday 26. 3. 2022 Mohacs – Bezdan
08:00-10:00 Breakfast
10:00 Our cruise continues with wine tasting on the cruiser
13:00 Arrival to Bezdan /Serbia/, a tiny settlement on the Danube River in Sombor Municipality, just across Liberland.
Transfer to the “Novitet” Weaving Damask silk manufacture workshop in Bezdan. Presentation of the unique damask silk production, famous for 18 still functioning old jacquard looms and 2 spools dating from the 19th century. The present-day damask silk manufacture was established in 1871 by Janos Schmidt based on technology of Upper Hungary. At present it is recognized as the oldest crafts manufacturer under law protection, and awarded for its contribution in preservation of cultural heritage. The damask silk weaving manufacture in Bezdan is the only one in the world still working on the original technology of high-quality damask silk manufacture. Authentic Liberland souvenir /of surprise/.
Gourmet Liberland experience at the Ark Estate – cooking course under supervision of hosts followed with traditional fish soup and fried fish and potato salad /or meat lunch by prior announcement/.
16:30Sombor sightseeing. Sombor is a small town in the north of Serbia, known as the greenest town in Europe. Many tourists call it “town in a park” or “park in a town”. We will walk down the pedestrian street and take a traditional horse carriage ride, visit the City museum and learn about the great historical legacy and the expected future with Liberland in the neighborhood.
19:00Dinner with Liberland wine and tamburitza entertainment in one of the oldest Sombor restaurants. Overnight on the cruiser in the Bezdan/Apatin area.
DAY 3. – Sunday 27. 3. 2022 Apatin – Novi Sad
8:00 – 10:00 Breakfast. Cruising along the Danube River starts at 8.00 and reaches Novi Sad around noon.
10:00 – 13:00 Liberland conference
13.00 Lunch and sightseeing in Novi Sad
Upon landing in Novi Sad debarkation from the cruiser and easy walk across the bridge over the Danube to the top of the Petrovaradin Fortress, the symbol of Novi Sad known as the “Gibraltar on the Danube” for its mysterious underground tunnels keeping explorers from around the world intrigued due to its rich history. Lunch in the restaurant on top of the fortress while enjoying the best panorama of the city and few world awarded Serbian wines.
16:00Novi Sad sightseeing. Novi Sad is European Capital of Culture for 2022 for its immense cultural and creative potential that nowadays highly maintains Serbian tradition, identity and language. Easy walk to the historical core of Novi Sad with touring of the City Hall, the Liberty Square and the Cathedral, including the shopping-pedestrian zone of Zmaj Jovina and Dunavska streets, and short free time for individual activities. 18,45 embarkation on the cruiser
20,00 Captains Liberland dinner – during cruise to Belgrade big festive meal for collecting memories and commenting on experiences. Overnight
The Blockchain Academy, a blockchain education and workforce development organization offering over 40 programs in partnership with Universities and Associations has announced the launch of the University Crypto Trading Competition with $25,000 in scholarships awarded from The Blockchain Academy.
From October 21st to November 10th individual student traders and University Student Teams can register to participate in the Competition. All current undergraduate and graduate students who participate will receive Blockchain Foundations and Crypto Trading Course for free. Only student teams of 3 to 5 are eligible for the $25,000 scholarship.
The announcement comes amid growing demand from students to learn more about Crypto and Blockchain. Most education institutions are still only researching this quickly adopted technology, contrarily nearly 1 in 5 students in the US already hold cryptocurrencies, twice the adoption rate of the general public. The Crypto Trading Simulator provides students with a Bloomberg Terminal investment banker type experience providing learners 86 trading indicators, live crypto pricing, and simulated market conditions, such as Up-Market, Down-Market, and Volatile.
“The University Crypto Trading Competition and donated courses are intended to provide existing students greater understanding of the paradigm shift happening to business, government, investing, and everything the internet touches”, says Ryan Williams, Executive Director of The Blockchain Academy. “Students graduating in the next 2 to 4 years will be entering the job market as Web3.0 takes hold. This generation needs to understand the power they are wielding.”
The Blockchain Academy $25,000 education program scholarship is intended to help the Universities and Colleges establish blockchain labs on campus to nurture blockchain skills and minimal valuable product application development. Scholarships are towards Blockchain Developer, Project Management and Business Strategy courses resulting in Certifications from the Blockchain Certification Association. Students on the winning team will be awarded their choice of programs and the balance of funding will go to other students of the winning University campus.
Dates of the University Crypto Trading Competition
START: Monday November 8, 2021 at 4 PM EST, Wall Street’s Closing Bell
END: Wednesday December 8, 2021 at 4PM EST, before Final Exams start.
AWARDS: Competition awards on Thursday December 9, 2021 at 2PM EST
Yesterday, the President of Liberland Vit Jedlicka had awarded an Order of Merit of the Star of Liberland, the highest state honour of Liberland, to Sir Anthony Ritossa.
The Order of Merit of the Star of Liberland is awarded to Sir Anthony for his lifetime achievements as well as for his pivotal role in spreading liberty. Other distinguished recipients include: MEP Daniel Hannan, Congressman Thomas Garrett, Congressman Ron Paul, Senator Sabrina Ricciardi, Steve Forbes, Mark Skousen, Patrik Schumacher or Niklas Nikolajsen .
The scion of a well-respected Italian family of olive oil makers with roots deep in history, Sir Anthony Ritossa, continues the entrepreneurship tradition that has made the Ritossa name famous. During his 30+ years long carrière in the highest levels of investment banking, Sir Anthony has brought together people from all over the world and helped organize numerous successful business ventures.
The Family Office is known for thematic investments, providing solutions to world-spanning challenges, including the US Subprime Crisis, the European Sovereign Debt and Banking Crisis. Recently, they have invested in various blockchain allocations, hereby advancing the cutting edge of this industry.
As Founder of the Ritossa Global Family Office Summits, Sir Anthony leads a series of high-level family office gatherings, held in Monaco, Dubai, Riyadh and Miami, dedicated to accelerating change via high-level discussion and debate of actionable strategies for building a better future. He has a deep passion for bringing people together to achieve greatness, supports sustainable development, and aims to support and inspire the next generation of leaders.
During the past five years, Sir Anthony has hosted 1,500+ elite family offices, prominent business owners, sheikhs, royal families, private investment companies, sovereign wealth funds and industry professionals from over 30 countries at 14 conferences representing US$4.5 trillion in wealth. His events have been responsible for US$1 billion+ in investments in companies ranging from start-ups to major global corporations.
Miss Freedom of the World 2021 Contest was held in Holiday Resort Pristina, Kosovo.
Phaedra Declercq was elected in Kosovo as Miss Freedom of the World 2021. Miss Liberland 2021 Isabela Beqira got the Crown “Miss Freedom of Europe & Miss Personality” in the contest & Miss Romania was declaired #MissElegance.
On August 30th, Phaedra Declercq was elected in Kosovo as Miss Freedom of the World 2021. According the official result the Miss Belgium Phaedra Declercq declaired WINNER of the Miss Freedom of the World 2021 Contest.
Miss Liberland, Miss Botswana, Miss Albania, Miss Portugal, Miss Japan, Miss Korea , Miss Macedonia, Miss Netherlands, Miss France, Miss Romania, Miss Montenegro, Miss Italy, Miss Belgium took part in the Contest.
First Runner up is Miisz Gracie (MISS NETHERLANDS)Second Runner up: Angela Vasilevska (MISS MACEDONIA)Third Runner up: Pamela Murati (MISS ALBANIA)Fourth Runner up: Olivia Azvedo (MISS PORTUGAL)Fifth Runner up: 板橋杏果 Kyoka ITSUBASHI (MISS JAPAN)National Director Liberland : Thomas G. Poehlmann
Competition comes on the heels Liberland announcing an initial investment commitment of EUR 140 million
Liberland today announced that Sergio Bianchi won its second international architectural competition with an innovative raised megastructure raised from the ground, leaving the ground below free for other species. This design embodied Liberland’s desire to create innovative and progressive green urban environments that rethinks how cities’ ecosystems work and function, while employing new sustainable practices including bioenergy and urban agriculture.
The second Liberland Architectural Competition attracted more than 20 entries from architects, designers and engineers from many countries including teams from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Czech Republic, China, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States.
The competition jury panel was led by President Vit Jedlicka and architect Patrik Schumacher, Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, and included citizens, technologists and architects involved with Liberland. The judging took place in May 2021.
The results of this competition come on the heels of Liberland’s announcement of an initial investment commitment of EUR 140 million from a number of key supporters. These commitments demonstrate the tremendous interest in investing in Liberland.
President Vit said “Back in 2015 Sergio entered and won the first Liberland Design Competition. His joy and passion for our country is obvious in his vision of a hilltop village, like medieval Italian structure. We are delighted his vision came to the fore again.”
Patrik Schmacher said: “The fact that Sergio was apprenticed to the legendary Luigi Pellegrin, an organic architect of some distinction in his university days, has clearly and positively informed his design, free approach and typological innovation of design. This is a well-deserved win.”
Sergio Bianchi said: “Liberland is a very important love affair for me. When I entered the first competition back in 2015 I was hooked. The chance to imagine new ideas on how to set up a new way to inhabit the landwas appealing to my deeper self. Liberland’s motto ‘Live and let live’ applies to humanity, but it should also apply to all different species in this world. This is where I drew my inspiration to allow other creatures to roam freely below the city.
The Design competition was curated and authored by Daniela Ghertovici, Director at ArchAgenda LLC. Launched last year, the competition requirement was “to translate blockchain concepts into urban and architectural design strategies”.
As Ghertovici explains: “The thesis of the Liberland Design Competition agenda posits that the infusion of decentralized blockchain logics into urban and architectural design, with its potential to radically disrupt and innovate social, economic, and political arenas, will ultimately transform the physiognomy and functionality of cities.
“From a historical standpoint, I theorize blockchain as the 8th mass media after Print (1450), Recordings (1877), Cinema (1900), Radio (1910), Television (1925), Internet (1990) and Mobile phones (2000), with the crucial distinction that it is a decentralized mass media, and this attribute of decentralization is itself a transformative concept for urban design and development.”
When writing the 2015 brief for the first Liberland Design Competition, it was very clear to Ghertovici that “Liberland, the world’s newest micro-nation — a sovereign values-based minarchy — has unprecedented potential to radically disrupt and innovate in every facet of society (governance, economy, jurisprudence, sustainability, education, charity, peace and most importantly freedom), but especially urban and architectural design.”
“In 2021, through Liberland’s extraordinary vision and perseverance, it has evolved into a global phenomenon among emerging models for building new societies (charter cities, special economic zones, free private cities, seasteading, etc), but unlike other models, Liberland’s sovereignty as a microstate means that is can build innovative urban systems without the difficulty of having to compromise and adapt to outdated urban planning and zoning restrictions,” she says.
– Tavis Digital is offering staking services for the Regen Network’s native token, enabling delegators to participate in the Regen Network and earn staking rewards.
– Tavis Digital is the first Swiss asset management firm to employ a white-labelled staking infrastructure to participate in the growth of top-notch blockchains.
– Tavis Digital has been a long-time supporter of the Cosmos ecosystem and Regen Network’s protocol is built on Cosmos SDK framework.
– Projects like Regen Network help to preserve natural capital and support regenerative land management. At the same time, Regen registers and offers carbon credits via its marketplace and through the blockchain to make the market more efficient, transparent and trustful.
– Anyone who holds Regen tokens can stake them directly to the Tavis Digital validator node and immediately start earning staking rewards with only 2% commission applied.
Tavis Digital has announced it is joining the Regen Network and actively supporting the network by operating a white-labelled validator node. The Swiss digital asset manager participated in Regen’s Genesis block and is now open to accepting delegations from all ecosystem participants, whereby they can stake their assets to earn staking rewards.
Tavis Digital has established itself as a reputable and experienced validator nodes operator which provides reliable and resilient staking infrastructure. This engagement with Regen Network is strongly driven by Tavis Digital’s commitment to making the blockchain space more sustainable. In comparison to the traditional Proof-of-Work mechanism, Proof-of-Stake is a more energy-efficient consensus algorithm as staking consumes very little energy and does not require special hardware. Moreover, as a project focusing on regenerative land management and carbon credits, Regen Network is utilizing blockchain technology to realign the short-term economic gains of businesses and the long-term ecological health of the globe.
Christian Speckhardt, Partner at Tavis Digital, further explains the choice of Regen: “We observe the development of the ‘Blockchain for Impact’ space with great interest. Regen Network is a leading project in this space, truly interested in regenerative land management and sustainable agriculture. By creating an open marketplace for project related carbon credits, Regen also contributes to climate action under the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
Despite increasing traction in the digital assets sector, it is still challenging for regulated investors and wealth managers to enter the space. Safe handling of digital assets and securities is still challenging and costly. Setting out to overcome these barriers, Tavis Digital offering its white-labelled blockchain validator nodes allows them to add to their ever-expanding range of financial products and services to delegators and institutional investors.
Tavis Digital believes there is increasing demand for institutional quality digital financial products, professional asset management services and robust operations. ‘First mover’ financial institutions can now benefit from Tavis Digital’s unique expertise, track record and market position without reputational or regulatory risk.
Regen Network’s co-Founder, Christian Shearer said: “the climate finance space is in desperate need of an overhaul. This is what Regen Network is setting out to do. We’re extremely happy to be teaming both with Tavis Digital and Sonic Capital to help bridge the worlds of crypto-finance with the worlds of traditional finance. It’s a bridge that is absolutely necessary if we are going to reverse global climate change.”
Stefan Rust, the Founder and CEO of Sonic Capital comments: “it is an exciting day when the Regen Network gets adoption with more mainstream and institutional investors. Regen has built the carbon registry on the Cosmos blockchain and great to see validators securing and validating this new global open registry. We look forward to working with Tavis Digital on this and other projects.”
About Regen Network
Regen Network is the open marketplace for climate solutions. Regen Network’s platform aligns economics with ecology to drive regenerative land management. Regen’s Registry allows land stewards to sell their ecosystem services to buyers around the world, functioning to reverse climate change and improve their soils, through incentivized carbon removal.
About Tavis Digital
Tavis Digital is a leading Swiss asset management company that focuses entirely on the portfolio management of digital assets. As a spin-off of Tavis Capital AG, a FINMA-regulated asset manager with over CHF 1 billion AuM from institutional investors, Tavis Digital positions itself as a pioneer in the asset management industry.
Tavis Digital currently runs 7 validator nodes (including Regen) and has around $90m assets under delegation.
About Sonic Capital
Sonic Capital invests in blockchain projects that build solutions for a better future. Sonic Capital is co-founded by former Bitcoin.com CEO Stefan Rust and innovation and investment expert Alyssa Aaron.
About Staking and Proof of Stake (PoS)
Blockchain networks pay participants to secure them. The most famous example is the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, which uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining algorithm. However, mining has downsides such as high energy consumption and technical difficulty. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is an alternative consensus mechanism (way to verify and secure transactions) that allows users to generally secure blockchain networks with minimal energy consumption and therefore enables the possibility of a sustainable blockchain operation.
“In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority.”
An Austrian-British economist and philosopher, Friedrich August von Hayek remains a pivotal figure in the defense of classical liberalism – the assertion that civil liberties and economic freedom are paramount to civilization. Hayek quotes are worth reading and considering given the influence he’s had on freedom and liberty movements.
An academic from the beginning, Hayek studied biology and philosophy at a young age. He turned 18 just in time for the outbreak of the Great War, which he spent a large part of serving on an airplane. This experience drove Hayek to study law and political science, as he wished to help the world never again repeat the mistakes which led to such horror.
Following the war Hayek studied at the University of Vienna, was hired by Ludwig von Mises, and moved to New York to compile data on the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve. During this time Hayek gravitated away from socialism in favor of Mises’ ideals, attending his private seminars and soaking up the Austrian School economist’s lessons. With his mentor’s help Hayek cofounded and directed the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in London. It remains Austria’s largest economic research institute to this day.
Hayek famously clashed with John Maynard Keynes in 1932, asserting that private investment in Britain’s public markets would serve them better than direct government spending. Keynes raked several of Hayek’s ideas over the coals in turn, although his rebukes weren’t enough to keep Hayek from earning a large following as he taught at the London School of Economics.
Hayek published his best known work The Road to Serfdom in 1944. In it he argued that Western democracies have “progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past,” and that society’s well-meaning attempts at continuing prosperity would erect the framework that ultimately can lead to totalitarianism. To Hayek, centralized planning imposed the will of a small minority upon the greater population, corroding the rule of law as well as individual freedoms. In essence, Hayek claimed that once a government concerns itself with the greater good – a nebulous, moving goal post – it can dispense of personal freedom however it deems necessary. The ideal government would only concern itself in matters which the free market could not help, such as the prevention of fraud and the creation of a safety net.
Hayek’s treatise on individualism had far-reaching influence. Nearly half a million copies have been sold to date, including one to Milton Friedman. Even Keynes found himself in near total agreement with The Road to Serfdom (although he would never deign to admit that Hayek’s vision for a vastly limited government could work in practice).
Hayek pioneered the Austrian theory of the business cycle with which he argued that artificially low interest rates lead to capital misallocation, the economic calculation problem which makes the case that government bureaucrats are never qualified to set accurate prices, and the critique of collectivism – a social system which could not exist without maintenance by fierce and unfair government intervention.
Hayek continued to teach throughout his life and had a profound impact on world leaders including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Much to his surprise, Hayek won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974. He passed away in Germany in 1992.
The Road to Serfdom Quotes
“To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behaviour as individuals within the group.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions – all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“The word ‘truth’ itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to believed in the interest of unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“One need not be a prophet to be aware of impending dangers. An accidental combination of experience and interest will often reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“The main cause of the ineffectiveness of British propaganda is that those directing it seem to have lost their own belief in the peculiar values of English civilization or to be completely ignorant of the main points on which it differs from that of other people. The Left intelligentsia indeed, have so long worshiped foreign gods that they seem to have become almost incapable of seeing any good in the characteristic English institutions and traditions. That the moral values on which most of them pride themselves are largely the product of the institutions they are out to destroy, these socialists cannot, of course, admit.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“When security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravest threat to it.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the “we” and the “they”, the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“The young are right if they have little confidence in the ideas which rule most of their elders. But they are mistaken or misled when they believe that these are still the liberal ideas of the nineteenth century, which, in fact, the younger generation hardly knows. We have little right to feel in this respect superior to our grandfathers; and we should never forget that it is we, the twentieth century, and not they, who have made a mess of things.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“What Tocqueville did not consider was how long such a government would remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinitely in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political life.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.” – The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
Hayek Socialism Quotes
“If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.” – Friedrich Hayek
“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.” – Friedrich Hayek
“But what socialists seriously contemplate the equal division of existing capital resources among the people of the world?” – Friedrich Hayek
“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.” – Friedrich Hayek
“I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.” – Friedrich Hayek
“Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.” – Friedrich Hayek
“While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” – Friedrich Hayek
“It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.” – Friedrich Hayek
“There can be no doubt that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring freedom is genuine and sincere. But this would only heighten the tragedy if it should prove that what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude. Unquestionably, the promise of more freedom was responsible for luring more and more liberals along the socialist road, for blinding them to the conflict which exists between the basic principles of socialism and liberalism, and for often enabling socialists to usurp the very name of the old party of freedom. Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.” – Friedrich Hayek
“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now – independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors – are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” – Friedrich Hayek
“From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.” – Friedrich Hayek
“The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.” – Friedrich Hayek
Hayek Quotes on Economics
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” – Friedrich Hayek
“The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” – Friedrich Hayek
“To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not to give them the same subjective chance. It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality—all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.” – Friedrich Hayek
“Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.” – Friedrich Hayek
“Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.” – Friedrich Hayek
“What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.” – Friedrich Hayek
“Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society, and which kinds of measures are particularly dangerous in this respect, can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.” – Friedrich Hayek
“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable … it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.” – Friedrich Hayek
We hope you enjoyed these Hayek quotes! Now go out there and spread your love for liberty!
Panther Protocol Co-Founder Anish Mohammed to talk about personal financial data
Anish Mohammed, Co-Founder and technology and architecture lead for Panther Protocol, will speak as part of an expert panel at The Data Economics Festival to discuss Exploring the Power of Personal Financial Data, joining Vinay Kuruvila, Head of Product Engineering at Venmo; Gary Fan, EVP and Chief Banking Officer at Gateway Bank; James Nicholls, Managing Director of Braithwate, Raonak Ahmad, General Partner of Skywalk Capital; and Sirtaj Brar, Director at The Data Economics Company. The panel will address the growing opportunities and markets around personal financial data, including information verification systems and higher-resolution credit systems or ratings.
The panelists will answer: “What should we be concerned about when our personal financial data is being used by companies to make decisions or adjudicate transactions? How should we understand privacy, control, and value from the perspective of the data creators and producers?”
Anish Mohammed says: “Privacy is fundamental basis of democratic society, which in turn is assured by privacy in life in day to day activities including financial privacy.”
“Personal financial data is highly valuable, highly sensitive, and used in more ways—and by more organizations—than consumers may realize. This type of data holds great importance in adjudicating many decisions about our lives, such as creditworthiness, and consumers deserve to have better understanding, and potentially to hold greater control, on how their personal financial data is transmitted, what organization use it, and how they use it,” said Arka Ray, Managing Director of The Data Economics Company.
“The objective of The Data Economics Festival is to bring together people from across industries and sectors who might not typically have the opportunity to discuss these topics in a forum that facilitates conversation and addresses challenging, and interesting, topics head-on and in a way that moves the discourse forward,” said Jennifer Hinkel, Director of The Data Economics Company. “Society is approaching an inflection point in how we think about the value of data, particularly personal data, where that value accrues, and who benefits from it.”
This session will take place on Friday, April 23, at 10:30 am Pacific Standard Time.
The Data Economics Festival convenes thought leaders across multiple sectors—technology, life sciences, economics, finance, academia, and media—in a five-day virtual event to explore the intersection of digital data and economics. The Festival addresses how the confluence of digital data and economics is transforming the world around us and opening new avenues to solving the “big problems”. The Data Economics Festival is produced by The Data Economics Company (DECO). More information about The Data Economics Festival can be found at lydion.com/festival.
The Data Economics Company’s mission is to pioneer and propagate the field of Data Economics by leading theoretical science and research; developing the mathematical, economic, and software frameworks and toolsets to power implementation; and continuing to advance commercialization of the Lydion DEOS (Data Economic Operating System). DECO fosters a global ecosystem of partners, customers, and scientific collaborators to accelerate the field of Data Economics and the impact of this science on the “big problems” and important challenges our communities, societies, and industries face. More information about DECO and the Lydion DEOS can be found at lydion.com.
Panther Protocol, the privacy protocol, was established this quarter to offer privacy-compliant services for decentralized finance. Panther Protocol addresses a key issue of privacy facing DeFi users, especially those engaged in sophisticated investments and loans in this sector.
Serial entrepreneurs and technologists form the backbone of the company. Oliver Gale, CBDC inventor joins forces with Dr Anish Mohammed, cryptographer and ZK proofs expert, to offer a strong technical solution to overt and unwelcome transaction exposure in DeFi.
“Decentralised Finance is a boon for people looking to invest, earn interest and make loans using their cryptocurrencies. However, there has not been a means to preserve privacy up until now,” says Oliver Gale, CEO of Panther Protocol.
“Privacy, a key component in democratic life, has been missing in this sector. We are not talking about illicit transactions, but the basic right to private transactions that are both secure and compliant. We are solving this with Panther.”
Panther Protocol is the smart way to solve privacy issues when handling crypto transactions. It does this in two key ways that are measurable and considered.
The first element is compliance. Everyone who commits their crypto follows compliance regulations. This is an entry-level requirement to make it above board and sustainable in the long term, regardless of what regulations come down the track.
To ensure this element is robust, gatekeepers will process the compliance forms. Gatekeepers are made up of financial institutions, exchanges and other software entities with the ability to collect KYC data. The attraction of gatekeepers is the provision of liquidity for their projects while their independence is a powerful part of the protocol.
The second is the security of assets. Panther Protocol takes crypto assets, secures them and mints zAssets by return. Each zAsset is one-for-one collateralized with its underlying asset. Whether the zAsset is a zBTC or zUSDT, the new zAsset is a direct synthetic representation of the original unit of value.
Co-Founder and chief technology scientist, Dr Mohammed says: “We provide game-theoretic bounds to privacy and price them. Initially, the Panther Ecosystem will be developed on Ethereum with the public release in Q3 this year. In Q1 2022, Panther will release the V1 of a Privacy Cross-chain DEX on a Layer 2 solution.”
The result is a compliant privacy platform allowing holders of zAssets to avail of DeFi opportunities without fear of being tracked or outed.
Gale adds, “Privacy and compliance are not incompatible ideas. We see that healthy societies should and can exist with both.”
Panther Protocol was founded in the first quarter of 2021. It has already raised $3million in seed capital and recruited a 20-person team. The protocol will deliver an MVP in Q3 with Gatekeepers and mixers, with a decentralised ecosystem available by the end of the year.
Panther Protocol is building an end-to-end privacy protocol for digital assets (zAssets), which can be deployed in a compliant way on any public blockchain.
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Edward Snowden
Panther Protocol’s unique value proposition entails:
Privacy for any digital asset
Interoperability
Compliance
Strong privacy by default
Unique architecture with gatekeepers, mixers, and privacy mining
Panther Protocol currently counts 17 team members, and nurtures one of the most open and thrilling work environments in the industry. The team is highly experienced in blockchain, finance, and cryptography, having gained exposure in leading organisations such as the United Nations, Accenture, BlackRock, P&G, Vimeo, Siemens, UFC, DELL, HSBC, and Lloyds Bank. Team members have contributed to over 18 blockchain projects including Ethereum, Ripple, AVAX, OCEAN Protocol, and blockchain.com.
Panther Protocol has ambitious plans to provide financial privacy and give economic freedom to people and institutions with a breakthrough privacy solution for DeFi.
The ideal candidates will have a proven track record and an edge in their field.
Outstanding communication skills, ability to work in teams, and work ethics will round up the profile of future team members of Panther Protocol.
All positions with Panther Protocol are remote and offer generous compensation.
Current Open Positions
Technical Development:
Solidity developer
Full Stack developer
UI/ front-end developer
Community/ecosystem:
Marketing manager digital
Marketing director
PR Manager
Community manager
Community manager senior
Technical copywriter
If you are interested in joining the team, please apply here.
What if we could take the power of blockchain and use that to make lotteries joyful again. Consider the community lottery held in your local club or town – it’s a means of raising money for a local or shared endeavour – the price is not high and the winnings are very transparent. Of course, the payout tends to be small – a combination of low volume and the desire to fundraise over actually winning vast sums. But what if that model could be twinned with national or hyper-national concepts? What if we could make the lottery fair and still pay out large sums. What if no one owned the lottery and everyone involved stood to gain so that the fundraising and profits were pooled back to the participants. And the participants were the true target recipients of the prize?
That’s a lot of questions but one project that seeks to answer them is MYLottocoin.com; a crypto lottery that is conventionally ruled, anonymously played and autonomously operated.
Its founder Amjad joins me for a conversation on how this works. It is, he says, a permissionless, DeFi powered lottery with decentralised features.
“We have created an inclusive model by incorporating the role of classic games.”
MyLottocoin is live, it went live in November 2020, a full month ahead of schedule. It was built on the Ethereum blockchain but the project team is looking to migrate it onto Binance Smart Chain to get around the issue of high gas fees.
It is a decentralized app operated autonomously by a smart contract without any human interaction.
MyLottocoin was built to remove some of the issues surrounding the lottery industry. Despite the fast growth of lotteries, both official and online, there are worries concerning trust security, transparency and reliability. The other unspoken elephant in the room is the fact of huge house percentages; regardless of where the ‘other’ profits are said to be used.
In order to maintain transparency, MyLottocoin has published its source code which can be reviewed by anyone. Amjad says it is a first of its kind and empowers players using a unique tokenized reward system. All players are rewarded the native token, MYL, for free and every three months receive a pro rata payout (10% of total sales) based on tokens held.
MYL are not governance tokens but utility. MYL was designed to provide the reward system and grow the community. The total supply of this ERC 20 token is limited to 100 million and will be airdropped to the same Ethereum wallets used to purchase the lottery tickets.
Every payout is administered automatically by smart contracts without user interaction.
“This eliminates the slow process of trying to claim winnings as exercised by other lotteries – a process which is both labour intensive and designed to reduce actual claims. Inertia by itself reduces the number of actual payouts protecting the house and penalising busy players.”
Currently, MYLottoCoin.com is offering a draw similar to the US Powerball. Other themed lotteries will follow including MegaMillions in September, Canada649 in December, EuropMillions March of next year and SuperEnaLotto in June 2022.
The ecosystem is decentralized with no need for direct management or for anyone to manually execute any features. However, there will be a development team in place to ensure the milestones outlined on the roadmap are achieved. In all, 85% of all takings are distributed as prizes, 10% for quarterly rewards airdropped to token holders and 5% left to pay for maintenance and development.
With prizes distributed automatically through smart contracts, security is guaranteed. In addition, players do not need to have signups or account creation, meaning players can use their own wallet without any need to deposit funds prior to play.
The website is live and open for play with the next step to develop a dedicated mobile app. Please visit www.mylottocoin.io or more information and to play the lottery on www.mylottocoin.com blockchain style.
The Women’s Leadership Study is a comprehensive survey of more than 500 professionals and entrepreneurs, exploring the qualities and experiences that contribute to women’s leadership and advancement in the workplace.
The awards ceremony is on 8th March 2021 – 6.00PM – 7.30 PM in India (1230pm GMT)
“At #GCPIT & #CIMSME, we have long believed that creating and promotion of a work environment where women can thrive, and implementing initiatives that support, advance, retain and reward them, is not only the right thing to do, it is a smart and strategic business approach.”
Santosh G, Director of Growth, GCPIT (India, Africa); CVO, Global Council for Cluster Excellence & Research; Global Chairperson, CIMSME; Director, ICTMAE, CEIIE & CEBT; Director, Azile Infoworld
Ronin, real name unknown, looks twenty years younger than his actual age and is father to three small children. And that, being a father, is the one thing he knew he wanted to be from a very young age. As it happens, despite a more mundane day job as a data analyst where he gets to check data in spreadsheets to mine fiat to support his family, it is looking like he will soon be able to migrate to a full time career in the NFT world. When this happens, and it’s coming soon, he will be living the dream.
His digital moniker, Ronin the Collector, sometimes confuses people. He will frequently receive links from artists and without any preamble, be asked to purchase their pieces. While sympathetic to the difficulty of selling art online and generally supportive of artists, he advises people not to do this – not least of which because he doesn’t have a large disposable income.
His love of all things digital began at an early age when he started gaming. He has strong memories of getting his first Nintendo Entertainment system when he was just six years of age. Ever since gaming has been a big part of his life, and that has morphed into different attractions including collectable cards. In 2015 he stumbled over the Topps collecting app and started buying Star Wars digital cards.
“I first discovered digital collectables when I read about a JPG selling for $200 and I was like whaaaat?”
Previously, Ronin had been a gamer and a hoarder at the same time. Playing the Japanese game Shenmue he operated a digital forklift task to earn points to spin the gashapon and win the resulting prizes.
“I literally worked at the forklift job for days on end to get the ultra-rare cards. As a kid we didn’t have much money and so I could not afford to buy cards, so earning them was a great way for me.”
Ronin is conscious that it is possible to buy these rarities outright – indeed he recently witnessed a player enter a Topps game and spend $25,000 to get the cards he wanted.
“I have kids and we have a new home – this was not an option for me – instead it drove me to be very good at the games, and when I accumulated prize money I used it to upgrade my gaming PCs”
Ronin knew about Bitcoin but that wasn’t where his head was at, instead he got more into the Topps games and when they launched the digital Garbage Pail Kids GPK last year he was all in –or he would have been had not an emergency wisdom tooth operation intervened at the same time. The first Topps GPK drop sold out in just 37 hours and he only managed to buy a few sets before his pain killers sent him back to sleep.
Subsequently he has been active buying and selling NFTs, and he is in profit, doubling his initial investment which stands at about $6000.
“Once I got over my emergency wisdom teeth, I began to track the trajectory of the card price. I understood the energy of the first sale, then the lull, then the way packs tended to plateau in price before rising again with new buyers.”
The learning took its toll. Ronin spent two weeks following the progress of the packs on the secondary market, getting a few scant hours of sleep a night. He still had the day job and his family, but he was totally addicted – and wrecked.
