181 - Afropolitan's Grand Plan To Start A Country

What would it look like to create a new country using crypto as a coordination technology? Join us today as Chika and Eche from Afropolitan detail their plan to begin with an NFT PFP project and end up with a country. ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless ------ 📣 STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 https://%E2%81%A0https//k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum%20%E2%81%A0 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ https://bankless.cc/Mantle%20%E2%81%A0 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 9:05 Starting a New Country 12:35 Public Perception Of The Idea 14:23 The Nation State Has Failed In Africa 16:49 What Was The Berlin Conference? 19:56 Defining Diaspora 25:43 Explaining Network States 29:52 The Solutions a Network State Provides 32:40 Giving Africans A Voice 38:44 How To Reach Afropolitan Endgame 43:45 How an NFT PFP Project Fits In 53:39 Phase 2 And Beyond 1:00:32 A Competitor To The Nation State 1:05:51 Acquiring Legitimacy 1:12:00 How Does Crypto Fit Into This Picture? 1:15:46 The Afropolitan Currency 1:18:22 Are Eche and Chica About That Life? 1:21:29 Long Term Bull Case 1:26:58 Outro + Risks and Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Eche: https://twitter.com/Echecrates Chika: https://twitter.com/ChikaUwazie Balaji's Episode on Network States: https://youtu.be/NEoxETtJ67Q ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You go try to talk to an African official today and say, hey, these guys are trying to start a virtual country, a digital country and blah, blah, blah, blah. They're just laughing you out the door, right? And the reason is, yes, take us as a joke. Like, we actually want you to laugh. We want you to keep on laughing because within the laughing period, we are building seriously so that by the time we reveal our leverage and our critical mass, no one's laughing anymore. And I think that was the similar Bitcoin strategy where today Bitcoin is taken as a serious asset, but 14 years ago, they're laughing you out the door.

• 0:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. What would it look like to create a new country using crypto as a coordination technology? We've explored this topic previously with Balaji Srinivasan. He calls it the network state, the idea of using crypto to create a new digital nation. It's an interesting concept, of course, but can it be done? As Thomas Edison once said, "Vision without execution is merely hallucination." So today, we're talking about the execution side. We have a project that's seriously trying to build a new country for Africa.

• 1:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  They have a plan using crypto. They have a roadmap. What would Africa's crypto nation actually look like? That is the topic today. A few benefits and takeaways. Number one, why the nation-state experiment has failed for black people. Number two, why Africa needs a redrawing of lines and how Web3 can help. Number three, why Africa is actually the best place to spawn a new network state movement. Number four, what about crypto and crypto values are demanded in Africa? What resonates the most? And number five, why Afropolitan, the project we're talking about today, thinks they can begin with an NFT PFP project and end up with a country on the other side? David, what's significant to you about this episode?

• 2:03David Hoffman?

  In crypto, we have a lot of very big ideas. In fact, we have so many big ideas that we don't have very many people actually trying to execute on big ideas. More supply of ideas than we have executors of big ideas. But today, we're talking to some people actually trying to go after one of the biggest ideas that crypto has presented. The idea of building a digital nation and not stopping there and trying to actually manifest that digital nation and the values and the infrastructure that that digital nation produces into the real world. Possibly one of the hardest goals that exists, but there are some tailwinds here. And I think this is a lesson that can be learned, not just about the network state

• 2:44David Hoffman?

  idea, but how and why crypto is going to be adopted in general, is that there are pockets of pent-up demand for crypto things: crypto values, crypto networks, crypto services. And we're talking with the two founders, F. Afropolitan, about why there is so much pent-up demand across the entire continent of Africa for something new, something new from the way that people are organized and the way that infrastructure is provided to these people. As the arc of technological adoption sweeps the globe, the word leapfrogging comes about. But we are entering the world of crypto networks. So how do we talk about the conversation of leapfrogging with some of the products and services that crypto networks provide?

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  Things like money and finance, of course, but also things like governance and social coordination. What does the word leapfrogging mean in these contexts? And why Africa is primed to leapfrog the whole rest of the calcified world into what is perhaps the next story for Web3, but also perhaps the next story for Africa?

• 3:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this episode was incredibly exciting, and the project is incredibly ambitious. Of course, going into this, you have no idea whether they can pull it off or not, but you have to admire the ambition of this thing and the world-changing nature. If we are actually able to use crypto as a coordination mechanism to found and start new countries, what sort of world does that leave us with? So David, I am very excited to discuss this with you in the DB.

• 4:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, of course, obviously, redrawing the map of Africa is a very ambitious endeavor. Yet if we are correct on some theses about crypto and what crypto supplies to the world, and also, we are understanding the current state of Africa. And Eche and Chica, the two guests in this episode, guide us through understanding that. The idea is like, yes, it's super ambitious, but the point about the whole African continent is the African continent is asking for this. There's pent up demand. So yeah, ambitious, but the idea is that the tailwinds behind this idea very easily triggers it to form into a movement. At least that's the bull case. There's so much more to talk about in the debrief of the episode. I mean, man, we're talking about the idea of Web 3 coming to change the landscape of,

• 4:58David Hoffman?

  we usually would follow that with Web 2, but no, we're talking about the landscape of countries that were defined in the 1880s. Like, finally, we're getting some churn in the world. At least this is the ideas that are going to be laid out in front of us today.

• 5:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That would be a very big deal if it happens. Of course, you guys can access the debrief episode in the show notes. And if you are a bankless citizen, you have access to that on the Bankless Premium feed right now. Guys, we're getting right to the episode with Chica and Eche. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one crypto exchange, a tool to help you go bankless, Kraken. Go create an account.

• 5:32David Hoffman?

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• 6:15David Hoffman?

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• 6:59David Hoffman?

  Enter Mantle, an entire ecosystem dedicated to the adoption of decentralized token-governed technologies. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built differently from the other Layer 2s that you may be familiar with. Mantle asks the question, "How would you build a Layer 2 if you had the technology of 2023?" Mantle Network is a modular Layer 2, built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80% compared to other Layer 2s, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications.

• 7:41David Hoffman?

  The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries in DeFi, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded to help the growth of Mantle, like Game7 for Web3 gaming, or EduDAO for the world of DCE, and BuyBit for TBL and Liquidity and OnRamp. So if you want to build on the Mantle Network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects to help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle. Bankless Nation, I'm super excited to introduce you to Eche Emole and Chika

• 8:23David Hoffman?

  Uwazi, co-founders of Afropolitan, an ambitious project with the ultimate goal of redrawing the lines of the African continent.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  First, by starting and founding a digital nation and then moving into the world of global nation governance and ending with getting some actual physical land in the African continent. And if this sounds a little bit like the idea of the Balagian network state, then you're on the right track. Today on the show, Eche and Chika are going to guide us through why Africa is so primed to take a new shape, aided by the power of Web 3 and the principles that crypto networks have to offer the world. Chika, Eche, welcome to Bankless.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Thank you for having us.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to be here.

• 9:04David Hoffman?

