[REDACTED] 2024 | Cloud Nations: The Network States Being Built Today

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   good afternoon everyone come on let's try that again I know it's 5 o'clock and we're keeping you from a drink but good afternoon everyone good afternoon we'll take it a little bit of energy well I just want to say thank you so much for sticking out the rest of afternoon with us and for being here uh my name is Kem I'm a partner at Penrose Partners uh just quick introduction on myself you know I do work in the private sector as an advisor investors lots of different

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   businesses but I'm also the digital Finance adviser to the government of Bermuda which has historically been a very Progressive Nation for enabling digital asset adoption digital asset regulation and really looking to uh embrace the decentralized communities around the world and be a government that supports the movements that you're all working on today and so with that I'm hoping to bring a bit of a tether to

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   the the traditional governments as well as the traditional businesses in the world but really here to learn from the esteemed panelists here so I'm going to let them intr uce themselves as we go along and I do want all of you to when you introduce yourself maybe give us just like a a quick Genesis story of why you were you know to the title here building a cloud Nation right what

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   inspired you what put you on this path and why does it really become an important part of your career and your life so I'll start start with you here Quinn okay hi everyone my name is Ken I'm from Vietnam and what we trying to do from Vietnam is like we really focus Fus on weet three ecosystem so this like a bit about Vietnam we have 900,000 viewers and also 400,000 bu in Vietnam

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   so when we do like a lot of like you know focus on web stre ecosystem we also ask the question like how we can bring all the buers fers and also crypto leaders which like you know align with the core values also have the same vision about the decentralized future and also how we can together also make it more mass adoption and the at the end of the day still like need to you know like bring the impact to the real world so that's why we also like doing focus

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   on education we also do we Tre Village which is like you know kind of pop-up City everyone let just stay together for one month uh and also like incubate the project uh focus on Real World um showcase and also we do e Vietnam we do education we C up the bridge with between ret three people and also the government the intuition and also the non-crypto people and bring into the impact to the region yeah it's amazing and being able to navigate all those

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   stakeholders you know truly a testament to what you've built with web 3 village so really congrats T more can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on and uh any recent updates I know you just flew in from changai where guys are doing some amazing things Edge City so love to hear more yeah appreciate it um I'm tour I'm one of the founders of edge City we create these popup cities or popup Villages Juan was

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   just talking about um very similar concept and we essentially gather up to a thousand people to live together for a month and it's just an incredible environment to experiment with new ways of living new technologies actual IRL applications of the kinds of stuff that we're building in crypto but also another Frontiers uh Fields like AI biotech longevity Etc um we've been doing this for about a year now it actually all started with an event called zalu which happened in Montenegro about 18 months ago um we were

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   intimately involved there and from there spawned essentially this entire movement um why am I building a cloud Nation I actually didn't know this term until starting to think about this panel but I the I'm really excited about these things because and I think we'll get into some of this but I feel like these kinds of um internet-based or network-based communities will start to become much more important aspects of people's lives as um the traditional institutions that have governed Our

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    Lives start to slowly become less relevant from a identity perspective and the way that we just live so yeah that's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing and we just finished a popup City yesterday it was in changai we had just about a th000 people people come for the month and yeah it was incredible um these folks were there so yeah that's it congratulations one I know you gave the keynote right now so I think everyone knows a little bit about what you're working on but did you talk I missed a

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    bit of it I was backstage but maybe a bit of your Genesis story why is this important to you yeah so maybe I'll um describe two two things here the first is the big first call came from bagy talking about Network States and the fact that today the you can't really innovate at a country scale you cannot create new countries and new nations in Prior centuries that was the biggest

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    valve to be able to try new things new ways of organizing people new ways of creating cities new ways of relating um new ways of uh stewarding Innovation and so on and today many countries have greatly rate limited many sectors of innovation and so it looks like we need a way of experimenting with new nation states and new countries and today it's extremely difficult to find a plot of land that hasn't already been claimed uh you basically have to wait for a volcano to erupt in the middle of the ocean which you know is quite difficult and

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    then hope that no big nation state try to take it from you uh which again may be even harder uh and instead if you then foro land and start focusing on the core thing that a nation means which is the people the organizations the institutions you don't actually need a land to create a country or a nation and so instead you can start with the network and build a state out of that

