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By Beth Geglia / Truthout
On January 3, 2026, Tim Stern, a German investor, was sleeping peacefully at his Venezuela residence when the phone on his small bedside table suddenly went wild. As he explained to Timothy Allen of the “Free Cities Podcast,” calls streamed in immediately after news broke that the United States had bombed Caracas in the early hours of the morning. Within hours, it was clear that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had been captured and was being sent to the United States — a change, Stern said in the podcast, that “is going to be the start of an absolute bonanza here in Venezuela.”
Oil interests were at the center of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela; U.S. President Donald Trump has made clear his intentions to reclaim nationalized Venezuelan oil for U.S. companies and to oversee the sale of Venezuelan crude. However, Stern is not involved in the oil industry. Instead, he’s the co-founder of a blockchain-based residential settlement called CryptoCity, a luxury real estate development spanning 35 hectares on Venezuela’s Margarita Island. Margarita, an island with duty-free port status and a population of around 490,000, depends largely on the tourism industry and has suffered hardships due to Venezuela’s economic crisis. However, CryptoCity is promoted to German and other foreign investors as a highly exclusive enclave. It boasts of luxury living for “high net-worth” entrepreneurs fully vetted and selected through a rigorous process. All transactions in the zone must be made in crypto, and residents form part of a “brain pool” aimed at generating joint business ventures through a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
CryptoCity is one example of how Trump’s foreign policy is benefitting a venture-capital fueled private city and “network state” movement. The project is featured on the page of the Free Cities Foundation, a leading private city promotor led by German economist Titus Gebel that has also championed the crypto-libertarian movement’s flagship project, a self-governing jurisdiction in Honduras called the Próspera ZEDE (Economic Development and Employment Zone). According to Stern, property in Margarita sold so rapidly after the U.S.’s attack on January 3 that their company was running out of apartments to sell. Property values shot up, properties for $20,000-$30,000 were nowhere to be found, and CryptoCity experienced an influx of investors interested in visiting the island, he maintained.
While libertarians have long fantasized about sovereign, “free-market” enclaves, a movement for so-called private cities, built in highly autonomous special jurisdictions, gained new momentum after the 2008 economic crisis. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is one of the most prominent backers of the movement. The billionaire first backed the Seasteading Institute — an organization promoting ocean colonization — and then VC firm Pronomos Capital, an early investor in Próspera. In 2022, crypto investor Balaji Srinivasan took the tech-futurist and land-hungry movement to the next level, coining the idea of the “network state.” A network state refers to an online community that pools capital, forms a blockchain “nation,” and then crowdsources land and exploits legal exemptions to build para-national territories.
Military Bases Could Open Doors for Private Sovereignty
At the end of the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump’s rhetoric on Greenland took a sharp turn, easing concerns over potential military conflict or crushing tariffs against European countries. Trump now claims to have reached a framework for a deal with NATO over Greenland and the Arctic, rumored to include sovereign territories for U.S. military bases, similar to the arrangement the U.S. holds in Guantánamo, Cuba.
Although official details have not been released and a larger conflict seems to have been averted, small territorial concessions in Greenland are still aligned with the interests of Trump’s tech oligarch allies and present a serious threat to the island. This is because even small pockets of U.S. territory could pave the way for venture capitalist interests in private jurisdiction development under the “network state” rubric.
Early in Trump’s second term, a rising network state project called Praxis — in fact a self-proclaimed “network empire” — enthusiastically backed Trump’s resolve to annex Greenland from Denmark, declaring plans to make it the first physical site for their digital nation. A week after Trump’s election, Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown announced that he had visited Greenland “to try to buy it.” Meanwhile Trump’s support for “Freedom Cities” within the United States (later named “Acceleration Zones”), an offshoot of Honduras’s Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDEs) like Próspera, moved from a campaign promise to official policy. Praxis — also backed by a group of mega tech and crypto investors including Pronomos, Balaji Srinivasan, Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research, and Apollo Ventures (the VC firm of OpenAI’s Sam Altman) — circulated a White House X post on November 5, 2025, that featured President Trump inside a pattern resembling the Praxian flag, adding a note: “Praxians in control.” The image leaves little room for doubt of Trump’s alliance with the right-wing network nation.
As the prospect of a full U.S. takeover of Greenland has grown increasingly remote, the idea of a Greenland-based “Freedom City” has understandably faded from view — but it has not disappeared entirely. An expanded U.S.–Denmark military base agreement could still create openings, depending on how its terms are structured. This possibility is underscored by Praxis’s focus on military defense and space exploration and its affinity towards designing cities adjacent to military installations.
In June 2025, Praxis proposed Atlas, a “defense-focused spaceport city on 3,850 acres at the Vandenberg Space Force Base,” in California, demonstrating its will to merge military development with network state plans. Praxis proposes launching Atlas first as a beachside industrial town to attract elite technical talent. Its close proximity to Department of Defense assets and Space Force installations on the base would enable “rapid test-to-deployment cycles” for AI-driven defense technology innovation. Estimated to attract 50,000 residents and produce $35 billion in income, Praxis promotes Atlas as a way to “defend the West on Earth and beyond.”
Danger of Expansion
In Honduras, small extensions of land were used by private city investors as a foothold to claim sovereignty and resist government oversight. The legislation backing ZEDEs was designed for these small footholds to grow over time. Honduras’s ZEDE law, which was passed in 2013, repealed in 2022, and ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court in 2024, contained a few key articles that insured the private territories would be difficult to contain. For instance, the law designated entire coastal areas with low population density as subject to the special ZEDE regime without a plebiscite or congressional approval, while also allowing new territory to be easily merged into the special jurisdiction if sold or voluntarily incorporated by a private landowner. The Próspera ZEDE, located on the Honduran island of Roatán, set a precedent for this when it purchased the Satuye Port, a non-contiguous territory on mainland Honduras, and placed it under the jurisdiction of the Próspera government. Próspera continued to operate as a self-governing territory and raise investment even after the Supreme Court’s ruling struck the ZEDE framework from the Honduran Constitution.
Praxis is a particularly extreme player in the network state movement. Western chauvinism is mixed with Mars colonization fantasies and allusions to white supremacist ideology in Praxis’s online discourse. One Praxis X post, for example, invokes the imperative to save the “corpse of Albion” — a term that refers to a fictitious independent island nation in the gaming world, but is also used by some ethnonationalist and neo-Nazi groups to reference a mythical, pre-modern, and “pure” Britain. Commenters responded to the post with “HAIL Praxis.” On February 6, 2025, Praxis boosted an X post titled “Make Rhodesia Great Again,” featuring a series of videoclips of colonial violence, and added “Praxians, are you ready for action?” Rhodesia, a former settler-colonial state in present-day Zimbabwe known for its systematic domination of the Black majority, is a widely recognized symbol of white nationalism. Praxis deploys other pre-fascist cultural concepts that were later adopted by European fascists and the Nazi Party, such as that of the “eternal city” and the “Faustian spirit.”
Taken together, Trump’s open disregard for the sovereignty of other nations does more than disrupt diplomatic norms; it paves the way for private city and network-state projects that revive long-standing logics of colonialism. If the Honduras case is any example, the legal details of an agreement between the United States and Denmark will be instrumental in determining the extent of the damage done to the island of Greenland and the self-determination of its people.
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