  So, Eche, you and I ran into each other at Zuzalu, and within a few minutes into our conversation, I was immediately just goosebumps about this potential, this latent potential for both Africa, but also for Web 3. There's mutual interest here, and I'm really just struck kind of like by the audacity of the idea. You guys are trying to found a new country, which is, you know, an insane thing to say, but in crypto, I think we are all into the idea of very big, very crazy ideas. But what gives you, what gives you guys the confidence, the audacity to say that, hey, we're going to found a new country and change the shape

• 9:46David Hoffman?

  of Africa? What gives you the motivation to even do this? Eche, let's start with you.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Honestly, I think for me, there are a couple of buckets I think about this. It's first, we are descendants of people who did more with less. So it's like we owe it to ourselves to do more with more. And I think it's the technology exists today for us to do way more, right? So I don't think 40, 50 years ago, like when you take examples of other states that have been formed within 50 or 60 years. I mean, think about America, right? They were doing this without like the internet. It's like, hey, one new country, they had to write pamphlets, the Federalist Papers had to wait for it to get disseminated throughout the rest of the world. Um, but I think for us, it's, we actually also have no choice.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  It's existential for where we're from, right? It's like, one of the inspirations for us was when Balaji said, because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. And we were like, huh, like, it, it, that just seems as a quote that encapsulates how we feel as Africans. And what is it going to take for us to really transcend, right? And then the incident enables us today to really dream that big because it, it acts as an equalizer. If this was forty, fifty years ago, and we're talking about network state, we're still getting laughed out the room now, but we're not getting laughed out as much because of the tools that exist today. So I think that it's, it's just the right timing and the tools do exist for us to be able to build for that disinformation.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chica, add on to that, add some perspective here.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I feel, you know, for someone who, you know, I spent, I grew up in the U S, but then around two thousand and fifteen, I spent about eight years in Nigeria. And I, this is my second company, right? Um, and I remember how frustrated I was because I was running an H R software company. And obviously it was a need and because of literally government and governance, it was very difficult to get it off the ground and get it to the scalability that it needs. Um, and I'm sure we're going to talk about this later, but there's a lot of data sets that say that Africa is the next frontier. Um, it's still relatively unexplored. It is the youngest continent in the world, um, and probably in about fifty years,

• 11:59Speaker 03

  um, probably three or four out of ten people you meet are going to be African, right? Um, and so we have to get this right. And going back to what H A said, it's existential at this point, uh, right? Um, so for me, I just feel like as someone who actually lived in Lagos and saw all the potential, saw all the different tech founders trying to build something. And literally a lot of times they were stuck and they were unable to scale because of governance. Uh, I feel that we need something that's going to change. And I don't think it's going to be building a new app or building a new technology. I actually think we need to change the foundation of governance and how Africa is operating today.

• 12:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chica, what, what do people say when you tell them that you're, you're like, you're trying to found a country? Uh, what's their, what's their reaction, right? Cause like in, in, in, David was saying crypto, we're used to big audacious ideas, but

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, to the mainstream, to the public, that just sounds crazy. Like, what, what do people say when you say that?

• 12:55Speaker 03

  So I typically get two responses, right? Um, so when I say we are looking to find a digital country is normally like a, like they pause for a second and they're trying to reflect on like, did I just hear what you said? And then it always be a digital country? Okay. And then it's like, okay, walk me through that. What does that actually look like? And to be honest, I haven't had anyone write out like laugh, but I do feel that, you know, there are people that are like, that sounds a little far fetched, you know? And I, I feel that once we start going into the details and it's like, okay, this makes sense. Or I, I understand. Or sometimes, you know, they end the conversation like, I still don't get it, but I can see why this is needed. Right?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  So I, I do feel that there's a lot of education that is needed. And I think also when you start sharing historical references of how other countries were formed, it really helps people to really start to understand like, oh, this actually is possible because this is how other countries have formed in the past.

• 13:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So, so of course, uh, we, we've acknowledged then that this is a big audacious idea. And we're gonna, you know, walk into kind of the how. Um, but before we get to sort of the how, let, let's talk about the why. And let's talk about maybe the state of Africa today. At the Afro-Politan website, you guys have published a manifesto, which I think is, um, is fantastic. And I'm going to read a, a line out of it because, um, these two paragraphs really, really spoke to me. Scarcity, weakness, poverty. Wherever we look and wherever we are, Africans worldwide are subjects, not citizens. Access to opportunity is scarce. Security is not guaranteed. For the most part, life is just about surviving, not thriving.

• 14:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  The nation-state experiment has failed for black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems. What do you guys mean when you say the nation-state has failed for Africa? Ajay, what does that mean?

• 14:59Speaker 00

  So specifically, when I think about that, um, we drew inspiration from like the US founding fathers. So Anthony Hamilton in Federalist Ones basically says, is it possible for societies of men to form a new government through reflection and choice? Or are we forever destined to depend on our governance through accident and force? And so for us, we're like, no modern day nation-state in Africa was created through reflection and choice. It was always mostly through accident and force. And so when we say the nation-state experiment has failed, we're saying the way that that experiment was conducted in our African context was never actually foundationally sound. Right? And it is obviously failed because it was always going to be a feature for it to fail.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Right? When it's a bug, what it looks like is countries like Singapore or Vietnam, or the Vietnamese war ended in nineteen seventy-five. Nigeria as a nation got its independence in nineteen sixty. So that's a full fifteen years after. But look at Nigeria today, look at Vietnam today, right? Night and day. Singapore, the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, used to come to Africa to try and draw some inspiration for Singapore because it was still a backwater state. Look at Singapore today, look at a lot of the African nations today. Let's not even talk about the UAE, right? In nineteen ninety, it was a sand desert, literally. Look at where they are today, look at where Africa, a lot of African countries are today. So when we speak specifically to the nation-state experiment has failed, we're saying we've not seen the benefits of it.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  And in our theory, it's because we never actually got to reflect and choose. Right? And that has been the foundational underpinning for why it has failed.

• 16:37David Hoffman?

  I want to go a little bit into the world of history because I think a theme that we're going to bring out in this show is that there is the belief here in the Afro-Polit movement is that there is latent potential in Africa. And that has been building for more than decades, for like centuries. And so also, you know, bankless listeners are probably going to be needing some help, some education about the history of Africa in order to fully understand what we're talking about here. So maybe we can go back to the Berlin Conference in the eighteen eighties. Eche, what was the Berlin Conference? What did it do and what was the net result as it defined Africa?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the Berlin Conference was a conference organized by like five or six of the major European powers. So you're talking about countries like England, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, right? And they were basically meeting together to basically decide on how Africa was going to be divided and shared, right? So all of them were basically having infighting between each other. So I think the German Chancellor basically called this conference and says, okay, this is how we're going to um divide Africa among ourselves, right? And this was in eighteen eighty-four, I believe, and it was called the Scramble for Africa. And so by by nineteen oh four, at least ninety percent of most of the African land had actually been divided

• 17:57Speaker 00

  and and then colonized by um a lot of these um uh European powers. And that set the foundation again for our quote unquote nation-state experiment, right? Because you can imagine the Berlin Conference, they're sitting in Berlin drawing lines on a map that are actually affecting real people on the ground. So you have tribes that were, you know, together who got divided through those maps. You had um ethnicities and religions that were not necessarily supposed to be together, who just got, you know, thrown together. Take Nigeria, for example, like you got hominized, like seven hundred and thirty-four ethnicities just put into one map and then you're like, hey, get get like you guys are forced to work together, right?

• 18:38Speaker 00

  So you're you see that um the consequences of that conference playing out over time and that has compounded, we believe, for the African um story, right? So again, the Berlin Conference, a a group of European powers came together. How are we going to share this African cake of a continent? And we divided it into pieces, everyone got a piece. But the way those pieces were divided were not really in the best interests of the people on the ground and we have suffered the consequences of that even till today.

• 19:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and just to really drive this point home, uh who were the African representatives at this conference?

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Not not.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  None, none, there were no African representatives at this conference. And I think that has really been what has played out for Africa in general. Like, the world always has a plan for Africa, and Africa really has a plan for the world, right? And I think that that's what we're looking to change even with the Afro-Polit and Network State.

• 19:35David Hoffman?

  And the Berlin Conference are the lines that we see on the map drawn today. Yes, and so till that has persisted eighteen eighty to now, so one hundred and forty years. That has defined legally, the legal jurisdictions of Africans, but has been in complete disregard for actual cultural boundaries and differences. And so, understanding this context moving forward, I think is going to be key in this episode. But there's also another element that, Chica, I want to get your help on. This word diaspora, I think, is very foundational to this story. Can you define this word diaspora, because we're going to need it moving forward?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Yes, and so I think it's important to lay out two things. So, number one, many countries have a diaspora, right? And so, for example, China, for example, they have a group of people who have left China, and they are in the US, they are in Europe, they're in Latin America. So, many different countries or ethnicities actually have a diaspora. So, I think that's important to put that there as a foundation. So, when we talk about Afro-Polit, what we're actually, a huge part of our community is the African diaspora. And to specifically define that, these are people who are Black American, right? So, they are in the US, they can be Afro-Latina or Latino, right?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  And so, they may be in parts of Latin America. Actually, one of the biggest African communities outside of Africa is in Brazil, right? And in fact, you will find a lot of Europa culture, which is actually belongs to Nigeria. So, there's a huge African diaspora in Latin America. We are also in Europe, we are in Asia, you know, we're in all parts of the world. So, it's essentially Africans in different parts of the world that are outside of Africa that are considered diaspora. And it's actually quite, there's different types. I think also a lot of people think we're all Black, and we're not. Um, if you look at northern Africa, um, they, you know, they have different ethnicities. Um, some of them might be Arab.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Um, and then even to be honest, if you look at, at, at South Africa as well, there are people who are, um, from Dutch origin, um, who have now become South African and some of them have left and they consider themselves part of the African diaspora. So not only are we multifaceted as far as where we spread across the world, but also, um, ethnicity wise, we are quite diverse.