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    take people that agree that think likewise about how to organize people and create a new structure for organization so that was kind of like the rallying um uh call uh it was part of suzu uh and that was a phenomenal uh attempt at bringing together a range of people and living together for for a while and from there um I was inspired to to use this as a tool uh to build cres Mento and to in that case not create a new network state but instead

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    support the upgrading of an existing nation that has a massive xack community that is deeply frustrated with the conditions of the local economy uh and instead sees the opportunity available today to upgrade the financial infrastructure using a crypto powerered um uh INF infrastructure the opportunity there is to create the economic conditions uh that give Le give rise to a tremendously prosperous country through the use of an economic zone and

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    unchain Financial Primitives to bootstrap uh an whole economy and if that can be successful it can serve as a model for the rest of the world on how we can innovate somewhere in between a full you know just digital Network State and whole normal national uh upgrading instead we can be somewhere in the middle to use the best benefits of um the digital world and crypto crypto as a

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    whole and a tried and true uh proven way of uh embedding different jurisdictions in current in current states which is the opportunity zone or or economic zone structure amazing I can appreciate that greatly and uh you know one perspective to kind of bounce off you here so you know with advising government of Bermuda a very small uh State a British overseas territory actually um you know operates in their private sector and their their community in a dollar based economy uh

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    with their Bermuda dollar right it's a onetoone peg to the US dollar but managed in the private banking sector and so that I believe is a Sandbox as well right similar to The Sandbox that you know not to speak to these two jurisdictions as sandboxes but they are a u a demonstration of what is possible especially when you're on the Innovative side of regulation in legislation and policy and you know I talked to Quinn

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    about this earlier I was like well you know you're advocating for your entire Community you're seen as a leader do you see yourself as a politician possibly in the role that you seive um but maybe give me that kind of perspective of the parallels that maybe the the citizen expects to the traditional government or the traditional world and how maybe there's a new paradigm that's creating where you may not need a politician right it may be a pure democracy in that your voice and your vote matters that

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    you don't need a delegate but maybe Quinn you can give me that perspective maybe you know president Quinn doesn't ring a bell but uh what are your thoughts um so I just originally just start everything you know to build the community build the ecosystem in the region so I don't see myself as the protction that's the first thing more like activist more like you know cut of this trying to create some impact from the beginning I even don't know like how

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    it going to be to be honest um but then I just like the more I understand the the you know the vision also the the demand like how we can support the Builder the founder you know the leaders in the ecosystem we just know that you know actually all of us like also don't see like hey we need more leaders or we need more politician but like you know how we all can contribute to it in a different way you know decentralized way but we can lie in terms of impact that

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    we want to create in the future and also impact and apply now right now in the real world in in our country and make the country also even better and then even that we also can apply to other country not only in Vietnam but also we can support other country in the region and and that's how we see it like more more like that way yeah yeah I I appreciate that and and to more to you

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    know the theme that we kind of came up with here the state of states right you know where are we in the traditional states where are we in the cloud States right um and we talked about the the parallels right so that governance that vote you know where do you see to more the the divide or maybe the misconceptions of what people should be expecting of a quote unquote Cloud Nation yeah for sure so I think we're very very early in this movement but

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    there's a lot of exciting stuff that's starting to happen um one I think when people think about this conceptually they make um maybe not a mistake but the the obvious leap to make is okay we have nation states and now we're going to have Network States what is what are the one toone mappings of all the things that nation states do that now these Network States need to do and I think that's not the right way to think about it for a couple of reasons one is that we're

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    early but two is that these things will have emerging properties that we can't really necessarily map one to one for example Network States I don't think for quite some time will have to worry about like maintaining Geographic sovereignty or like have you know armies because they're just fundamentally different structures right um so I think there's things like that where you know when you

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    ask like are we becoming politicians I I think there may just be a new I don't know type of uh role in these in these entities right um new new types of structures entirely not just democracy plus but it it could be you know something actually I high bandwidth democracy is something people talk about or you know things like that and then on the early side I think with things like Chris amento and Alf with things like what we're doing at Edge City I see them almost as Proto versions of what these

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    things could become but they're critical to bootstrapping this entire movement because what you need is you need to get people honestly Argentina is the best example of this you need to get people in a place aligned around a key idea and a key vision and actually like co-locating for a time in order to build connection and so I think of these things as like accelerators of affinity because now there's 2,000 people who are

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    in Argentina in August who are lit up by the idea of building this thing and many of them went to other places in the world but they're still linked to the idea of cres amento as a movement and now they can actually start to become more of a digital nation of some kind whereas if you just if you just have a club of people you met online and you might be linked through some kind of identity type thing some value some