“My wife finally pulled me to one side one Sunday afternoon and said go to bed. I did and I slept for 16 hours straight.”
Ronin was now going down the rabbit hole. He recognised his huge interest was matched by others. He began to build a community online and he wanted to bring value to that community. He set up Facebook groups and then Discord groups. He reached out to giants in this space and his first interview was with the lead designer of the Project Kogs on WAX. ArcLegger from Red Fox Labs is a bit of a legend in this space and Ronin could not believe his luck.
“I knew I was meant to stick with this space and I’ve been here ever since.”
In these endeavours Ronin is joined by his co-host on NFTLive, NiftyQ, and their show Director, CryptoBuffalo. They divide up their responsibilities across the LADZ network with Ronin active in digital art and live auctions, while Q and Buffalo each have projects they focus on directly.
The most active community set up by the team is the Ladz community on Discord which numbers about 900 members who are very engaged. At the same time, NFTLive, a weekly podcast focused on NFT’s that Q started in 2021, has become one of their flagship shows on their YouTube network. They dish out Ladz tokens to reward their community for engagement and in turn these can be used to access different ‘districts,’ their way of organizing chat channels by topic, in the Ladz Discord server, as well as access to special events and content specifically focused on engagement between the creators and their community.
Despite the gender specific sounding name, Ronin assures me that they are seeing more women in their chat, and this is something that he’s very proud of. There are also a number of different shows during the week covering different topics on YouTube, all catering to the crypto community.
Ronin and the team are looking to rebrand, using the Ladz name, and expanding upon their community through various mediums. Community lore is very important and Ronin has started building this out by curating art that fits their cyberpunk vibe – different artists have been commissioned to create this art for the community, which will be auctioned off during a live event in the Metaverse.
Ronin is constantly innovating and looking at ways of meshing the real world with the digital. Recently he planned on hosting a live digital art auction with a professional auctioneer in Dencentraland. It hit some hiccups, notably on the digital auction house side, and this has been rescheduled but the innovation has already attracted a lot of interest.
He’s moved the venue from Decentraland to CryptoVoxels and is planning a special night.
“The community said it wanted to be able to chat during the auction so this is on the agenda. Even though we’re in a metaverse there are some things that are best translated from the real world – such as the ability to interact during the evening. It’s social and not just commercial.”
The plan is to have a viewing the night before the auction, with cocktails, which is traditional in the real world.
“Just because it is digital does not mean it is not social.”
The 12 artists are already picked out for the first auction and Ronin wants to curate new artists in a friendly way. He has found too that he is a ‘lighthouse’ and can link up people to benefit their art generally, linking graphic artists with musicians. He spends a lot of time on Clubhouse where he is meeting like-minded ‘ladz.’ He assists newbies to get online and then create their first NFT. While chatting on Clubhouse, he will scout artists’ Instagram and if he thinks they are a fit, he invites them to join the Discord group.
The plan is to host a gallery auction monthly initially, but he hopes to create a full metaverse for Ladz where people can come and view a preview, then wander outside and maybe have a beer with other people.
“Who knows, but we may have wearables and interact even more directly. How cool would that be?”
Until the new ladz city in the metaverse is built, hop over to https://bit.ly/joinladz to catch up with the community and learn about all things NFTs. And if Ronin ever advertises face cream – buy it! He’s actually 37 years old but you’d card him if he walked into a bar. Whatever cream he’s using, I’m buying!
Freedom is one of my life’s priorities. There are countless means which I use to acquire it. I do this by simply cutting myself away from the mechanisms, platforms, structures, and relationships which would limit me.
One such mechanism of limitation is the current state-controlled financial system. Let’s ask ourselves: “How does current fiat money work? What problems exist within the fiat monetary system?”
Because this question is worrying many people, society has begun to look for possibilities of escaping from the state-run monetary system. One variant is the most popular cryptocurrency—Bitcoin.
The origins of money
In order to assess the usefulness of Bitcoin as a means of exchange, we must ask ourselves a simple question: What is money? And what qualities does Bitcoin have compared to current money issued and controlled by states? Money is a generally recognized equivalent, the language, through which people express value. Money is the conserved value of labor and the memory of society. Money also often reflects the entrepreneurial risk taken and not just labor. Therefore, the pursuit of an expression of value is as old as society itself.
The first historically preserved documents that are available are primitive book entries on clay plates. With the coming of division of labor and specialization, barter trade began to take over, i.e. the exchange of goods for goods. People exchanged fish for wheat, weapons for skin, pastry for ceramics. Some raw materials are perishable, and you don’t always find someone to offer the raw material you just need. So, people were looking for a solution.
The solution was therefore to use rare and durable items as a means of exchange. That is, stones, shells or linen. You could sell your five fish for shells or precious stones. After some time, they became known as a means of exchange, so you could buy a ceramic bowl for them and avoid losing time during multiple exchanges. These precious objects were later replaced by precious metals, especially gold and silver.
Gold is rare, does not perish, but is impractical for carrying over long distances. It is too heavy and difficult to split in more parts. Some people began realized this and offered a solution. The first “bankers” appeared, offering to deposit gold for a small fee. Proof of ownership of the gold was a paper bill. Using this credit bill, the customer could later withdraw his gold back. Gradually, trust in these bills increased among people and they exchanged credit bills instead of taking gold from banks. This has made credit bills into banknotes.
Since the 20th century, fiat money has been the dominant system. Fiat currencies are defined as money with forced circulation. Their establishment and circulation are mostly governed by a country’s Parliament and administered by their Central Bank. In other words, fiat currencies are state-ordered national currencies such as the crown or the euro. They are one of the attributes of a sovereign state. Even if we had perfect central bankers in one country, we would still be affected by the erroneous actions by central banks of other countries.
This happened when, in 1971, the gold standard in the U.S. was definitively revoked by President Nixon. From that action, it followed that the Czech Republic (for example) changed its policy so that its own money is now only covered by the fact that the state legislatively forces people to accept, account, and pay taxes using it. It is therefore not linked to any commodity. And the quantity of it is gradually increasing, with wealth increasing much more slowly.
This results in inflation. The Austrian School of economic thought defines inflation as an increase in money supply, while the mainstream economic sources define inflation as a phenomenon that causes currency to lose its value in the market and reduce its purchasing power. Basically, the inflation rate tells the rate at which money loses its purchasing power over a given period of time due to an increase in the total amount of money in circulation. Thus, inflation will not increase wealth, it will only increase the amount of money supplies, because wealth is, by its very nature, a commodity and money is the means to acquire it.
Inflation alone would not be a problem if it were merely a steady increase in the monetary supply. It would not be a problem, that is, if my liabilities and receivables balanced on my account and my personal monetary supply increased proportional to inflation, with a similar effect for my neighbors and everyone else. However, that is not the case. Banks create new money, but this money is unevenly distributed. Those who get the new money first are able to disproportionately benefit from it. The market has not yet managed to reflect the new amount of money, and so the value of new money is higher; this is because those who first get this new money can use it when the market has not yet managed to reflect it through an increase in prices. (Now, for example, banks create new money by offering new mortgages – that’s why the construction industry is thriving.)
Inflation is reported as a figure at the end of the year. But this number has a structure. In some sectors it can amount to tens of percent. This means that if the figure is 2% at the end of the year, some sectors may have inflation of 3% and others may have 1.5%. So, it depends more on the choice of the consumer’s basket than on how prices as a whole actually increase.
This invisible phenomenon has, besides the above-mentioned unfair redistribution, another negative impact on individuals. States tax their citizens not only using taxes, but also through inflation. Traders who make profit from goods—which they had bought cheaply and sold for higher price—often do not even realize that (in addition to taxes) they lose their profits through the stealthy but very real phenomenon of inflation. The longer you wait for the sale, the lower your profit becomes. If inflation is 4% (which varies between countries and sectors), you will not see the big picture of how much value you are actually paying in taxes, since 4% is lost due to inflation created by a central bank .
To sum it up, while inflation hurts most people by depreciating their money, there are those who benefit from this process. This is usually the banks and people who first get the newly printed money. In a very simplified example, where we have only three apartments in the whole economy and buyers do not need to hold money, we can show the principle: If we have three apartments for sale for the price of 2,000,000, and the bank prints a new 1,500,000 of mortgages, we will not suddenly have 4 new apartments, but still 3 apartments, only with a price difference, which will probably rise to 2,500,000 over time (of course we cannot know exactly, we take this with a grain of salt). The first to access the new money will, at old prices (still 2,000,000 per apartment), trade with new money as the market has not yet managed to reflect the new money supply, so its value is higher. We still have the same number of commodities, but the money supply is increasing, which increases the price as well. The price increase will affect not only the houses but will slowly affect all other sectors as well. This process is repetitive, favoring the first users of newly printed money and constantly decreasing the fair value of money in the long run.
Both World War I and World War II were financed through inflation (already the Napoleonic Wars were financed through inflation).
Fiat currencies are managed by central authorities. These institutions can arbitrarily reduce your money’s value, even though it supposedly already belongs to you. We have been convinced of this several times in the case of currency reforms in Cyprus, Venezuela, Argentina and also with annual inflation.
And not everyone is allowed to open a bank account. This is particularly true of developing countries and of Islamic countries, where women have less rights. In our country, this applies to people who have problems with the law, which can result in their account being suspended. It can also apply to organizations that are deprived of the right to receive money, as happened with WikiLeaks.
Centralization of the current financial system often has a negative impact on payments. Banks and payment gateway institutions are subject to state regulations. It is so easy for states to exert pressure and censor, block, or confiscate payments and collect information about them. Not only are states nowadays not capable to protect their citizens’ information from possible hacker attacks, but they can also abuse it at any time. Payments censorship was applied, for example, in the case of Wikileaks. In 2010, the US government ordered companies such as Visa, Mastercard and Pay Pal to ban Wikileaks donations. (And here comes the role of cryptocurrencies, which I will mention further.) And this is where one of the story lines begins to take on real contours.
Indirectly, people were heading in the direction of cryptocurrencies since the first money and first efforts to protect information (the first known encryption effort is about 3,500 years old). Every failed attempt at a new currency shaped the direction people took in creating alternatives to state money. Some alternatives were even successful, but always short-lived. Most of them were ruined in different ways by centralization or by double spending.
E-gold
E-gold was an electronic payment system that made it possible to hold an account with balances expressed in grams of gold, silver, platinum and palladium. The coverage was 100%. In May 2008, the service had more than 5 million accounts and managed several tons of gold. However, on the pretext of money laundering, E-gold was canceled after it lost with the courts.
e-Bullion
E-Bullion was a digital currency established by payza.inc. From 2001 to 2008, you could instantly convert your gold and silver online with e-Bullion. E-Bullion had over a million users and managed approximately 50,000 ounces of gold. E-Bullion was founded by Mr. and Mrs. Pamela and James Fayed. After problems in marriage and subsequent divorce, Pamela Fayed was assassinated and James Fayed was sentenced to death. This resulted in the demise of e-Bullion. And it was the centralization which caused failure of e-Bullion, E-gold, Liberty Dollar and QQ. If you have a central point that controls the currency, the currency is dependent on its central point, which can die, run away with the funds deposited, or a single government intervention to destroy the currency is enough.
Liberty Dollar
Liberty Dollar was a currency that competed directly with the US dollar. The Liberty Dollar was intended to return to the original US dollar with a gold standard. It was coined with a metal content of 999/1000. And it had exactly the same fate as E-gold, but the justification was far more absurd. The Liberty Dollar was canceled on the pretext of currency counterfeiting. However, this was totally misleading because the Liberty Dollar not only looked different than the US dollar, but was mainly much higher in value.
Liberty Reserve
Liberty Reserve was a service that made it possible to transfer money online. It differed from traditional banks in that it required its users name, date of birth and e-mail. However, it no longer verified this information. This resulted in uncontrollable anonymous transactions. The Liberty Reserve creator, Arthur Bukovsky, was then sentenced to 20 years in prison for “money laundering”.
Naturally, people have been trying to cope with the problems above for a long time. People needed a different means than the fiat currencies. But they always followed the same path, just changing shoes for better in the form of alternative currencies. But changing shoes is not enough – if there is a central authority in the system, it is very easy to destroy the system. But with the onset of cryptocurrencies, not only shoes have changed. The path has changed. Suddenly we find ourselves in a decentralized and distributed environment and there is no need for central authority.
Cypherpunks to the rescue!
The second storyline took place at a time when the Internet freed itself from the military network. However, it blended very closely with the first part. The Bitcoin creator (or rather the group using the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym) was not an enlightened programmer. He merely materialized what the Cypherpunks group had been trying for years. The Cypherpunks, community of cryptographers, mathematicians and hackers, not only predicted the arrival of cryptocurrencies, but also laid their foundations. The Cypherpunks believed that the Internet has the potential to change society, virtualizing some of people’s daily tasks. HTTPS, PGP and GPG are the results of their work. They realized that the development and use of cryptography was the only means of combating state censorship, preserving private information, protecting private messages, anonymous trading and freedom of speech, not only in a virtual environment. Cryptology was widely used and improved especially during the wars.
Already in the first century AD invisible ink was used. A resin sap was used. When it was dry, it was transparent, but turned slightly charred and turned brown when warmed up. In the fifteenth century came an even more sophisticated method. With melted alum in vinegar, reports were written on the shell of a hard-boiled egg. The solution went through the shell and stained the solid white. The message could be read after peeling the egg. In England, deciphering of ciphers led to the execution of Mary Stuart. In the early Middle Ages, frequency analysis developed in the Arab countries. Arab scholars first discovered that the cipher in which we replace each letter with a different one can be deciphered. It is sufficient to calculate the frequency of not only individual letters, but also their pairs and triplets. In France, the deciphering of a cipher led to the fall of the Huguenot Fortress of La Rochelle during religious wars. Capturing and deciphering Zimmerman’s telegram led to US involvement in the First World War. In the 1920s, the US government denounced the problem of deciphering as immoral. It did not detect a message that could have prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor.
This is just a small account of how encryption has changed the world.
Modern cryptography exchanged paper and pencil for computer technology. The classical ciphers used by cryptology cease to be enough, and ciphers that are almost unbreakable in polynomial time, even with low-value smartphones.
Free-thinking people turned into a community called the Cypherpunks.
The Cypherpunks were people who gathered on the predecessors of the discussion forums and mailing lists. They discussed how to use Internet technology to gain more individual freedom and detachment from the state and governments. They believed in the use of exponential technologies. They knew that these were weapons that could serve both to oppress freedom and to achieve it. But they did everything they could to use technology to their advantage.
We already have the technology to achieve freedom, now we just need to learn how to use it.
It’s almost three years since GDPR came into effect in the EU. We talk to legal eagle Jetse Sprey in Amsterdam about the impacts of the law both within Europe and without.
What the main impacts?
Funnily enough the rules didn’t change that much from the rules that were in existence pre GDPR, but the key difference lies in the penalties attached to flaunting data protection rules.
This is a nutshell can explain why GDPR burst upon the world with such a vengeance three years, in some ways out of proportion to the new legalities. It fostered an awareness for companies who realised they needed to look after the data they held and to ensure they were GDPR compliant.
And not just here in Europe, anyone dealing with European people and their data also had to become compliant.
It’s been an earthquake.
At the same time, GDPR has become a sort of standard for international legislations, or rather an example to be followed. In California, the new data protection laws draw heavily on many of the elements of GDPR. The same can be said for new laws in India.
In this field of data protection, Europe is leading the way.
How important is the role of GDPR in privacy – the pros and cons:
I would say the way people interact with their data has been changed in a profound fashion, but not always in a straightforward manner.
It makes people more knowledgeable on their privacy and what companies can do with this data. This is an important step where people become more aware of the importance of what happens to their data. It also introduced frictions; for example, during the pandemic it has proven more difficult to exchange data on people who are vaccinated or who have results from COVID tests. This can interfere with the swift reaction to different factions within a country which makes it more of a hurdle to control the spread of the pandemic.
These issues aside, it is a definite change for the better.
What about surveillance? We know that there are more CCTVs installed than ever before, again helpful in chasing crimes but also invasive in aspects of individual lives. In the lockdown, many people now work from home, and while employers cannot install CCTVs in their workers homes, there is talk of monitoring software recording keystrokes and activities on company-owned laptops.
That is a great question. In addition to the growth of awareness of what happens to your data, the possibilities of using big data in AI backed projects makes every piece of data potentially valuable.
The good news is that counting keystrokes on your laptop is not permitted under GDPR.
It is too big an invasion of your privacy. Mostly in democratic countries, surveillance is monitored and measured. However, should you live in a country like China or other non-democratic counties, then it may be commonplace for governments to use technology to spy on the people.
We should not be smug however here in the democratic world, privacy is not just about the here and now, it’s also about the future. If you look at what recently happened in the US on the 6th of January, then you might realise how precarious our hold on our rights may be. One day you are living in a free democratic country and the next you live in a Trump-like dictatorship. If that happens, then all your privacy laws go down the plughole.
We need to safeguard our hard-earned rights.
At the core of GDPR is the right to be forgotten. Why do we need that right and how can it be balanced?
Can you remember a time before the internet? Maybe if you are young enough you might not, but once upon a time news was recorded in newspapers. Perhaps there was a record of some kind, maybe with an individual’s initials or their full name, but over time it might be forgotten. The paper is thrown out, people forget. However, now with the internet, people can key in that name and up pops the associated misdemeanour or story which the subject may not wish to still be available.
Everyone makes mistakes, does stupid stuff, but the evergreen nature of the internet can be unforgiving. The absolute right to be forgotten has to be balanced; is the public’s right to be able to find that information more important than the individual’s right to erase their actions?
There is a well-publicised example of a German man who committed a double murder back in the 80s. He served his time and the story would have gone into relative obscurity only the German paper Der Spiegel recycled his story in 1999, bringing it up again to the top of Google searches.
The man fought a successful battle wherein the article is still online and is still in the Der Spiegel archives but it has been removed from Google. This is a very good example of a balanced approach.
So in the era of blockchain and immutable databases, how does GDPR play out?
Here we come back to base tacks. We need to be very careful about the kind of data we store onchain. And that data is personal should always be encrypted.
In my opinion, sensitive data such as health care should be private whereas elements such as certificates are better placed on the blockchain; one is meant to be private the other is meant to be shared.
In addition, if sensitive data is on the blockchain then the architects of chain should impose filters – in much the same way Google currently applies them.
It’s about striking a balance.
Very interesting – so it is good timing that GDPR comes into law around the same time as immutable technologies become more popular – we have an opportunity as humans to ensure the right kind of data is saved in the appropriate formats in the first place.
Yes, that is where it all starts – with the humans.
CRYPTOCURRENCIES are one of the most engrossing and innovative technologies of the past decade. Thanks to the recent bull run, the general public is taking notice of their potential as an investment.
People are rushing to buy Bitcoin with credit cards to become a part of this revolutionary financial movement.
And while Bitcoin has been leading the way of the recent price rally, there are thousands of coins to choose from. But could you imagine that one of those coins hovering in the top 20 by market cap was created as a joke?
In this article, we will try to tell the story of Dogecoin – a cryptocurrency that was created based on the popular doge Shiba-Inu meme. You will discover how it was created and how this apparent gag became one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in the entire market.
What is DOGE?
Dogecoin (DOGE) is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies and was created in 2013 as a fork from Litecoin’s code.
Jackson Palmer – a member of Adobe Systems’ marketing department – combined two of the most talked about topics on the internet at the time… the doge meme and cryptocurrencies. This unlikely combination gave us the name Dogecoin. His initial tweet was met with extremely positive feedback, with the community urging him to continue this project.
At the same time, Billy Markus, a programmer from Oregon wanted to create a cryptocurrency that would distance itself from the other cryptos and offer a more user-friendly alternative.
The initial idea behind DOGE was to mock the seriousness of the whole cryptocurrency space and go against the gold rush-mentality behind popular coins such as Bitcoin and Litecoin.
To this end, Palmer bought the dogecoin.com domain and slapped a picture of the now-iconic Shiba-Inu on the coin’s logo. Markus took notice and contacted Palmer, starting a collaboration that would lead to the creation of the DOGE coin.
What is different about DOGE?
Unlike most cryptocurrencies that have a limited total supply of coins, DOGE does not. Dogecoin’s creators decided to leave the supply cap open, letting miners being able to add DOGE coins infinitely to their portfolios. The reason behind this is to keep the incentive to mine more coins but also to be able to easily replace lost coins.
Being based on a fork of Litecoin, Dogecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm for mining, making it a lot more democratic to obtain than Bitcoin as it requires standard hardware instead of the expensive ASIC miners.
At first, there were supposed to be only 100 million DOGE released. However, this plan changed and today, according to CoinMarketCap, there are more than 125 billion DOGE in circulation.
How did DOGE get so popular?
So, if the technology behind DOGE isn’t groundbreaking, how can its incredible popularity be warranted? After all, DOGE’s market cap reached $2 billion during the 2017 crypto bubble and the current cryptocurrency price has put its market cap above $1 billion once again.
The answer is simple – the community drives this project forward. Only 72 hours after its release in 2013, the value of DOGE jumped 300%, showing that simplifying the blockchain technology can bring in the masses.
Thanks to Palmer’s marketing genius, the project began to tick all of the right boxes when it came to gathering more followers.
For instance, in 2014, as big fans of the movie “Cool Runnings” they used the qualification of the Jamaican bobsled team to get the coin more visibility. Thanks to the community they managed to raise $25.000 and sent 26 million Dogecoins to the bobsled team, successfully sending them to the Olympics. This cemented even further the “fun, caring and sharing” mentality of the Dogecoin community.
Another example of the community being tightly tied together is the success story of the sponsoring of underdog NASCAR car driver Josh Wise. Doge supporters raised $55.000 and allowed him to race.
DOGE always goes viral
The DOGE cryptocurrency has a history of going viral many times over the years, which in turn has boosted its price and trading volume to astronomical levels.
Two recent events are worth mentioning:
In July 2020, DOGE went viral on social network TikTok. Users began a challenge with the hashtag #DogecoinChallenge, urging others to invest $25 in DOGE. The fad caught on, boosting DOGE’s price by 100% in a couple of days.
In December 2020, Elon Musk tweeted “One word, Doge”, which made DOGE’s price jump 25% in just a few hours.
Conclusion
Created as an internet joke, Dogecoin has amassed a loyal following throughout the years. Thanks to a solid community, it has outlived crypto projects that seemed more technologically advanced. Even the creators who thought the hype would die off sooner or later were wrong. People appreciated DOGE’s light-hearted take on the overtly serious crypto market which contributed to its huge popularity.
It has not gone unnoticed in the crypto world that Elon Musk, CEO and founder of Telsa, had been flirting with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past two weeks. On his Twitter account he changed his bio to #Bitcoin and before that to former CEO Dogecoin – in a long running joke with the popular tipping cryptocurrency personified by an image of a Shiba Inu dog.
Then on Monday, February 8th, the flirting turned serious and in a filing to the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla announced it had purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin in a move to provide ‘more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.’ In the same filing, the company announced it would accept bitcoin as payment for its cars.
Dogecoin had already experienced a multi digit growth on the back of this flirting, but on the day of filing, Bitcoin jumped to more than $44,000 and pushed the entire cryptocurrency market cap well over the $1 trillion mark, a barrier it had seemed unlikely to break before Elon’s intervention.
The first piece of news makes sense on the back of accounts reported for Tesla at the end of 2020 showing the company had record cash and cash equivalent reserves of $19billion – the company would have increased the dollar amount overnight in this announcement.
Likewise, the news that Tesla will accept bitcoin for payment for its landmark cars is another first, traditionally Tesla prefers to sell its cars direct but previously only for fiat. In the past luxury dealers have resold Teslas for bitcoin, notably in 2013 a luxury dealer in California sold one for 91.4 bitcoins or $103,000 at the time.
Other luxury autodealers have accepted bitcoin for cars, including BMW, while E-Z car rentals accepts bitcoin for car rentals stating faster transaction speeds and Bitcar offers fractional ownership of luxury cars for crypto.
As a result of the news, Tesla shares also rose 2%.
Back in 2018, Elon had been fined by the SEC for tweeting that he would take his company public. It cost him $20 million personally, $20 million for the company and he was forced to resign as chairman.
The men who crashed through Pete Wood’s front door early one morning were convinced he was the head of a credit card fraud ring. He was cautioned and brought into the police station in central London where he was shown documents literally picturing him at the head of a vice ring.
Their caution was ringing in his ear – You do not have to say anything. However, it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned anything you later rely on in court. Anything you say can be used as evidence.
But this was not on a TV crime progamme and this was in real life. Pete’s only crime, if such it was, was to have received payment from a man who was wanted by the police. How had this come about? How was it that Pete was associating with a known criminal and worse, receiving funds from him? Well, if you are reading this article in its original publication – Blockleaders.io – the answer will not surprise you. This was 2015 and Pete had set up a bitcoin exchange and was receiving money from many people in return for bitcoin. He did do KYC as best he could but it was impossible to police the purchasers.
The level of ignorance about bitcoin amongst the general public in 2015 was reflected in the police. Even as Pete tried to explain what bitcoin was he knew he was on a losing wicket. Eventually he was released but was still remanded on bail for a year. This cost him his job as when he tried to ask to call work to tell he would not be in, he was informed they knew already. What he found out afterwards was that a team of detectives had stormed his workplace and seized all computers and devices from his desk.
“This was 2015. I worked in an open plan office of a large company. I reckoned everyone thought I was some sort of criminal or worse. I did not return to work.”
As it happens work could not take him back while the case was open and he agreed to part company amicably. It is an ill wind that blows no good and the early morning arrest had catapulted him into his new full time career dealing in cryptocurrency. The case was dropped in a year and Pete was never charged. Instead he went onto to build a cryptocurrency exchange with a turnover of GBP 100 million.
Actually Pete has been seen by the police at least four times since. There were two more early morning visits and then a number of invitations to come into the station.
“It has changed from arrest to me advising the police. The information is still a bit spotty. You might have one detective up to speed in one station but then another station might have no knowledge. The joys of being involved in a nascent industry.”
Pete returns to his native Luton to give talks to his local school. “It was a tough area when I was growing up but I think it’s getting worse,” he says. “I’ve asked local businesses too and they think it is worse.
“I go back and give talks to my old school because I want to show them that they can be successful but sometimes they just had to think outside the box.”
I should point out at this point, Pete has never heard of the Luton airport song inspired by the unforgettable line uttered in the Campari TV ad by cockney actress Lorraine Chase. The song was performed by one-hit-wonder girl band Cats UK, while the music was inspired by the Squeeze hit from the same year, Cool for Cats. For old time’s sake you can watch the 1979 video here. (Ed note – Pete pointed out reasonably that he was not even born when the song was recorded).
Back to his talks in his old alma mater, Pete makes no secret of his inability to succeed academically once he hit secondary school. But he points out there are other ways to succeed – see the GDP 100 million company turnover above.
A self-confessed nerd he was taking computers apart when he was 11 and then doing the same for his friends by the time he turned 13.
“It was a puzzle I loved. It just made sense. I was also an avid gamer which proved handy in later life.”
Entering high school the signs were all very positive. Pete showed precocious ability especially in maths. He was ranked the third smartest kid out of a pool of 200. He also excelled in sports, playing at representative level for at last three different games. He regularly achieved As and A+s.
However, while he entered high school with great points, by the time he graduated his grades were all Cs: just enough to get him a place on an IT course. Asked to explain this regression, Pete shrugs on the phone. At least I imagine a resigned shrug down my end of the line. “Things were tough at home,” he says sparsely but without rancour.
Regardless of the cause of the loss of interest, academic excellence never returned. At the same time, Pete was working part time with a local hospital. He approached the head of IT looking for work in that department. Unexpectedly but fortunately a job on the IT help desk turned up the next day. Pete dropped out of college and went to work full time in the IT department.
For the next four years Pete was promoted year on year. He went from humble help desk assistant to second line technician to manager. However, the lack of a degree meant he could not progress any further.
“Despite my previous form, I applied for and got a foundation course in IT in Portsmouth. I had a great year, made lots of friends and spent all my money. But I hated the course itself. I am just not made for academia.”
Back to his old job but this time they suggested they would send him on an Open University degree course.
“I agreed. It was ludicrous really. I just did not enjoy studying – but put something practical in front of me and I was happy. That was the third – and last – time I tried to study.”
Around this time, Pete moved company to get promoted and in his new workplace, a co-worker arrived with a small black box.
“I was fascinated. It was an ASIC miner of course and so I went out and got one too. That was in 2014 and I earned GDP 600 in eight months.”
Despite not enjoying college, Pete would research any topic that interested him thoroughly. Soon he had read everything he could get his hands on related to bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. He also quickly realised that as the hashrate for bitcoin went up, he would need more powerful machines with graphics cards. Instead he looked into mining other alt coins and settled on Nova coin.
Where he was working, he was in charge of several thousand machines – all bog standard. He realised he could use the computing power to mine very successfully as long as it did not interfere with the user’s ability to use their machine. So he wrote a script that paused mining on the machines while there were in use. Once there was a 10 second period with no keyboard or mouse activity the software would kick in again and start mining.
He earned GDP 2000 in Nova and put that into bitcoin.
He also realised that it was possible to use arbitrage to make money out of buying and selling bitcoin. He went onto wholesale sites to purchase bitcoin and then re-sold it on retail sites such as localbitcoins.
“It struck me forcibly that everyone was buying and selling but no one knew anyone else. The whole process lacked transparency. I wanted to bring the process out into the open and so I founded Bit Broker. Now you could see who you were trading with.
“We slowly became the dominant UK exchange and by 2018 we had a turnover of GDP 100 million. Not bad for a kid who could not finish a university course. This was the message I had to tell the kids back in Luton.”
Around the same time the unfortunately early morning arrest meant that Pete gave up the day job and moved full time in brokerage. Now he set his sights on making cryptocurrency available for everyone.
“Even on popular sites such as Coinbase, it is not intuitive for a newcomer to buy bitcoins or other alt coins. As a dominant site, there are also other issues such as poor service and high fees. I felt we could do a much better job and I believe we have in CoinBurp.”
CoinBurp – a name you won’t forget – was formally launched in 2019. It is very slick and easy to use. It caters for the retail market and in particular seeks to attract a new crypto-curious audience. Already there are more than 15.000 customers and millions in deposits and trading volume.
The event comes as collective sentiment about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies continues to rise, along with meaningful implementations of the technology in both the public and private sectors. The industry seems to be moving towards a more mature phase, less susceptible to hype and speculation.
Blockchain technology is rapidly maturing as companies look to leverage its power to develop and implement robust, enterprise-ready solutions. The conference will explore this ongoing evolution and take a deep dive into the factors pushing blockchain and cryptocurrencies from hype to mainstream adoption.
Blockchain has massive potential to address many of the existing challenges with transactions and doing business in Africa. Bitcoin ownership, usage and volume of trades in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has seen a massive surge in Africa, with Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya leading the pack.
Africa looks set to witness even more explosive growth in use and adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in 2021 and beyond.
An impressive list of speakers include:
Yele Bademosi – CEO at Bundle Africa and Founding Partner at Microtraction
Peter McCormack – Host of What Bitcoin Did podcast, Defiance podcast and Defiance TV
Henri Arslanian – Global Crypto Leader at PwC Michelle Chivunga Nsanzumuco – Founder, CEO and Investor at Global Policy House, Senior Advisor to Government of Bermuda, African Union, British Blockchain and Fintech4Good Lead for Africa
Dan Held – Growth lead at Kraken
Nathaniel Luz – Lead at Dash Nigeria
Marvin Coleby – Co-founder and CEO of Raise and Co-Trustee at the African Digital Asset Foundation
Brandon Topham – Divisional Executive for Investigations and Enforcement at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA)
Roselyne Wanjiru – Director of Growth and User Acquisitions at Pesabase
Buchi Okoro – Co-founder and CEO of Quidax
Richard Ells – CEO and Founder of Electroneum and Anytask
Yael Tamar – CMO and Co-founder of SolidBlock
Sam Bankman-Fried – CEO and Founder at FTX
Well-known South African entrepreneur and venture capitalist, John Lombela, will lead the proceedings as the Master of Ceremonies.
Topics include:
The latest global crypto institutional trends: how much institutional money is going into cryptocurrencies and why now?
What is required for cryptocurrencies to go mainstream in Africa and what is the future of crypto adoption in Africa?
Is cryptocurrency and blockchain based payment solutions making an impact in cross-border payments in Africa and globally?
Decentralised finance (DeFi): what are the opportunities and issues and will it end badly?
What impact is stable coins having in the global import and export market?
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) – is this the future for central banks?