• 22:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're part of the African diaspora, even though they're not living within the, the nation state boundaries of, uh, Africa and all of the countries represented in Africa because they subscribe to the African nation, let's say. One of the foundational, I, I think, uh, ideas, um, for me in kind of understanding this concept of a digital nation was, uh, when Balaji came onto, uh, the Bankless Show. This is, um, I think his second episode on Bankless. We'll include a link in the show notes, guys, so, so you can get up to speed on his concept of a digital nation, because I think it's very much influenced the Afro-Politan movement. But, um, the, the, the term nation state has two separate words inside of it.

• 22:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, the first is nation and the second is state. And nation is, uh, um, separate than the idea of state. So a nation is a shared culture, a shared set of values. It's almost akin to a kind of a tribe, all right? And so, um, that is the actual, like, cultural identity of a given, uh, people group, right? And that is separate from the, the concept and the term state. So state is, is almost like the protocol. That is the set of laws and regulations. So, um, the US Constitution, that, that is part of the, the nation state protocol of the United States, but it's different than the concept of, of nation. And what, part, part of what you're saying, I think, is, you know, uh, the, the history

• 23:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  of Africa is really this division in terms of arbitrary borders and it's the state-type protocol without kind of the nation. And so this is, um, I think an important concept for people to really understand is when we open up the idea of entering into a new nation apparatus, people don't have to live in the same geography. People don't have to live within the same state boundaries. We can redefine the state boundaries to be something else. And that's what you're doing here with the Afro-Politain Movement. How many people are in the African diaspora?

• 24:09Speaker 00

  So there are 150 million people worldwide. If it was a country, it would be the 10th largest country in the world.

• 24:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we're talking about an absolutely, like, a very large population set and growing very fast?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Extremely large. And I think something also interesting is that, number one, it's a group that even in Africa, they have been trying to figure out. And they've been asking themselves, how do we tap into this market? Because the interesting thing about the African diaspora is many of them come home, right? Whether it's through the December, you know, we call this the homecoming. Ghana has officially labeled it as the Year of Return, and we're going to talk about this later. And what's interesting about the Year of Return is that not only has, for example, Ghana opened it up to Ghanaians in the diaspora, but literally the president also has opened it up to either Black Americans and said, yes, you know, for, you know, obvious reasons, you have left, but we're opening this home back to you.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  And you can come here, and you have a place, and you have, you know, a structure. And so I think the African diaspora is quite, it's quite big. But also, the African Union has been trying to figure out how can they connect into this group. And I think also because of the cultural elements that are happening now through Afrobeat, through fashion, through film. And you can see this on Netflix, you can see this on, you know, different concerts. I think there's a lot of interest in this specific group as well.

• 25:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we talk a little bit about the the solution you're proposing here? And I think in order to to get to explaining Afro-Politan, we have to explain the concept of a network state. And Etchi, where were you when you first kind of heard about this concept? And what impact did it have? And maybe, could you help define it for listeners?

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, definitely. So I remember Bilaji releases his first article called "How to Start a New Country" in April 2021. And I was in Dakar, Senegal. I remember like I'm up at 5:00 AM reading this and my mind is blown. I think, like I said, the particular quote that really hooked me was what he said, "Because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old." I basically saw what Bilaji was talking about because prior to that, we had done the Year of Return in 2019, where about a million plus people from the diaspora came to Ghana. And then in 2020, because of COVID, we pivoted into media but through a social audio app called Clubhouse. So on Clubhouse, Afro-Politan and I and Chico, we built a community, online community on there of about 200,000 people collectively.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  So in 2021, when Bilaji says, hey, he's proposing this idea of a network state, he defines it as a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that's able to crowdfund territory around the world and eventually gain diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. It's a mouthful, but how we basically broke it down was to say to ourselves, okay, when we were running our Clubhouse communities, we showed a capacity for collective action. We funded things like the Ethiopian refugee crisis during the Ethiopian civil war. We funded the police brutality protests in Nigeria. And we organized around Clubhouse. So we were able to even send Bitcoin to the protesters in Nigeria. And we organized that through a highly aligned online community.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  And so when he then said, okay, you're able to crowdfund territory on the world, we basically likened that to us bringing a million plus people from the diaspora to Ghana, right? And they were actually physically on land. And then he says, Oh, um, the next part is like gaining diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. We're not there yet, obviously, that's what we're working on too. But to me, it was like, these are building blocks, right? Like, they're, they're proof of concepts, right? If you start to break it into each elemental, um, um, identity, you're like, it's not that far-fetched. Like, you've already shown a capacity for collective action. You've already shown a possibility to have a highly aligned online community, right? You, you, you, you need to crowdfund territory around the world, right? And you can start off as something as simple as like potential WeWorks, right? In different places in the world.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  And then you build up those, uh, uh, Chinatown, um, type models as you scale. And then the pre-existing, um, state recognition is the one that you're really optimizing for, because then you ensure your sovereignty at scale. So that, that was our definition from the network state.

• 28:31David Hoffman?

  There are a few elements that I want to pull out of Abology's network state idea that I think can carry us through into the next bit of the conversation. But Abology's, like, network state idea came from, like, potentially aligning like-minded and, like, like-cultured people. And some of the examples would be like, uh, let's make a network state that has the freedom of, of research in certain, like, a network state without the FDA. And that would allow for certain people to do certain things. And, but he kind of gave, or like, people talked about the network states in very narrow senses. But we, we were just going through, like, some of the, what we're calling the latent potential of Africa as a continent. And the, the other theme that I think has, that's been, um, used about, about Africa

• 29:14David Hoffman?

  and its relationship with technology is this word called, like, leapfrogging. Right? Like, there was no landlines ever established in Africa. It just went straight until, uh, sell, sell your devices, right? And so I think perhaps what we're talking about here and, and what the African politics movement is trying to do is, we're trying to leapfrog governance, yo. Like, we're trying to skip a whole step.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 29:35David Hoffman?

  And the idea is like, why can we do this? Whereas like, yo, if we make a network state that's about like, uh, you know, freedom to innovate across like FDA regulations, that's one thing. But what about the freedom to be a nation that the African continent has never had before?

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:52David Hoffman?

  And so I, I think that this is kind of the energy that, that we're tapping into. And so maybe you guys can talk about just like, connect the need of Africa to have a voice and the solutions that a network state at, at least proposes as a potential path forward. Chica, you want to take us home on this one?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so. I feel like number one, you know, there's many problems. Like, we could be here all day and talk about that. I will talk about something that I think is probably the most relatable. Um, and it's something that we, not that we necessarily shared, but we're in the same space with Zzala, right? Um, so Africans having the, just as much mobility as an American, right? And I feel that, um, today in Africa, there are many African citizens who have difficulties, not only being able to travel in Europe, in America, right? Cause the visa is quite long, um, and to be honest, quite demeaning of all the different documents

• 30:52Speaker 03

  they require as an African to travel to many of these countries, but even within Africa, right? Um, so for example, if, uh, Nigerian wants to travel to Zanzibar, as an American, I can show up to Zanzibar right now and I get in, right? All I gotta do is a visa on arrival. And Nigerian actually has to wait a month to three months, right? What? Yeah. Yeah, we, we actually were supposed to go to, oh, we went to Zanzibar. Yeah, same thing with South Africa. So we were supposed to travel to Zanzibar and basically because of, uh, the Nigerian passport, we basically, half of our time that was supposed to be in Zanzibar was spent still waiting in Kenya to get our visa back, right?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  Um, and so there's a lot of just like challenges, even with mobility. And I think kind of the bigger issue here is that Africa needs to trade within each other, right? In order for us to get to our full potential, we have to be able to do things among each other. So I feel that there's a voice that needs to be had, uh, when it comes to just simple mobility. Like, I just wanna leave Nigeria and fly into London, like, as simple as that is. And most people can just wake up and do that. Most, a lot of Africans cannot, right? Um, and so we're hoping that as Afro-Politans, we're already having many conversations with different government entities around this, right? What does a visa look like for Afro-Politans, right? And just giving that simple ability to have. Move around, right?