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    project you're working on but you've never actually spent time together you've never done anything together it's it's going to be much much harder to get to the level of identity um integration that you'll need for something like this so I see these pop-up cities as like a an accelerator like a bootstrap function for these things that we're trying to build yeah one uh I see you you know

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    pioneering here um and I want to kind of challenge you with some of these parallels right um you know yes you're mobilizing people and you've galvanized this movement and you're saying you know we don't need the politicians we don't need military we don't need these things but you know what happens in times of maybe crisis right or in times of distress or threat to these communities whether cyber I'm not saying that at all huh I I I never

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    said we don't need government or militarist or politicians so don't I don't mean that in in any way no no no I'm just kind of flowing on the theme Here of the parallels and the Divide but like you know do you see a a world in which you know the community you've now created need to create allies um connection absolutely so the the whole movement is uh unlike other network states that are just starting digitally Cento is is not that it's a building a new community within an existing nation

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    and building a ton of bridges so in that uh it's doing it hand inand with government so one of the first things that we did is invite most Regulators around uh crypto or financial infrastructure to come to cesim Mento and two come to a left and we had a regulatory day with every single leader uh in the um uh of the different regular regulating agencies uh on stage discussing the opportunity space for for Argentina and we had multiple visits

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    from government from um part part of the current presidential um cabinet to um parts of uh the wios iris government working with us to build build this and one of the really exciting things is that and the opportunity here is that there is that crossover moment of both a Grassroots bottom up um organic movement with strong top down openness and support um that creates this golden opportunity in this very moment that I

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    think is only open for the next two years if it doesn't happen in the next two years then the administration um Can potentially change um and it's given Argentina's history and the Pendulum swinging it's very possible that the next whatever whoever comes next will not be open to crypto in this way so we have this very narrow time to try and create that economic prosperity and lock in an economic zone

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    um that can give uh these uh this new Financial infrastructure the 20-year longevity yeah that's great and you know one of the topics you know we discussed about earlier was you know building these Cloud Nations or network States um you know where does centralization versus decentralization play in right um you know Google right now you know kind of almost owns the brand of cloud right

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    um are they a cloud Nation themselves centralized and operate Quinn any thoughts on that to more um don't let me stump you that's not the point Google a cloud Nation I mean I guess to some degree you know people are spending a lot of time there I think it it matters a lot about like what is the the the point of this like they obviously are not trying to do that could they do that I guess potentially I think that would be a little dystopian because I don't think they would do it in the ways of of you know like the the

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    types of things that we care about as citizens of an entity in terms of you know sovereignty over our data citizens care about money right maybe that's what drives that Community right is just pure Financial incentive like how how does decentralization almost open up different incentive mechanisms right we talked about identity value you know connection these these things that can also be tied into benefit right um but maybe not purely Financial so I guess

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    I'm trying to challenge that idea and try to introduce how decentralization can benefit yeah mean I don't think you can build a nation out of just pure financial interest and and profit I think um that you don't really need a nation for you can just go to the whatever existing Nation exists and you can go and U make a great business there um it's much more about values and culture it's the values and culture give

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    rise to a policy landscape and the policy landscape enables certain things right so the Today We Live in um a a whole range of nation states that have were that the grw the last few centuries of lots of different ideas and value systems being explored and eventually give R gave rise to a quite free world with lots of freedoms that we now called human rights and those aren an invention

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    they're not you know unlike the documents that say these are inalienable things that just exist uh we invented those those are our social technology to coordinate and we constructed that culture and those principles to enable a range of possible opportunities and ways of relating and ways of operating um and I think the the the today there's in the hundreds of countries out there lots of

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    variability in different ranges of experience that you could have um but where the opportunity is what's missing is that there's specific policy spaces that are just not explored and are completely inhibited by current large scale parties and so a group of us around the world think that in order to explore that different way of relating and that different way of organizing in a different policy space we need to introduce some experimentation here to

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    construct new new forms of um of socializing yeah but I I think it's interesting you bring it back to policy right and you know we don't want to be the politicians of the the new networks or the new nations but policy and rules and and to some degree even policing of people abiding by these rules like these are important Concepts that if someone wants to let's say untether themselves from a current Nation or state these will be expectations and um you know to