Regulation and compliance – what type of regulation are we seeing global and what are the challenges and focus areas for regulated entities?
In addition to global experts, the conference will feature the usual opportunities to visit vendor exhibitions and connect with professionals across several industries. Blockchain Africa Conference 2021 will provide an opportunity for thought-leaders and pioneers in the industry to learn, network and collaborate and gain insight into cryptocurrencies and blockchain’s utility and expectations for the future.
Bitcoin Events is Africa’s leading blockchain and cryptocurrency event coordinator since 2015, attracting 280 global speakers and 5000 delegates representing 85 countries around the globe.
In January 2011, according to his profile on Linkedin, Andreas Antonopoulos became the owner at himself. It was around this time he realized that Bitcoin was going to be the most important thing in his life and in the world around him. Once he read the whitepaper he was hooked. He subsequently spent the next four months obsessively reading everything he could get his hands on that covered blockchain and Bitcoin. During that moment he took the first steps to becoming Mr Bitcoin.
I ask him when we speak on the second day of January 2020 when did he have the same aha moment with financial systems and banks. When did economics make sense to him?
Andreas replies that he has no formal degree in economics except for a couple of elective undergraduate college courses that sparked his interest. However, from a very young age, he had been interested in politics and economics as related to politics and so he started reading. He remembers when he was 14 or so he read some seminal books including classics by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. By the time he had reached college, he was reading books on micro and macroeconomics.
“In addition, I have always been self-employed – out of the 30 or so years that I have worked, less than twelve months was spent working for someone else. The rest of the time I’ve started and run companies, which is basically trial by fire. If you don’t understand economics, your business is more likely to fail.”
I probe further. I feel that Andreas has an understanding of finance which is much more intuitive than many others. For example, he does not strike me as someone who is frightened by bankers.
Andreas agrees. This understanding of banking came from working in the City of London in the early 90s as an IT Consultant. Even when Andreas talks about the City he explains it very cleverly and simply.
“The City of London is a small enclave inside London and is the financial centre. Think of it as a self-managing entity like the Vatican of Finance but in London.”
He worked for several small hedge funds, small investment groups that did mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts and ran various managed funds. He set up the computers in their companies, their Bloomberg and Reuter terminals and installed firewalls and emails. He was exposed to not only the way money flows and deals are made, but also listened to conversations behind the scenes. He got to know some of the people who were fabulously rich and making money at a rate that seemed extraordinary if not ridiculous.
“And I quickly learned a couple of things. From the outside, you might assume these fantastically successful people are among the smartest people on the planet. And that is certainly not the case. You might also assume they are the hardest working people but that is also not that case at all.
“My image of an industry that involves applying grit, determination and smarts was totally blown away. In fact, I witnessed huge privilege, a lot of insider information, shenanigans and taking advantage of loopholes in the system to accumulate fabulous wealth. I saw the sausage being made and it’s ugly, very ugly.”
Andreas worked in the City between 1991 and 2001. He continued to be shocked at the nepotism, corruption and fraud. He acknowledges there are also decent people working in the system but contends they are just gears in a giant monster system that perpetuates evil deeds on a massive scale
“That experience taught me the other side of economics which is not how it works in theory but how it works in practice and there is a pretty big gap.”
I next ask Andreas, as he believes Bitcoin is the antidote to the evils of traditional financial systems, how can we push for mass adoption.
His answer is laconic. “We have to wait and be patient.”
I push some more – there must be a way we can convince people of the innate corruption of current financial systems and to consider migrating to Bitcoin.
Again, Andreas is laconic and almost resigned. “There is a common expression you might know. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Similarly, you can give people all the answers and education and that still won’t make them act. And this doesn’t just apply to people who are not yet persuaded about Bitcoin. It applies just as much to people who already know about Bitcoin and then use it the wrong way or not at all.”
In the same way, Andreas is perplexed at the way people leave their money on exchanges when they hear about hacks the whole time. I suggest that perhaps they think it won’t happen to them or that they live in a nice safe democracy.
Andreas practically harrumphs at this idea. “Right, yeah, maybe they think their democracy will not be taken over by corporate interests. Bad news for you people, it already has in a way that’s too soft for you to notice but produces results that baffle you. Election after election after election.”
Now we move to political interference. Andreas points out that if people are merely curious and cannot connect cause and effect, they won’t see how the little things that are happening in their personal life are changing. He says we have become blind and as result, the very institutions of modern civilized democracy are being destroyed.
He explains this by pointing to the use of money in modern societies. Every time someone uses a credit card for convenience, they cannot see that their data is being sucked up by the four or five intermediaries involved in each transaction. The resulting surveillance data that is collected from their financial purchases is then used in any number of ways, including generating propaganda in the next elections.
“The problem is that since money has been part of the fabric of society for thousands of years it’s almost invisible and as a result, it is very hard to change people’s minds. It’s a mythology of money where people think economies are stable because governments control them, and money has value because it in turn is controlled by governments.”
I return to the question of how can we talk outside the bubble and reach a great audience. Andreas is still stoic.
“We have to be patient and understand that for those who need it, they’re going to find it. And our job primarily is to make it easier to use, to make it easier to understand and to make it available as an alternative choice. We have to maintain this as an available easy-to-use,” he pauses and re-emphasizes. “easy-to-use securely and easy-to-understand choice so that when people eventually figure it out, they can come and recognize it.”
KateVass Galerie is a well-known contemporary gallery in Switzerland, which represents established, middle-tier and young emerging artists who are engaged with new technologies in their artistic expression. The founder is a Russian entrepreneur Ekaterina Vassilieva – who shortened her name to Kate Vass for easier pronunciation, Growing up in Russia, she received both a classical Soviet Union and modern Russia education including music, literature and several languages, and afterwards she entered the European Business School in London, where her interests in business, entrepreneurship and marketing developed.
Her first job started in the real estate market with the well-known “big brand” firm Knight Frank. It was 2005, shorthand for boom time in property, and Kate became successful in the field of international luxury property sales. Looking back to the heady times working with Knight Frank, Kate comments:
“I think when you are very young – and hard working – sometimes you attribute more to your talents and ambitions than to the business brand or the state of the market you represent. In hindsight it is easier to realise my success was very much predicated on the environment I worked for and the timing, which I now highly appreciate. Also, the Knight Frank experience gave me the base for the future career development and equipped me with skills of HWC/UHWC communication, market knowledge, and networking”
I interject to say that sometimes ever more mature people fail to attribute the favourable elements that contribute to their success – a lack of modesty and awareness that may later trip them up when things are not so smooth.
Her success did not go unnoticed, and she was headhunted to join a newly formed real estate company in 2008 as Department Director, but she sensed the market was about to turn for the worse
“I refused to let clients purchase if I felt it did not suit them. I could already feel there was a long-term crisis waiting for us in the whole global financial market and I became increasingly cautious for my clients. In this kind of situation, you have to rethink the values and attitude towards money and success.”
Kate always sees a crisis as an opportunity to learn. She reviewed her career to date, successful if short, and decided that what she was missing financial and investment markets knowledge to be fully capable of satisfying HWC/UHWC needs.
“It’s not just buying a property – there is the financing of the deal, the tax implications, financial restructuring perhaps – it’s a complex mix and to offer the best advice I needed to understand all the moving parts.”
So, Kate decided to shift her career into the private banking industry and set the goal to become a professional banker. In 2009, she was employed by the City Group in Moscow at the junior position and simultaneously began an MBA in Banking based between Russia and Switzerland; a two- and half-year part time course that demanded her time in the evenings and 100% of her time on weekends.
“I was so desperate to get into the banking field and to get my MBA but I was beat, I did not have any free weekend or holidays for the entire two years, I looked at myself in the mirror totally exhausted and I thought to myself – never again. That’s where I began to understand the ‘work-life balance’ thing.”
Kate had now settled permanently in Switzerland. Her employer UBS was sponsoring Art Basel, the biggest contemporary art fair in the world. Kate was captivated both by contemporary art and the high price tags. She recognised that different cultures appreciated different art genres and she wanted to understand more. Her ambitions, great amount of curiosity and natural intuition of the business opportunities drove her study for the third University degree, this time in the field of Art and business.
The University of Zurich had just launched a two-year, part time, executive MBA in Art markets, combining an appreciation and history of art with commercial requirements including taxation and law. Kate signed up, but it was not met with approval from her employer. She was basically told she should not enrol and so initially she told no one. Her classes ran from Friday evening and encompassed her entire weekend. Again she sacrificed leisure for study.
Ultimately, she has mixed feelings on the value of this degree. The first six months proved interesting and her class was a mixture of professionals from different sectors and gallery employees. When the course turned to the commercial aspects Kate came into her own as she already had experience in many of these areas.
The degree did, however, help her change her career out of banking and into consulting. She graduated from the MBA in 2017 but had already begun collecting art. She travelled to the main art fairs and forged good relationships with galleries. Quickly she realised it would be impossible to work with classical art as she did not have the financial resources for such expensive opportunities and the majority of the real gems are already in private or museum collections.
“Not only could I not afford to collect the masters of contemporary or modern art, there is always an issue of provenance when a discovered painting pops up. The art world is full of forgeries. So, I looked instead at photography and then alternative art. This was something I enjoyed, and I could afford to work with.”
Kate also discovered that she was unimpressed with the bad treatment of artists in general. She wanted to create a business where the artist is respected. And she wanted to be innovative and cutting edge; travelling to the Art Basel Fair that year nothing excited her.
“There were identical things every year, every gallery had a similar program and art fairs were full of the same faces and similar artworks. I wanted to change this. As we all know, the change should come from ourselves, and only by doing, one can set a different example.”
Sometimes it’s the chicken and sometimes it’s the egg. For Kate it was the stumbling over an unconventional, contemporary building for rent in Zurich, actually it was classified as residential, but with its vaulted ceilings and acres of glass, Kate saw her gallery.
“I had a very clear idea of what my gallery would be like – it would be accessible. None of this snobby treatment where visitors can feel intimidated; a gallery should unite client and artist, not create an unnatural border which only the rich or the privileged can cross. I wanted to remind people that one of the gallery’s purposes – is to exhibit for a broader audience and educate a new generation of collectors as well as discover new talents.”
In just three months Kate went from renting the space to launching her first exhibition. She opted to go with a photographic exhibition, pieces of which she had already largely assembled, however she quickly realised that no one needs another traditional photography gallery.
Kate was getting to where she wanted to be, but there was a missing link. Back in 2013 as a financier, she discovered cryptocurrency and blockchain. It fascinated her from the beginning. Her career subsequently had not endeared her to traditional financial markets, and she had a view on how blockchain and cryptocurrency might be the missing piece in the puzzle. She sought out technologists and artists working in blockchain and digital art. Someone approached her after her first successful photography exhibition and asked if she wanted to do another.
“No,” she said. “I want to do a blockchain art show. This was in August 2018 and I planned my blockchain show for two months’ time with the curator who had agreed to help me with this challenging task. Everyone thought I was crazy.”
The exhibition was successful, helped in no small part by the inclusion of world-renowned Irish artist, who later became a friend, Kevin Abosch.
“Kevin is one of the most talented contemporary artists of our time, having recently launched his I’m a Coin project and working with another established artist Ai Wei Wei. So I named the exhibition after him ‘Perfect and Priceless. Value systems on the blockchain.’
“Quality contemporary art has the ability to challenge society – it’s ahead of its time, new and exciting. My first set of digital artists were just entering the scene and the work was more engineering than digital. For example, we had a Chaos machine by Distributed Gallery, which consumed money and produced hashtags and we had cyber punks, called ‘Cryptopunks’ by a duo of artists from Larvalabs producing sealed envelopes which once opened gave the holder access to a digital token. It was exploratory and new back in November 2018.”
Many works were sold out within a few months.
Next stop Kate wanted to do an AI show which opened in May 2019. Entitled “Automat und Mensch” which in translation from German means “Human and the machine”. By now museums were venturing into similar spaces and Kate knew she was on the right track. The main aspect of the show was generative art, defined as art being produced by a machine or with the help of the computer.
“The interesting aspect about generative art is the placement of the artist in the creation of the art.”
This time the number of artists had more than doubled from 13 to 29 which was very ambitious. It was a retrospective of the history of generative art of the last 70 years. The showroom was divided into 2 parts: pioneers and contemporary-emerging artists. It was not 100% commercially successful; however, it still plays the role of being among one of the best exhibitions on generative art produced by a gallery. At the same time, many museums such as the Barbican centre in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany and HEK in Basel have subsequently shown AI exhibitions, with many artists overlapping.
This year with COVID the gallery is closed to the public and Kate has gone completely online with a digital show called “The Game of Life-emergence in generative art’ curated by Jason Bailey. This is inspired by the mathematician John Conway, creator of the theory Game of Life, who sadly passed away from COVID this April 2020. The four artists taking part have used the Game of Life theory in their work.
Kate has also purchased a virtual decentralized land slot on Somnium space to set up another small solo artist exhibition within VR crypto space. This is more “an artist experience” that helps to reach out to a new type of crypto collector. When the gallery works with cutting edge artists, it’s obligatory to use the newest tools to deal with collectors, as well as build the marketplace to enable 100% provenance and transparency, which is mostly avoided by the traditional art world.
For now, Kate is busy running two jobs; her consultancy and her gallery. She labels her career disruptive. Her focus is on female artists whom she feels are largely side lined in terms of support and remuneration. Her last show which she introduced at the Vancouver biennale this year is dedicated to female generative and crypto artists
A celebration of the woman” is a part of the community that she found under the hashtag #womensupportingwomen, to empower women in art and create more opportunities, and change in the new media art world. And after that?
“The sky is a limit. In the fast-changing, volatile environment at least 30% of businesses will die in the next 10 years, the only option you have is to disrupt or be disrupted. Any entrepreneur should figure out how to accommodate new technologies and unconventional thinking.”
Jillian, who is also Editor in Chief of the Liberland Press, interviewed President Vit for her upcoming book, Persons of Interest, timestamped in Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
The award-winning journalist Jillian has just published her first book in blockchain and is offering it as a pre-sale discount at 99c. Persons of Interest, Timestamped in Blockchain and Cryptocurrecy, Vol 1 2020 follows the paths of 41 prominent people working in the sector; some are very high profile and some less so, but they all share a passion for blockchain and cryptocurrency.
President Vit is a natural personality for this book with his deep appreciation of blockchain and cryptocurrency as means of allowing people to exchange value freely without undue government interference. He is unique in many ways, from having the foresight to found a new nation and to plan the implementation of the governance of that nation on a blockchain. A true visionary.
This book is for anyone interested in this sector, focusing on the saucy, thoughtful, quirky, energized, crazy, intelligent, and inspiring players in the space.
From world Presidents to Models on OnlyFans – this line-up could only be found in the weird and wacky world of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Andreas Antonopoulos – ‘We must be patient’
Tim Drapers’ eyebrows make a special appearance
John McAfee ‘On his tombstone – Lover, Adventurer and Poet – but not yet.’
Vít Jedlička‘Who has thought about founding a country?’
Richard Ells ‘Make Crypto mobile’
Jon Noorlander ‘Disturbingly Satisfying Digital Art’
Samson Williams ‘Nothing in Space is Free’
The cover artwork is provided by international digital artist and photographer- Lars Kommienzuspadt; author and inventor of Dark Pinup. Check out the secret easter eggs in the design.
In all, there are 41 interviews in this collection with a foreword by Sonic Capital CEO and ex Bitcoin.com CEO Stefan Rust, a short history of money by Marc Coleman, IBEC heavyweight and economist, and an afterword by Sean Ballent, co founder of Cryptowriters and editor to this book.
Dip in, dip out – and find out what makes the Persons of Interest in this exciting world tick.
The book was laid out and designed by a top designer https://anytask.com/davinero from the newly launched freelancer site AnyTask.com.
For more information, please contact Jillian on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilliangodsil/
To purchase a pre sale copy of the book for 79p visit your local amazon website and search for B08NS1LXG8 or Persons of Interest by Jillian Godsil.
Also, if tech is not your thing, then perhaps horses are. A couple of years ago (2016) Jillian ran a fund raiser to buy a field for her daughter’s two rescue horses – didn’t work then – but maybe it might now. All profits from the sale of the book are going towards Toby and Deano. See the history here: https://jilliangodsil.com/index.php/a-field-for-toby/
The flagship chronicle for the Free Republic of Liberland has recruited new journalists and writers to join the popular online journal for all things Liberland, Libertarian, business and crypto.
The most recent addition is CryptoTraveler, aka as Frisco d’Anconia who is a journalist & a Free Market policy analyst who single-handedly brought Libertarianism and Blockchain technology to his birthplace of Ghana. Frisco has written for top Blockchain news journals like Cointelegraph, CCN, Bitcoin News among others. He’s the founder of the Africa Blockchain University, which is an advocacy and public policy institute dedicated to shaping public policy around Blockchain. Since 2016, he’s been travelling through Africa, living a nomadic life, promoting Blockchain technology & writing about its communities. He joins the Liberland Press to write on crypto, Libertarianism and the African continent.
Readers of the Liberland Press may have also witnessed recent articles from Jonathan McCormick Jr. who joined the writing team during the summer as senior international correspondent. His articles have ranged from local Liberland news to an account of a meeting with Andrew Henderson, founder of the Nomad Capitalist, with President Vit Jedlicka.. Andrew in the meeting with President Vit was so impressed that he agreed to becoming a supporter and citizen there and then. Jonathan was able to break the news that President Vit has also been invited to speak at the famous Nomad Capitalist Live Conference in Mexico next May.
Jonathan is a journalist, crypto entrepreneur and Eagle Scout and founder of Mount Crypto.
The Liberland Press editorial team is also joined by analytic American philosopher writer Thomas Dylan Daniel with many interests, including fiction, poetry, biological material reductionism and agency, the interaction between minds and languages, and of course blockchain. Daniel’s greatest work to date is Formal Dialectics, and he is active on social media and a handful of content oriented sites around the web, speculating on cryptocurrency investments and politics in between deeper philosophical thought pieces.
Frisco, Jonathan and Dylan join existing contributor Gregory Diehl, author of multiple bestselling books on identity development for businesses and individuals. He is also the founder of Identity Publications, an organization that produces and publishes books containing ideas that matter. Diehl travels to more than 50 countries, enjoys homesteading in Ecuador and Armenia, and kidnaps felines from streets around the world. Connect with him at gregorydiehl.net or identitypublications.com.
The Editor in Chief of Liberland Press is Jillian Godsil, award winning blockchain author and broadcaster. She took on the role in October 2019 and has written on local news, blockchain and cryptocurrency events.
She has recently published a book on the people in blockchain and cryptocurrency, to purchase a copy please visit https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NS1LXG8 (adjusting the local amazon link for in-country links). She includes of course an interview with President Vit in the book.
To suggest stories please email one of the writers or contact Jillian directly on Ireland@liberland.org
We begin on the subject of eyebrows; or rather I begin, with the owner of the eyebrows in question no less the crypto luminary Tim Draper. I am a self-confessed fan of Mr Draper but am less enamoured by this particular part of his visage. I also confess to being slightly mesmerised by them, while accompanied by the strange notion they might one day quite independently fly off in different directions. Such is my addiction to these two artefacts I harbour a secret desire to seek out Mr Draper’s barber and bribe him into running a trimmer over them, or at least one, and then necessitating the trimming of the other. And they say COVID is not affecting general mental health?
Case closed, m’lud.
Back to Sukh and his agency, Nijjar Media, where he is combining targeting marketing with crowdfunding. The latter, while rapidly growing in popularity, requires sophisticated and targeted marketing. In the early days of crowdfunding an idea on the back of an envelope might generate funds but in an increasingly crowded marketplace, that idea needs polish to stand out.
Working with Tim Draper and Meet the Drapers TV has certainly catapulted Sukh into the major league. He modestly demurs; he is not a celebrity filmmaker but his association with one of the leading blockchain and crypto advocates can do him no harm. He does agree the opportunity is amazing.
“Being able to work with someone as universally admired and known as Tim Draper is a great honour. In addition, the entrepreneurs on the show are top notch and super motivated. It’s an awesome opportunity.”
Many entrepreneurs have been featured on the show – now about to begin filming its fifth series – and Suhk finds it hard to pick out a standout entrepreneur until pushed.
“I would then nominate Jeffrey O’Neill who founded a company called Zephyr Aerospace. We met a year ago on set when he was presenting his idea of an economy airplane seat. This was pre COVID so his focus was on disrupting how space is used on planes.”
In the Zephyr invention Jeffrey built a double decker seat using the unclaimed real estate above people’s heads. The result – two seats on top of each other, totally enclosed with access provided by a folding-out staircase.
“On the one hand, the collapse of the aviation industry through COVID, might have sounded the death knell for any inventions in this space, but Jeffrey was able to pivot his invention as saving aviation in the future. The enclosed and separated compartments would ensure any transmission of virus would be severely curtailed. It’s a new solution to how travel may look during and post COVID.”
Filming Meet the Drapers TV is very intense. It is the first time many of the entrepreneurs are in front of a camera and they can be very nervous.
“You can cut the tension with a knife.
“But it is also a very energised place. Some of the entrepreneurs have been working on their ideas for years and now they get an opportunity to present their precious projects to well-known venture capitalists. It’s an interesting environment.”
Sukh reckons it is less hostile or drama laden when compared with other pitching shows such as Dragons Den or Shark Tank.
“There is a healthy discourse between the entrepreneurs and the panellists, and the latter may be made up of sales professionals, serial entrepreneurs, and engineers. Most of the pitching entrepreneurs are in the tech space so it makes for lively conversations.”
When not filming, although blessed with an insight into what makes a project venture-capital-ready, Sukh works with startups to help them get to that stage.
“The crowdfunding marketplace has changed in the past couple of years allowing easy access to these platforms which is good, but the resultant popularity makes standing out harder.
“Many entrepreneurs are solo players. As a founder there is so much to do, so we like to step in as their marketing arm. We help then craft their stories and find their users. We do everything from digital marketing, go to market strategy, video production and paid media. We help entrepreneurs go from the ‘good idea’ to launch their businesses online and run successful crowdfunding campaigns.”
Another project Sukh is working on is in the DNA sector, or rather the commercial sequencing business surrounding it. Big agencies such as Ancestory.com and 23andMe are multimillion dollar enterprises but the industry is not transparent about where the captured DNA ends up and who has access to it.
“Sequencing DNA is an awesome tool and we can learn so much in terms of health, disease, physical attributes and who we are. But as the most important piece of data that has ever existed in mankind, we need to be able to trust who can look at it, test it, learn from it and even earn from it.
“Daniel Uribe is the founder of Genobank. His son was diagnosed two years ago with a rare disease based on a mutation in his DNA. As Daniel was researching everything to do with the disease, he stumbled over the legal, but to him unethical, use of DNA by these large companies and so he decided to set up the world’s first anonymous DNA testing kit.
“We worked with him to tell that story and his crowdfunding was successful, in fact it was more than 464% oversubscribed on the Republic crowdfunding platform.”
We banter a bit more on all things crypto, movements like DeFi, tools like NFTs and when crypto will finally beat fiat but return again to the eyebrows. Since speaking with Sukh and writing this article I did a bit of celebrity sleuthing and can announce quite confidently that I don’t need a DNA kit to track the source of the flyaway eyebrows; they were inherited from his father, Mr Bill Draper.
Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Sonic Capital, has used his time in COVID to kick start the next version of his career and one that may be his defining legacy: he is on a mission to save the planet and make money. Take that world, kapow!
First let’s travel through his journey to world-saving, money-earning domination. Born in Hong Kong, Stefan was educated in Switzerland but when he finished his education, he wanted to find out more about his roots, about China and to learn Mandarin. He returned home and soon stumbled across the burgeoning mobile sector in China, quickly becoming engrossed in building out networks in this sector. Next stop Sun Microsystems, of ‘the network is the computer’ fame, where he helped grow the ecosystem around Java on their mobile phones. He was becoming adept at building communities around new powerful modern technologies.
It was a logical step to move from China to Hong Kong, where the money was to fund the growth.
“The actual melding of Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers with the capital markets in Hong Kong didn’t happen as fast I imagined but I was learning how to build communities – with speed.”
Stefan saw the innovation provided by software developers driving efficiencies through more streamlined processes and workflows. He put together a developer agency supporting and managing developer communities across Motorola, Qualcomm, Intel, Sony, Blackberry and Google. He organised at least 30 hackathons a year and that’s when he discovered bitcoin. A developer helping him grow a project in Guatemala asked for bitcoin in payment.
‘I had to look it up, it was 2012, so I went on eBay, paid with Paypal with a Java wallet and got my first bitcoin. I was hooked straight away.”
The simplicity of bitcoin struck him forcibly. The speed, low cost, and immediacy of bitcoin compared so favourable with dollar transfers with their heavy fees and long delays.
“I could see the opportunity.”
Immediately prior to COVID, Stefan held the position of CEO of Bitcoin.com for a year and a half. I asked him what it was like working with Bitcoin Jesus.
“I knew of him in advance of course and had watched some of his videos but I hadn’t met him before. Then my wife was organising a big event for a Swiss bank and I said you’ve got to get Roger to speak and she did.”
Afterward the conference, everyone was milling around in the hallway and Stefan struck up a conversation with Roger. Despite all the requests for selfies and photographs, they kept on talking and as he says, they just hit it off.
“We both have the same sort of vision as to where this industry needs to go and we both enjoy the power of disruption.”
He was headhunted a month later to grow Roger’s business and he accepted with the stipulation from Stefan that he would do it only if he was able to close three deals within three months. He closed five.
Now Stefan was CEO of one the fastest growing cryptocurrencies companies in the world. During his tenure he launched a new exchange, got credit card approval across 26 different countries, launched a new wallet, did rebranding, launched Mint, and grew the community to 30,000 in Meetup in 80 cities across the world.
“Working at Bitcoin.com was super active; it was 120 miles an hour all the time. Roger has a lot of energy and passion and I really enjoyed working alongside him. We were on a race to regulate before the regulators could overregulate us.”
It seems logical that Sonic Capital should come next. Founded in May 2020 in the middle of COVID it’s hard to argue which came first, the COVID or the Sonic.
“COVID gave us breathing space. We have bigger problems than the pandemic.”
Stefan sees the biggest problems in three areas; environment, social and governance.
“Let’s put some perspective on things. Crime is currently costed around $5 trillion annually yet the entire market cap for cryptocurrencies is loitering between $200 and $300 billion. And yet people are worried about crypto crime?
“Then we have 1.7 unbanked people that can’t participate in any financial systems. And as for the environment….”
Stefan started attending ESG conferences and in particular began looking at where people were investing.
“They all had their checklists, literally manually checking off ESG requirements, but when I looked at the ESG funds they are huge, and they are all investing in the same companies. But what if we moved this onto the blockchain, bring down the costs and introduce governance.
‘Blockchain being the truth machine.”
Stefan takes this idea another step further by looking to tokenise the environment so that consumers with mobile phones, some 60% of the global population, can participate.
“It becomes very simple. People can download a wallet onto their smart phone from the app store and then engage with saving the planet and receive a financial reward.”
Let that thought digest for a moment. Saving the environment is not a cost but an opportunity.
“We’ve always made money by killing things, chopping down trees for example and selling the wood. What if we turned that concept on its head? We have the technology to monitor the carbon sequestered in a tree or a mangrove swamp. We can track the carbon, using formulas and processes to measure it. And then we can tokenise it and reimburse the farmer for keeping the plant alive.”
Examples of rewarding people for saving the environment are already in use. Stefan references the Ant Forest app in China. The app has a formula that tracks how the holder travels – is it by foot, car, taxi? When the holder takes healthy options, they are rewarded with green points.
“There 500 million people using this app and almost 1 million trees have already been planted as a result. It’s greening the planet and rewarding people when they walk to work.”
I love the idea but question where is the money coming from and how will this be sustained?
“Right now, this is being supported by Alibaba as a marketing exercise, but they are bringing it to other companies using messaging apps to transfer value. The green points have become a tradable commodity. Therefore, merchants who want to reward their customers for being green can buy the green tokens and give them to their customers when they actively exhibit green behaviour. For example, if you want to purchase takeaway noodles but you opt not to have the bamboo chopsticks then you earn green points.”
Stefan sees similar opportunities in the sustainable energy marketplace.
“Energy is going through a revolution, much like the telecommunications did in the late 90s. There is huge deregulation in the distributed energy resource market. When people put solar panels on their roofs, they save money in energy costs, they earn green carbon credits and they can sell surplus energy back onto the grid. It’s a virtuous circle.”
This is at a time when all the major companies are looking to go carbon neutral. Companies such as Apple, H&M, Ralph Lauren have all come out stating this as a mission statement.
“This trickles down the supply chain as everyone needs to be carbon neutral. The ripple effect is exponential.”
So where is the opportunity for Sonic Capital in all this innovation and disruption?
“Technology is the key to measuring and tracking carbon neutrality, using smart contracts doing audits on the blockchain, which data is in turn tokenised. It’s a whole new industry and a new market. The tokens will be freely tradable, everyone can participate and it’s a much more level and transparent ecosystem.
“It’s a natural antidote to existing funds that are extremely opaque, involve huge arbitrage and pricing, are highly regulated and governed with lots of middlemen taking a cut along the way.”
The goal of Sonic Capital is to support the technologies and entrepreneurs who are going to drive that innovation.
Finally, the unbanked. Stefan holds up his mobile.
“We can use the smart phone to allow people to earn an income without going through 15 middlemen. We need to develop apps that allow people to earn tokens, track tokens and then deploy them.
“We need to go mobile, mobile first and mobile only.”
Stefan again references the telecommunications revolution.
“When we first used telecoms, it cost a lot of money but then IP came along and suddenly everyone is calling for free, except they were paying in data, their own data. New business models are starting to invert that, paying people for their data. Merchants will pay people in tokens to get feedback on their services and that in turn will drive a UBI.”
Save the planet and earn money indeed, move over Flash Gordon.
Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Sonic Capital, has used his time in COVID to kick start the next version of his career and one that may be his defining legacy: he is on a mission to save the planet and make money. Take that world, kapow!
First let’s travel through his journey to world-saving, money-earning domination. Born in Hong Kong, Stefan was educated in Switzerland but when he finished his education, he wanted to find out more about his roots, about China and to learn Mandarin. He returned home and soon stumbled across the burgeoning mobile sector in China, quickly becoming engrossed in building out networks in this sector. Next stop Sun Microsystems, of ‘the network is the computer’ fame, where he helped grow the ecosystem around Java on their mobile phones. He was becoming adept at building communities around new powerful modern technologies.
It was a logical step to move from China to Hong Kong, where the money was to fund the growth.
“The actual melding of Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers with the capital markets in Hong Kong didn’t happen as fast I imagined but I was learning how to build communities – with speed.”
Stefan saw the innovation provided by software developers driving efficiencies through more streamlined processes and workflows. He put together a developer agency supporting and managing developer communities across Motorola, Qualcomm, Intel, Sony, Blackberry and Google. He organised at least 30 hackathons a year and that’s when he discovered bitcoin. A developer helping him grow a project in Guatemala asked for bitcoin in payment.
‘I had to look it up, it was 2012, so I went on eBay, paid with Paypal with a Java wallet and got my first bitcoin. I was hooked straight away.”
The simplicity of bitcoin struck him forcibly. The speed, low cost, and immediacy of bitcoin compared so favourable with dollar transfers with their heavy fees and long delays.
“I could see the opportunity.”
Immediately prior to COVID, Stefan held the position of CEO of Bitcoin.com for a year and a half. I asked him what it was like working with Bitcoin Jesus.
“I knew of him in advance of course and had watched some of his videos but I hadn’t met him before. Then my wife was organising a big event for a Swiss bank and I said you’ve got to get Roger to speak and she did.”
Afterward the conference, everyone was milling around in the hallway and Stefan struck up a conversation with Roger. Despite all the requests for selfies and photographs, they kept on talking and as he says, they just hit it off.
“We both have the same sort of vision as to where this industry needs to go and we both enjoy the power of disruption.”
He was headhunted a month later to grow Roger’s business and he accepted with the stipulation from Stefan that he would do it only if he was able to close three deals within three months. He closed five.
Now Stefan was CEO of one the fastest growing cryptocurrencies companies in the world. During his tenure he launched a new exchange, got credit card approval across 26 different countries, launched a new wallet, did rebranding, launched Mint, and grew the community to 30,000 in Meetup in 80 cities across the world.
“Working at Bitcoin.com was super active; it was 120 miles an hour all the time. Roger has a lot of energy and passion and I really enjoyed working alongside him. We were on a race to regulate before the regulators could overregulate us.”