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Um, so I think there's many other things we could talk about, but that's just the one that comes top of mind, especially because me and Eche travel so much. And it's something that's constantly top of mind for us.

• 32:29David Hoffman?

  The, the, um, bargaining power that a, uh, cohered Africa, uh, could get from this, I think, is, is what we're really going after. And really this falls into the category of what I see the, this movement going towards is trying to give Africans a voice. For the first time, they didn't have it in 1880 when the lines were drawn, uh, in, in Europe about Africa. And, and perhaps the African voice has been like robbed of being actually able to speak because the, the tribal boundaries and the tribal groups have been divided. And it's been, there's been a, a friction, a, a lack of resonance between the legal topology and the cultural tribes.

• 33:11David Hoffman?

  And so how, how do you see this whole like pursuit of a network state movement? And the relationship of Africans having a voice? Actually, I do want to take this one.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, and I think you, you really nailed it on the head, David. So again, it's about organizing around shared values and purpose, right? So, um, a lot of tribes in fight among each other saying, hey, you're not for my tribe, so I can't vote for you, right? But no African state can point to the benefits that anyone has gotten from voting from somebody who's from their tribe, right? Like, it's not like, oh, hey, we're from the same place. I vote for you now we have access to facilities or healthcare or whatever. It's not working. So now it's like, how do we go back to now organizing around shared values and purpose? And this cuts across borders, right? So I think when we read Balaji's Network State, the first critical part was that highly aligned online community.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Like, hey, guys, we're, we're not aligning just based on race or tribe or sex or gender. We're aligning based on our shared values of where we see ourselves in the world. And I think, again, the internet enables us to do that at scale. So imagine if you were on, Facebook was a country with its own currency, right? But this time, instead of an online passive network, it's a digital republic, right? And the citizens are organized around those shared values and purpose. That's, that's the way I see it.

• 34:27David Hoffman?

  What, what do you think some of those shared values are, Eche? What, what do you got to zero in on?

• 34:31Speaker 00

  One of the first ones was, and like I gave the context of because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. Remember in our manifesto, you spoke about the scarcity, right? One of our biggest ideologies is an ideology of abundance, right? And I'll tell a quick story around why the ideology is one that we chose. I I grew up among the first um young African immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area to break into tech. So my friends or folks who worked at Facebook or Google or Netflix or whatever, right? And they were the first ones in their families to earn six-figure salaries. And the change in their um family life or even in the community was very noticeable. So over time, we would maybe go out for dinners or for lunch.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  And folks would be rushing to put their cart down to pay for everyone's meal, right? And that's because they now lived in an environment of abundance. I in in terms of like my my community, you would see people say, hey, I'm a plant dad, I'm a plant mom. But those same people in Africa would not have time to be plant dads or moms because they were in a state of survival, right? And so like one of my friends, Stanley, like I'd go to his house. He would wake up in the morning and pick up a plant or a water bucket and water sixty-three plants in a patient manner.

• 35:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm laughing because this sounds like David right now. Are you a plant dad? I've not heard that term. Would you would you uh identify? Oh, my God.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  This is like, what is it, the Zee Plant? Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  So my friend Stanley, though, that saved man, put him in back in Nigeria or put him back in Africa. He would not have time or even the thought process to care about the welfare of a plant. And so for us, it was abundance allows us to aim for absolute human flourishing. Like, what does that actually look like for us as Africans? And it seems like for a lot of us, we have to flee Africa to tap into that. And I think for us, that's the that's the narrative that we have to we want to change through Afro-Palestine. And one of those core values is is a is a is a ideology of abundance. Like, how do we? Have an abundance mindset. How do we play long-term games with long-term people? Right. And I think folks like Naval, I've also helped like underline our philosophy with the movement as well. So, yes.

• 36:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what's really interesting about this idea of abundance that you're talking about, Eche, is it reminds me of a kind of the memes of the United States of America, right? This land of opportunity. And you might agree or disagree on whether America has kind of lost that. And the reality is not quite what the meme appears to be. But that is the underlying philosophy. That is why America has been a place for immigrants over the decades and over the centuries. It's because it has provided through its nation and through its state, through its culture and through its set of opportunities that the protocol provides, like the constitution. It has provided an economy, a land of opportunity.

• 37:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it strikes me that if digital nations want to attract a population, they're going to have to embrace that idea of abundance. And they're almost going to need to maybe create opportunities, create economies. I'm wondering how you think about that. And this gets into what the shape of Afropolitan actually is. Because I am hook, line and sinker. Like, I love the ideas that Balaji presents in the idea of a kind of a network state, right? And, you know, I've read the network state. We've had Balaji on. He's kind of explained it. I am just, I love it. It's just, I'm there.

• 38:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  The one question that I have in my mind is, okay, Balaji is one of these people who kind of lays out the vision, right? And then kind of like disappears and he's like, now everyone go do it. And so now we're on this execution point and it almost seems like a, you know, step one, start an online community. Dot, dot, dot. Found a country at the other. And I'm like, how do we get from online community to country? It's all, it's these dot, dot, dots, these ellipses in the middle that I haven't quite seen executed. I feel like Afropolitan, you guys are actually trying to fill in those dots. You're trying to take this staged approach to what it actually means to start with an online

• 38:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  community and evolve to an actual, let's talk about the end destination. Remember that ambition that we talked about? The end destination is some sort of UN-recognized, world-recognized, legitimate territory with some land somewhere. That's the end state. But how do you get there? What are the stages that you guys have laid out for the Afropolitan movement here?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I can talk about stage one, because that's the stage we are in that we've completed. And it's an ongoing stage, and Etche can talk about stage two. So when we were saying, okay, we need to start online community, as Etche mentioned before, me and Etche are quite successful in starting many online communities, right? And the most recent one before this one was actually our Clubhouse community. And we were able to show that, okay, not only do we get on Clubhouse and talk about, you know, what's happening on the day, we actually can move towards collective action. But when we relaunched Afropolitan with the manifesto, what we realized is that, wait,

• 40:02Speaker 03

  actually, we need to make sure that the people who join us are actually aligned to this vision. And yes, we have this huge community with us, but everybody can come. It's first phase, right? And it was very important that we said we built a network, right? And this network is very close knit, right? And so when we were looking at how we were going to actually apply this in the Web3 space, what we actually saw was NFTs, right? And, you know, you see a lot of these NFTs, they're great, tight-knit communities, and there's a lot of them that are doing different things for the collective actions. And we felt that for onboarding a group of people who may or may not have interacted with Web3 before, this was probably the easiest way to do it. And

• 40:47Speaker 03

  so we decided on 500, right? 500 people who would represent our founding citizens.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  And what's interesting about it was it was a very collective group of how we even onboarded these 500 people. So we first said, okay, we're going to do NFTs. And we wanted to make sure that the art told a story and it was quite connected to the African abundance experience. And so the first step was we reached out to an Afro-Policy member, her name is Joy. And she actually created a whole story for us, right? And this story was just these gods and goddesses. And if we were to create this new world, what would it look like, right? And she created that storyline for us. And that was kind of the underpinning of the art. And so once we had the story, we're like, okay, who's going to create this art for us?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  And honestly, how we found the artist, Agosa, I love him, the dad, he's 21, very young, just fresh. We actually saw him on Twitter. So I was just on Twitter and someone retweeted his art on my timeline and I was like, my God, this is it. Like, it, it just like, it was this very like ethereal, like goddess, like, it was just, it was just beautiful. And so I was like, this guy gets it. So we spoke to him and we sold him on the vision and he was like, I love this, I, I want to be part of this. And so we spent a few months just pulling out the different art pieces. And I think for us, what was very important was that the art represented the African diaspora, right? And so if you actually look at the different NFT pieces,

