Floating Island Crypto Nation Aims for New Way of Governance

The worlds first autonomous floating island nation-state is set to be completed by 2022 and has begun selling the cryptocurrency intended to drive the project today.

The project which is backed by PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Theil is planned to be a sea-bound, city-state containing 300 homes along with a handful of commercial buildings, including restaurants and hotels, built in the Pacific Ocean off of Tahiti. The project will be a collaboration of two non-profit organizations, The Seasteading Institute and Blue Frontiers.

Varyon, the cryptocurrency intended to fund the project, has gone on sale today at the investor level. Details about the pre-sale were released by the project;

“Varyon (VAR) is expected to be required to purchase seasteads, fractional ownership of seasteads and seastead residency from Blue Frontiers, the presale is available today for the first 4,000 ETH with bonuses from 5% to 15%. The public sale date is yet to be determined.”

The crowd sale of the token will be divided up to fund the various developmental aspects of the project including; design and engineering, community growth and general administration needs. Sales of property, shares, products and any services from Blue Frontiers are all expected to be done only through the Varyon token.

Varyon describes the token as ‘an easily exchangeable token, of which only a billion will ever be made. Varyon will also be tradable and usable beyond just Blue Frontiers.’

Construction of the ‘utopian’ island state is set to begin next year following an agreement signed with French Polynesia in 2017. The design of the colony, which is shaped like a fishhook was created to address climate change in the region. As sea levels increase, possibly rising as much as 6 feet in the region, so to will the entire superstructure of the island.

Nathalie Mezza-Garcia, a political scientist and researcher for the Floating Island Project, told the Daily Mail that,

“the island’s residents will be free of fluctuating geopolitical influences and trade issues’ and claimed the nation “could one-day house refugees displaced by climate change.”

The concept as conceived of by Peter Theil is not routed in creating a tropical getaway but as an alternative to living under the auspices of any of the existing world governments.

President of the Seasteading Institute, Joe Quirk, reiterated this notion when he said he wanted to see ‘thousands’ of rogue floating cities by 2050, each of them ‘offering different ways of governance’. As Quirk told the New York Times ‘Governments just don’t get better, they’re stuck in previous centuries. That’s because land incentives a violent monopoly to control it.’

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