It seems logical that Sonic Capital should come next. Founded in May 2020 in the middle of COVID it’s hard to argue which came first, the COVID or the Sonic.
“COVID gave us breathing space. We have bigger problems than the pandemic.”
Stefan sees the biggest problems in three areas; environment, social and governance.
“Let’s put some perspective on things. Crime is currently costed around $5 trillion annually yet the entire market cap for cryptocurrencies is loitering between $200 and $300 billion. And yet people are worried about crypto crime?
“Then we have 1.7 unbanked people that can’t participate in any financial systems. And as for the environment….”
Stefan started attending ESG conferences and in particular began looking at where people were investing.
“They all had their checklists, literally manually checking off ESG requirements, but when I looked at the ESG funds they are huge, and they are all investing in the same companies. But what if we moved this onto the blockchain, bring down the costs and introduce governance.
‘Blockchain being the truth machine.”
Stefan takes this idea another step further by looking to tokenise the environment so that consumers with mobile phones, some 60% of the global population, can participate.
“It becomes very simple. People can download a wallet onto their smart phone from the app store and then engage with saving the planet and receive a financial reward.”
Let that thought digest for a moment. Saving the environment is not a cost but an opportunity.
“We’ve always made money by killing things, chopping down trees for example and selling the wood. What if we turned that concept on its head? We have the technology to monitor the carbon sequestered in a tree or a mangrove swamp. We can track the carbon, using formulas and processes to measure it. And then we can tokenise it and reimburse the farmer for keeping the plant alive.”
Examples of rewarding people for saving the environment are already in use. Stefan references the Ant Forest app in China. The app has a formula that tracks how the holder travels – is it by foot, car, taxi? When the holder takes healthy options, they are rewarded with green points.
“There 500 million people using this app and almost 1 million trees have already been planted as a result. It’s greening the planet and rewarding people when they walk to work.”
I love the idea but question where is the money coming from and how will this be sustained?
“Right now, this is being supported by Alibaba as a marketing exercise, but they are bringing it to other companies using messaging apps to transfer value. The green points have become a tradable commodity. Therefore, merchants who want to reward their customers for being green can buy the green tokens and give them to their customers when they actively exhibit green behaviour. For example, if you want to purchase takeaway noodles but you opt not to have the bamboo chopsticks then you earn green points.”
Stefan sees similar opportunities in the sustainable energy marketplace.
“Energy is going through a revolution, much like the telecommunications did in the late 90s. There is huge deregulation in the distributed energy resource market. When people put solar panels on their roofs, they save money in energy costs, they earn green carbon credits and they can sell surplus energy back onto the grid. It’s a virtuous circle.”
This is at a time when all the major companies are looking to go carbon neutral. Companies such as Apple, H&M, Ralph Lauren have all come out stating this as a mission statement.
“This trickles down the supply chain as everyone needs to be carbon neutral. The ripple effect is exponential.”
So where is the opportunity for Sonic Capital in all this innovation and disruption?
“Technology is the key to measuring and tracking carbon neutrality, using smart contracts doing audits on the blockchain, which data is in turn tokenised. It’s a whole new industry and a new market. The tokens will be freely tradable, everyone can participate and it’s a much more level and transparent ecosystem.
“It’s a natural antidote to existing funds that are extremely opaque, involve huge arbitrage and pricing, are highly regulated and governed with lots of middlemen taking a cut along the way.”
The goal of Sonic Capital is to support the technologies and entrepreneurs who are going to drive that innovation.
Finally, the unbanked. Stefan holds up his mobile.
“We can use the smart phone to allow people to earn an income without going through 15 middlemen. We need to develop apps that allow people to earn tokens, track tokens and then deploy them.
“We need to go mobile, mobile first and mobile only.”
Stefan again references the telecommunications revolution.
“When we first used telecoms, it cost a lot of money but then IP came along and suddenly everyone is calling for free, except they were paying in data, their own data. New business models are starting to invert that, paying people for their data. Merchants will pay people in tokens to get feedback on their services and that in turn will drive a UBI.”
Save the planet and earn money indeed, move over Flash Gordon.
Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life.
They are called libertarians.
WHAT IS A LIBERTARIAN?
Libertarians believe that, in politics, liberty is the most important value. Almost everyone wants freedom for themselves, but a libertarian also seeks to protect and expand the freedom of others.
When people are free, we can create a more just, more prosperous, safer, and better world for everyone.
A libertarian is committed to the principle that liberty is the most important political value. Liberty means being free to make your own choices about your own life, that what you do with your body and your property ought to be up to you. Other people must not forcibly interfere with your liberty, and you must not forcibly interfere with theirs.
POLITICAL LIBERTY
There are many values other than liberty that are morally important, and there are many forms of liberty outside of political liberty. People talk about the freedom to be one’s self, without being ostracized by a narrow‐minded society. They talk about the freedom that comes from financial independence. And they talk about freedom from oppression by sources other than the state.
Some libertarians see the fight for liberty in politics as part and parcel of a broader struggle; others take a more limited view. A belief that liberty is the most important value in politics is what unites them.
Libertarians envision a pluralist, cosmopolitan society united by commerce and travel, not divided by nationalistic antagonisms. They envision a world where people are free to experiment with different ways of living, free to try new ideas that might just be crazy enough to work. A world driven by the entrepreneurial spirit that is always asking questions like “How could this be better?” and “Can I make something entirely new?” Such a society may have a patchwork messiness about it, but it would also be vibrant and humane.
Because all people are moral equals, each possessing a wide domain of rightful autonomy, libertarians believe that claims of special authority—like those claims made by governments throughout history—require special justification. In other words, people claiming the right to infringe upon our liberty carry the burden of explaining why they’re entitled to do so.
Furthermore, libertarians tend to believe that most (if not all) of the claims to special authority made by the various governments around the world are unjustifiable. Governments assert wide‐reaching powers to control people’s day‐to‐day conduct, take their belongings, and even conscript them into fighting wars. If they offer any justification for these powers, it’s only as an afterthought.
When ordinary people aren’t careful to respect their neighbors’ privacy, or presume to boss other people about or physically interfere with them, those of us concerned with justice and civility object. We might say: “Stop that. Mind your own business.” But the agents of the state act like the same rules don’t apply to them. Once they decide they want to do a thing, they generally don’t stop to consider whether doing it is any of their business in the first place, or whether they’re going about doing it in a way that disrespects the dignity or autonomy of their fellows. Legislators, bureaucrats, police, and other agents who enforce the state’s commands treat other people as pawns on a chessboard to be maneuvered into whatever configuration they deem best. Too many fail to see people as independent agents with their own desires and plans. That’s true even in relatively free societies.
Libertarians think that we ought to hold ourselves, and our governments, to a higher standard—that a freer society is possible and desirable. When people cooperate with one another peacefully, with respect for each other’s rights and liberties, we are capable of incredible things.
THE CORE PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTARIANISM
Many cultures around the world have a tradition of liberty, shaped by each society’s particular circumstances and by the thinkers who lived there. As the world grows more interconnected, these different traditions are increasingly in dialogue. Libertarians often view themselves as the modern heirs to the tradition of liberty that developed in Europe and colonial America.
Libertarianism is rooted, historically and philosophically, in the liberalism of the Enlightenment.
Libertarianism is rooted, historically and philosophically, in the liberalism of the Enlightenment. But although it belongs to an intellectual tradition dating back centuries, libertarianism embraces a vision of political liberty which is, even today, revolutionary. The Enlightenment liberals stood against the idea, older than human civilization, that some people ought to boss others about, setting the table for a conflict still playing out in society today. The old idea, sadly, dies hard.
John Locke (1632–1704)
Liberals like John Locke argued that because people are people, there are certain things you can’t do to them, not because they’re hereditary aristocrats or have some other kind of special status or group membership, but just because they’re people who share with you a common humanity. The things you can’t morally do to a person constitute that person’s rights. We are all born to these rights—in which sense, they are natural rights—and we do not owe them to the generosity or authority of any third party, whether individual or group, mundane or supernatural. Our rights delineate our spheres of individual autonomy. We have rights to bodily integrity and to own legitimately acquired property. Put another way, it would be immoral for someone to assault or kill us, or to seize or damage things we own.
LIBERALISM
In everyday conversation, “liberal” most commonly refers to someone left of center in mainstream politics, but not as far left as a communist.
Here, we are using “liberal” in a more general and older sense of the word that is still used in everyday conversation outside of the United States. Rather than being the opposite of “conservative,” this broader meaning encompasses large parts of both the left and right of modern American politics. It also includes modern libertarians and the “classical liberal” thinkers of the Enlightenment that influenced modern liberals of all stripes.
Libertarian philosophers and economists tend to view themselves as the true heirs of classical liberalism, taking the important core ideas of classical liberal thinkers and building on and refining them. Other modern liberals, like John Rawls or John Maynard Keynes, rejected libertarianism because they disagree with libertarians about the right direction to develop classical liberal thought. Liberals are united in opposition to illiberal, authoritarian ideologies, like communism, fascism, or theocracy.
Liberals like Adam Smith explained the mechanisms by which a free economy can change and adapt to best produce the goods and services people want without any centralized plan or planner. This idea—that economic production and consumption can be and largely are carried on in a state of spontaneous order—is one of the foundational principles of both modern economics and libertarian theory. We need no maestro directing goods where to go; people trade goods and services independently using their own judgments, and the sum of their choices produces a system that helps allocate resources to their most efficient ends, making us all richer.
Modern day politicians on the left and right sometimes pay lip service to these ideas, but in practice they reject them. Legislation is all about imposing an order from above, rather than letting one emerge from below. And in creating their schemes, politicians all too often fail to give citizens their due as people, treating them as pawns and running roughshod over their rights to decide and plan for themselves.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF THE STATE
A libertarian is suspicious of the claims made by the world’s various governments to legitimacy and authority. Many justifications for state authority involve some version of the “social contract” story—the idea that people in a society have agreed to be ruled so that they can achieve some aim that is only attainable collectively. But even when a written constitution uses the language of the social contract, there are still big problems with justifications of this sort.
For one thing, we know that as a matter of history the state had its origin as an institution not with the people of this or that society banding together for the common good, but rather in conquest—looting and murder. Roving warlords evolved their strategies from violent theft to extorting tribute payments, which was less risky and more remunerative in the long run. They would eventually settle down in one place instead of roaming, establishing themselves as an aristocratic class and protecting their turf from rivals. With this history in mind, the various academic justifications for the state’s legitimacy start to seem like self‐serving “Just So” stories that gloss over the state’s bloody, exploitative historical origin.
Even if some version of the social contract story works—and the more sophisticated ones take the historical reality of the state’s origin into account—libertarians recognize that the people in a given society could only delegate to a state powers they themselves already possess. If it wouldn’t be permissible for an ordinary person or group of people to take some action, there are no emergent properties of states that would permit them to take that same action. You have a right to defend yourself against thieves and murderers, so you could delegate that power to the state. You don’t have the right to force your neighbor not to drink beer on Sundays, so the state could never legitimately be given such a power.
Today, many states are still openly run so that a ruling class can extract resources from a subject class. And even high‐functioning democracies that purport to serve the public good share the essential features of their more brutal and openly exploitative cousins:
A monopoly on the use of legitimized force within a geographical area
The power to make and enforce rules
The power to seize money and other assets and to coerce the performance of labor
These features make control of the state extremely appealing to people who want to use its power for the benefit of themselves and groups they favor, at the expense of groups they disfavor or society as a whole. Some of them are just greedy for money and power. Others embrace ideologies holding that using the state to benefit a favored group is morally good. Motives aside, these features of the state have a tendency to set us against one another when we participate in politics. Politics makes us worse.
CONFLICT AND COOPERATION IN HUMAN SOCIETY
Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943)
You can divide the methods humans use to acquire goods and services and accumulate wealth into two broad categories. Sociologist Franz Oppenheimer called them “the economic means” and “the political means.” The economic means encompasses production and exchange—that is, making things yourself out of what you already own or are able to harvest from nature, and trading with other people or giving and receiving gifts. The political means covers all the various ways of taking things that belong to other people by force or fraud, including the organized force of the state. It may seem odd at first to think of stealing as “political”—but keep in mind where states come from. When Oppenheimer called taking goods by force the “political means” of acquiring wealth, he had in mind the historical origins of states as extractive institutions with the purpose of enriching a conquering class at the expense of a conquered class as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
For a libertarian, a cooperative society, and moreover a moral one, is a society in which people rely on the economic means of acquiring wealth. In the market nexus, we are able to come together to find others who share our interests and cooperate with them to achieve gains we could not alone by undertaking enterprises together or engaging in trade. Sometimes, of course, our foresight isn’t perfect and we fail to achieve those gains—but because market interactions can create wealth, rather than merely move it around, they can be positive‐sum; one party winning doesn’t entail another party losing. That encourages us to see other people as potential collaborators, and it rewards all of us for cooperating with one another. Indeed, economic science tells us that the wider the range of potential trading partners we have, the wealthier we will be.
Human life—civilization—isn’t only about wealth in the narrow sense, of course. People interact with one another and organize into all sorts of groups for a wide variety of purposes. What’s important to a libertarian is that we make our dealings with our fellows peaceful and consensual. It’s in that way that we can show the appropriate respect for each person’s autonomy and humanity.
Peaceful, consensual interactions, whether in the market or other aspects of human life, are essentially pro‐social. Politics, libertarians think, is fundamentally anti‐social.
Every law—whether just or unjust, well‐known or obscure, old or new—is ultimately a threat made at gunpoint: Don’t cross this line, or else. When it comes to laws against violating people’s rights, that way of doing things might be appropriate, but a great many laws are not of that type. Solving problems politically means a group of people using violence—or getting others to use violence on its behalf—to impose its will on others without their consent. For that reason, a libertarian tends to be wary of politics playing a large role in human affairs. The humane, peaceful way is better.
Mencius/Mengzi was a philosopher who dedicated his life to traveling throughout ancient China, giving rulers advice on how to rule virtuously. Although he was writing in the 4th‐century BCE, many of his ideas have themes that often arise in libertarian thought. He believed that moral and material prosperity was best achieved by the state leaving people to develop freely. According to Mencius, those in power are to be held to a high standard. Just because a person has the state’s backing does not mean they can do whatever they wish.
We have seen that when it comes to big questions about the nature of politics and the state, or about what makes for a good society, libertarians have a distinctive way of thinking. That distinctiveness carries over to the way libertarians think about smaller questions, too. You might have heard someone say that on public policy, libertarians are “socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” That’s misleading. Even when libertarians agree with the left or the right on a given issue, they often have very different reasons for the conclusions they draw, and much of the time libertarians disagree with left and right both. When evaluating different specific policies and institutions, libertarians have a coherent set of ideas all their own. That’s not to say libertarians always agree. They don’t. And what’s more, they shouldn’t, because libertarianism properly understood is an ongoing conversation, not a dogma.
Let’s begin, however, with a topic where libertarians tend to strongly agree.
WAR
Across the years and around the world, no single issue unites libertarians more than war, and no other issue is more important. A libertarian despises war. In fact, one could view the whole libertarian project as opposition to war and militarism: A libertarian disapproves of using violence to induce other people to do what one wants. Furthermore, a libertarian is hostile to the state’s attempts to impose military regimentation on society as a whole, treating citizens like soldiers—organized and trained by the state to effect the state’s ends.
The indirect effects of warmaking abroad are often inimical to liberty at home. The size and power of the state, which grow during war time, rarely return to prewar levels after the fighting stops.
Because wars inevitably create widespread death and destruction of property, threaten civil liberties, and encourage nationalist thinking instead of individualism and cosmopolitanism, libertarians treat war as, at best, an absolute last resort. Libertarians like Christopher A. Preble have cogently argued that a libertarian foreign policy must be restrained, shunning wars of choice, and that the military should be of an appropriately small size for that purpose. Some libertarians, like Bryan Caplan, think there are good reasons to oppose any and all wars, and many libertarians are inspired by the ideas and deeds of pacifists like Leo Tolstoy or William Lloyd Garrison.
Anish has a different way of looking at technology. He has a clarity of view and an ability to cut through the layers of complexity – without losing the sense of the piece. It’s the same with his explanation of DeFi: which is proving both a movement and a technology at the same.
Anish choses to divide DeFi into three core components. The first is the underlying infrastructure which at this moment in time is Ethereum, which also has some issues notably in the price of gas. The second layer is derived from traditional financial instruments including automated market makers, bonding curves and other financial tools. The third layer is the governance process or the Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) characterised by the staking of tokens and voting of the community.
“All three come together to allow DeFi to do what it is doing right now with governance being the key – without governance you’d just have pumping and dumping.”
Anish argues that in traditional finance regulatory bodies do the overseeing, whereas in the cryptoworld it’s the governance that fulfils that function. There is no oversight body or bodies in cryptocurrency and so the community votes with their feet.
The optimist in Anish believes it will be the community that will therefore influence the evolution of ecosystems, of protocols, to create and maintain fair, open and transparent systems.
Anish stresses that transparency is the key here too.
“If you put your money into a bank it is totally opaque, you have no idea what is happening and what outcomes you are likely to get. By comparison in DeFI you can see how you will be rewarded based on the protocol; the processes are auditable, and the ecosystem is largely transparent. The barrier to looking under the financial hood has been broken by DeFI.”
Anish is hopeful that DeFi will look to democratise access to finance for everyone, especially once the big dramas die down.
“One of the things I am looking forward to is when the underlying layer, Ethereum, gets to a point where it can handle the traffic. Ethereum currently is a bit like uber drivers in Bangalore; when the traffic gets heavy, they put up their prices. Unless you pay higher fees, your trade won’t go through. Worst case the outcome is more like having a limited supply of bread, you join the long queue but by the time to get to the shopkeeper, there is no bread left and the shop closes down.
“This is the situation right now. We don’t have the ability to process trades but when the throughput is good enough then it’s a game changer; no traffic jams, no surge prices in uber and people allowed access to finance without needing a bank account.”
Despite Ethereum’s traffic jams, Anish is still relatively upbeat with solutions coming forward such as sharding and rollups. In simple terms sharding is akin to doing date queries or spot checking queues whereas rollups only involve checking the topmost transaction. Then there is Zero Knowledge Rollups or ZK rollups which Anish explains by saying – Zero knowledge proof are like you see someone in a room with only one door, yet minutes later the person is beside you outside the room without having used the door. You have no knowledge how it came to pass but the person is most definitely outside the room.
These improvements would definitely speed up throughput according to Anish.
“You need to look at the total number of developers and the total number of users on Ethereum and that outstrips all other blockchains by a couple of orders of magnitude.
“While we wait for better throughput, other contenders such as Cosmos, Polkadot and Algorand can offer solutions but their current numbers of devs, users and capital are still very tiny by comparison.
I questioned Anish about the second layer; if we are porting traditional financial instruments to the blockchain, can we improve them at the same time?
Absolutely is his reply.
“Let’s talk about CDOs or collateralized debt obligations. When stacking multiple debt vehicles in traditional financial instruments the individual risk ratings are opaque. Even if the bundle of CDOs contains lots of risk, the producer can still tie it up and put a triple A credit risk on the top and no one is the wiser.
“Using ZK proofs, we can use math to prove or disprove if the CDO is actually a triple A rating or not. It’s not up for negotiation. There is no buddy buddy system where I scratch your back and you scratch mine, nothing like this between a smart contract and an oracle.
“Smart contracts and Oracles don’t have emotions. Right now, a very small minority of people make decisions for the 7.5 billion people living on this planet and the decisions only favour the tiny minority, that is not fair.”
Anish argues that having an efficient protocol with governance would make the cost of doing transactions on the blockchain very cheap with much less friction.
“You just need to push a button.”
There is one last question to be asked of this new financial utopia. How can we ensure we get good governance?
“I will be very honest here. Humans as a species have been evolving, mostly positively. We learn from our mistakes and I believe we will reach a place where we will have much better mechanisms in place. I don’t see us going backwards – I think that is a low probability.”
And that is where we leave the interview. I am much reassured by Anish’s positivity. If someone with the brain of Anish believes in a bright future, one preserved on the blockchain and guarded by maths, then I will believe it too.
In this episode our guests Joey Langenbrunner and Nicholas Rodriguez discuss:
1) How Liberland is making an impact around the world through the gift of giving
2) A recent partnership with the Red Cross
3) Financing a project in Brazil with Bitcoin Cash
Contact the Liberland Aid Foundation: laf@liberland.org liberlandfoundation.org Follow the Liberland Show: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/liberland-show/id1442988844?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/6oGiaY901GlfWbaFqgEEaF *Donate and support the Liberland Show: Bitcoin – 1CCZ7jzaynPTrFTfSEwipPdvGGK6n32HbS Ethereum – 0xCA7f419b5B1B3833e15dA6c1F09E6752ab4AFED6 **Listen to Dream Chasers: anchor.fm/dreamchasers
What I want to talk about is the general issue of market failure, and in particular, its relevance to the issues raised by the current pandemic. I am going to claim that market failure is indeed a real problem, but it is not a problem that is specific to markets, it is a problem that exists in a wide variety of different contexts.
Market failure is often used as an argument for government intervention in the economy or in the world, and it in fact is an argument for that, but I want to claim there is a stronger argument against the alternative, that market failure is a reason why a laissez-faire free market does not always do the right thing, but there is a stronger reason why the alternative to a laissez-faire free market is unlikely to do the right thing, and I think that’s true even in the case of contagious diseases, which some people would argue, perhaps correctly, are one of the stronger arguments in favor of government.
Let me start by explaining what market failure, in my view, is. Market failure describes a situation where individual rationality does not lead to group rationality, where each individual takes the correct action in his own interest, and yet, we’re all worse off as a result. And the reason that can happen is that each individual acts in terms of consequences for himself and those he cares about. Sometimes individual actions have effects on other people, so it is possible to have a situation where my act benefits me, but harms us, your act benefits you, but harms us, and we’re both worse off as a result.
The standard example that any of you who have taken Econ courses have probably encountered is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, that’s a two-person example of market failure, where the two prisoners both confess, when they would be better off if they both kept their mouths shut, because each one correctly believes that he is better off confession, than not confessing.
My favorite standard example is one which would happen somewhere pretty close to where Liberland now is, about 1000 years ago. I want you to imagine that you are one of a line of 10,000 men with spears, your spears are all pointing in that direction, and the reason they are is that another 10,000 men on horseback with spears are coming at you. You do a very quick cost benefit calculation, you say if we all stand our ground and keep our spears solidly planted, with luck, we can stop their charge. And some of us will die, but most of us will live. If we run, horses run faster than we do. I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I said, “we.” I don’t control him and him, I only control me. If I run and everybody else stands, one man out of 10,000 has a very small effect on the outcome of the battle, and I won’t be one of the ones killed stopping the charge. If everyone else runs and I stand, I’m dead. Whatever everybody else does, I am better off running. We all make that calculation, we all run, and most of us die. Welcome to the dark side of rationality.
Let me give you a less exotic example, but one you may well have experienced yourself. You’re in a restaurant with friends having a pleasant conversation, but the restaurant is a little bit noisy. So, in order for your friends to hear you, you have to raise your voice a little. Of course, everybody else is doing the same thing, so you have to raise your voice even more, and when it’s over, the restaurant is very noisy, as restaurants unfortunately often are, and nobody can hear anybody else, because you’re all speaking loudly. And that’s the same logic as my situation with the army running away, in which each individual takes the correct action, given what everybody else is doing. But my action has negative effects on the rest of you, so does your action, and we all end up worse off.
Let me now talk about market failure in the context of the ordinary private market, the sort of laissez-faire system that most of us are in favor of. One of the nice things about the private market is that most of the time I bear the costs and receive the benefits of my actions. So, most of the time if an action is on net worth taking for me, it’s on net worth taking considering the effect on all of us. And the reason for that is the price system. If I want to use an input, say somebody else’s labor to make something, I have to pay him enough so he is willing to work for me. That means I have to pay him enough so he is better off working for me than doing anything else he could do, so that’s transferring the cost of his working from him to me in the money I’ve got to pay him. If I produce sometimes valuable, I can sell it. The result of my selling it is that the value to the people who are getting what I’m producing is transferred to me in the price they pay me. So, roughly speaking, in a well-functioning free market each individual bears the cost of his actions, receives the benefits and therefore has the right incentive, the incentive to take those actions that produce net benefits and avoid those actions that produce net costs. That’s one of the attractive features about market system.
But it isn’t always the case, because there are situations where I can take an action where some of the costs are imposed on other people, the standard economist example would be air pollution; or, take an example where some of the benefits go to other people and I can’t collect them, for example, if I think up a new idea which other people can then use. You could think of lots of other examples, but basic research is one of the standard textbook examples of this kind of issue. So, that means that there are situations on the free market where something happens that shouldn’t happen or fails to happen that should happen, therefore market failure exists on the free market, but on the free market is the exception, not the rule. It occurs only when the normal mechanisms are not working in the way they usually work. But it does provide an argument for government action, because it means that a sufficiently wise and benevolent government could under some circumstances intervene and make things better. The problem, of course, is the shortage of sufficient wise and benevolent government actors, because market failure also occurs on the political market.
If you think of the individual voter who is supposed to be what makes democracy work, the individual voter knows that his vote has a very low probability of changing the outcome of an election. If by spending a lot of time and energy in figuring out who to vote for, by one in a million change, his vote is decisive, the right person gets elected, and the benefit from that goes to everybody in his country, and therefore only a tiny fraction of it goes to him. So, the voter is in a situation where in economic language the externality of his action is something like 99.9999%. The result, of course, is that most voters are rationally ignorant. They vote according to which candidate looks handsome, or which candidate their friends like, or reasons of that sort.
The same thing is true of other actors on the political market. When an interest group lobbies for a tariff, its members receive the benefit of the tariff, other people pay the cost of higher prices or fewer exports to exchange for imports, the various costs the tariff imposes.
If a judge makes a bad decision and sets a bad precedent, he probably never knows it and he bears none of the cost. There is actually a real US case in which a panel of judges made a logical mistake that a smart high school student should have been ashamed of making; they confused an annual cost with a lifetime cost. The result was a decision that almost certainly killed some thousands of people because it resulted in a delay in reducing vaccines due to an incorrect liability decision. I could give details if people were curious, but you probably aren’t. None of those judges ever suffered for doing that.
There may be an exception I haven’t thought of, but I think it’s pretty close to true that no actor on the political market either receives most of the benefit of his action or pays a significant fraction of the cost of his fraction. Hence there is no good reason, on the free market there is a reason why most of the time individual rationality leads to group rationality, there is no reason to expect that on the political market individual rationality will lead to group rationality. And the implication is that shifting decisions from the private market to the political market is more likely to make things worse than to make things better.
Let me discuss the application of this to the particular issue we are now all facing of a pandemic, the coronavirus. Unlike Jeff Berwick, I do know people who have gotten the disease. There is a nice lady who generously designed the covers for two of my more recent books, her husband got the coronavirus very seriously. Her daughter who has recently done a modification of my webpage which will be up pretty soon, because it looks much prettier than my version of the webpage, got it, fortunately not seriously, so this is not an imaginary disease, it’s no more fake than the Spanish Flu was fake a century ago, or the Black Death seven centuries ago. It’s a real problem and it is a real problem for which private action will not result in people doing the perfect things. Unlike what libertarians would often like to believe, the free market is a very good institution, but it is not a perfect institution, because there aren’t any perfect institutions.
So, what’s the problem with private action with regard to contagious diseases? The problem is that when I avoid getting infected I am producing two benefits. I’m producing a benefit for me, because I don’t get sick. But, I’m also producing a benefit for other people, because if I’m not infected, they can’t catch it from me. Furthermore, when I’ve already caught it, going out imposes a cost on other people. That is, if you wish you can call it aggression if you like, but it is in fact a real cost on other people, not on me. So, I have an inadequate incentive to avoid catching the disease and an inadequate incentive to avoid spreading the disease. Hence, if we really had a perfectly wise benevolent ruler who could tell me when I could or couldn’t go out, that could really produce benefits, but again, we have a shortage of such rulers.
So, let’s compare the situation to the political actors. In the case with the private actor, I have an inadequate incentive, but I have a pretty strong incentive because I don’t really want to get the disease and die, I’m 75 years old and male, which puts me in two of the high-risk groups. So, I have a strong incentive to take precautions, and in fact I’ve been self-quarantining for several weeks, and we’re set to do so for another month or so, maybe longer, even if not the ideal incentive we’d like me to have.
What about political actors who are making decisions for me and for other people? And the answer is that the political actors on the healthcare market, at least in the US, I’d be talking mostly about the US because that’s what I know best, in general, they have resulted in the medical system being a good deal worse than it otherwise would be. The FDA makes rules about when medical drugs can be introduced. An economist by the name of Sam Peltzman, University of Chicago, many years ago studied the effect of one change in the FDA regulations, a change that was designed to make sure that drugs were not only safe, but also were useful. And his estimate was that introducing that change which raised the cost of bringing drugs to market reduced the number of medical drugs brought to market each year roughly in half and had no detectable effect on their average quality. So, I think that suggests what I think is almost certainly true, that if the FDA did not exist, there would be a much larger range of medical drugs available and almost certainly at a lower cost, because the FDA by essentially being over cautious because a failure in the direction of the thalidomide case gets on the front page, whereas the mere fact that they don’t approve the use of a drug and an extra 10,000 people die doesn’t make it on the front page, but that’s an extra 10,000 out of 200,000, however many would have died if you did have the drug.
So, furthermore, the government intervenes in a number of other ways. If you are a hospital and you want to expand your activities, you in effect need permission from other hospitals. If you want to build a new hospital, you in effect need permission from other hospitals. The theory of this is we don’t want excessive medical facilities, but of course, it’s always in the interest of a firm to try to keep competitors out. So, that means that the government reduces the availability of hospitals and hospital beds. In order to practice medicine you have to be licensed by your state and in practice the medical profession has historically used that control to hold down the number of doctors. During the Great Depression the American Medical Association sent a letter to the medical schools telling them that they were producing too many doctors and they all cut back as a result, because they knew that the AMA had effective control over whether their school got recognized for licensing. So, that’s one respect in which government intervention has made us less willing, less ready to handle the problem.
For specifics this time around, we know that the Chinese government initial suppressed the information that the coronavirus existed. When one of the doctors went public with it, they took fairly strong actions against him. We know that the US government, when the problem appeared in the US, forbade people from using tests other than the tests that the Center for Disease Control and the FDA had approved of. It then turned out that the tests that the Center for Disease Control was putting out didn’t work, and that cost us, I don’t know, probably a month or so, three weeks to a month, before we got useful tests. We know that the Center for Disease Control for weeks told people they shouldn’t wear masks because it didn’t do any good, that was clearly false at the time. A blogger who I respect for his care in reading scientific articles had a long article going through the existing literature from which it was clear that we did not know how much protection masks provided, but the masks provided substantial protection for other people and some protection for the person who is wearing the mask. The CDC eventually reversed its position, they now are in favor of you wearing masks. As far as I know, they never got around to saying, by the way, we made a horrible mistake which killed thousands of people, which almost certainly is the case, given that people were following the bad advice they had given. I am reasonably sure that nobody at the FDA has been hanged or even fired as a result of that mistake and I think that stands fairly clearly for the general point that people in the political system rarely bear the cost of the mistakes that they make.
Similarly, the CDC has finally reversed its position on saying in effect that only American respirators count, on saying that you could use N-95 but not KN-95, KN-95 being essentially the Chinese version of N-95, and again, the government is in various ways getting in the way and therefore making the problem worse. Now, the government has probably done some useful things, as well. I suspect that telling people that they were not allowed to have gatherings of large numbers of people actually showed the contagion. But the question, the argument, you always have to make an argument for the free market, is not it’s perfect, not there’s nothing government can do better, but that we have no way of having a government that is restricted to things they can do better. And so the question is whether the ways in which government makes things worse are or are not greater than the ways in which it makes things better, and I’m arguing that even in the case of a contagious disease, probably we are better off without them.
Now, that raises the interesting question of what would happen if we had no government because, of course, I’m an anarchist. Individuals still have an incentive to avoid being infected. Without a government I would still be self-quarantining. I in fact cut short my speaking trip in Europe and canceled the last two talks that might or might not have happened anyway in order to come home, because I recognized I was at risk and my younger son persuaded me that I was being unreasonable in assuming that because it had always been safe before, it would be safe this time. If there were no legal restrictions on raising prices when there is a shortage, we would have had a larger incentive to stockpile for emergencies. We would have had more incentive to ramp up production when shortages appear. If this sort of situation were really common in a market system, which it isn’t, then the private law would have been modified in various ways to recognize the fact that when you impose a risk of infection you’re imposing cost on other people.