• 42:20Speaker 03

  it is from like white all the way to very dark, right? And even those with the teglo and also just different, you know, characteristics of the African diaspora and also the clothes as well. So we made sure that North Africa and Southern Africa and West and East, all of those pieces were represented in the art. And then we basically had an application process, which is quite counterintuitive to most NFT projects. Typically, there's a lot of FOMO and it's like, oh, we're selling, it's this amount. And it's like this quick bid to buy. And we said, no, we need to make sure everyone's aligned. And so we had an application process. We had thousands of people apply. And as a community, because we actually have community members involved, we actually, one by one, looked at each application.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  And those who were accepted were able to submit. So today, we have 500 people who are Afro-Politans citizens. You can see it on OpenSea. It is one of the few NFC collections where, basically, everyone is holding, because they really believe in our vision. And I think for us now, we've been doing a lot of community networking. There's a lot of specific events and programming that we do for the Afro-Politan community. But that's really Phase 1, was just getting pure alignment. And I think the NFCs, they serve as our passport. So people have a sense of pride of holding those NFCs, and it's a way for them to show that they're actually citizens of the nation that we're building.

• 43:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I want to hang on this subject really quick, just to... I think there's like an optimistic way of talking about this, and then there's the cynical way of talking about this. So Phase 1 of more, of which we're going to go into, so Phase 1 implies a Phase 2, and we'll get to Phase 2 in a second. To me, maybe this is like the establishing the digital community phase. But like, the cynical take is like, okay, we're going to start a network state. We're going... There's so much latent demand and purpose for doing this in Africa. And now we're talking about an NFT PFP project. Right? So like, that's the cynical take, right? And then the ambitious, the take that I would like to lean into is like, well, NFT PFPs, these are the icons of your digital representation.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:28David Hoffman?

  These are the badges of your digital cultural self. This is the identification of an in-group and an out-group, right? Like, this is our tribe, this is our community. We've talked about this in the context of other PFPs. But I think Afro-Politan is taking this and actually putting rubber down onto pavement with this, which is like, hey, all of the Azuki tribe that is currently having some drama on Twitter.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like, the CryptoPunk, like, blurry lines of a tribe. These are all tribes, but you guys are taking this into the actual, hey, we are going to establish our digital online nation, and we're using these PFPs. But overall, like, how does this PFP strategy fit into Phase 1? And like, again, please define Phase 1 a little bit more for us. Like, the establishment of the online footprint of the Afro-Politans? Overall, like, color in the rest of the picture here.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I I think it it was very important because you could start a digital nation, you don't need to utilize blockchain for that. Right, but why put PFPs or start up for NFCs in the first place? Remember from our African context, we have scarcity, we have corruption, we have a low trust society. And I think those principles that blockchain enable us to have, whether it's accountability or transparency or immutability, was what we wanted to bring to the community, even from a governance perspective. So we're like, hey, your identity will be on blockchain, it can be tracked, it's transparent. Your community treasury will be on blockchain, you can see where the wallets go, where the money is going to. Again, using those building blocks to show people like, hey, this is going to be different from our status quo.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Because you you want a governance structure that's going to be held accountable. So I'll tell you a quick story. My family sold some land to like the Mormon church in Nigeria. And they wanted to build roads in the town. And then the government is like, hey, no, just give us the money, we'll do it. And mind you, the government doesn't ever do anything, so they're going to steal the money. And so the church is like, no, we should do it because we know we're going to actually do it. And then they're like, um, no, just build the the road up to your church and then that's it. So when you go to the town, all you see in the Mormon church is the tarred road, really paved, that starts at the beginning of the church and ends right outside of the church, right? And then the rest of the road that's owned by the government is just in in tatters, right?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  And the example that I give with blockchain there is imagine a community has its treasury in on the blockchain. And you make it a milestone thing where, hey, if we say the government gives this contract to this contractor, we can ensure it gets done because before the funds get disposed fully, they have to show proof of work or potentially proof of stick. These are some of the principles we're looking to bring to the governance side of things. And that was why it was very important that we said to our community, like, hey, we're gonna go use blockchain. And because on the blockchain, we believe that we can increase transparency, accountability, and also obviously the immutable aspects of it to help engineer that trust. Where it's like, don't just take me and Chica's word for anything. Verify, right?

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Like, we want to move, we want to really ensure that that trust is built from a nation building perspective. And so I can understand the skepticism when people are like, oh, now we're talking about PFPs. It's not to say that your PFP. Eventually has to be your actual passport for entry. The reason we chose the art passports was when we decided to go on this project, David, you have to understand where we are starting from. Most Africans are disconnected from our history, right? And so for us, it was like, we can't know where we're going until we have a firm understanding of where we're coming from. And most great civilizations in the world have built off mythology, have built off art. When you think about Europe and Renaissance. So we were basically just recreating that within our story, but utilizing blockchain and NFTs to tell that story.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  And that was my phase one had to be us attracting the best of the best. Africa and our diaspora and even our allies had to offer across board through multiple sectors.

• 48:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I'm, I'm definitely willing to lean into the optimistic element of this. Like one thing I'll say is I think, you know, people, the, the NFT brand name is tarnished from, um, you know, 2020 to kind of shenanigans. Um, but, but let's look at this from a base principles perspective. All right. So this is a piece of on-chain property.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That no nation state, no colonialists, no group of the United Nations can actually take away.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  From individuals. Okay. That's number one. Number two, it's borderless.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyone can access it. Uh, there, there's no permission required. All you need is an internet connection. Uh, number three, this can be a form of identity. So the idea of, uh, an NFT being some sort of passport in the future, of course that's necessary if you want to achieve governance, if you want to vote, that sort of thing.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then the last point, which I think you were getting to, uh, Etchi, is NFTs can also serve as a unit of cultural expression. And think of like the, the memes that forming a nation requires, right? You think of Betsy Ross and the Star Spangled Banner, you know, her sewing these stars and kind of a flag. And someone could dismiss that and say, well, it's just a piece of cloth.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, but it, it, it, um, created such symbolism in the narrative of an early nation of the United States that it. That kind of stuck and people rallied around it. So of course, an early nation state would would need some sort of cultural expression and cultural units. And that's what an NFT can provide. So that is maybe the the bull case for all of this.

• 50:05David Hoffman?

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• 50:49David Hoffman?

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• 51:32David Hoffman?

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• 52:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does that resonate at all? Definitely, definitely.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it does resonate.

• 52:52David Hoffman?

  The part that I heard that I really want to draw out is the commitment to blockchain values. And I think maybe the PFP has, in the grand arc of apropos, an overall a minor role in the whole thing. Except what it really does is it plants a flag in saying, hey, we are committing to the values embodied by the blockchain. As some podcast co-host says, if you adopt crypto protocols, you adopt crypto values.

• 53:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I say that.

• 53:18David Hoffman?

  Ryan said that. And so that's the part that I really heard out of Echea. It's like, yeah, call it just, you know, be overly cynical and call it a PFP. But it does the job of committing to certain values that are embodied in Web 3 and commits that as like, hey, this is a part of our digital nation DNA.

• 53:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you've got that as the base. You've got the NFTs. That's part of phase one here. So now let's fill in some of the rest of the dots. So now you have an on-chain community with some sort of identity assigned to it, some sort of cultural expression, right? What does phase two look like? And then also fill in phase three and phase four. How do we get from NFTs all the way to a country?

• 54:07Speaker 00

  So, so the idea for phase two, what we're calling it is government as a service. But the way we're thinking it through that is eventually it's this platform that allows us to unlock internal economy among this digital community, right? So the African DAS Bar today sends home seventy billion dollars worth of remittances back home. How can we help facilitate that even within this platform? You can think things like risk capital, things like self-serving ID. Again, like why I'm so drawn on this, but it's going to network state phase two aspect of it is if you're able to utilize crypto, the way I see crypto from an African perspective, it's, it's a backdoor to financial freedom for a lot of Africans, right?