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    where we talked about this right like does your citizenship with your traditional Nation exist in parallel or is there a scenario in which you make the leap into a digital life and digital citizenship and are there digital boundaries and borders that you now have to have visas to access right um I I feel like some to some of these foreign Concepts but in in your work in your world these are these are real things to consider right so you know where where do you guys see with kind of the

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    Frameworks that you're looking to build um and how do you almost uh continue to inspire your your citizens so one of the things we talk a lot about at Edge city is our theory of change is very bottoms up it's very like evolutionm minded very you know essentially let's try things and or not even let's try things let's create a space where people can try things and so the point is like instead

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    of 180 experiments that are currently being run in terms of how do you structure a group of people at that scale what if there were thousands right what if we had a thousand concurrent experiments running and what are the policies that run you know these types of entities um what are the new types of Institutions Etc so that's that's I think the lens through which to look at this like we're kind of we're in the phase where we're trying to figure out what are the right structures it's sezs it's you know it might be places like

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    Bermuda that are um friendly to this kind of experimentation like what are the right structures that will allow for that level of experimentation over the next couple of decades Quinn any thoughts on that um so for us actually we see that you know for uh we just create the safe Zone and also like create like you know the inspiring zone for people for builder for leader also like to testing out different experiment to see that like what is not working in the region for now but and

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    then we they cannot test in the big scale with 100 million people but now with like you know with the scale of like um 100 or 200 leaders living together in a certain amount of time and Al so test out with like 10,000 you know like community members something like that they can see that what works and what doesn't work and also we can see that like you know what is the new idea that you know can really apply into the the real world problem and and the the

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    key thing is like we work from the grassroot but we also work from the government Also let's see the perspective like you know also from the traditional government like how they also see all of that like you know what is the movement of that this kind of popup City that can bring into you know the current even government and also like even like bringing in the economy so for example they have some uh City or

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    some areer that you know like um they need to boost for the economy so how we can support them right how we also can Inspire other builders are you know founder to you know really build the real impact in that so we work on both like you know different perspective from you know governments traditional also from the CH the the new you know digital Builders from blockchain ecosystem and

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    and that's the key thing that we think about number one is impact and second that like also we really care about the core value align that's the key thing that we really want to make it different because you know as a traditional Nation also we have the law the law just say like hey this is a thing that you can't do but coding also like is the thing that like hey they writing cot also like

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    kind of writing law every single day but in the way that like hey this is the thing that we doing to every day so instead of that for Community like how we can bring all the builders and leader together and create the impact and build the new future with the great impact is like we need to align with the core values that is a key thing for for that also yeah and and that the work that you guys are doing truly adir admirable um you know you're putting yourselves out

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    there and you're interacting with governments and communities in different parts of the world and so you know what I would call a call to action of this panel is you know I I I've met all of you today and I really appreciate learning about your stories and your perspectives and um I'd love to find ways of collaborating knowledge sharing Building Bridges um you know internationally physically digitally

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    however we want to do it but I think um I'd love to be able to draw more attention to your pro projects that from different parts of the industry right there is a whole institutional world you know I'm the only guy in a suit here at this conference usually I'm not the guy in the suit so this is you know refreshing for me in a weird way but you know I think your story needs to be projected to these these groups as well

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    um so that they can provide funding support but with that I'll give you each of maybe a quick closing remark just your final takeaway thoughts on where you believe the state of states are today Quin start with you um the state of State actually I think at we at the very early stage we also trying to doing some starting from some new movement and then also want to test out uh with the good intention like create the impact and also like Inspire more and more people and also even bring like you know

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    uh non- crypto people you so to join this movement in our popup city um and I also learned a lot from uh B to this leader so I want to hear also like maybe some the last minute to share about that with our audience here um a lot of people are talking about recently about like civilizational cycles and that maybe now you know 400 years of the West failure nation state system maybe it's time for something new I think that's potentially true especially with everything happening technology in general I think that will

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    be figured out in environments like this and it could only be figured out in environments like this it's not going to come from from private Market or government or think tanks or whatever so if people are interested I would say like you know go to Argentina in December come to the next Edge city um go to Vietnam like it's these conversations are happening so it's it's very exciting one take us home yeah just

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    want to Echo that uh come join us in December in Argentina and come bring whatever it is that you're doing in building and share it with h with a broad community and help us upgrade uh both an the current economic infrastructure of places like Argentina and then export that back to wherever you're from so come join us and let's go thank you very much big round of applause for your panelists