If I had more time I’d go into more detail, but I’ve just gotten the 30-second message. So, let me end by saying that if you want more information to all of this stuff, is this readable? Unfortunately, it’s mirror image because of the way the system works, by my webpage (daviddfriedman.com) has lots of my books and articles, it has recordings of many of my talks, you can also find my vlog for my webpage, and that will give you more than I am able to say in 20 minutes. Thank you all, have a good day.
Fmr. U.S. Congressman Ron Paul addresses the Liberland 5th Anniversary celebration
Hello everybody, thank you for joining me today. I’m sorry I can’t be with you in Liberland. But Liberland is a very important place for me and for anyone who loves liberty, because it sets the example of what we need someday in this world, if people finally decide liberty is better than authoritarianism.
There has never been a time in the history of the world for the world to be in such chaos, and universally so, across the whole globe. The financial situation is falling apart, there is not much respect for civil liberties, warmongering continues to go on, our country is bankrupt, but the whole world is bankrupt. So, we are having serious problems, and at the same time all this fuss and fume over coronavirus is handled the same way they handled 9/11 – destroy the civil liberties of the American people. Right after 9/11, the Patriot Act was passed, and this was supposed to solve all the problems, and that’s exactly what we’re doing today in reaction to the coronavirus, take away the liberties of the American people, and this will solve the problem. But it is very, very serious, and that is why Liberland is so important.
It’s important because it’s a place, it’s important also because it’s an idea, too. It’s a place where people can go and understand and promote the answers to the world’s problem. So, that is why I’m very proud to be a part of this organization, and I have, like I said, a passport to Liberland. But of course, there is a mystical part of it too, because it’s not enough to house too many people, but it is real. It’s mystical in the sense that it represents an idea, and the idea is that of liberty and the great need for that element right now, today, more so than ever.
You know, there was a major speech given when I was a sophomore in high school, it was given by MacArthur after he had been fired by Truman during the Korean War. And the speech was given to the House of Representatives and to the nation, and we had an assembly which was very, very unusual, the only time it happened while I was in high school. They brought everybody together to listen to somebody talking on the radio, and that of course was to listen live to MacArthur’s speech that became very, very famous. But most everybody remembers his closing, because he closed it with some words from an old Army ballad. He said, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” And it was interesting and catchy, and it has been remembered. But, you know, when I take that saying and want to use it in a way about what happens to old Libertarians, the last thing that should happen is old Libertarians shouldn’t just fade away, old Libertarians should go to Liberland! That’s where they should go and promote the cause of liberty. I think that is so different and important, because it is the issues of liberty that the people that are involved with Liberland are the ones who know this and can promote it, so to me it’s so very important.
MacArthur famously said: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
Ron Paul says “old Libertarians shouldn’t just fade away, old Libertarians should go to Liberland!”
Liberland is an idea, but it is a place, and only ideas have consequences, and the consequences are serious when they are bad ideas. But instead of me seeing the whole world totally in chaos and falling apart, I see the ideas of liberty, and Liberland as a place now that more people should be seeking and understanding. Because it is that ideological expression of individual liberty in contrast to the authoritarianism which is being presented to us as a solution in Washington and in world governments, and wherever we go, that we have to sacrifice our liberties to solve all these problems. All these problems have come from the abuse of government power and the lack of liberty. So, if we want to really think seriously about what we should do, then we shouldn’t fade away, we don’t want to be like the old soldier that fades away and nobody ever hears about him.
All Libertarians should go and seek their place in Liberland, whether it’s the actual place or whether it’s the ideological place, which is so important. And that is based on one thing, nonaggression. It’s simple, everybody should love it, whether you’re liberal, progressive, or whatever. Just give up the principle of using force and violence against each other. Governments can’t do and people can’t do it, so that should be available to all of us. Just think how wonderful it would be if people could come together with this basic principle that nobody and no government can initiate violence against somebody else. The world would be peaceful. It’s a little bit more than we can expect, but at least the more, the merrier. The more people who believe that, the less chaos that we’re going to have. But too many people, like is going on right now, we have this chaos and people are so anxious to look to the government, the government will solve our problem. But I do believe the ideas of liberty and the whole principle of libertarianism is alive and well.
Liberland is a place and it is an ideological philosophy that people should cling to and make available, because it brings people together, no matter what your beliefs are, religious or no religion, economics on how you want to spend your money, and who is supposed to take care of you, who is to protect you from yourself, all these things that everybody professes to believe in, you take a poll and everybody says I don’t the government in my bedroom, I don’t the government telling me how I’ll spend my money, and I don’t think our government should be fighting all these no-win wars. So, all we want to do is bring that to fruition and let people understand that there are a lot of people out there that know and study about liberty and we need them to know about Liberland, and to make use of this and move in the direction of liberty and away from the coercive effects of authoritarianism, and believe me, it’s ripe for those changes.
I think if the American people hear there message, they will respond to our call. And that is what is necessary. It is not a military fight, it’s an ideological fight, and it is up to us promote the ideology, and it’s based on this basic principle that individuals own their own lives and they have a responsibility for their life, to take care of it. One major responsibility, don’t take care of other people by the use of force, you have no right to do that, it won’t solve the problem, it causes chaos.
So, that is the reason that I think Liberland is a great symbol, so I don’t want anybody saying old libertarians should just go away, old libertarians should just fade away, old libertarians should become just as active as ever, just like all young libertarians. The message is clear, we need to promote it.
I want to thank everybody for being with you today, and let’s promote the cause of liberty.
“Three… Two… One!” Somaliland Representative to Taiwan Mohamed Hagi and Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu uncovered the plaque for the representative office of Somaliland in Taiwan, AP footage shows.
This September 9th move marked the completion of the representative office exchange between the two countries with the Taiwan office in Somaliland officially opened on August 17th.
Thomas Walls, Liberland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, told Liberland Press, “Liberland congratulates Somaliland and Taiwan on opening representative offices in each other’s country. It’s very encouraging for Liberland to see our friends in both countries strengthen their bilateral relations. Both nations are committed to peace and prosperity, and by extending mutual diplomatic and commercial ties, they are exercising their sovereignty in practice. Liberland enjoys a very cordial relationship with Somaliland and we look forward to having the same with Taiwan.”
Hagi described the common ground between his own country and the host nation at the office opening ceremony in Taiwan, saying, “Our two countries are members of the same community of democracies, bounded by our shared political and economic freedoms, as well as international values. Somaliland and Taiwan’s relationship will remain intact.”
Wu echoed Hagi’s friendly sentiment saying, “Taiwan and Somaliland share the commitment to safeguarding the values of freedom, democracy, justice, and the rule of law. We both face external pressures, but are both proud of our sovereignty and stand ready to defend it.”
Hagi Tweeted that since the opening of the office in Taiwan, “The House of Representative[s] of the Republic of Somaliland has officially supported a Resolution of Taiwan Relations Act (TRA).”
The Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations, is a confederation of five, and later six, tribes indigenous to North America and based in upper New York state and southern Canada. The original confederacy was founded by the Great Peacemaker treaty in 1142 and is considered one of the world’s oldest participatory democracies.
It was also to influence the political makeup of modern America: in 1988, the U.S. Senate paid tribute with a resolution that said, “The confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself.”
The Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee, while physically within the territory of the United States and Canada, are judged to be sovereign nations. However, to date that status has not been recognised by the UN. Why is this important to sport in general and Lacrosse in particular?
Let me tell you a story.
Lacrosse as a sport was invented by the indigenous people of North America, who in turn say they received the game from the Creator. They refer to it as a Medicine Game and they used it as a way to celebrate community as well as to train young men for battle. The game was played by two opposing teams numbering hundreds of men, typically from different villages, and could cover a playing field of many miles. The game could also last several days and was very physical. Each player had a stick with a net which was used to transport a small ball. Goals were achieved when the ball was thrown into a net of the rival team. The rules initially were changed from tribe to tribe with some versions allowing players to have two sticks apiece.
It was in the late 1800s that a dentist from Montreal named William George Beers codified the game as we know it today. The modern name, Lacrosse, was derived from Jesuit missionaries working in the North Americas. Despite trying to ban the game, they thought the playing sticks resembled that of a bishop’s crozier and hence La Crosse became Lacrosse. , emblematic of the nature of the game, including names which translate into English as ‘we bump hips’ or ‘little brother of war’.
The game gathered international popularity with Canadians adopting it as the national sport. Exhibition teams then spread the game across America and into Europe. Queen Victoria saw an exhibition match in 1876 and declared the game ‘pretty’ which resulted in a number of schools in the UK adopting the sport, which was further popularised by Enid Blyton’s best-selling children’s books in the 1940s.
Lacrosse briefly appeared in the Olympics in 1904 and 1908 before being dropped. However, in the 1908 games, a Canadian team won the Gold medal, and the captain of the team was Irishman Paddy Brennan – so an Irishman holds an Olympic medal for Lacrosse.
The history of Lacrosse in Ireland has been sporadic. It was first introduced into Newtownards in 1872 with men’s teams springing up mostly across Northern Ireland at this time. The codifier of the game, William George Beers, invited an Irish team to play exhibition matches in the US and Canada in 1886 where they enjoyed a three-month tour.
But as the century aged, Lacrosse faced stiff competition from other organised sports such as rugby, soccer and GAA and the men’s sport faltered. Then during the 1920s women’s Lacrosse began to become popular, playing internationally with the green jersey until again dying out in the ‘70s.
Fast forward to 2001 a new men’s Ireland national team was formed which went to compete in a European Championship in Wales and everything took off again. While still a minority sport in Ireland it has an active and growing population of around 300 players. A new schools’ competition launched in 2019 had just six teams but the enrolment for 2020, pre COVID, was up to 16 teams.
The modern game is played on a pitch the same size as a soccer pitch with ten players in each team – three defenders, three midfielders, three attackers and one goalkeeper. It is a very physical game – a mixture of hurling and ice hockey. The players have a stick and net which they use to pass the ball with the aim of landing it in a net measuring six feet by six feet. It is still a physical game and can be very fast with runs of play similar to basketball.
Lacrosse is part of the World Games, which is a multi-sport event which is essentially a staging platform for the Olympics. World Lacrosse is actively seeking to reinstate the game into the Olympics. The next World Games is being held in Alabama, US in 2022. Up until the start of this month, the Irish national Lacrosse team had qualified for the event.
And this is where the story between Ireland and the Iroquois Confederacy gets interesting. The Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team was ranked third in the world, and Ireland was ranked 12th, based on final placement at the World Championship in Israel in 2018. However, any teams playing in the 2022 World Games event would also need to meet eligibility requirements under Olympic rules – to fulfil the ambition of migrating Lacrosse to the Olympics.
The Iroquois Nationals are not recognised as a sovereign state and were therefore not invited. Only eight teams were going forward and Ireland moved up the ranks as other teams were deemed ineligible as well. Scotland for example as it competes under the Team GB in the Olympics. Teams from the Philippines and Puerto Rico were only associate members in 2018 and were excluded on that basis, which paved the way for Ireland to find itself as the eighth and final team.
Michael Kennedy, founder and CEO of Lacrosse Ireland takes up the story:
“While we were initially very excited, we were looking at the Iroquois team. They started an online social media campaign that drew a lot of attention with some 70,000 signatures. In fairness, World Lacrosse, and the International World Games Association which manages the World Games listened. Something had to be done.
“On our side, far from being upset, Irish players and supporters were signing the petition and suggesting that we might even go as far as to boycott the Games. So, we surveyed our operations group – about 30 leaders within our organisation – and they all agreed unanimously that we should do whatever it took to support the Iroquois. We were ready, if asked, to vacate our position.”
When the call came the CEO of World Lacrosse didn’t even have to ask the question – Michael vacated the place.
“It’s important to say that we vacated – it’s a legal term to mean that the place was never ours to begin with. That’s important to state as the Iroquois Nationals were in the medals and earned their place fair and square.
“What we wanted to do is enable the Iroquois to take back what is rightfully theirs, which is a position among the top teams in the world.”
In this episode our guest, Patrik Schumacher, World Diplomat of Liberland, discusses:
1) How discovering Austrian Economics during the 2008 financial crisis transformed his world view 2) His influence in the architectural development of Liberland, and the Liberland Free Trade Zone 3) How he overcame massive amount of criticism for not blending in with the status quo of his industry
The president of the self-proclaimed microstate “Liberland”, Vit Jedlička, accompanied by his associates, last weekend in Apatin organized a reception for firefighters and divers, to whom he gave a symbolic awarding of certificates of appreciation for their contribution to the rescue of the vessel “Freedom”. days burnt in a fire.
The damage to the ship is estimated at 100,000 euros, and it was saved from certain sinking by fire brigades from Apatin, Kupusina, Sombor and one from the territory of the municipality of Odzaci. Extinguishing was difficult due to the inaccessibility of the terrain, so the teams on land were joined by a unit of the Apatin Society for Underwater Activities, which extinguished the fire from the boats. Due to the danger of overturning, the inside of the hull was eventually extinguished with a special foam.
Jedlička thanked the firefighters for their quick response, as well as the divers who appeared in the first hours of the battle in rescuing the ship. – “My associates told me with how much attention and dedication everyone approached the extinguishing. That is why we pay tribute to these units, not only because of last week’s shutdown, but because of everything they do every day in their environment to preserve human lives and protect property,” said Jedlička.
In the manner of a true statesman, he awarded the participants in the action the highest recognitions of the self-proclaimed state “Liberland” – Medals of Honor and Recognitions for Special Merits.
On that occasion, the firefighting units of Apatin, Sombor and Kupusina, the Apatin Association for Underwater Activities, as well as deserving individuals, representatives of these services, Ferenc Hegediš, Nikola Mirić, Marko Popović and Sasa Vujović, were awarded medals.
Sombor firefighters Dalibor Mrdjenovic, Sasa Gligorevic, Misa Radic and Kupusinac Janos Sidor also received the medal of honor.
Recognitions for special merits were given to Miroslav and Branislav Basta, Kornel Selik, Zoran Grahovac, Branko Kartalija, Nikola Mergl, Branko Pajić, Karol Sidor, Robert Rekeća, Istvan Marašek, Istvan Kulić, Gužvanj Nandor, Stefan Roža.
In addition to the medal of the part, members of the Apatin Society for Underwater Activities Milorad Bujić, Igor Pinćir, Neven Benić, Đerđ Deneš, Veljko Cvetićanin and Nebojša Medić were also awarded diplomas.
The award ceremony was held, where else but on a ship, on the Danube, and the winners expressed their gratitude to Jedlički with a smile for the attention he showed them in this way. – In this way, Mr. Jedlička wanted us to feel good and proud of the work we do every day, is one of the comments of the winners.
In addition to the recognition, the fire brigade and the Society for Underwater Activities can expect material assistance from the company “Liberland” in the coming period. Socializing on board was also an opportunity to present their activities and equipment needs in performing tasks.
Website Visit the website for speakers and pictures from last year
Floating Man 2020 – LIBERLAND ONLINE CONFERENCE
This year our on-site Summer festival has been already sold out due to the Covid-19 restrictions which imply a limited capacity. However, you can still be with us at our online conference.
We will be hosting Liberlandian speakers from all over the world. They will update you on the development of Liberland including business and investment opportunities.
Prominent speakers include: Brock Pierce – Presidential candidate in the USA Eric Benz – CEO of Changelly Vít Jedlička – President of Liberland Patrik Schumacher – Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects
“Mud, mosquitos and music – the original ingredients for a festival. Add in an airstrip, riverboats, cryptocurrency, Croatian police and a new micro nation taking its first baby steps and you get a better picture of Floating Man Festival, the newest festival on the circuit for the traveller who likes their adventure raw and untouched and their conversations peppered with political philosophy, and whose festival neighbours vary from nomadic world travellers to multimillionaires…” Jillian Godsil / Irishtimes.com
The fire on the Liberland flagship Freedom intended for the settlement of Liberland is the largest misfortune in the short history of this nation. Luckily, no one was injured and the ship was not yet outfitted with expensive technology as planned.
The overall damage is estimated at more than 10 Bitcoins (BTC). The fire aboard the Freedom comes during the time of significant loss of our personal and economic freedoms during the global coronavirus crisis, which is an alarm for all liberty-loving people.
We are deeply grateful to the men and women of Apatin who risked their lives to save the ship. My special thanks goes to the Apatin firemen as well as the divers. We will ensure they are recognized for their brave actions. So far, we do not believe that the fire broke out spontaneously or was lit on purpose. We are awaiting the results of the investigation to confirm the details.
This event will not deter us from making further investments in this region that has become our beloved home or from setting the stage for the proper settlement of Liberland in the coming years. We have started a crowdfunding campaign to restore and upgrade the whole project so that people coming to Apatin and to visit Liberland will have a comfortable place to stay on Liberland property.
President Vít Jedlička
Liberland
to donate please go here https://liberland.org/en/donate
NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens, just might be the next gateway drug into all things crypto. NFTs address the critical issue of a digital asset being unique – ensuring provenance and ownership while removing the problem of counterfeits. In essence, NFTs are used to create verifiable digital assets.
The term NFT first broke into crypto consciousness when the game CryptoKitties went viral and almost broke the Ethereum network back in 2018. However, while the hype surrounding the CryptoKitties prevailed for several months and many people invested big money in creating specific trading platforms, the secondary market never took off and the hype and the kitties largely disappeared from sight.
William E. Quigley, co-founder of WAX, the leading NFT blockchain platform, said even at the height of the feline virality less than a dollar a day in secondary trading volume was present. The time had not yet come. The CryptoKitties phenomenon lay in the creation and not the trading which pointed to a lack of community.
WAX has now embarked on a 2020 trail blazing move to finally put NFTs on the radar and not just for crypto audiences; in fact opening the door to non-crypto communities is their secret sauce.
NTFs best use-case examples are for digital art and collectables – where provenance and uniqueness are vital – and where communities are active. And this is where WAX directed their spotlight.
Back in May, WAX partnered with The Topps Company, an American company best known for its sports and non-sports trading cards. It holds a dominant position in the market and is the only baseball card manufacturer with a contract with Major League Baseball.
Back in 1985, it produced the Garbage Pail Kids cards with legendary underground cartoonists using gross-out humour and a subversive twist. The collections growing popularity soon caused them to be banned in school playgrounds, thereby ensuring their success. 35 years later, WAX and Topps took the project online.
It was an unmitigated success. In just over 24 hours 110,000 digital trading cards in 12,000 packs were sold out. Within a few days many were selling their cards on secondary markets such as eBay for thousands of dollars.
Then in July, the team launched another series of products this time based on Netflix’s extraordinary documentary series The Tiger King. Topps ‘spoofed’ (their words not mine) the over-the-top documentary series in a limited GPK goes Exotic collection that went to three physical print runs. On July 16th it went online and into NFT history as the biggest NFT sale to date. In just 67 minutes the entire set of 7,000 mega packs and 13,020 standard packs sold out totally more than $200,000.
What is even more exciting is the secondary market of both sets of NFT is running at a faction of x10 the original sales.
Evan Vandenberg, Director of Business Development at WAX says they are on a learning curve and points to the easy-to-use WAX wallet as one key element in the popularity amongst a non-crypto audience. “I get that when you are talking about large sums of money then having control using your private keys is important. But if you want to buy something or play games then having a wallet that can be created using your social profile makes sense. It’s a much faster and easier option and it has been responsible for the huge onboarding of this traditional collectable card community.”
The healthy secondary market on WAX is very exciting to Evan. He tells me, that as we have been speaking, some 382 transactions have been clocked up on the WAX marketplace. “I could watch this all day,” he says.
The age demographic of the collectors is also interesting.
“They are older than we first thought – people in their 30s, 40s and 50s,” explains Evan. “This is probably as a result of the age of the original cards but points to an older demographic coping with NFTs and cryptocurrency. It just goes to show that interest can drive action.”
For Evan and WAX the programme is only just beginning and like buses coming together there are a number of huge announcements coming down the tracks.
“Next up we are working with celebrity actor William Shatner who is digitizing personal memorabilia and creating a unique range of collectables. Some of the content is new and unseen and when people buy rare cards he is going to donate physically signed images and art work.”
I note that this is a fabulous opportunity for a well-known, indeed well-loved actor, to be able to benefit from their personal brand while still alive rather than in a posthumous sale, but Even corrects me. William Shatner is a big crypto fan and is much more interested in the process than the financial rewards.
“He has been a delight to work with – he has been interested in crypto from the getgo unlike some of the celebrities that endorsed ICOs back in the crazy 2017s. We are very proud that he has agreed to join the WAX Advisory Council. He is helping us promote the NFTs and is very active on social media – not bad for a man of 89.”
After Shatner’s collectables, then comes CapCom’s StreetFighter, Blockchain Heroes and Kogs. StreetFighter already has some scintillating artwork and they are looking at how to incorporate a game element to the NFTs. Blockchain Heroes are developed by popular pod-casting duo Joel Comm and Travis Wright of Bad Crypto fame and are based on real influencers in the blockchain space (William Quigley is one), while Kogs derives its origin from the school yard game Pogs.
As with all popular and profitable platforms, the scammers are already out trying to prize loot from naïve collectors.
“It’s like everything – you have to make sure you are buying the real McCoy – same as everything else you can buy online. For example, if you look at the asset itself check and see in the GPK example that the Topps name is on the card – and that it is spelt correctly with two ‘p’s. We’re looking to come up with really user-friendly ways to reference check the cards or produce red flags to warn the community if something might be wrong.”
As Even says – it’s a learning curve, a very fast learning curve. “And with COVID going online makes even more sense,” he adds.
‘Honduras Prospera’ is a unique initative translating the ideas Titus Gebel formulated in his book on ‘Free Private Cities’. Prospera is just getting off the ground. So far it is only a small seed of what is to come. The ambition is to create the Hong Kong of Central America, on the island of Roatan, Honduras. The aim is to create largely autonomous free market enclave with its own jurisdiction and court system within the uniquely liberal framework of the ZEDE programme (Zone for Employment and Economic Development) established by parliamentary action in Honduras. The programme invites private entities to establish, regulate and run free enterprise zones anywhere in Honduras. This is not yet a fully autonomous micro-nation as Liberland aspires to become, as ultimate sovereignty is maintained by the host country Honduras. However, the degree of autonomy granted reaches far beyond what is usually granted for special economic zones.
The inspiration for the ZEDE programme came from Paul Romer’s idea and initiative to create so called ‘Charter Cities’ as a development tool for underdeveloped regions. Paul Romer is no Libertarian, as is evident by the fact that he was chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank (from 2016 to 2018). Romer originated so called endogenous growth theory in the 1990s (which earned him the Nobel prize in economics in 2018). Endogenous growth theory emphasizes innovation as factor of economic growth. While this seems obvious and nearly tautological, Romer’s achievement was to include investment in knowledge production, i.e. education, science and R&D into mathematical growth models that had formerly treated technological advances as exogenous. Romer emphasized the non-rivalry of knowledge, i.e. the fact that knowledge resources can be used simultaneously by all without mutual interference or resource depletion. There is a mutual enhancement of knowledge uses, i.e. strong positive spill-over effects. Romer posits the importance of ideas and of so called meta-ideas for growth. A meta-idea is “a recipe for social interaction that encourages the production and transmission of ideas” and he calls cities, markets and science the three big meta-ideas. The 19th century idea of a new type of technologically and practically oriented university (like MIT) was another meta-idea. The idea of Charter Cities can also be classified as a meta-idea in this sense.
“One of the biggest meta-ideas of modern life is to let people live together in dense urban agglomerations. A second is to allow market forces to guide most of the detailed decisions these people make about how they interact with each other. Together, the city and the market let large groups of people cooperate by discovering new ideas, sharing them, and learning from each other.” Paul Romer, The Deep Structure of Economic Growth
Romer launched the idea of Charter Cities in a 2009 TED talk. It was primarily targeted at developing countries where the institutional prerequisites for growth – reliable government, property security, the rule of all – are lacking and preventing the take-off of development. In 2010 Romer published a paper with the title ‘Technologies, Rules, and Progress: The Case for Charter Cities’. He published under the auspices of the Center for Global Development, a prominent Washington think tank for developmental policy, dedicated to reducing global poverty and inequality:
“In this century, new technologies can raise living standards at the fastest rate in human history. … It will happen only if our rules keep up with our technologies and the proliferating web of human interactions that these technologies make possible. The constraint we will face will come from neither scarce resources nor limited technological opportunities; if we falter, it will be because of our limited capacity for discovering and implementing new rules.”
While this paragraph is calling for political innovation in the face of technological transformations, most of the article has a more conservative outlook, focusing on copying established Western rule sets in Africa:
“If technologies are ideas about how to arrange physical objects, rules are ideas about how to structure interactions among people. Like technologies, rules can be shared and copied. … Developing countries pursue catch-up growth by copying technologies. … What types of mechanisms will allow developing countries to copy the rules that work well in the rest of the world?”
Copying rules is a rather conservative stance, perhaps safe and appropriate for catch-up development. Perhaps this is also what Honduras was expecting.
But with Prospera they are getting much more than what they have bargained for. A radically new type of polity, not a mere copy of current 1st world standards.
Harvard educated Honduran lawyer and presidential adviser Octavio Sanchez brought Romer and his idea to Honduras and a uniquely radical legal framework for autonomous economic zones was soon legislated in 2011. Romer served as chair of a “transparency committee” in connection with the ZEDE programme until 2012.
The most basic advantage of Titus Gebel’s Free Private City concept is that citizenship is based on voluntary, and in this sense “free”, participation. It is not based on a political revolution where one group of political actors, whether minority or majority, is imposing the new system on a given population. Instead a Free Private City Corporation, like Prospera, appears on the scene, on the market for governance provision, with a competitive service offering focusing on security of life, liberty and property. This is an invitation to join the city as a citizen, based on a real social contract specifying the terms of engagement between the prospective citizen and the governance provider. The offer includes a rule of law based on a newly packaged bundle of well-corroborated common law procedures, rules and rulings. More specifically it is implementing Ulex, an open source legal system, offered by legal scholar Tom W.Bell’s Institute for Competitive Governance (that counts Titus Gebel amongst its advisers). Further, Prospera has build up its own judiciary by inviting eminent judges, including former supreme court judges. The social contract itself will be adjudicated by an independent international arbitrator. The governance provider and citizen-client thus, unlike in all known states, stand on a truly equal footing with respect to dispute resolution.
This freedom of social or political contracting is mutual, i.e. both parties, prospective citizen and city, have to agree to the trade, as is always the case in proper markets. This, however, also implies that there is no general right to join, and therefore probably no free, unrestricted immigration. This is not only so because a governance services fee will be levied which not everybody might be able to afford, but the city might be selective and impose requirements with respect to language, skills, minimum capital endowment etc. In this sense a free private city might be compared with a club. Its business model might be premised on a certain vision of a successful society and the attempt might be made to curate the society accordingly. This might be compared with certain business park projects trying to curate a certain synergetic cluster of tenants, trying to brand the development with respect to a certain industry, i.e. trying to create a financial centre, or a new media district etc. Such attempts at selectivity might falter and the developer might have to become more indiscriminate, i.e. less selective, due to a lack of uptake. This might easily happen to a city that initially had a very strong, restrictive curatorial agenda. Early and intensive marketing should be key for an ambitious curation to succeed. A critical mass of tenants would have to be assembled is a short period of time. (Here a visually eloquent urban and architectural design might be a crucial component.)
We can probably presume that some minimal degree of selectiveness might have to be maintained, over and above the price mechanism that could always respond to overflowing demand by increasing the fees for newcomers. (The city might want to avoid becoming a sanctuary for drug lords.) While the main absorption and growth regulating mechanism of successful cities will be the price mechanism, either via land prices and rents, or via fees or taxes, some further control over immigration will properly be maintained. Therefore, a free private city would not add to the freedom of those who would not be eligible to join. However, there are reasons to believe that if the idea of free private cities takes off, there will probably be at least some cities with initially very liberal immigration policies. Since there will be many cities without existing populations that would want to be protected from immigrant competition, and because most of these cities, as start-up for-profit enterprises, will neither be willing, nor able to offer any welfare provisions or guarantees, immigration could be very much more liberal than most current states. (Instead insurance offers as well as mutual aid societies could and would deliver social security on the basis of voluntary participation. Some cities, Prospera included, might make insurance with a reputed life insurer or participation in a mutual aid society a condition of residency.) If there are no severe spatial constraints, it would make economic sense for the city operator to either expand its territory or else absorb an increasing population by means of densifying the build-up of the city. This would probably be in the interest of the operator, and probably also in the interest of private landowners, and employers too. The presumption here is that the operator will, in its contract with its citizens, reserve its immigration authority.
As always, best protection against rising prices due to demand pressure will the additional competitive supply. This supply should be forthcoming as long as states do not continue to block the conversion of agricultural into urban land or the utilization of their uninhabited land.
A proper free competitive market in governance provision, as envisioned here, presupposes that there are many providers in the market, or at least a menu of many different cities to choose from, even if this market ends up being dominated by a handful of big corporations franchising their models like hotel chains around the world. The smaller the territorial units, the easier it will be for citizens to avoid lock-in, and to exercise their market choice and move to a different jurisdiction. This vision of a rich choice menu of jurisdictions, small and perhaps differentially curated or specialized, within relative proximity, stands in stark contrast with the USA as huge political monolith that locks in most of its citizens from cradle to grave. The majority of US citizens do not even hold a passport, let alone consider which government they should live under to be a matter of individual market choice. In addition, and this is mostly relevant to high performers, exit from the US is costly. The relinquishment of US citizenship is penalized with a imposition of a hefty Exit Tax.
The switching between governance regimes might further be eased due to the possibility of decoupling jurisdictions at least partially from territorial boundaries. The ZEDE framework allows for non-contiguous communities and new businesses from anywhere in Honduras to opt into the Prospera jurisdiction. In general business law does not need to be tied to a territory and switching between providers should be as easy as switching insurance providers. Tom Bell’s Ulex offering was initially developed for non-territorial governance and dispute resolution, primarily targeted at the crypto-space, i.e. for distributed protocols like Etherium, Tesoz, EOS and Dash as an alternative to governance via hard forks.
Rules and laws concerning spatial co-location, physical property and physical interactions remain tied to territory. However, rules and laws might be varied, street by street, or even block by block, and much might be devolved to individual condominiums or owners of individual establishments. The risk of this adaptive diversity becoming disorienting will probably be avoided via a spontaneous self-regulation and balancing of divergent and convergent tendencies, via the spontaneous aggregation of individual decisions making this trade-off locally.
Let us presume that current states bent to a future popular demand for allowing the secession of charter cities, just as governments are now pressured to allow for charter schools to compete with state schooling. Then, once the idea of private cities takes off, we can assume that initially as many forms of cities or polities would form as there are ideologies, secular or religious. What guarantees that all or even most of these private cities will be free cities in the libertarian sense of offering a laissez faire regime based on individual liberty, private property and far reaching economic freedoms, giving as much scope as possible to freedom of contract?
Libertarians would agitate for laissez faire and a socially liberal regime but would not want to see any restrictive impositions coming from an overarching authority. The ideal of libertarianism ultimately presumes the absence of any such overarching authority. Instead the overall disciplining and ordering of the whole field of interacting private cities or polities is expected to be delivered by the competitive market process via the profit-and-loss system, and guided by a parallel discourse involving the social sciences as well as public proselytizing efforts. An informed critical discourse will discourage and discredit questionable or unviable private city concepts in advance, so that many projects that are likely to fail will never get off the ground. Others might go ahead undeterred only to be weeded out by the market process. Discourse will also be a crucial facilitator in the generation of new projects. Together discourses and markets will deliver the rational selection process that is required in any progressive evolutionary process.
In a previous paper (and my contribution to the 2nd Liberland conference) entitled ‘Corporate Governance Structures as Models for Micro-nation Constitutions’, I distinguished various forms of corporate ownership, including various types of cooperatives, that might enter the market of competing private cities. Now, we might further extend what might be possible, for instance monarchies, perhaps ethnically based, even openly discriminatory polities, or illiberal theocracies using draconian forms of social control, perhaps also communist communes. Whether such communes would be tolerated as districts or enclaves within a private city would be up to the operator to decide. Titus Gebel, in the recent Liberland conference on Free Private Cities explicitly welcomed that communist communes to form within the bounds of Prospera, while expressing historically based doubt about the longevity of such communes beyond the initial generation of enthusiasts.