• 54:48Speaker 00

  The traditional financial ecosystem does not work for us, basically alienates us at scale. But through crypto or crypto principles, we're able to reimagine a financial ecosystem that actually allows us to become insiders for the first time. So we are systematically locked out, whether it's like from freedom of mobility, whether it's freedom to transact. Crypto brings us into the conversation. Like you said, crypto gives us that voice. So with phase two, where we envision it is, hey, there's a, there's a potential super app. You're able to do things like get loans, DeFi loans, or you're able to get, um, send money back home. You're able to get your self-serving ID within that ecosystem as well. Similar to like the E Estonia play that Estonia was able to develop, we're looking to build that within phase two as well.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  And then going into phase three, what we're calling that is the minimum viable state, which is how do we build up the credibility needed to be viewed as a country one day? Like Chika said, like when you tell the average person like, hey, we want to go start a new country, there's always that look of, I thought you were a serious person. Now I gotta, I don't know where I can put you in. But the thing is, how do you build up that credibility? And so for us, last September, we got recognized by the New York Stock Exchange as the first ever internet country for the African DAS Bar. So we basically went up there, we got to ring the bell, we brought our community together. That level of access, the New York Stock Exchange is a two hundred year old institution. So think about. Them recognizing your your movement tomorrow, it could be the United Nations. So it's a perception play. Other than that.

• 56:18David Hoffman?

  You're collecting stamps of approval. You're collecting legitimacy badges.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Legitimacy as you grow, right? And also, we provide visa and arrival services for a lot of Afro-Palestinian citizens today to four African countries. So Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. Again, the way I like to position phase three, it's almost like an Amazon, Amazon Prime type of thing, where Amazon says to me like, hey, we're going to charge you $20 extra for your Amazon Prime membership. I'm like, yo, go ahead, because you've shown me so much value that I could trust you where you're always improving. And I think for us, we're positioning ourselves for that level of legitimacy, where people should, our citizens should come to trust us that we're operating in their best interest. Where if we then say to the world like, hey, we have delivered this much value to you in phase three, when we're then going for recognition from pre-existing states,

• 57:07Speaker 00

  you don't have critical mass and leverage to make that argument. So then phase four for us is where the land piece comes in. But we want to innovate on that piece because today, when you think about a nation state, you're thinking about a four-cornered border. We want our border to stretch across the entire world. What would that look like? We want to combine two concepts together. One is an embassy, and the other one is a Chinatown. So take, for example, maybe the US Embassy in Ghana, for example, is a sovereign territory in a host government. In Chinatowns, they have their own post office, their own malls, their own banking, their whole, like, just little commerce within the town. You want to combine an embassy plus a Chinatown for a sovereign Afro town, right? And so then, let's zoom out just to summarize, right? You're an Afro-Palestinian citizen.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  You navigate the world with your Afro-Palestinian passport. You're able to make payments for goods and services using the Afro-Palestinian cryptocurrency within the Afro-Palestinian platform. You're also able to get physical entry into Afro towns, sovereign Afro towns located across the world. And that is, in a nutshell, the phases that we're going to. Each phase obviously has nuances involved. So in something like phase three, you could start off with a free trade zone before you actually get to the Afro town. But you're you're putting down building blocks before you get to the overall final version of a fully recognized sovereign country.

• 58:27David Hoffman?

  So let me see if I can summarize this and see if I got this correctly. So Phase 1, we talked about that. We'll move straight into Phase 2. Phase 2, you're calling it government as a service. Yes. My interpretation is like grow utility to Africans. Be useful to Africans. And maybe you're saying like, hey, Web 3 and crypto does a lot of useful things for Africans, and we are simply going to figure out how to be like a service provider, consultant, assistant to connecting the dots between the value that Web 3 can provide to the Africans that need Web 3. And then the idea is like, all these Africans are like, oh, this was really useful. This Afro-Politan thing is kind of cool.

• 59:11David Hoffman?

  I'm going to stick around and grow, and I'll ascribe myself to the part of the Afro-Politan digital nation. And so you get legitimacy from Africans, the people, right? And so that's Phase 2. Phase 3 is, okay, now that we have our digital footprint, our online footprint from Phase 1, we have a growing population of supporters and people legitimizing our value that we're providing them from Phase 2, we go to Phase 3, which is Minimum Viable State. And that is acquire recognition and legitimacy from authorities. Just get external powers that be to give like the thumbs up to, oh, Afro-Politan, that is a real thing that we are going to contend with. They have power, they have legitimacy.

• 59:56David Hoffman?

  We are going to acknowledge their existence and their influence, and they will have, here is their seat at the table. Afro-Politan, please sit right here, next shoulder, shoulder with the rest of us. And so that's Phase 3. And then Phase 4 is like acquire land. Yes. Anywhere, anywhere where you can get it, anywhere where it's appropriate, anywhere where it's relevant, put an embassy there, create a Chinatown version of Afro-Politan. And then all of a sudden, we don't have, it's not about producing one central hub of Afro-Politan. It's about many, many, many satellites, wherever African culture emerges, Afro-Politan wants to be there. These are the phases? Yes, these are the phases.

• 1:00:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think for me, two questions kind of arise that might be in listeners' mind right now is, one is, do I have to forsake my citizenship of my nation-state in order to join Afro-Politain? Or can I be a dual citizen? And maybe the second question kind of dovetails with the first, which is, is Afro-Politain trying to replace the services of a nation-state? I mean, are you guys going to take like, let's say, healthcare or court system, you know, like rule of law? Obviously, crypto gives you some of that, gives you the property rights layer, but is this a competitor to the nation-state? Or is it more like a supplemental type of status?

• 1:01:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So yeah, you know, how do you think about that?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  So to the first question, like, let's say we were all citizens of Switzerland on this call, and I said, "Hey, David, hey, Ryan, we want to start a new country." Your first thought is, "Why? What's wrong with this one?" Right? It's like, you already have stuff that works. For most Africans, when you propose this idea, they're like, "No, we don't even know what good governance or even like being in a functional nation-state actually even looks like." So for us, what we're saying is, nation-states need competition. In every other business, right? Companies have competition. Nation-states don't have competition. And so what then happens is, you can be a citizen of Nigeria, your government has no incentive really to really come through, because where are you gonna go? Right? You can't, you just go to the US easily. They're not gonna give you visas.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  You can't just immigrate out. Like, it's really one of the top 1% that get those opportunities to even--

• 1:02:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're stuck. You're essentially geo-locked because of the place you were born.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  You're born. And so for us, it's like, how do we introduce a hedge? Where you're like, one of the reasons you migrate out is for better opportunity or optionality, right? What if that opportunity and those optionalities can come to you via the internet? Right? And then you can then point to your government and say, "Hey, how come Afro-Politain citizens get this? Why don't we get that?" Right? And you're seeing those benefits go to people who actually look like you versus us being there and saying, "Hey, Americans get these benefits, or the French get these benefits, and we don't? What's going on?" So if you're able to introduce some sort of competition, where folks on the ground can say, "Hey-- I'm an Afro-Politain citizen and I get access to this, this, this and this. Why are my governments not doing the same? Now, in terms of work, whether we're looking to be supplemental versus competitive,

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  I think there's a balancing act, right? You don't want to really be too antagonistic from get-go. What you are saying, though, is can we act as a supplementary arm to what your government is unable to do for you today? And really execute it in a high, on a high level, right? So, for example, there are partnerships that we could have with the governments of Ghana, where they're like looking to attract like maybe tourism or FDI, which is how we started off with the Year of Return. That is a win-win relationship. But the idea for us is you shouldn't have to forego your opportunity and optionality in your life just because of where you happen to be born into. Like, that is just even a ridiculous, like, starting point. And so for us, it's the Afro-Politain networks that can serve as that hedge, where it's like, hey, if it's a dual passport, yes,

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  but if you get to choose which passport is working for you in this particular situation. So sometimes you could use your AMEX, sometimes you could use your visa, right? Like, it's like, what points are you actually going to get from producing this particular passport at this entry point? So maybe there are spaces in which being a Nigerian, where the Nigerian passport gets you better access, or maybe there are more spaces where having an Afro-Politain membership, an Afro-Politain passport gets you more access. The idea is get optionality and opportunities into the ecosystem, because that doesn't really exist at scale within the nation-state framework.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I just want to add, because I am a dual citizen, right? So I have American citizenship, I also have Nigerian citizenship. And to be honest, I love having both. And I like having the optionality of both. There are things about the US that I have been able to benefit off of. I think probably number one is education, right? But then in the later part of my, you know, in my, or my recent part of my adult years, I really have been able to take the opportunity of having Nigerian citizenship. And it's as simple as because Nigeria is part of ECOWAS, I'm able to travel across, you know, all of West Africa with my one Nigerian passport. So I see Afro-Politain passport as the same thing, right? Where we don't want people to feel like, oh, I have to...

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Give up my, you know, my passport. But again, there's additional benefits that you can get from the African passport. Something as simple as payments, right? Because today, payments across different African countries is quite brutal. It's not fun. It's not friendly. And I feel that if we are able to solve for that and people are able to leverage that, then they can say, oh, yeah, like, when I'm traveling across Africa, I can easily do payments. But also, when I'm back in the US, I can do a payment into some African countries. So I think it's being able to utilize both, right?

• 1:05:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Chica, let me just do a big plus one on that. I'm a, I have a dual citizenship as well. I'm a duly. So, and Canada and the United States, and it's fantastic. It's great. It's just like a fantastic fringe benefit. And I would love to join other digital nations. I think everyone should be a dual citizen. I want to ask you guys another question here, because David was talking earlier about earning that seat at the table, earning legitimacy. And for, I think, a lot of early nation states, that has actually required violence. That has actually required revolution. That has actually required war. I know Afro-Politain, of course, is very much, this is an opt-in movement. You're not, you're certainly not calling for any of those things.

• 1:06:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I guess my question is broader, is do you think that if nation states are threatened by what network states are essentially doing, you think they're going to let you in to the, to the club here? Yeah, you guys don't even have a tank. Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  I think, I think the strategy is you want them to take you as a joke, right? Like, if I went to the nation and said, hey, we're trying to do a digital nation, a digital country, they'd laugh you out the room. And the reason you want them to do that is the same reason you wanted them to laugh at Bitcoin, right? It was a ha, ha, ha. You're buying Bitcoin with pizza. Ha, ha, ha. It's a joke. It's a gimmick. Thirteen, fourteen years later, no one's joking, no one's laughing, right?

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  One of the efforts their laughter in in the years that they're laughing to really build in a serious way. Right? Because even I like you're saying like, aren't you giving your strategy away? I'm telling you like you go try to talk to the African officials today and say, hey, these guys are trying to start a virtual country, a digital country and blah, blah, blah, blah. They're just laughing you out the door, right? And the reason is, yes, take us as a joke. Like, we actually want you to laugh. We want you to keep on laughing because within the laughing period, we are building seriously so that by the time we reveal um our leverage and our critical mass, no one's laughing anymore. And I think that was the similar Bitcoin strategy, where today Bitcoin is taken as a serious asset. But 14 years ago, they're laughing you out the door.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  And I think that that is the same strategy here, which is we don't want to frontal assault. We don't want to go get tanks. We don't need to do that. The the the historical context I draw with this is back in the day, Harriet Tubman had like the Underground Railroad, right? Which she got the slaves to freedom in Canada through the Underground Railroad. With a network state, you're building the overground railroad, right? Which is like, hey, the internet serves as that cloud service. And you don't need to go protest physically. You don't need to go say, hey, pick up a gun or do whatever. Just opt out to opt in to this network state. And then let's amass our critical mass and leverage through the network state um paradigm. And I think that is the strategy here. I don't think you need you need to have tanks,

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  but you you want them to laugh at you. In fact, you encourage people to laugh at you because you're focusing on the folks who are actually aligned with you and building with them as you go. So, yes.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  But also, I want to offer another angle that I feel a few people are talking about this. But I I think it's even more relevant to what we're building. So I think even before COVID, if you were trying to have a conversation around, how can a country and this organization partner together? It might have been like, what are we talking about? Once COVID happened, a lot of countries realized like, oh, we cannot rely on tourism. We actually need human capital, people coming here into our country and adding actually productive hours to our GDP.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  So what's been interesting on our journey is quite a number of countries have actually said, we're actually interested in having conversations of what that looks like with Afro-Palisian, right? And even if it just starts off as simple as, you know, being able to issue visas, right? Which solved a lot of problems for many of the African citizens, right? It's a start. So I actually think that a lot of countries, because of what's going on in the world, they're actually more interested in being open and having a conversation. And a lot of countries in Europe are getting older, like they're aging, right? And Africa provides this young, fresh human capital of people.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  And so I think that's also the advantage that Afro-Palisian had is like, hey, we have young, smart minds of entrepreneurs, builders, innovators. Let's have a conversation of what that looks like in order to bring this group of people into your country, right? So I think that's another angle to think about.

• 1:10:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's a brilliant angle. I mean, let's not forget that another, you know, equivalent path to achieving legitimacy, rather than kind of like, you know, monopoly on violence type of thing, is the strength of your economy. And it is true that Africa has a massive amount of energy potential right now. And there's so much latent potential. You just look at kind of demographics and population growth compared to much of the rest of the world, and it's completely massive. I want to talk about crypto for a minute. So crypto in Africa, of course. One of the things I was thinking of going into this conversation is like the services that a nation state provides its citizens.

• 1:10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, let's remember, we are, yes, we are geographically bound and we are all born into a nation. But the bargain we have with our nation state is that they provide a set of services for an individual. And in return, in exchange, we provide, you know, consent of. Governed. Yes, I will kind of opt into this and we will pay taxes. We will pay for these services. Right. And some of the services they provide are a money system, a fiat system, a banking system. That's often tied together, a property rights system. So that if I own a specific piece of physical property, someone can't take it from me. They provide civil rights. So the Bill of Rights would be an example embedded in kind of the Constitution. They provide security,

• 1:11:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  which we talked about. They provide rule of law. They provide a way to express societal consensus through governance. So in a democratic republic, of course, that is a vote, one person, one vote, of course. And it strikes me that at least some of these boxes can kind of be checked by crypto infrastructure. All right. So I mean, you're on the Bankless Podcast, right? We got the money and banking thing that we've been working on for a long time. And it strikes me that a digital nation like Afro-Politain can just kind of tap into that. So can you explain a little bit more? Obviously, we've talked about NFTs, but how else does crypto fit into this picture?

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  So I remember watching Bilaji come on here and talk about the whole Bitcoin, like get your money out of the US system, the whole thing. And if he had like, if he had been speaking to a Nigerian audience, would have just been like, we've already been done that, bro, like.

• 1:12:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where you been?

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Where have you been, right? And I think it's because a lot of people are always wondering, why is Nigeria one of the top countries where crypto adoption is taking place? It's because we fundamentally understand as a people that we have leaders we can trust, institutions we can trust, and money we can trust. So Chika could give an example. When she first moved back in 2015, the Naira, which is our local currency to the dollar, was 150 to one. Today it is eight hundred to one. So if you are Nigerian and you had kept your savings or your investments, you have seen that decimated across the board. And so it's it's something I hope Americans or even Canadians never get to experience where you wake up and you see your money halved. I mean, that has to be such a breach of trust.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  It is a huge breach of trust. So when crypto or Bitcoin came to the party, I doubt the average Nigerian has read the Bitcoin white paper, but they understood intuitively what type of time it was, which was like, look, this is a hedge against the nonsense of the government. This is a store of value I can actually put my faith in. So it's almost like it went from in God we trust on the fiat paper to in code we trust, right? Because they're like, look, I can trust the code because what happens is when Bitcoin goes down by whatever percent, it affects everyone equally in the world, right? So if Bitcoin is down like five percent today, if you're in New Zealand, if you're in Ghana, if you're in the US,