Why would libertarians wish and call for a world of private cities, a world where all this is possible and might come to pass? Well, freedom of voluntary association, including the right to discriminate concerning participation, is a core tenet of libertarianism. If people freely chose to segregate or to subject themselves to a draconian religious regime, then we might warn and proselytize against this but would at the same time oppose any coercive measures or violent intervention trying to prevent or break up such associations. Can we really know in advance whether these forms are always detrimental for all? The crowd will show the way via voting with their feet. Discourses are important in trying to anticipate and guide, but the final selection comes via market action on the ground, sometimes only after discursive guidance was ignored, or worse after guidance turned out to be misguided.
Honduras Prospera_Zaha Hadid Architects
While the very conception of free private, for-profit polity emerged, naturally and congenially, from within libertarian political discourse, and could probably not have emerged from within socialist or conservative political discourses, there is indeed nothing that stands in the way of the founding of socialist or conservative private cities, once this theoretical possibility has become a real opportunity for entrepreneurial initiative, as it has been in Honduras. Indeed, there have been historical examples of socialist communities that started on the basis of privately funded initiatives. The fact that these ventures failed, as well as why and how they failed, is material historical evidence that should alleviate the worry of preparing the turf on which for regressive regimes might flourish.
The question which of these polities should be preferred is, according to this paper, not a moral question, neither a question of personal preference, but a question of which constitutional form will be most conducive to the development of the forces of production and thus economic growth leading to ever higher levels of prosperity. So far all migrations followed a prosperity gradient.
Libertarianism’s essential message here is not moral but economic, it is an historically located socio-economic hypothesis. The essential message here is not a moral dictum like “the principle of self-ownership and respect for private property is sacrosanct” but a theoretical thesis about the current historical conditions of prosperity, namely that increasing degrees of freedom for individual autonomy, free contracting and free exchange in markets, as well as unconstrained freedom of speech, communication and discourse, are advantageous for general prosperity. This thesis then also translates into a prediction, which at the same time becomes advice for would be governance entrepreneurs, namely that those “free” polities that are based on libertarian principles will economically out-compete both its conservative-traditionalist and its socialist-interventionist competitors, at least with respect to those private communities that attempt to function as production centres, and that means, increasingly, as creative knowledge economy hubs. Traditionalist or socialist entities might survive as retirement communities.
Libertarians should therefore be relaxed about these other possible private cities because we can presume that even the initial popularity of such regimes will be limited and since we are convinced that the prosperity potential of such regimes is minimal, they will soon shrink and disappear rather than proliferate. There is plenty of evidence that prosperity, material freedom, the general availability of a prosperous standard of living is an irresistible attractor, even for many or most at the same time still caught up in a deeply religious or otherwise culturally backward ideology. The advantages of material affluence are obvious enough for everyone. This affluence is based on productivity levels and competitive productivity gains that will best be attained by the laissez faire regimes preferred and advocated by libertarians. Libertarians are convinced that the competitive market process in the market for living and working together will select and proliferate free private cities. The concept of free private cities does not only make sense for us as libertarian political activists, fueling our missionary zeal to create a better world for all, but it also makes eminent business sense for entrepreneurs and investors in the market for living together.
The relative marginality and economic desperation of a country like Honduras made breaking through the usual political barriers here more likely, and the chances for success are great due to the fact that there are many low hanging fruits of development in Honduras that allow for rapid catch up growth (as was seen in Asia in recent decades). This implies that Prospera’s economic success is indeed likely. Such catch-up growth would be a signal to the developing world but with respect to world political discourse mere catch-up growth will probably not be perceived as something earth shaking that would be seen as challenging the political status quo in the central, most advanced arenas of the world. A similar experiment in the heart of Europe that would have the chance to break the stagnation at the frontier of productivity development would, in contrast, immediately irradiate the collective imaginary within the advanced societies, and become a torch leading the way forward for a long overdue political revolution. This political revolution is necessary to unleash the politically enchained potentials for accelerated progress that the AI revolution promises.
In
response to the devastation sustained by Caribbean island nations during the 2016-2017
Atlantic hurricane seasons Liberlanders began planning how to provide humanitarian
assistance to other countries. Bogie Wozniak, Dave Molineaux, Rabbi Altman,
Father Philippe Charles, and Steven Melnik started diplomatic negotiations and fundraising
efforts for the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
In
Feb 2019 Nicholas Rodriguez and a team of Liberlanders from the United States
came together and founded the charitable organization that is now known as the
Liberland Aid Foundation (LAF) for the purpose of providing Liberland
supporters a path to provide humanitarian assistance.
Liberland
Aid Foundation is a U.S. registered not for profit organization that received IRS
501(C)(3) status in 2019, thanks to the expertise of Stephen Wood. This allows
donations made to the LAF by US citizens and residents to be considered tax
deductible contributions by the IRS.
LAF’s mission is to
serve as a charitable and educational organization that allows freedom-loving
people to channel their generosity into needs-based humanitarian assistance and
other benevolent endeavors based on the principles of voluntary action; to
promote self-help through education about entrepreneurship and markets.
“We envision a world
where trust exists between partner nations, and humanitarian efforts help to
alleviate human suffering so that people can live a dignified existence in a
more peaceful world.” Liberland Aid Foundation
The
Liberland Aid Foundation is focused on providing humanitarian aid, disaster
preparedness, food assistance, water sanitation and hygiene, education and
training, with an emphasis on environmental standards, conservation and
sustainability.
All
donations made to the Liberland Aid Foundation go towards helping people in
crisis situations obtain the relief they desperately need.
If
you are interested in making a donation and helping LAF achieve its goals there
are several options available.
Supporters
can donate directly through the LiberlandFoundation website, which will allow you to donate either
cryptocurrency or dollars.
Amazon
will donate 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the charitable organization of
your choice. All you have to do is follow this link above, sign up and choose Liberland
Aid Foundation Inc, and Amazon with automatically donate .5% of your order
to LAF.
Supporters
can also donate through Facebook, and I encourage those who are on Facebook and
would like to stay up to date with the latest news to join and share the group
with others they think may be interested.
In the aftermath of Covid, the world will
need to rebuild economically and politically. To prepare for this, the Startup
Societies Foundation is hosting a virtual summit that will explore how special
jurisdictions can combat pandemics and rebuild governance institutions &
economics in the aftermath of Covid 19.
This conference will explore how small and special jurisdictions have an
advantage when dealing with coronavirus and similar pandemics. Their size makes
it more manageable for governments to trace goods, people, and to implement
drastic measures to fight health threats. Successful containment strategies
within Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau are evidence of this.
Other special jurisdictions, like Special Economic Zones (SEZ) can
facilitate trade as states enact policies to reduce transmission. Trade
barriers will likely follow recent travel restrictions as states are more
motivated to control their own supply chains. Yet states must still
trade. SEZs can provide a bastion of global exchange amid mounting tensions.
Also, SEZs that focus on medical technologies can help firms create preventive
treatments or vaccines. These innovative Zones can also be administered by
Distributed Ledger Technologies, reducing the need for physical contact.
Special jurisdictions should be at the forefront of PostCovid 19 policy
by providing innovative, accountable, and nimble governance. Now, at the depth
of the pandemic, is the time to lay the foundations. Don’t Panic.
Build.
All ticket holders will receive afree copyof our how-to
manual to create Startup Societies. Also, to support decentralized
applications, the conference will also accept cryptocurrencies to purchase
tickets.
APATIN, SERBIA – The President of the Liberland, Mr. Vit Jedlička, met the officials of the Province of Vojvodina, Mr Ivan Đoković, the Secretary for Economy and Tourism, and Đurađ Milanović, the director of the Educational Center for Training in Professional and Vocational Skills.
On that occasion, Liberland Group LTD, as a socially responsible company, made the second donation to the Technical High School in Apatin, a 3D printer and engraver, which will be used by the students, along with the previously donated computers, to gain experience in new technologies. The donor, together with the guests from the Province of Vojvodina, visited the School’s facilities and learned about their goals for future development. It has been agreed that the students of the School will present their first printed models at the exhibition that will be included in the program of the upcoming Floating Man Fest 2020. Mr Petar Popović and President Vit Jedlička signed a joint statement on the donation and answered questions from the press.
The joint delegation continued their visit to the Apatin Free Trade Zone, where the construction of a new company office building was made official. It is going to be a Business Incubator and Logistics Center for all interested entrepreneurs and investors. Principal Popović expressed his hope that this will be the place where the cooperation between the Liberland Group LTD, the Technical High School and the provincial Educational Center will reach its full potential.
During the celebration, the delegation visited the new location of the Floating Man Festival and the “Bitcoin Freedom” boat. The meeting was concluded by a tour of the Danube River where the Agreement of cooperation in business education was signed with the provincial Educational Center.
Signing ceremony in Liberland between vojvodina education agency and Vanja Car director of Liberland Group
Jillian Godsil, veteran fintech journalist and recently nominated broadcaster, has been awarded the title of 2020 Blockchain Journalist by Uptrennd.com.
Jillian says: “This award gives me immense personal pleasure. Like many journalists and content creators I dislike when platforms profit off my hard work. Uptrennd is a truly democratised platform that rewards active users – whether they are writing content or engaging with it.
“I think Uptrennd is not only a game changer in its principles but it is also succeeding on a practical and monetary basis – this means it will ultimately replace other centralised and exploitative platforms and I am very glad to be part of the process.
Uptrennd.com first went live on January 1, 2019 in a beta format. It is based on the principle that users are paid for creating content and engaging and sharing content. Upwards of 50% of advertising revenue on the site is then funnelled back to those active engaged users rewarding them for making the site relevant, updated and sticky.
Since formation, the site has grown exponentially with approximately between 5,000 and 25,000 users joining each month to a new total of 119,660 as at 16 June 2020. With continued patterns that number is expected to grow to 1.5million members by January 2021.
The UP1 Token is listed on a number of exchanges including Coingecko. It is listed using organic growth and the founders did not employ an ICO or any other form of crowdfunding to generate value. Currently the token is valued at $0.004036 and has a market capitalisation of $824,545 according to Coinmarketcap.
The recent Uptrennd.com awards covered 20 different categories from Best Blockchain to Best Traincrash and ran from 25 May 2020 to 1 June 2020 with the winning names announced on 9 June 2020.https://www.uptrennd.com/user/blockchainawards
Jeff Kirdeikis, founder of Uptrennd.com, commented: “Our community is one of the most engaged and fastest growing blockchain social media sites in the world (according to Alexa ranking and Similarweb). The site is an example of true democracy at work with rewards going to those who contribute the most. The Uptrennd Awards is another example of our active community at work and we praise the contenders and final winners. It’s another great day for Uptrennd.com.”
Uptrennd is an online community that pays users to post content.
Users are paid for creating posts, commenting, sharing content and engaging with sponsored content. The value of these points comes from funneling over 50% of the advertisement revenue directly into the Uptrennd ecosystem.
Uptrennd is an optimized social media platform fusion. Uptrennd brings blogs, social feeds, videos, music and news to one all-encompassing home. The majority of online platforms permissionlessly profit off of user created content and attention. Uptrennd is a movement to shift the wealth from corporations to individuals. This ecosystem empowers users to financially thrive through contributing online content.
During the initial growth phase of Uptrennd, the conversation will be primarily focussed around cryptocurrency, blockchain and distributed ledger technology. As the community grows, topics will slowly branch out into a diverse ecosystem across all topics. Uptrennd will be a one-stop-shop for all things crypto. The platform will provide in-depth educational content for absolute beginners to learn about cryptocurrency. Simultaneously, it will also be a comprehensive platform for those experienced to greatly deepen their knowledge. Uptrennd will bring the crypto world to one unified home.
Functionality Example: John makes an informative post to the “Ethereum” niche on Uptrennd. Steve, Wayne, and Bruce all found value in the post, so they each give John’s post an upvote. John, the content creator, is awarded points for each upvote. These points can then be: redeemed for tokens, used to level-up, redeemed for select promoted placement on the webpage, or spent in the marketplace.
Steve, Wayne and Bruce are all three able to comment on John’s post as well. These comments are also eligible to be upvoted and earn points.
If Steve shares John’s post to his feed and another user upvotes it on Steve’s feed, Steve and John will split the value of the upvote.
Does the concept of the political “left” and “right” have any consistent meaning or definition anymore? Perhaps these once useful labels are no longer valid concepts for categorizing an individual’s philosophy on the political structure of a society. Perhaps they are only crude references to vaguely defined packages of ideas, reinforced by the two major political parties that control of the system and benefit from their prominence.
There are, at any time, only a limited number of parties able to compete for leadership in any given democratic system. Have two broad, all-encompassing categories to place them in makes it easier for the average voter to pick a team to root for. It makes it easier to adopt the group mentality as part of one’s identity because all nuance and detailed examination are stripped away.
Sure, there may be layers of disagreement within a party, but almost never enough to cause a severe break in the system, to split one large collective into many smaller ones.
In the same way, there are only a handful of major religious groups within most nations. Minor denominations may be endless, but they almost all fit under broad umbrella religions like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. No one ever loses sight of what team they are really on in the end, and therefore neither do they ever lose sight of the “other” they are opposing.
If you ask people to tie the libertarian philosophy to a particular “side” of the specious political spectrum, many say that it falls squarely on the right. Right? After all, the right is supposed to lean toward individualism and the left toward collectivism. The philosophy of liberty is one that empowers to the individual to free themselves from the will of the collective.
But maybe the division isn’t quite as clear cut as that.
Individualism and Collectivism on the Left
How should we categorize people who support the individual right to bodily autonomy? It is typically considered the leftist position, for example, to support safe medical abortions and the freedom to put whatever substances one wants into their own body.
But how, then, could the left be considered collectivist?
The collectivist approach is to use the force of the law to limit what others can do with their own bodies. It is the leftists, in these cases, who operate in an individualist capacity, with respect for personal sovereignty.
Where the political left shows its collectivism is in matters related to the social services they feel entitled to receive at the expense of the collective. Healthcare, education, and various other examples of what they see as “basic human rights” requiring the extortion of funds are a significant part of what defines the left’s political identity.
Individualism and Collectivism on the Right
The right is considered more concerned with the good of the individual, even at the expense of society. This is certainly true when it comes to many fiscal matters where their money is at risk of being forcefully redistributed for purposes they don’t support.
However, the right’s collectivist side emerges when they create laws that restrict how people’s private lives. This is often with the justification of preventing degeneracy or defending against perceived attacks upon sacred traditions. Whether it’s immigrants coming to their country and “stealing” their jobs or homosexuals entering into matrimony, the right may fight with the full force of the law to preserve their hallowed way of life.
Essentially, the fatal collectivist flaw of right-wing philosophy is to treat another person’s life as if it were your responsibility to manage without their consent. From that twisted perception, we accept that the things someone else does to themselves are actually being done to us. We believe our intervention in their life is a form of innocent and necessary self-defense against their perceived moral failings.
Collectivism on Both Sides of the Bird
On an intuitive level, it’s easy to understand the appeal of both varieties of collectivist ideals. Believing that services like education and healthcare are a fundamental human right necessary to the function of society makes it easy to argue that they should be provided to all people, no matter how. It’s a very tribal approach to handling the interdependence of people living together for mutual benefit (i.e., “You help take care of me when I need it, and I’ll act in kind.”).
Where this intuitively appealing thought process falls apart is at scales far beyond the natural agreements individuals are capable of making with one another. Spanning far beyond the limits of Dunbar’s number is a vast world of endlessly variated peoples. People you will never have a close, personal relationship with most of them, you could never come to form intuitive agreements that ensure you will all willingly watch out for each other.
Collectivism aims to forcefully manufacture these tribal bonds on a scale that can never work for limited human psyches, and the mechanism for doing so is state-sponsored violence.
We can, similarly, view the right’s need to assume power over their neighbors’ bodies through a tribal lens. From the point of view, they can be said to be trying to mitigate behaviors they consider harmful to the health of the tribe. It may be no personal concern of yours if your tribe mate chooses to inject potentially dangerous or addictive substances into themselves or participate in non-traditional forms of sex. Still, what will become of the culture of the tribe you depend on to survive if such habits and beliefs begin to proliferate?
Will there be any room left for you and your incongruent way of life at the end?
So, in a certain way, mutual agreements with one’s close connections about a particular way of life can be seen as mutually assured self-defense.
Individualism as a Total Concept
Though it shares qualities with both sides, where the libertarian philosophy truly stands out is that it excepts the intuitive collectivism of neither. It, through rational analysis and uncompromising dedication to first principles, knows that a society cannot be optimally healthy without the actual agreement of all its participants to uphold the ideals it lives on. It is not enough to assume you know what is best for the collective and use your might to make it so.
By empowering the individual to make these kinds of decisions over their own life and property, the libertarian philosophy as an absolute does the most possible to protect each and every person from well-intention meddling in their private affairs. It is the only sensible way forward for a species that long ago evolved out of the basic tribal unit and into the planetary scale of a globally connected society.
We both have more opportunities for socialization with other people and more considerable discretion over how and why we choose to socialize (or not). By abandoning the false dichotomy of what style of collectivism we prefer, we will be able to build previously unimaginable types of prosperous and free societies.
“I reckon Libertarianism is largely misunderstood. Let me explain. I am a venture capitalist and that is all about the free market. It is about helping people innovate and improve their business and giving them the capital to do it.
“Whereas traditional banking is very bureaucratic. There are set rules and if people don’t meet those requirements then they can’t get a loan. It’s a very closed environment.”
William believes that libertarians tend to be much more open minded and flexible. He would love if all customer service agents were libertarians as he reckons their views would be much better than the top down approach. He also thinks that the libertarian message is often judged quite harshly – it doesn’t sound as appealing as the progressive message which says it will take care of everyone.
“In reality, the libertarian viewpoint is to create a level playing field for everyone. It does away with crony capitalism, the idea of having a master. In addition, when you look at today’s capitalism it is most certainly not free market capitalism. In 2008 the banks ran amok and were bailed out by the public purse. That is not a level playing field at all.”
Curious Customers or Convenient Customers
When it comes to the customer, William’s years at Disney taught him it is not curiosity that keeps the customers but convenience.
“For sure customer services must be curious to understand the customers but when it comes to customers the main thrust is convenience.”
William uses the phrase that consumers ‘pray to the God of convenience’ in which customers will always defer towards the most convenient path. Passwords are often bypassed if let and customers will even purchase a lower quality product, even more expensive, if it is easier to use.
“I often wonder who someone like me – with a keen focus on making things easy and convenient for customers – ended up in Blockchain.”
HODLing during a Bubble
William has seen his fair share of bubbles; financial, housing, dot.com and crypto. And while he appreciates it can be hard to see beyond the edge of the bubble, even if you suspect you may be in a bubble, to the other side. It’s human nature as he sees it to jump ship. However, his advice, if you can hold onto whatever it is you are into, hodl, and only look to get out when you reckon it is 25% up on the bottom.
“Not 10% because that can often be a dead cat bounce, but 25% is a good rule of thumb.”
While William emphasizes he is not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice, he does enjoy watching assets. It is his job to evaluate assets and this is where the value of assets can be confusing.
“In tough times, like a recession or with bad financial news, the stock exchange can still go up which drives people nutty. It doesn’t make sense but of course the markets don’t work on current value, they track future values.
“Like right now there are 40 million Americans out of work but the markets are not reflecting it. The markets are expecting a V shaped recovery after COVID. This is a man-made crisis if you will, and once the lockdown is lifted, the economy is expected to recover very quickly.”
Global design and architectural minds will soon compete to build the most efficient and livable version of The Free Republic of Liberland.
Just over five years ago, The Free Republic of Liberland was proclaimed as a libertarian utopian micronation, situated on disputed land between Croatia and Serbia. Founded on the principles of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, the world’s youngest micronation garnered keen interest from over 200,000 global individuals who registered for citizenship within the first week of proclamation. To date, Liberland has received over 600,000 applications for citizenship.
With this incredible amount of interest from around the globe, there arises a significant challenge; the micronation encompasses just 7 square kilometres of land, a challenge facing Liberland Founder and President Vít Jedlička who mentioned that: “The citizenship is only limited to 120,000 people. it’s pretty dense to consider 120,000 citizens living there.”
In order to ensure the future success of Liberland, its design and architecture must optimize the use of its 7 square kilometers to perfection. Every precious piece of land must be utilized to its fullest capacity, to create a space that is liveable, enjoyable and sustainable.
To accomplish this formidable task, ArchAgenda LLC, a research-based architectural and computational design lab dedicated to advancing radically innovative architecture agendas, will be curating the Liberland Design Competition 2020. The competition will soon draw design talent from across the globe to envision the architectural future of the new micronation, based on its aspirations for individual and collective freedom, autonomy, minimal governance, voluntarism, charity, fair free markets, non-aggression, diplomatic goodwill, innovative entrepreneurship, and ecological responsibility, all supported by a distributed and transparent peer-to-peer computational network (blockchain). The competitors will be challenged by the curator to translate the untapped potential of distributed peer-to-peer computational networks into architectural and urban designs, and to propose nature-like systems that deliver urban synergies and design fluidity.
If the curator’s design guidelines, coupled with extreme population density and limited space weren’t enough of a challenge, competitors must also consider Liberland’s close proximity to the Danube river, which is notorious for periodically devastating floods. Whilst considering the flooding, the architectural design must be sustainable, given the limited space and resources available.
Jillian Godsil, editor in chief of the Liberland Press and judge with the competition says: “I will be interested to see how the entrants can incorporate blockchain into the development of Liberland. Blockchain is already being used as the bedrock of the governance and I am keen to see what inspiration, real or intangible, will be derived from blockchain in the development of the built infrastructure.”
Director of ArchAgenda LLC and Lead Strategist of Liberland Design Competitions, Daniela Ghertovici mentions: “In this unprecedented moment of global crisis, we have the opportunity to collectively rethink the design strategies of our built environments. As countries converge on drastic social control measures that aim to combat the Coronavirus pandemic, the fundamental infrastructures of every societal function system have been threatened with collapse, or at best, an unstable future. There is a newfound urgency to activate innovative agendas to counteract this new normal. Liberland is the optimal incubator and role model for new societal agendas and a vision for cities of the future.”
Registration for the competitors in the design competition is scheduled to open on May 13, with submission of designs, judging and the distribution of prizes to occur in late 2020. Given the current isolation mandates in most jurisdictions around the world, this year’s Liberland Design Competition will allow many architects and designers to direct their creative energy into a 21st century micronation that values liberty and sustainability.
To Liberland Design Competition 2020 website is now LIVE
President Vit Jedlička’s opening speech for the 5th Anniversary of Liberland celebrated by an international Virtual Conference with 27 different speakers including John Dalli, Roger Ver, Ron Paul, David Friedman and many more leaders.
Dear Liberlanders,
Thank you for joining us for the fifth
anniversary of Liberland. It has been a
remarkable time with some remarkable achievements. There is no doubt that Liberland is the most
successful startup nation in the new millennium, and we have done some
extraordinary things with some 600,000 people now on board and supporting
Liberland.
We have built our representative offices in
more than 100 countries around the world.
We have attracted the most famous and the greatest scholars in the liberty
world that are joining us today. So, I’m
more than excited that things are coming together after five years. Some people are a bit impatient, they think
that starting a country is a summer holiday job, but that’s not the case, some
things just take time and right now we’ve got the best experts in the areas of
technology, diplomacy and commerce to come together and build a new
society.
Today we have 27 speakers ahead of us and I
believe you will have much better understanding of what our plans are. There are no doubt many challenges ahead of
Liberland and we have a lot of work to do especially in our constitutional
effort. Right now we have four
constitutional drafts and we still need more intellectual force to make the
blockchain governance a reality. But I’m
very happy that we have Ghostbusters, a famous technological team, with us and
working on it. They have two
presentations today and they will be able to show you in detail what our plans
are.
I believe there is no better time than now
to work on these things when the rest of the world is under lockdown and we’ve
got enormous economic and other challenges ahead of us and I believe it’s also
the time for Liberland to flourish when people will be striving to find
alternatives to their existing situations.
The future is here for those that are able to adapt fast and that’s why
we have built the Liberland Response Center, a place where people can help each
other with the troubles that they have during these times. But it’s also a wholesale distribution center
and I’m proud to announce that there are 600 face shields now being distributed
as humanitarian aid in Croatia, that there are 600,000 respirators heading to
United States and that the whole network of Liberland has been activated to help
the world deliver the things that are most needed.
I’m also very proud about the establishment
of Liberland Aid Foundation, the very key institution in establishing the
diplomatic relations with other countries, and its activities now span over
three continents. It is really the
community that makes Liberland possible, that’s the nation, a group of people
that share common vision and have a common goal. Our government has been quite stable now for
more than five years and I’m also happy to announce that we have a new member,
Samuel Der-Kazaryan. Tariq Abbasi has
been a moving force of Liberland government now for more than four years. He has been extremely active in pushing
Liberland’s recognition around the world and you will be also able to enjoy the
presentation of our foreign minister, Thomas Walls. Together these gentlemen make a great team to
push Liberland to the next level.
Formerly the anniversary was supposed to be
held in Liberland, but since the coronavirus outbreak we had to change our
plans and we are utilizing the internet and the virtual area to the
limits. I hope you will be able to enjoy
the breaks in some new space and network with other people.
On the other hand, we are still focused on
the Liberland settlement and as we speak there are people pushing the
settlement of Liberland forward. We are
also opening up our free trade zone a place where Liberland companies, as well
as other companies will be able to flourish under the Serbian jurisdiction of a
free trade zone. I hope that we will be
able to attract multimillion dollar investments in Serbia. In Liberland, we are not bound by a common
language, by a common religion, we are not bound by anything else, but a creed
of liberty, of freedom. We believe that
the interaction between the state and its citizens should be voluntary and that
is the best way to organize a society.
We know very well that these things work. We can
see the success of other microstates that have embraced similar
principles. I believe we can go further. We can establish this relation on a
completely voluntary basis and that’s why we have come up with the system of
merits, where every single taxpayer in Liberland also becomes the shareholder
of the very country he is living in. Our
experiment, I believe, is one of the most important experiments in the new
century. The amount of energy that can
be unleashed in society is enormous. A
healthy growth of a society is 10% a year, it is four, five, six times more
than we see in the societies today, and it might be one of the best responses
to the coronavirus crisis opening up the free markets and opening up free
interaction between the people. That’s
why we are here, despite all these obstacles and other governments in the
way. We are Liberlanders, we are trying
to make this a reality.
I hope you will be able to enjoy the following 27 speakers and that you will have a lot of value from the whole event. I also hope that you will be able to enjoyable our blockchain governance in the near future and that right after the traveling bans will be lifted you will come and visit us in Liberland.
Hosts online webinar on April 11 with international speakers and Virtual Reality hangout
The Free Republic of Liberland is celebrating its 5th Anniversary on April 13, 2020. Originally, the Republic had planned a full two-day conference but due to COVID19 this has been migrated to an online webinar with a Virtual Reality (VR) experience.
President Vit Jedlička will open proceedings and outline the achievements made by Liberland, its officers and citizens over 2019. He says: “While we are now in the middle of a global pandemic, we want to do three things. The first is to celebrate the achievements we have made as a community over the past five years. Secondly, we are actively working to fight the pandemic in our neighbouring countries and all proceeds from the online webinar will be donated to the Liberland Aid Foundation to provide immediate assistance in terms of providing protective equipment and medical equipment.
“Finally, we want to use the day to look forward to our ambitious plans for Liberland in the future.”
An active component of the one-day event will be the ability to hang out in the Virtual Embassy in the Virtual Reality platform of Somnium Space.
Speakers include John Dalli, former EU Commission, David Friedman, legal scholar talking on the issue of Government, debating the pros and cons, Joseph McKinney, from the Startup Society Foundation, Roger Ver on the topic of Cryptocurrencies as a solution for Big Government and Michael Carbonara on modern Liberland Banking.
Local officer Vanya Czar will talk about the Liberland Free Zone while Saro McKenna from Ghostbusters will speak about Liberland Blockchain Governance. Daniel Dabek, founder of SafeX, will talk on a decentralised market based on Monero.
Other speakers include Vojtěch Roček, organiser of CoroVent, Pavol Luptak, founder of Paraelni Polis, Naomi Seibt, climate and reason activist, and Nik Halik, astronaut and documentary maker. Finally, Vítězslav Kremlík, author of the Guide to Climate Apocalypse will speak to fear-mongering leading to totalitarianism.
The Conference takes place on Saturday 11 April via the GoToMeeting platform and during the break participants can hang out at Liberland’s VR embassy in Somnium Space. Tickets cost $20 and can be purchased the website https://anniversary.ll.land/
Liberland is stepping up to the mark by sourcing medical elements needed in the fight against Corona virus or COVID-19. As the pandemic sweeps across the world, the government of Liberland is working to source masks, tests and even ventilators for use to stop the virus.
President Jedlička has suppliers in China that can ship the required medical devices to the Czech Republic, Serbia or Croatia. He is talking to relevant government departments in the three countries to see if these contacts are needed. It is also his intention to distribute for free a percentage of the order once confirmed.
‘In these times we all need to pull together,” he said. “To that end we have put together a website where we can share news and help each other. There are articles on DIY approaches to staying safe as well as myth busters. We are concerned that national governments are not taking this pandemic seriously. We want to help our Liberlandians wherever they are based.”
The website is at coronavirus.ll.land
The Free Republic of Liberland is a sovereign state located between Croatia and Serbia. Liberland is a constitutional republic with elements of direct democracy. The state has two Vice Presidents and five Ministers. The language is English. The liberland Merit is the currency of Liberland. The country’s motto is: To live and let live.
Liberland’s embassy opening inside Somnium Space is the start of virtual representations of organisations that share the free and decentralized world view and are ready to enter the 21st century and use it’s technological advances. The immersiveness of virtual reality will make diplomatic matters and talks between all counterparties feel very real while commercial contracts can be recorded on the blockchain to be verifiable and auditable, making the exchange of digital goods and services seamless.
Liberland will pay a symbolic sum of 100 Somnium CUBEs, the in-world currency, for a one year rent of Somnium Space VR land parcel. This goes in the tradition of real embassies that pay usually a fraction of the market price as a sign of friendship and welcomeness of the hosting country.
Artur Sychov, the Founder and CEO of Somnium Space, says: “We have built Somnium Space to allow freedom of expression and communication. I am happy to see thousands of people use our platform for exactly these reasons and Liberland representation is a very important step towards creation of an alternate life and complete digitalization of humanity.”
Vit Jedlicka, the President of Liberland, says: “We are excited not only to open our embassy in Somniumspace, but also hold part of our Anniversary.ll.land conference. We will be hosting prominent speakers like David Friedman as well as members of the EU Commission and members of Serbian government. It is great alternative way how to hold events for up to 500 people without risk of spreading the coronavirus. It is also a fantastic way to present our different architectual concepts. ”
About Somnium Space
Somnium Space is an open, social and persistent VR world powered by blockchain, where everyone can buy land, build or import objects and easily monetize their experiences. Our ultimate long-term vision is to create a virtual environment which offers a rich addition to reality, packed with new and exciting possibilities. Built as a cross-platform world, Somnium Space allows people to experience one constantly expanding, seamless single instance shaped by players. Combined with an in-world economy, it provides a next step towards a true metaverse experience.
About Liberland
The Free Republic of Liberland (hereinafter “Liberland”) is a sovereign state located between Croatia and Serbia on the west bank of the Danube River. On some maps, this area is referred to as “Gornja Siga.” The nearest towns are Zmajevac (Croatia) and Bački Monoštor (Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, Serbia).
This parcel of land came into existence due to a border dispute between Croatia and Serbia. This area is not claimed by Croatia, Serbia, nor any other nation or private entity. Furthermore, it remained unclaimed since the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991. In fact, for many decades, it has been uninhabited and no claim was ever made to this piece of land. It was therefore Terra Nullius — a no man’s land — until Vít Jedlička and Jana Markovicova proclaimed it as the Free Republic of Liberland on April 13, 2015. Liberland has set its boundary with ample margin from neighboring countries to ensure that it does not infringe upon the territory of Croatia or Serbia. The total area is approximately 7 km² and is now the third smallest sovereign state, after the Vatican and Monaco. (For more information regarding the border dispute between Croatia and Serbia see the article on Wikipedia.)
Liberland is stepping up to the mark by sourcing medical elements needed in the fight against Coronavirus or COVID-19. As the pandemic sweeps across the world, the government of Liberland is working to source masks, tests and even ventilators for use to stop the virus.
President Vit Jedlička today announced that he has located certified suppliers in China that can ship the required medical devices to European countries. List of factories was made public on the website including general market conditions as well as terms of delivery.
Newly launched website http://coronavirus.ll.land also has a Do It Yourself section filled with advice for general public how to make respirators, sanitization or ventilators at home. President Vit suggested that H13 vacuum bags have the necessary density to block the virus and are viable replacement for FFP3 filter that are not available on the market at the moment. Coronavirus.ll.land is a website where everyone can contribute with a piece of knowledge to help others to protect themselves and their loved ones.
‘In these times we all need to pull together,” he said. “To that end we have put together a website where we can share news and help each other. There are articles on DIY approaches to staying safe as well as myth busters. We are concerned that national governments are not taking this pandemic seriously. We want to help our Liberlandians wherever they are based.”
People today tend to categorize their political values and beliefs on a
binary spectrum, ranging from “far left” on one end and “far right” on the
opposite. This spectrum is so widely accepted that many of the people who
regularly include its terms in their lexicon and mentally include themselves
within its confines scarcely stop to examine what it means. Furthermore, they seldom
question the validity of this dichotomy.
The left and right are usually characterized by America’s two major
political parties, Democrats and Republicans (or “liberals” and
“conservatives”), respectively. But where do political groups of lesser
prominence fall on the spectrum? Where do Libertarians, the party most closely
associated with freedom for the individual align?
To answer that question, you have to dive into what left wing and right
wing really mean, followed by what it means to be a member of the Libertarian Party.
According to
Wikipedia: “Generally, the left-wing is characterized by an emphasis on ‘ideas
such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform, and
internationalism’ while the right-wing is characterized by an emphasis on ‘notions
such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism.’”
Hmmm. At first
glance, it’s not obvious which of these two sharply divided categories the US
Libertarian Party fits into. Let’s look at its recent history and what new
voters could be seeking from their candidates next.
Where
Gary Johnson Stood
As a successful
Republican New Mexico governor, 2016 Libertarian Party presidential candidate,
Gary Johnson pronounced that he had slashed taxes more than a dozen times,
balanced the budget, and left the State with a billion-dollar surplus.
Under conventional
definitions, reducing taxes and focusing on fiscal responsibility would usually
fall clearly under the right-wing paradigm.
Conversely, on
addressing the issue of high crime, particularly those that were drug-related,
Governor Johnson noted that half of what the State of New Mexico was spending
on law enforcement was being “wasted” on drug-related crimes. He further
proposed that, for instance, the use of marijuana be treated as a health issue
and that, further, it be decriminalized.
Granting individuals the right to legally choose for themselves what they
put in their bodies? That’s undeniably left-wing activism.
Reputed to lack
interest in policy details, Governor Johnson took a more partisan approach to
governing during his second and final term as New Mexico governor.
Several
significant proposals to do with tax reform, health care, education, jobs, the State
of the economy, its budget deficit, the promotion of civil liberties, the use
of military force or the lack thereof, legalizing marijuana, and dealing with
the environment were put forward during the 2016 presidential campaign. Johnson’s
proposed tax reforms would furthermore incentivize the private sector to create
millions of much-needed jobs.
Another of his
radical proposals dealt with the administration of the State. State bankruptcy
filing would be allowed, while negating any chance of the Federal government
coming to the financial aid of any one troubled state. A move away from federal
power and toward greater state power is undoubtedly a step toward smaller
government, a traditional right-wing value.
Free-market
principles were at the heart of the 2016 campaign when pouring over documented
opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Proposed budget cuts would have
negatively affected the military. There was even an endorsement of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership with the proclamation that this partnership was
indeed promoting free trade.
How Libertarians
Feel about “Leftist” Ideals
There are many on
the left who support the Libertarian Party’s proposals to legalize the “liberal”
use of marijuana. This falls in line with the “no victim, no crime” principle,
which basically claims that people should be allowed to do what they want with
their own lives so long as it isn’t hurting anyone else.
Of course, where
this agreement often falls apart between political parties is exactly what
constitutes “hurting” someone else, which might explain why Democrats are so
often opposed to the Conservative ideals of loosening business restrictions and
allowing entrepreneurs to do whatever they want for the sake of profit.
Individual
liberties are undeniably a fundamental part of the Libertarian Party’s
platform. The American Civil Liberties Union even afforded Libertarian Gary Johnson
its highest rating in lieu of civil liberties. Other than drug
decriminalization, the Libertarian Party is vehemently opposed to censorship
and the regulation of the internet, the Patriot Act, prolonged detention
without trial for prisoners, as well as “enhanced airport screenings” that rob
travelers of their liberty and privacy.
What Libertarians
distance themselves from Democrats is frequently on the subject of what
handouts and amenities Americans are entitled by virtue of the government
intervening on their behalf. Libertarians, by definition, are minarchists. They
are among the lowest when it comes to the number of services they want to be funded
by involuntary taxation and provided by central planning.
Many Libertarians
see government involvement in central services like highway planning, military,
police, and healthcare as a necessary evil to be monitored and endured.
Meanwhile, a typical Democrat wants the central government’s power and funding
to provide these things as heightened to ensure all citizens receive equal
access to them.
Tossing the Whole
Bird out the Window
As Gary Johnson saw
it, the Libertarian Party is more culturally liberal than the Democratic Party
yet more fiscally conservative than the Republican Party. Their overriding willingness to legalize
same-sex marriages, end capital punishment, and end prohibition of illegal
drugs place them closer to the Democrats. Yet, the party maintains positions of
lowering taxes, closing down the IRS, and ending the concept of a welfare state,
just like the most hardcore Republicans. Perhaps, optimistically, we can see
this as embodying the best of both worlds.
So how do we
reconcile this dynamic collection of political values with the standard
left/right dichotomy that defines modern American politics? Perhaps the answer
is not to have to resolve it at all, but to throw the outdated dichotomy out
the window. Maybe the most Libertarian ideal of all is for every individual to
be able to pick and choose their principles and policies by their own merit,
not broad and sweeping category generalizations.
by architectural guru Patrik Schumacher, London 2020
This is a
discussion paper that tries to address the question of Liberland’s prospective
urban planning policies. This is not only an important question from an
aesthetic and urban design perspective but, more importantly, concerns urban
development as a crucial factor in economic development. The critical issue
here is the question of how much prescriptive planning, if any, would not only
be compatible with the libertarian ideological credentials of Liberland but
more importantly how much planning, and what kind, if any, would be optimally prosperity
enhancing for Liberland.
The most
important proposition of this paper is to recommend for Liberland to start with
a simultaneous plurality of approaches, i.e. to work with a plurality of
planning regimes rather than with a single regime. The strategic decision would
thus be to offer choice to potential developers, investors, buyers and end
users. In the overarching context of government as contractually bound service
and the pursuit of governance innovation, it is important to experiment and use
the initial market feedback from potential investors and then from the measured
market performance of built results, for a pragmatic discovery and selection
process concerning urban development regimes and policies.
Policy
regimes aim at an urban order implying an optimal co-location pattern that
maximises positive externalities, i.e. functional spill-overs or synergies, and
minimises negative externalities. The maintenance of a nimble, flexible
openness to future opportunities is another concern to be considered.
This paper
distinguishes, analyses and comparatively appraises three fundamental types of regulatory
regimes or planning regimes for urban development, namely ‘sponsored’ versus ‘self-governed’,
versus ‘spontaneous’ orders. With respect to sponsored orders the paper
distinguishes and compares three subsidiary orders, namely the ‘anticipated’,
the ‘curated’ and the ‘rule-based’ form of a sponsored order. The overall
system of distinctions developed and employed here reads as follows:
Sponsored Order:
Anticipated Order
Curated Order
Rule-based Order
Self-governed Order
Spontaneous Order
The
assumption here is that the various planning regimes listed above are
distributed across the land available to Liberland, so that each regime is
instantiated and tested in at least one zone or urban district. Regimes can
then be expanded or contracted, first based on uptake during the marketing and
land sale phase, and later in accordance with the actual urban development
experiences on the ground.
In
what follows Liberland as initial land owner and contracting party to all
initial land sales or leases is here referred to as the ‘Liberland Corporation’,
or in short the ‘Corporation’. This phrase leaves it open how Liberland will
business-wise be constituted when it hits the ground and concretely implements
its preliminary governance software to the material reality of its envisioned
territory, i.e. the phrase ‘Liberland Corporation’ leaves it open whether it
will operate as, or in analogy with, a customer cooperative, an employee
cooperative, a supplier’s cooperative, or as shareholding company, i.e. as an investor’s
cooperative. The author has addressed this question in an earlier discussion
paper presented at the 2nd Liberland conference. The question of
Liberland’s constitution is largely independent of the question investigated in
the current paper, namely the question of how Liberland best sets up and orders
its urban development space.
The assumption underlying all three planning regimes distinguished above is that the Liberland Corporation will not itself develop and build but sell land parcels to investors, developers or end users. These land assets will be sold with particular covenants that reflect the respective planning regime that applies to the particular land in question. Land sales might be outright sales (free holds) or long leaseholds, e.g. 25, 50, 75 or 100 years, with the option to negotiate lease extensions. The advantage of the leasehold system is that the Liberland Corporation, in the long run, participates in the land appreciation. A further advantage is that the Corporation can redirect land use as land returns at the end of the lease. However, leases are, ceteris paribus, usually less attractive for investors than outright land purchases, and the Liberland Corporation could choose to trust land owners to adapt rationally to unforeseen future conditions. The owners can indeed be expected to redirect land uses in adaptation to new demands and value options, and they would prefer to do this, and might do a better job, without worrying about finite lease terms. With respect to future openness restrictive covenants or rules that are meant to curb negative externalities are a constraint that might turn out to prevent adaptation. In this case a return of land within a leasehold system might make it easier to reset the rules. Also, the externalities and spill-over effects that motivated the covenants might change and might make the restrictions obsolete. In any event, some way of accommodating such changes should be allowed for.
Properties
might have to be re-allocated for the sake of the global city or district
benefit. However, eminent domain powers are to be eschewed here, in the context
of a libertarian society, in favour of repurchasing rights, perhaps at a
pre-established multiples of market value, or of the original purchase price in
the absence of a liquid market.
With these preliminary framing reflections and decision in place as underlying assumptions, we proceed with the theoretical exploration of the various regimes or orders distinguished above:
Zaha Hadid Architects – Beethoven Concert Hall Bonn, Germany
1.Sponsored Order
The Sponsored
Order implies that the Liberland Corporation is acting as authority just as
municipal planning authorities do now everywhere. The crucial difference to
normal practice here is the general difference that sets the whole idea of Liberland
as ‘free private city’ apart from all existing governments: the institution of
an explicit “social contract” that clarifies the rights and
obligations of the parties without customers or citizens being subject to
one-sided changes of the overarching terms of the agreement. This ‘enhanced
rule of law’ contrasts with all current systems of government, including
democracy, where individual citizens’ are never safe from unilaterally imposed
changes to their economic rights and obligations.
With respect to the Sponsored Order we can distinguish three sub-variants, namely the anticipated, the curated and the rule-based order. In all three sub-variants order is maintained by the Corporation acting as authority. However, the three sub-variants, while often blended in practice, exhibit important differences that deserve to be distinguished.
Anticpated Order
In both the Anticipated and the Curated Order the Corporation generates a relatively detailed master-plan that operates via positively imposing building functions, building types, building lines, maximum heights etc.
In the
Anticipated Order this master-plan becomes the basis for the reliable
anticipation of how each parcel sold is embedded in a larger context. The
master-plan reliably anticipates the road network, public spaces, the building
forms in terms of building outlines and heights, and possibly further
specifications as well as prescriptions of land uses, possibly very
detailed. In the anticipated order only developments anticipated in the
masterplan are permitted.
The advantage of certainty for investors, namely that the possibility of unwelcome surprises is excluded, is paired with the disadvantage that the prescribed developments might be coming forth only slowly, if at all, if the masterplan misjudges the market desires. This kind of prescriptiveness puts no brake in development only where the locational attractiveness and the associated development pressure is so high that all uses want to pile in anyway. Then use selection is viable without slow down.
Zaha Hadid Architects – Bergisel Ski Jump Austria
The Curated Order
The Curated Order is more flexible via the discretionary powers granted to the planning authority.
This
discretionary regime is thus a response to the disadvantage of the rigidly
binding masterplan and offers flexibility via ad hoc adjustments to the
masterplan responding to unanticipated demands and market conditions.
Order is here maintained via the Corporation’s case by case appraisal of how a submitted
development proposals fits into the overall curated value proposition
originally envisaged. The Corporation maintains the right to approve or
disapprove each individual proposed development in light of the overall city or
district value, thus representing the collective interest of all citizens, resident
firms and land owners in general, inclusive of regard for future city
development potentials. This implies also the possibility of a shift in the
overall urban agenda.
The
disadvantages of this approach are well rehearsed: the uncertainty of gaining
permission might discourage potential developers to invest in the effort of elaborating
a proposal in the first place. Also, even if this 1st hurdle is overcome, the
permission and negotiation process is costly and time consuming for both
parties. Therefore it is advisable to maintain an evolving up to date
masterplan as underlying default option for permissible development.
Further, the
possibility of downstream context transformations remains a disadvantage for
buyers who value certainty of final global outcome and want to avoid surprises
that thwart their long term plans and calculations.
Example: Development in London is subject to strong discretionary planning powers.
Zaha Hadid Architects – Bora Residental Tower, New Mexico
The Rule-based Order
The Rule-based Order imposes strict rules and development constraints on all parcels.
These rules
are usually restrictions rather than positive impositions, i.e. prescribing
height or GFA limits rather than exact heights. These rules might be varied per
predefined zones, or even per parcel. Everything that is not explicitly
forbidden is here permitted.
The rule-based
approach is exemplified in the US, for instance in New York. Here the planners
have no, or much less, discretionary power in relation to individual
developments. As long as developers stay
within the rules they cannot be refused permission. This gives a highly
valued certainty to those looking at buying parcels and investing in
development, i.e. certainty with respect to whether they can realize what they
intend to do, while making less predictable what is happening around them in
comparison to the anticipated order.
This certainty
about development rights also reduces the transaction costs and the costs of
the administrative processes associated with development. This probably also
speeds up the development process in comparison with the anticipated order and
the curated order.
The
disadvantage is that the overall shape and character of the city is less
predictable. All we know is that the shape of the city will not violate the
general abstract rules imposed. However, to the extent to which we can trust
the rationality of the market process as a process that aggregates and
coordinates the dispersed rationality and knowledge of individual investors,
who come together to benefit from each other in an evolving urban network
garnering synergies, we can predict that the overall value generated, possibly via
unexpected solutions, will probably exceed any anticipated or curated value
proposition.
2.Self-governed
Order
The Self-governed Order implies
that the Corporation, in the districts so designated, is devolving the planning
authority to the landowners or to all property owners invested in the district.
This implies a land owners’ or property owners’ democracy, albeit with voting
powers best allocated by land share, i.e. in proportion to the size of the
property, in analogy to the self-governance rules of share holding companies. These
rules will initially be constituted by the Liberland Corporation in order to
give clarity to this proposition and to overcome potentially costly transaction
complexities. However, the constitution itself might also be allowed to evolve
through a self-induced and self-regulated self-governance process.
The main differences to the usual
municipal democracies is firstly the fact that a self-governed planning regime
is restricted to matters of urban development, secondly that the right to vote
or otherwise participate in the governance and decision process is restricted
to land owners, and thus excludes resident tenants, and thirdly that voting power
is allocated by share rather than according to the one person one vote
principle.
This is to avoid the problem of
universal suffrage democracy, namely overburdened, uninformed and indeed
rationally ignorant voters who are vulnerable to demagogy.
In contrast, the major land and
property owners are well placed to discuss and take decisions with regard to
appropriate collective action measures for the benefit of all end users of
their properties, and this includes the district’s and wider city’s citizens,
as well as the future citizens and customers, individual and corporate, the
land owners would like to attract. Collective action issues include potential
negative externalities of particular potential developments as well as
infrastructure investments that are not always forthcoming spontaneously.
Value maximizing decisions are
best taken by the stake-holders who have the knowledge and incentive to do so
as rationally and as effective as possible, and value maximising decisions are
indeed utility maximising decisions, and thus imply the best known overall land
utilisation.
Some large investors might prefer
the Self-governed Order over the Sponsored Order as it empowers them in shaping
the destiny of their district. The advantage of the Self-governed Order over
the Sponsored Order is that the rationality of the district development policies
can benefit directly from the lived experience, knowledge and incentives of the
land owners.
A potential disadvantage might lie
in the difficulty and costs of the democratic collective action process that is
implied here. Where delegation of powers becomes necessary, due to scale and
due to the complexity of collective action issues, principal-agent problems and
the danger of corruption come into play.
There are many examples where land
owner associations have solved collective action problems and formed for the
sake of collective district improvements. However, there is no example the
author is aware of where such land owner associations have taken up the full
responsibility of urban planning self-governance.
3.Spontaneous Order
The Spontaneous Order regime is the only urban development regime that is not assuming any capacity for any form of centralized collective planning action. The assumption here is that the gains that might be achieved via collective action might not be worthy its costs and inherent dangers and that the spontaneous formation of an efficient order is possible, even likely via the free accumulation of individual choices, each informed by individual knowledge, imagination and incentives. The phrase ‘spontaneous order’ was used by Friedrich von Hayek in a more general sense. While the phrase is used here, in this working paper on planning regimes, restricted to spontaneous urban order, this concept can be understood as falling, as special case or subset, under Hayek’s more general concept, thereby making Hayek’s more general, related insights about the use of knowledge in the economy and about competition as a discovery procedure relevant here. After all land and real estate markets are, first of all, also markets, albeit with some special features.
Under
the Spontaneous Order regime land is sold without any use and density restrictions,
indeed without any restrictions whatsoever. The respective zone might be
referred to as the “wild zone” or the district for a “free for all” form of
development. This might appeal to some potential investors and might attract
truly creative and entrepreneurial investors, developers as well as resident
tenant entrepreneurs.
Total development freedom is conceivable where the traditionally severe negative externalities associated with heavy industry or large scale manufacturing, in close proximity to residential and cultural facilities, is no longer to be expected within an urban area, in the era of the post-Fordist knowledge economy. The Spontaneous Order thus becomes viable in principle when the uses that are to be expected include forms of living, forms of knowledge work and forms of consumption and recreation, without large scale physical production coming into play. Working, living and consuming hardly disturb each other and in fact often desire and benefit each other’s proximity. The need for the traditional segregative functional zoning is thus historically obsolete.
With
opting for an unrestricted 1st world urban “wild zone” or “free
zone” Liberland could make a mark and stand out distinctively against the
backdrop of urban overregulation everywhere in the advanced economies,
especially in Europe. The general failure of European democracies to unleash
entrepreneurial creativity is especially acute in the urban development arena,
where inflexible density restrictions, and strictly prescribed land use
allocations, together with prescribed standards, stifle and misdirect
development.
There
are many considerations that recommend a very high degree of unconstrained
urban development freedom. Cities facilitate the sharing of services, the exchange of
knowledge, as well as direct cooperation and collaboration. The wild zone
allows for creative entrepreneurial energies to be unleashed thereby increasing
the likelihood to discover the solutions and at patterns that integrate the
many potential purposes, functions and business plans that would most effectively
utilize the land resources available. That’s what markets do best. This paper
argues that land parcelling in the Spontaneous Order zone should also emerge
spontaneously via market demand. This would allow for very small initial
investments. This would also accelerate the churning of ventures, giving the
whole process its required pace and thus a chance for each or most sites to
cycle through a number of trials until uses synergize with the wider context
and with each other.
The freedom of mixing land-uses is
crucial for the vitality of the city. Only a creative trial and error process
guided by price signals, as well as by the profit-and-loss selection system, can
discover and optimize, at each individual site, the most value-enhancing
use-mixes that best synergize with the particular urban adjacencies of that
site. It is precisely these functional synergies that motivate us to
agglomerate in cities in the first place. The planning bureaucracy lacks the
requisite knowledge, as well as agility, and often the incentive, to optimize
and maximize value.
In
the free zone each urban entrepreneur is free to find any available site, and
define and calibrate a value-enhancing mix of complementary uses that also
complement and synergize with the already existing or planned adjacent uses and
their audiences. This way unique and uniquely integrated urban districts have a
good chance to evolve, districts with urban mixes that no central curator could
have imagined or fine-tuned. However, at a further stage a curator or larger
developer can try to analyse and learn from the spontaneously evolved synergy
network in order to imitate its pattern and replicate its success. While
nuances might be missed or difficult to replicate, the advantage of such an
replicating curatorial effort would be the cutting out of the time and resource
consuming trial and error discovery process. Therefore, it is advantageous for
Liberland to maintain multiple zones, including the free zone laboratory, but
probably without universalising the spontaneous order regime.
To bet on the emergence of a
spontaneous order implies an earie uncertainty as to what will emerge, if
anything worthwhile. The process is far less predictable. This also, on the
positive side, entails the potential for radical innovation because the freedom
to try new ideas are granted and those ideas are put to the profit-and-loss selection
test and winning innovations are allowed to proliferate without restriction.
The unpredictability of the kind
of development that might end up working in Liberland is, in any case, inherent
in the very idea and unprecedented proposition of Liberland. In these special
circumstances total freedom of settlement might be the best strategy to find
settlers at all, and any restriction might curtail a potential but unknown
development take off. However, suggestive plans of what it might become might
be helpful, i.e, a non-binding plausible vision could be provided.
A temporary disorder might result
if there is no shared conception of what Liberland might base its economic life
on and if very divergent visions start to place their bets and seed themselves
simultaneously, without a lot of synergy potentials. Against this potential
danger, as well as against the danger of nobody seeing any potential, the
non-binding vision, promoted with conviction might be an anti-dote.
A freewheeling trial and error
processes can surprise us with unimagined innovative solutions. But they also
have their costs: all the failed trials that must be absorbed when safe bets
are eschewed before a something finally works and works well.
This will inevitably take time but
massive white elephant losses are avoided. The absence of regulations and
permission procedures is also a (trivially obvious but important) accelerating
factor in its own right.
There is also another potential
mechanism of playing out a nimble synergy discovery process among many
potential investors and entrepreneurs, namely via a prior digital city and
community building game. Here we can achieve super nimbleness, without
necessarily being constrained to small sites or low-rise buildings that are
quick to demolish and rebuild. Such a platform could also be layered and
involve not only developers playing a competitive and synergetic “monopoly”
with each other but could at the same time already involve endusers. The idea
here is that all those who consider joining Liberland or this particular
district would evolve an emergent order, or multiple possible orders, together
prior to purchase and construction. The
multitude of finally dovetailing plans would not have to use investment
sequencing in the real world but in a much time compressed virtual planning
world where the plan emerges bottom up as a result of a quasi-market process.
Whether such a game would be taken seriously enough to inspire credible
hypothetical commitments whether something like this could indeed take off is,
of course an open question. This tool itself will have to go through iterative
trial and error phases to discover the right balance between a deterring lack
of generating credible commitments and a deterring strictness of demanding and
insuring credible commitments.
Concluding
Remarks
This paper is far from being
conclusive. It is a discussion paper that presents an initial exploration,
taking a first stab at the crucial questions and considerations unfolded here,
questions that will have to be decided in one way or another when business has
to start.
When venturing into the unknown,
facing uncertain risks and uncertain opportunities with all options considered,
where pros and cons can be charted but not easily weighted with regard to their
significance in the case at hand, it is probably advisable to start with a
multi-pronged approach that lets many flowers shoot out to bloom or perish. Therefore
the Liberland Corporation should initially make room for all the possible ways
to create an urban order discussed here, and, if only tentatively at first,
allocate the different ordering regimes to different parts of Liberland.
End.
Zaha Hadid Architects – Beijing Daxing International Airport
Short bio:
Patrik Schumacher is principal of
Zaha Hadid Architects. He joined Zaha Hadid in 1988 and was seminal in
developing ZHA to become a global architecture and design brand.
Patrik Schumacher studied
philosophy, mathematics and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart and London. He
received his Diploma in architecture in 1990.
He has been a partner since 2003 and a co-author on all projects. In
2010 Patrik Schumacher won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling
Prize together with Zaha Hadid.
In 1996 he founded the Design
Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association in London where he
continues to teach. In 1999 he completed his PHD at the Institute for Cultural
Science, Klagenfurt University. Over the last 20 years he has contributed over
100 articles to architectural journals and anthologies. In 2008 he coined the
phrase Parametricism and has since published a series of manifestos promoting
Parametricism as the new epochal style for the 21st century. In 2010/2012 he
published his two-volume theoretical opus magnum “The Autopoiesis of
Architecture”. Patrik Schumacher is widely recognized as one of the most
prominent thought leaders within the fields of architecture, urbanism and
design.
Since 2008 Patrik Schumacher has
been increasingly interested and committed to Libertarian ideas and projects.
In recent years he has been lecturing widely at libertarian conferences around
the world, and is applying libertarian insights to urban development and
planning issues. , In 2018 he published
a paper via the Adam Smith Institute entitled “Only Capitalism can Solve the
London Housing Crisis” and published “A Capitalist Revolution for Effective
Urbanisation” in the Guardian.
Patrik Schumacher joined two
Liberland conferences. In the run up to the 1st conference he took a
leading role in the organisation and jury of the Liberland urban design
competition. At the second conference he presented a paper entitled “Liberland
PLC – Corporate Governance Structures as Models for Micro-nation Constitutions”.
Patrik Schumacher is a recipient
of Liberland’s ‘1st Class Merit’ award. He received an honorary
doctorate in social science from Guatemala’s libertarian university ‘La
Universidad Francisco Marroquin’ where he also holds an honorary professorship.
The Government Blockchain Association (GBA) ran a Future of Money, Governance, and Law Conference on January 31, 2020.
The conference was attended by six Liberland representatives on Capitol Hill, Washington. Joey Langenbrunner, Pranav Badhwar, Bogie Wozniak, David Molineaux, David Ament, and Steve Wood from Liberland were all in attendance.
Dan Larimer, co founder of Steemit, BitShares and Block One, the publisher of the EOSIO protocol, was a keynote speaker for the conference. Following his presentation, Joey Langenbrunner met with him and discussed how Liberland is using the technologies he developed as a foundation for the governance systems in Liberland. Dan was intrigued, and further talks are planned to continue this conversation.
Following the conference, the GBA expressed an interest in Liberland formally joining their association as the representative for micronations to Steve Wood, as they have been looking to add this perspective to their group. Vice President Bogie Wozniak concurred with this suggestion, and Steve is following up to determine the details of this relationship.
For more information, please visit the Liberland website
Freelance
journalist Jillian Godsil popped her Davos cherry this year and learnt ten
surprising things you might not know about Davos
Now in its 50th year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit was
first launched by German economist Klaus Schwab. The conference is aimed at
working with both private and public bodies with the objective of impacting the
global agenda on finances, economics and more recently climate change. It is
held at the end of January in Davos, a mountain resort in the eastern Alps in
Switzerland. The meeting is by invitation only and brings together some 3000
business leaders, international political leader, economists, celebrities and
journalists for 5 days.
However, there are also many fringe events happening in and
around this tiny town which attracts a further 40,000 plus people keen to meet,
talk about key issues and do business.
I attended the Davos Summit on the fringe. It was an eye
opener but not in the way people might imagine. I attended as a freelance
journalist.
The main promenade of Davos is converted into an exhibition space. The promenade itself is relatively short but every shop face gets a makeover so instead of retail outlets the main companies appear to have their headquarters on the main street. False facades and often total re-dos inside would make you think you were inside a major conference rather than on a main street in an Alpine town.
The traffic is legendary. There is one main street and everyone wants to get up or down it. Lots of Swiss traffic police are stationed at every corner with their distinctive lighted red cones – like stunted light sabres – directing everyone this way and that, mostly at a snail’s pace. Get in early or get stuff in traffic.
No one stays in Davos unless you are one of the exclusive 3000 invited guests. Everyone else scrambles to find accommodation in surrounding towns and resorts. Some people commute in from Zurich every day on the train which is a two hour journey. We stayed in a very pretty Alpine lodge some 90 minutes out of town. And when I say out of town I mean up the mountain. Our group lead had hired a minivan with drivers. Our Davos bus left each morning down the mountain into town on terrifying roads in a route that bonded us all when we survived each journey. In our resort our views were spectacular and we overlooked a quiet ski lift. While we were there for the conference, other guests were there skiing, and we’d look at them enviously as they sailed off each morning.
Actually, amend that last point. Many people do go skiing while at Davos. The only shops that resist the corporate refurbishment are ski and boot hire shops. Amongst all the traffic and the cars are many skiers heading out for the day.
Boots – wear boots. The pavements are covered in snow. It is freezing – down to minus 15C at night – and it is a hilly town. There are stories every year of falls and broken bones. In fact, I would go one further: invest in crampons. These are like slippers that go over your shoes and provide some traction in the snowy sidewalks. Most people wear boots inside events too unless you are uber organised and carry your loofahs/heels in a bag. A word of caution: crampons are super on the sidewalk but inside on tiles they are vey devil. Either take them off or walk very slowly. Some restaurants have signs saying no spikes allowed.
The very best marketing prize goes this year to Zurich. They set up their corporate headquarters in Davos giving out brightly coloured blue woolly hats. Our first morning walking the promenade saw lots of people wearing them. I had huge hat lust and was contemplating grabbing one off a passer-by. The advice given to me was to only grab a hat off someone that I could beat in a fight or outrun. Before such extreme measures were implemented, we spotted the source of the free hats and got our own with no one injured in the process.
Security. Given the number of important officials, politicians and celebrities around, the security is very tight. Lots of armed police and check points in and out of the town. You have to carry your passport with you at all times. Then there is the issue of gaining security passes to go into the main hotels. Let me just say it is very complex and quite expensive. Ask me again if you want to know how to do it but for first timers it is another thing to drive you crazy.
Official news. Most of the hoi polloi do not get anywhere near the headline guests. It is better to watch the news each night to catch up on the events and speeches. Having said that, one night while we were waiting outside a hotel for our Group Van to bring us home, former UK prime minister, Tony Blair walked within one foot of me as he gained his official car.
The main summit has many events but the fringe summit has zillions. Trying to keep track of all the talks, panels and networking events is tiring. Join a few WhatsApp groups of seasoned pros who have been there before to get an idea of what is on and where these events take place. Many are held in nooks and crannies as every available piece of real estate in Davos is rented out, leased or hired by incoming companies and organisations.
The final thing I learnt is that to really get the best out of Davos 2021 you need to start planning now. It is not meant for the casual observer. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It’s about time you learn who brought the most innovative urbanization concept to Liberland! Right off, we want to thank you for your patience, as the process took quite a while.
Here’s final selection of winners after months of work of both our own key members and the jury of recognized architectural experts. We cherish all the teams and individuals who shared their artistic visions of how to turn the 7 km2 of land into a welcoming home and a rising global hub for all Liberlanders. All design projects require top determination and much intellect, as every piece completes the whole, and that’s why we value your contribution so much and sincerely thank you for it.
Let’s quickly review the challenge our best players had to face:
Design a full visual plan for the urbanization of Liberland’s grounds of mild, LA-like climate exposed to flooding. The project’s focus should be on a green environment joining private and industrial areas suitable for living potential of some 340,000 residents, with basic in and out infrastructure. It should be also flexible in terms of economy and settlement facilities, so that it can be possibly readapted to changing market conditions. This plan should also embody nature and freedom as in line with Liberland’s ideals.
The results come as a combination of the jury’s votes after they considered the popular vote. The winners of Liberland’s Architectural Competition are:
1st place Studio: RAW-NYC Architects, USA and UAE
Team leader: Raya Ani, Director
Award: 10,000 Merits
Files: link
Highlights: This concept features vertically stacked city layers that can be leveled up with the rising number of inhabitants. Each of the layer’s underside is adjusted for algae urban farming for food and power production without the need for sunlight and for CO2 emission control. The designers went a mile ahead by introducing many energy-saving and waste processing features to keep this futuristic metropolis very self-powered and low on pollution. The project also minimizes the needs for car use, with everything in a maximum of 20 min. walking distance. Overall, the jury found it as stunning and ahead of time – a prime example of socially-friendly sustainable living all could enjoy.
2nd place Krzysztof Juroszek, Architect, Poland
Independent submission
Award: 9,000 Merits
Files: link
Highlights: Mr. Juroszek prepared an exceptional, in-depth state-city plan founded on landmasses elevated 3m above the Danube river to reduce flooding risks. It includes an ambitious grid-based land development simulation based on potential lot value calculations that also consider wind ventilation conditions to keep residential areas non-polluted. He was able to stand out by presenting an exceptional sociological insight into Liberland’s future.
Highlights: After carefully studying the area’s topography, this contestant imagined organic building structures based on a hexagon, of size and height related to the spot they’re situated in. All buildings of different purposes are styled in one fashion placed in linear blocks matching the land’s elevation. This design is a very organic approach that expands on the natural beauty of Gornja Siga.
4th place: Studio: Lab.Id, Argentina Award: 5,000 Merits
Files: link
Highlights: Designers here encourage nature preservation by lifting the city above possible flooding levels, leaving the wildlife below to be. Furthermore, building foundations are also elevated to minimize forestry removal and let the sunlight feed the lower levels. The project also includes calculations on possible means of air and sea transportation that can reach the country. Check out the second picture to see what planes will fit in our airport lot.
5th place: Studio: Sergio Bianchi Architettura, Italy
Team leader: Sergio Bianchi, Director
Award: 4,000 Merits
Files: link
Highlights: This plan includes a massive, hexagonal tube-shaped geometrical structure resembling a spaceship, with an airport on the highest level. All of the areas are kept car-free – outside visitors can leave their cars underground and use rapid transit system to move within. The internal skeletal structures are also powered by more than 5 different sources of eco-energy. This would simply be Mothership Liberland if it could fly.
Special jury awards
For “The most futuristic design”
Studio: MIX Design studio, Canada
Team leader: Stanley Lung
Award: 5,000 Merits
Files: link
For “The most structured proposal”
Adam Jaskulski, Architect, Poland
Independent submission
Award: 5,000 Merits
Files: link
Our representatives will contact all winners in the upcoming days. Once again, we thank you for your involvement on behalf of Mr. President and Liberland’s government. Here’s what he says:
“We are blessed to have such great minds involved in creating Liberland. The winning design concepts show that the country can become a prosperous habitable area using latest innovations in green technology to remain mostly self-sufficient. We will further study upon the 1st place project to see if and how exactly it could be introduced in reality. When that’s possible, we want to launch a virtual 3D landscape with building models to help people choose a place to live or to invest in. I congratulate all selected participants for their clever ideas representing the freedom Liberland stands for.”
The competition’s jury included:
Patrik Schumacher, Partner at Zaha Hadid
Vedran Mimica, Professor at IIT College of Architecture in Chicago
Alisa Andrasek, Founder of Biothing and Partner at Bloom Games
Bruno Juricic, Architect, Curator and Scholar
Shady A. Michael, Founder of S+ Studio
Martin Hruska, Owner of S.A.L.D Studio
Jan Petrs, Founding Partner of Studio Archistroj
Daniela Ghertovici, Founder and Director of Archagenda LLC
What’s next
We want to stay realistic and will not share unreasonable future predictions. The next step for our nation will be introducing first settlements… on the Danube, actually. It’s called Seasteading. Designers are now giving us solutions for boathouses that could appear near Liberland even this summer. Stay updated with us – we’ll spread the word on Facebook as this moves on. Fingers crossed!
All image files are downloadable in a kit from here. Media inquires are welcome. Please contact press@liberland.org with your story – we’ll do everything to help.
Summer may be coming to an end, but at ARK Village, a new season is just getting started. Tucked away by the Danube, surrounded by water, forests and the landscapes of the Upper Danube region, ARK is a place to slow down, get outdoors, meet good people — and stay a little longer than you originally planned. This autumn and winter, ARK is turning individual events into something bigger: weekend retreats.
Ark Liberland Village Events 2026
Imagine arriving with a few friends on Friday. You settle into a bungalow by the lake. There is no rush. During the day, you head outside — cycling, canoeing, fishing, hiking, taking photographs, learning outdoor skills or simply exploring the Liberland and Danube landscape.
Then comes the evening. A fire. Food cooking slowly. A drink and a long conversation.
New people joining the table.
And the feeling that there is really no reason to go home yet.
COME FOR THE EVENT. STAY FOR THE WEEKEND.
—
ADVENTURE AT ARK
Archery and Outdoor Skills October 3-4
ARCHERY, OUTDOOR SKILLS AND EXPLORATION
Our first autumn retreat is built around adventure.
The Archery Gathering on 3–4 October will bring together people who want to spend a weekend outside, test their skills and have some fun.
But archery is only part of it.
Expect outdoor challenges, adventure activities, canoeing, movement, exploration and practical outdoor skills — with plenty of opportunities to simply enjoy the lake and the Danube.
Bring your friends. Come for the gathering. Stay for the whole weekend.
NOTE: Safety rules will be followed strictly!
—
NATURE AT ARK
Danube Bike Tour October 24-25
TWO WHEELS, WATER, WILDLIFE AND THE DANUBE
On 24–25 October, ARK turns its attention to the natural world around us.
The Nature Retreat will combine a bike tour with the Sombor cycling community, a fishing tour with the master fishermen from Apatin, and a range of activities connected with the landscape around ARK.
There will be opportunities for photography, bird watching, fishing, cycling, walking and discovering the unique environment of the Danube region.
It is a weekend for people who would rather experience nature than simply look at it through a window.
And once again, there is no need to rush home after the activity.
Stay by the lake. Cook together. Explore all weekend.
—
WELLNESS, LONGEVITY AND WINTER ALCHEMY
Ark Longevity Retreat November 21-22
As the days become shorter, ARK changes rhythm.
The Longevity Retreat, 21–22 November, will focus on wellness, healthy living, movement, relaxation and spending quality time away from the usual urban routine.
And then comes Winter Alchemy, 12–13 December.
Winter Alchemy Retreat December 12-13
Cold air. Warm fire. Traditional winter food. Nature. Conversation.
A different kind of winter experience — one built around people, simplicity and being outdoors.
—
MORE THAN AN EVENT
ARK is designed for more than a single activity. You can come with your partner, your family, your friends, your community or your team.
Spend the day outdoors.
Take a canoe onto the water. Go cycling. Try fishing. Walk through the surrounding nature. Photograph wildlife. Learn something new.
Have a massage or simply do absolutely nothing.
Then return to the lake, cook something together and spend the evening around the fire.
You can stay for one night. Or two. Or three.
The point is not to fill every minute with a program. The point is to have a reason to stay.
—
YOUR WEEKEND. YOUR CREW. YOUR ARK.
ARK Village is particularly suited to groups who want something different from the standard weekend trip.
Friends looking for an adventure. Families wanting time in nature.
Communities bringing people together. Business teams escaping the office.
Liberland groups looking for a place to meet, work, explore and relax.
There is accommodation by the lake, space for outdoor activities, food, nature and plenty of room to create your own weekend.
You don’t have to follow a rigid schedule. Build your own.
—
THE ARK WEEKEND FORMULA:
Friday
Arrive. Settle in. Meet your people. Dinner. Fire. Lake. Conversation.
Saturday
Adventure, nature, cycling, fishing, canoeing, workshops or exploration.
Saturday evening
Good food. Drinks. Fire. Music. Stories. New friends.
Sunday
Slow breakfast. Another walk, ride or paddle. One more coffee by the lake. And maybe… stay another starry night.
From the proclamation of independence on the banks of the Danube in 2015 to permanent settlement, blockchain governance and a growing international diplomatic presence, Liberland’s first eleven years have been anything but conventional. This timeline traces the defining moments that transformed a bold experiment in liberty and voluntary government into a functioning community with its own institutions, economy and place in the world.
The history of the Free Republic of Liberland is an unusual convergence of classical liberal ideas, experimental governance, blockchain technology, physical settlement and international diplomacy.
Proclaimed on the banks of the Danube on April 13, 2015, Liberland began with an ambitious proposition: that a new country could be built around individual liberty, voluntary cooperation, private property and limited government. What began as a declaration on an uninhabited piece of territory between Croatia and Serbia quickly attracted worldwide attention.
In the years that followed its historic proclamation of independence, Liberland has developed institutions, a global diplomatic network, a blockchain-based system of government and, eventually, a continuous physical settlement on its territory.
These are some of the milestones that have shaped Liberland’s first eleven years.
2015 – The Founding of Liberland
On April 13, 2015, Vít Jedlička and the first Liberlanders proclaimed the Free Republic of Liberland on Gornja Siga, approximately seven square kilometers of land on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia.
The territory had emerged from differing interpretations of the Croatia-Serbia border following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Croatia maintained a cadastral interpretation of the border that placed Gornja Siga outside Croatia, while Serbia regarded the Danube as the relevant boundary and likewise did not claim the territory. Liberland’s founders therefore regarded Gornja Siga as terra nullius prior to the proclamation.
The announcement produced extraordinary international attention and hundreds of thousands of applications for citizenship.
The remainder of the year brought both rapid institution-building as well as considerable difficulties. The Liberland Settlement Association organized attempts to establish a physical presence, while Croatian authorities increasingly restricted access to the territory. Numerous Liberlanders and supporters were detained during attempts to visit Gornja Siga.
Those confrontations made physical settlement difficult, but they also transformed Liberland from an obscure experiment into an internationally known project.
2016 – Building National Institutions
With worldwide attention established, Liberland increasingly turned toward the less glamorous but essential work of building a state.
Government departments, diplomatic missions and humanitarian initiatives developed while work continued on a constitutional system intended to place strong limits on government power and protect individual liberty, private property and voluntary exchange.
Liberland also began developing its system of national honors. The First Class Order of Merit of the Star of Liberland, established in 2016, would eventually be awarded to distinguished supporters of liberty, innovation, humanitarian work and the development of Liberland.
2017 – A Diplomatic Breakthrough
On September 25, 2017, Liberland and the Republic of Somaliland signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Berbera.
Representatives of the two governments agreed to begin a mutual recognition process and created a Joint Committee on Technology, Energy and Banking. The agreement became one of the most important early milestones in Liberland’s foreign relations.
At the same time, Liberland was attracting architects, entrepreneurs and urban planners interested in the possibility of building a new city virtually from the ground up. International architectural proposals explored dense, environmentally conscious and technologically advanced approaches to developing the territory.
2018 – Humanitarian Action and International Expansion
Liberland’s growing international network increasingly moved beyond advocacy into practical action.
Following Cyclone Sagar, which caused severe destruction in Somaliland in May 2018, the Liberland community organized humanitarian assistance for the country. The effort demonstrated that the relationship established the previous year could extend beyond diplomacy into practical cooperation.
Liberland also continued expanding its international representation and building communities of citizens and supporters across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.
2019 – Developing the Liberland Economy
By 2019, Liberland Merit, or LLM, had become an important element of the country’s voluntary economic and political system.
Rather than financing the state through compulsory taxation, Liberland rewarded voluntary financial contributions and work performed for the country with Merits. By the end of 2019, more than four million LLM had been issued.
This system laid important conceptual foundations for the later blockchain governance model, in which Merit would become directly connected with political participation.
2020 – Building a Digital State During a Global Shutdown
The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented restrictions on international travel and physical gatherings. For Liberland, however, it also reinforced the importance of institutions that did not depend upon geography.
Work continued on electronic government, digital identity, cryptocurrency and remote administration. During this period Liberland decided to move its developing blockchain e-governance concept toward the Polkadot ecosystem, an important step toward the architecture subsequently developed for the Liberland Blockchain.
The experience demonstrated one of Liberland’s founding assumptions: many functions traditionally associated with a state could be performed digitally by citizens scattered around the world.
In spite of these challenges, Liberland signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the government of Haiti on March 5, 2020 and Liberland citizens acting through the Liberland Aid Foundation delivered around 37,000 lbs. of food to Haitians in need.
As international travel resumed, Liberland intensified its diplomatic outreach.
Delegations engaged government officials and political leaders in a growing number of countries, while the rapid international adoption of cryptocurrency brought new attention to Liberland’s longstanding interest in Bitcoin and blockchain-based governance.
The emergence of El Salvador as the first UN member state to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender was particularly significant for Liberland, whose government had accepted Bitcoin and maintained cryptocurrency reserves years earlier. In November, Liberland citizens made a large donation in Bitcoin to the Benjamin Bloom Children’s Hospital in San Salvador as an official Liberland delegation visited the Presidential House and several Ministries.
2022 – The Liberland Blockchain Takes Shape
In 2022, years of experimentation with digital governance began taking concrete technological form.
The Liberland Blockchain, based on Substrate and the Polkadot technological ecosystem, approached its Alpha Mainnet stage. The system was designed not merely as another cryptocurrency network but as infrastructure for a state: citizenship, elections, company registration, governance, assets and eventually judicial functions could be administered on-chain.
The year represented an important transition from the idea of blockchain government to functioning national infrastructure.
2023 – Return to the Territory
The year 2023 fundamentally changed Liberland.
Early in the year, settler Jan “Honza” Urban maintained a presence on the territory for 25 days despite difficult conditions and restrictions on access. The highly viewed visit of YouTuber Niko Omilana subsequently brought Liberland to millions of viewers around the world.
The decisive breakthrough came on August 6, when a group of Liberlanders entered Gornja Siga through a newly established border regime with Croatia.
For the first time since the country’s founding, regular access to Liberland became possible. Settlers quickly established camps, infrastructure and basic services, including filtered running water.
The following months were not without setbacks. Croatian authorities again removed settlers’ property in September, but Liberlanders remained and rebuilt. From August 2023 onward, a core community maintained a continuous presence on the territory.
For the first time, Liberland was no longer only a state with a territory it sought to settle. It had become home to a permanent community.
2024 – Blockchain Democracy and New Political Leadership
In October 2024, Liberland conducted its first congressional election entirely through its blockchain governance system.
The election demonstrated that blockchain government had moved from theory into practice: eligible citizens could participate in choosing national representatives through transparent on-chain mechanisms.
Among those elected to Congress was TRON founder Justin Sun. Following the election, Sun was appointed Prime Minister of Liberland.
His entry into government brought considerable international attention to Liberland and strengthened the connection between the country’s political experiment and the global blockchain community.
2025 – Ten Years of Liberland
Liberland entered its second decade with achievements extending from the Danube to the Moon.
On March 2, a digital Liberland flag reached the lunar surface aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander, part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The Moon landing occurred near Mons Latreille in Mare Crisium.
In April, Liberlanders from around the world gathered to celebrate the country’s 10th Anniversary at Ark Village in Apatin and on Liberland itself.
The year also brought further development of the Liberland Dollar, or LLD, expanded blockchain connectivity, international diplomatic outreach and ambitious investment plans for the region surrounding Liberland.
After a decade, the project that had begun with a flag planted on the banks of the Danube had developed a permanent settlement, elected institutions, a functioning blockchain government and a worldwide community.
2026 – Institutional Maturation and a Second Decade
Liberland’s eleventh year has been characterized by the continued maturation of its democratic, technological and diplomatic institutions.
Quarterly blockchain elections have demonstrated continuity in on-chain governance, while Congress has assumed an increasingly important role in legislation and national policy.
Liberland has also begun another major technological transition. After years of developing and testing its Substrate-based blockchain, work began toward greater Ethereum compatibility and ultimately migrating key elements of governance into the Ethereum ecosystem. The goal is to combine Liberland’s existing on-chain institutions with the security, liquidity and enormous developer community surrounding Ethereum.
Meanwhile, continuous settlement on Gornja Siga has now endured for more than three years. Dwellings and basic support structures have been established, regular events bring visitors to the territory, and the Liberland community in nearby Apatin has continued to grow.
Internationally, Liberland has continued expanding dialogue with governments, legislators and diplomatic representatives while advocating peaceful resolution of outstanding questions with neighboring Croatia.
Eleven years after its proclamation, Liberland has moved through several distinct phases: from an idea, to an international movement, to a digital state, and finally to a country combining functioning digital institutions with a physical community on its territory.
From Declaration to Nation-Building
Liberland’s history remains a work in progress.
Its first eleven years have demonstrated that building a new country is neither a single declaration nor a single diplomatic breakthrough. It is a gradual process of creating institutions, establishing a population, developing infrastructure, maintaining international relations and building a community whose members are willing to invest their time and resources in a shared future.
The principles announced in 2015 remain at the center of that experiment: individual liberty, voluntary cooperation, limited government and the simple national motto, “To Live and Let Live.”
The milestones of 2015–2026 therefore represent more than a chronology. They document the transformation of Liberland from an audacious idea into an ongoing experiment in what a sovereign state can look like in the twenty-first century.
By Vít Jedlička President of the Free Republic of Liberland
Imagine waking up to discover that your bank account has been frozen, your encrypted messages are no longer private, and every financial transaction you make can be monitored or denied. This is not a dystopian novel. Pieces of this system already exist across the democratic world.
While the world’s attention is deliberately captivated by high-profile summits and geopolitical theater, a silent and profound restructuring of our fundamental liberties is taking place in the shadows. Unelected bureaucrats, operating far beyond the reach of democratic accountability, are quietly laying the final bricks in an architecture of digital totalitarianism.
If we do not recognize and resist these developments immediately, the concept of individual liberty will soon become a historical footnote. The time for polite debate has passed; we are facing the rapid erosion of privacy and financial autonomy.
The End of Private Thought
The first pillar of this new control grid is the eradication of private communication, often packaged under the manipulative guise of “protecting the vulnerable.” By pushing for mass surveillance tools – often referred to as “chat control” – supranational entities like the European Union are attempting to secure a master key to the private digital lives of every citizen.
Protecting children is a legitimate objective. But this isn’t about catching predators. It is about establishing an omnipresent surveillance apparatus.
Governments naturally seek additional powers during moments of public concern. The problem is not today’s justification, but tomorrow’s application. History repeatedly shows that surveillance tools created for one purpose are eventually used for others – and surely weaponized against those who hold dissenting views.
Such tools will be used to monitor, blackmail, and silence the conservative, the libertarian, the anti-war advocate, and anyone who questions the prevailing orthodoxies surrounding migration, climate mandates or state expansion. It is a direct assault on freedom of speech and the greatest expansion of state surveillance ever proposed in democratic Europe.
The Financial Panopticon and Political Debanking
The second pillar is the aggressive push toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), such as the digital euro. By elevating a programmable, centralized digital token to the status of legal tender, the state is building the beachhead for a cashless society.
A cashless society under a central bank is the definitive end of freedom. If a single bureaucrat sitting in Frankfurt or Washington controls the digital wallet of a person, a company, or a sovereign nation, they control you entirely. Liberland was founded on the opposite principle: that governments should compete for citizens by protecting liberty rather than expanding control.
We do not have to guess what this future looks like; the weaponization of the financial system is already happening. Across Europe, individuals are being debanked, financially exiled and placed on sanction lists not for committing acts of violence, but merely for voicing dissenting opinions and unorthodox perspectives.
Consider the chilling reality of what’s already happening under the current system:
* Graham Phillips: A British blogger who had his bank accounts seized without any judicial process after being sanctioned by the U.K. government. His crime was producing video content from the Donbas region that the state deemed “destabilizing” and contrary to the official narrative.
* Alina Lipp: A German blogger who had her bank accounts in Germany blocked, the funds withdrawn, and the accounts closed. Because her reporting and social media posts challenged the mainstream European perspective on the conflict, she was economically completely cut off by EU sanctions, with reports indicating even her family’s accounts were targeted.
* Jacques Baud: Even the historic sanctuary of Switzerland is no longer safe. The former Swiss intelligence officer and author reportedly saw his assets subjected to an EU freeze in 2025, proving that independent geopolitical analysis is now treated as a financial crime.
If your bank can freeze your life savings because of a social media post, an unpopular geopolitical opinion, or your political affiliation, your money is not yours – it is merely being rented to you on the condition of your absolute obedience.
The Path to Sovereignty
The original idea of European cooperation – a free market of unhindered trade and voluntary association – was beautiful. But it has been thoroughly hijacked by a nomenclature intent on domination. They have destroyed the original vision, replacing it with a regime Orwell warned us against.
How do free individuals and sovereign nations defend themselves against this?
Enshrine Financial Freedom: Nations must immediately amend their constitutions to explicitly protect the right to use physical cash and alternative, decentralized currencies.
Reclaim National Sovereignty: Sovereign states must take the courageous preparatory steps to exit bloated, overreaching political unions. We must look to models like Switzerland’s historical participation in the European Economic Area – engaging in trade without surrendering sovereignty.
Opt Out: As individuals, we must adopt decentralized technologies. We must build and utilize parallel economic structures that cannot be frozen by a central authority or a compromised bank.
Freedom has never survived by accident. Every generation is called upon to defend it against the technologies and institutions of its own age. Ours is no different. We can either accept a future in which every message, every transaction, and every opinion exists at the discretion of distant authorities, or we can build systems that place the individual back at the center. Liberland was founded for exactly that purpose.
Here in Liberland, we understand that freedom is not granted by the state; it is inherent to human existence. The legacy systems of control are desperately tightening their grip because they know their era is ending. The future does not belong to the digital panopticon or the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels. It belongs to a sovereign, wealthy, secure, and free Central European space.
A Cherished Reunion of Brotherhood, Trust & Four Decades of Family Bonds with the Minister for Minority Welfare and Public Enterprises, Government of Telangana.
In a heartwarming reunion that reflected the enduring values of loyalty, mutual respect, and lifelong friendship, Consul General and Special Presidential Envoy to India and SAARC Countries H.E Syed Algazi , had the privilege of meeting his esteemed brother and long-standing family friend, Mohammed Azharuddin, Minister for Minority Welfare and Public Enterprises, Government of Telangana whose family shares a cherished relationship spanning more than four decades with H.E Syed Algazi the Royal Family of Hyderabad Deccan.
Their meeting was far more than an official engagement—it was a celebration of an extraordinary bond nurtured through generations, founded upon trust, affection, and shared values. Such enduring relationships stand as a testament to the timeless traditions of goodwill, unity, and mutual respect that have long defined the heritage of the Royal Family.
H.E Syed Algazi expressed his deep appreciation for the continued warmth and brotherhood shared between the two families, reaffirming the importance of preserving these cherished ties while working collectively towards the welfare and progress of society and country.
The occasion also reflected a shared vision for strengthening in Liberland collaboration in areas of public service, inclusive development, community welfare, and social harmony, inspired by the values of compassion, dignity, and responsible leadership.
This memorable reunion serves as a reminder that while positions and responsibilities evolve, genuine relationships built over decades remain invaluable, continuing to inspire future generations with the spirit of friendship, respect, and unwavering brotherhood.
As a new addition to LiberLand, we have been waiting for permission and assistance since November 2025 to organise a small event in Alicante about LiberLand, but no “go ahead” or help came. What did we learn from it? —> Do it yourself as good as you can and try to represent LiberLand and its ideas as best as you possible can. 🙂 Due to unique “composition” around Alicante (Denia is German ;-), Benidorm is British ;-), a lot of Dutch, Italian, Polish, Argentinians, French), Alicante’s Hogueras, Mascletas, daily fireworks, world cup football on TV converging at the same time and place, …we decided spontaneously to organise the first LiberLand “Stammtisch” in Alicante about LiberLand and its core ideas 🙂 https://www.hogueras.es https://soyalicante.com/programa-completo-de-las-hogueras-de-alicante-2026-calendario-horarios-y-actos-clave/ (every day) ogBsQgF9lukCfKJVFhDAIya2R5ogABLESnEYfd (every day) Don’t take the word for it…just google it yourself. 🙂 We put the word out late for an event on the same day. Within the first 20 minutes we had a 12 confirmations of participation; 4 German speaking, 6 Spanish and 2 English speaking individuals. The agenda was simple;
LiberLand “Stammtisch” Meeting at 9 PM, —> Short presentation of LiberLand and its core ideas followed up with plenty, and I mean, plenty open questions.
Watching World-Cup German Game together at 10:30 PM,
Participating in the last post Hogueras fireworks at the beach at 0:00. We used a place with around 30-people capacity and started with 12 confirmed participants. Since it was a spontaneous and open LiberLand event, within the first 15 minutes we have been FULL of 6 “Stammtisch”-tables of participants. People were standing outside trying to listen about LiberLand. During the evening, we met numerous individuals asking about LiberLand and the idea behind it. I personally have to say, that I never had so much interaction with new people in such a short time, not even when I was organising shows and exhibitions worldwide during my employment. My throat was sore the next day. But I was happy and it was worth it. 🙂 A lot of questions came up which are currently being summarised. Unfortunately, lots of them could not be answered. But we had a lot of fun and masses of new people heard about LiberLand. Lessons Learned;
Don’t wait, act in a good faith,
People are “hungry” for new ideas/system if presented in the right unified way,
A lot of questions remained open and couldn’t be answered,
Keep it Simple and Short,
Make it understandable to average person,
Once Liberland has “a solid finalised public offer” on the table, we can address the masses.
Costa Blanca and Alicante in particular, is a place which European nations are visiting between March and October each year, and where multi-cultural and multi-lingual LiberLand communities could be build very quickly. Just do some research for yourself and check flights and statistics for this region. https://www.costablanca.org/en/ About the author;
…is an E-resident of LiberLand,
…has got a pure Liberland company in LiberLand with a few engaged contributors ;-),
…has got a small curated international community in various countries.
…has got time, inclination and resources to support solid, structured, meaningful projects.
…(NO publicity or marketing here, so you have to research us/me on your own). Any questions; email us; infoLLsolATprotonDOTme
Representative Thomas Massie has long been admired by many Liberlanders for his consistent defense of constitutional government, civil liberties, and limited government in the United States Congress. Following his recent primary defeat after a heavily financed campaign against him, Liberland reflects on Massie’s record, his connections with the liberty movement, and why many supporters of freedom continue to view him as one of the most principled independent voices in American politics.
For more than a decade, Representative Thomas Massie has been one of the strongest defenders of constitutional government, individual liberty, and the principles of the American Founding Fathers in the United States Congress. Since taking office in 2012, Massie has built a reputation as an independent voice for limited government and civil liberties – principles that strongly resonate with many citizens and supporters of Liberland.
Many Liberlanders were disappointed to see Massie lose his recent primary election after a heavily financed and aggressive campaign against him. The race showed how difficult it can be for principled, independent politicians to withstand coordinated attacks backed by enormous financial and media power.
There has long been significant overlap between supporters of Liberland and supporters of former Congressman Ron Paul, who received Liberland’s Order of Merit in August 2025 shortly after his 90th birthday.
The same is true of Thomas Massie. Both men earned respect within liberty circles for challenging political orthodoxy and defending constitutional principles even when it came at political cost.
Liberland officials have met with Representative Massie several times. In September 2018, a Liberland delegation visited his congressional office to present the history and founding principles of Liberland. The delegation discussed Liberland’s commitment to liberty, voluntary governance, free markets, and modern governance systems inspired by the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison while incorporating blockchain technology.
In July 2024, President Vít Jedlička shared the stage with Representative Massie at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, reflecting the growing dialogue between liberty-minded movements around the world.
Outside politics, Massie has always stood apart from the typical image of a modern congressman. An inventor and engineer, he earned degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On his cattle farm in Garrison, Kentucky, he personally built an off-the-grid timber-frame home using wood and stone from his own property. Powered by solar energy and a repurposed Tesla battery system, the home reflects Massie’s practical self-reliance and technical creativity. He has often called himself the “greenest member of Congress.”
Massie also earns admiration for his opposition to runaway spending, taxpayer-funded foreign aid, mass surveillance, and restrictions on civil liberties. He opposed pandemic lockdowns and famously forced Congress to return to Washington to vote on emergency measures in person. He never voted to raise taxes and has long supported auditing the Federal Reserve.
He was also the co-author of bipartisan legislation requiring the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The measure passed overwhelmingly and was later signed into law by President Trump, though full disclosure has still not occurred.
Massie’s independence won him admirers not only across the liberty movement, but among conservatives and liberals alike. The late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk frequently praised him as one of his favorite members of Congress. Representative Ro Khanna (D.-Calif.) wrote after the election: “… my good friend Thomas Massie lost tonight. I’m angered by the smears on his character. He lost because he had the guts to take on the Epstein class.”
A record-breaking $35 million was spent in Massie’s primary, mainly consisting of injections from a small cabal of billionaire donors and specific interest groups opposed to Massie’s maverick votes on foreign policy and foreign aid.
Massie’s primary opponent did not show up to a single debate and – somewhat hilariously – neglected to delete AI prompts from the text of his social media posts. Massie received over 1,500 donations from small donors in Kentucky, whereas his opponent only had a total of 70 donors in Kentucky, according to FEC filings.
Political campaigns are often rough, but many of the accusations directed at Massie during the recent primary campaign badly distorted his record and beliefs. The campaign against him also cynically exploited the political trust and emotional instincts of many older voters through relentless advertising and sensationalized attacks. For many supporters of liberty, the campaign was another reminder of how hard it is for truly independent voices to survive in political systems increasingly ruled by massive fundraising operations and nonstop media warfare.
Regardless of electoral outcomes, Thomas Massie’s record defending constitutional government and individual liberty has earned him lasting respect among many Liberlanders and supporters of freedom around the world. We hope he will continue to play a leading role in the liberty movement for many years to come.
I want to say I am sorry to our readers that we are not producing content to the level that we were after I took over and started writing for the Liberland Press.
This is for several reasons:
We are in the process of retooling how generate articles and working with with the Liberland marketing team and the Liberland government on several issues.
There is no need for the International Relations Series. When I first started writing this series I was approaching it from a mindset that to be a legitimate country we must start approving treaties and by extension shoring up the case that Liberland is fulfilling the Montevideo Convention by entering into diplomatic relations. However after the Minister of Justice Michal Ptacnik explained to me the nuances of various international treaties I realized that what I thought I was doing was actually counterproductive to what the overall mission for Liberland is and that is for a truly limited government and not hand waving claims that we have a limited government when the reality is quite the opposite.
Burn out is real. This is why I stopped writing Liberland vs The World, it wears you down after a while and everything starts sounding the same with no real substantive differences in my writing.
Can’t get enough time to write the articles the quality time they deserve. I have a couple of articles that I have been wanting to finish writing on but due to other obligations I have not been able to give them the time they deserve this includes several Spotlight articles.
We have some exciting developments underway and if we are able to pull them off we will share them on here!
I do hope everyone understands and in the meantime please make sure you receive TGP’s daily international news brief on WhatsApp by following here:
Liberland Press Daily News Brief channel on WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbCQc2xJENxy5DVfOr2Y
KATHMANDU, April 19: The Mahasiddha Peace Sanctuary has announced a four-day bicycle journey from Kathmandu to Lumbini to advocate for global peace and harmony. During a press conference held on Wednesday, organizers revealed that 108 cyclists will participate in the event, which is scheduled to commence on April 28.
According to Devendra Basnet, the journey’s technical coordinator, the expedition will begin at the sacred site of Swayambhu in Kathmandu. The route will see participants travel through several major hubs, including Hetauda, Narayangadh, Kawasoti, Bardaghat, Bhumahi, and Bhairahawa. The journey is timed to conclude in Lumbini, the birthplace of Lord Buddha, on May 1, coinciding with the auspicious occasion of Buddha Jayanti.
The final day of the event includes a series of spiritual and literary activities. A collective meditation program is scheduled for 7:00 AM on May 1. Following this, at 8:00 AM, the sanctuary will host the official release of The Path of Complete Liberation, a book authored by Shyalpa Tenzin Rinpoche, the visionary and founder of the Universal Peace Sanctuary.
Speaking at the press conference, Rinpoche emphasized the urgency of the journey given the current state of global affairs. He noted that the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East have left the world in a state of concern, making the adherence to Buddhist philosophy and messages of non-violence more critical than ever. Rinpoche expressed his belief that this four-day cycling pilgrimage will serve as a symbolic and practical effort to foster peace.
Shyalpa Tenzin Rinpoche has been a prominent figure in the international community for nearly 40 years, dedicated to spreading Buddhist teachings and the message of universal peace. By organizing this event, the Mahasiddha Peace Sanctuary aims to remind the global community of the importance of inner tranquility and collective harmony.
The journey is expected to draw significant attention to the message of peace as the cyclists traverse the diverse landscapes of Nepal, ending at one of the world’s most significant spiritual landmarks.
Diplomatic news: Consul General His Excellency Syed Algazi meets the Ambassadors of Palestine and Venezuela for a Diplomatic mission for the betterment of students and our respective countries. Our Consul General and Special Presidential Envoy to India and SAARC Countries, His Excellency Nawab Syed Algazi Republic of Liberland along with the Ambassador of the وزارة الخارجية والمغتربين الفلسطينية Embassy of the State of Palestine -India سفارة دولة فلسطين-الهند – MFA H.E. Abdullah M.A. Abushawesh and H.E Juan Jose Goldnick Brandt Minister Counsellor – Venezuela Embassy in india together with 60+ countries, Ambassadors, Consul Generals, Diplomats and 125+ delegates: One mission – Coming Soon.
The World Peace Sanctuary is taking shape in Lumbini, Nepal as the first level neared completion on 22nd March according to a release from His Eminence Shyalpa Rinpoche, who is overseeing the construction of the project. We are looking forward to it’s completion and hope that it become a beacon of Universal Peace for many years into the future.
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