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  we can all see it and it's transparent. But in our system, in a traditional, you know, fiat system, you don't know the policies that are made and a lot of it is convoluted. But what you do know though, is your money has just basically been poofed overnight. And so for us, it was like, crypto enables us to really ensure that freedom to transact, but the transparency that comes with it as well, because you're willing to say, okay, if if this is, if this is happening in Bitcoin and it's happening everywhere in the world, that's a fair process. But you can't be in Nigeria where you might have worked doubly hard or you've even gained more revenue this year, ten X revenue, and then your currency gets devalued overnight and you're like, yo, what what just happened? Like, what is going on? And you have no

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  ability to even affect or even to change that, because again, by virtue of where you're born in. And what it does is it limits your upside to be able to tap into financial freedom or even financial services at scale. So with crypto, like I said, it acts as a backdoor for a lot of Africans and even Afropolitans to that financial freedom, because In crypto, you're not judged by the color of your skin or by where you happen to be born into. It's just download a wallet and get access into the financial ecosystem. And, and I've seen that um happen with creators within our ecosystem where before maybe PayPal or Stripe won't process payments in Africa for whatever reason, right? But now because they're, they're, they're accepting payments through Ethereum or through a crypto wallet,

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  that no longer stops them from having the freedom to transact. And so for us, the cryptocurrency or even the principles of crypto are very important to the movement because the idea is like there are three core values, the freedom to of mobility, freedom to transact, and then freedom to thrive, not, not just to survive. And I think that that's something that, I mean, everyone in the world deserves, but Africans especially even deserve more because of where we're starting from.

• 1:15:47David Hoffman?

  One of the things that you said in phase two, Eche, about government as a service, you dropped the very, very small line of a Afro-Palatan cryptocurrency.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56David Hoffman?

  What is the thought behind that? Is this the, we're, we're gonna make a currency for the Afro-Palatan nation? What, what's the theory here?

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  So again, the idea is like, we want money that we can trust and access to store value. Bitcoin obviously serves like is an example of what that can look like. I won't say that we have developed that out yet extensively today, but the idea is leveraging those principles, right? And I think for us, it's just across the board. Like, for example, if I go to Kenya with Nigerian money, I can't transact, I can't change that money for Kenyan money. I have to change my money to dollars first and then use dollars to change into Kenyan chilis, right? And so even in intra-African trading, we don't trust each other's monies for very good reason, right? And so for us, it's like, how do we actually reimagine? It's not just a governance play, but it's also a financial ecosystem play,

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  which is if you can leverage crypto, it allows for more borderless transactions. Today, if I want to send money from Nigeria to Ghana, it first has to go to New York, Citibank or whatever. Get charged fees before it gets to Ghana. These rules don't help us, right? Or the way the system is currently set up really actually keeps us out as outsiders. And so for us, crypto now enables us to reimagine this where like you no longer have to go to a bank and worry, hey, am I not receiving a loan because I'm black? Am I not receiving refinancing because I'm black? No, just trust in the code and let the code make that decision versus the current systems that we have, which again is why we're also big fans of bankless. Because within that, we no longer have to rely on the benevolence of whether a person is good or a person is bad.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  We just all submit to the code and if the code works today, cool. But we know it's not because they're trying to keep us out. It's just, it's, it applies to everyone equally and that's what we want.

• 1:17:43David Hoffman?

  There's a, a line in deep bankless lore that we've invoked a number of times. And it's come, it comes from Van Spencer when he asked about certain DeFi protocol founders, if they're about that life. And this is in contrast to founders that want to form an equity company and potentially go public on a public, you know, the NASDAQ. If you're going to be a DeFi protocol founder and issue a token, you've got to be about that life differently. And so I want to invoke that question, but inside of this brand new context, because you guys are doing something completely different than just founding a DeFi protocol. Y'all are trying to found a country. So I don't even know how you know the answer to, are you really about that life?

• 1:18:28David Hoffman?

  But it's a question about Eche and Chica as founders. How do, why you two? Why are, how do you guys know that you guys are able to ultimately spawn a movement that redraws the lines of Africa? How do you know that you're about that life?

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things about me and Eche. So we've been building community for over 10 plus years, right? And I think funny enough, someone talks about this, like, how can you build a community when you haven't been brought people together at a dinner table? Right? So if you have not been able to do that, you have no business finding anything of this nature, right? And me and Eche have convened people all walks of life, different ethnicities, different types of people, over and over and over again, over 10 plus years. I think we take community building seriously, so this is the reason why even as we speak right now, our community members are creating a whole DNA initiative projects and like figuring

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  out what is the DNA of Afro-Politans, because it's very important that they are part of the identity. But I also think for this to work, from the African diaspora perspective, you have to find two people who are about the actual diaspora, right? And it's not just a Nigerian thing. So me and Eche, yes, we are both Nigerian, but we are very, it's very keen for us that we find people from Egypt, from South Africa, from Kenya, from Ghana. And literally like we've been almost like these ambassadors, we're flying over to all these different countries and we're actually connecting and meeting those people. And every time we go to a new country, we say, hey, Afro-Politans and those who are not Afro-Politans, connect with us, right? So I think it's very important that, you know, the type of people that do this thing

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  actually go and travel and connect with people and also realize that if you're talking about the diaspora, you actually actively recruit people from all parts of Africa. I think that's the only way this thing is gonna work. And I think the other thing is that me and Eche, we talk about like, this is a lifetime thing. Like, we're not trying to, I mean, some may say like a zooki, you bought this energy and like you just out, like, we're not doing that, right? Like, we're here, we, from beginning, we dox ourselves, you can see our faces, we're real people. And I think for us, because this is like a lifelong mission for us, it's not something that we sold the energy project and there was a rug. Like, we actually continue building and we are gonna continue because this is so important to us.

• 1:20:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, as we draw to a close here, this has been just fantastic. It's cool to see so close to kind of the inception of an idea of the network state. Talk to a group of people who are actually like doing the hard work to fill in the ellipses to actually like form a digital nation and a digital country. It's so exciting. So we'll certainly be the monitoring, what you guys are up to and keeping track of this project, as well as many of the other ones on Bankless. But I want to ask you this, this kind of question. If you, if you could sort of zoom And Chika, you were just talking about being kind of long-term focused here, right? And I want you guys to get long-term focused on this maybe two-part question. Like, the first is, if we look 10 years from now,

• 1:21:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  what does, in your ideal world, if Afropolitan is massively successful, if it's what you hope and dream, what does that look like? And that's that's part one of the question. And the second part of the question is, what does the world look like? When nations like your community and like yourselves, when there can be nation founders, like nation startups, what does that do to the whole world? Because I find myself excited by the possibility, but also finding it difficult to imagine what that world looks like. So maybe you could kind of close us out with that, Eche. What would you say?

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  I think for me, it's like, it goes back to the ideology of abundance, right? So if you can imagine like 20 years ago, like if Netflix didn't exist, right? But you open up Netflix now, you get to see storytelling from the cultural perspective of maybe Korea, or from India, or from this, or from that. And it doesn't seem to take away from even the storytelling from the US, or even from a Western lens. We're just saying, we're adding more to the to the tapestry of humanity, right? And so for me, when I see, when I extrapolate into the future, it's when Balaji talks about four frontiers that exist: space, sea, land, and the internet, right? In space, there may be like 10 people up there. On land, a lot of Africans are not allowed to really freely move on land.

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  In the sea, you know, black people don't swim like that. I'm just joking.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  On the internet, there are like 3.5 billion people. More people still to come online, right? And with advances in Starlink, or like a whole bunch of other infrastructure, there are more people coming online. And what you have then seen is African culture then being exported in a borderless manner, whether it's through our music, whether it's through our movies, or whether it's through whatever other cultural aspects of it. And so when I extrapolate into what that world looks like, it's a world in which we've really brought everyone into this abundance, right? And it begets more abundance. Like, why do we have to even move from scarcity to begin with? And that's very important where if we can align around those shared values and purpose, and maybe if ideology is, if our ideology is one of abundance, when we come to the table, maybe we sit down and figure out what a win and help win looks like

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  versus, you know, zero sum games where I win and you lose, right? And I think that that's very important for us even from a community building perspective, which is we're always trying to figure out what is the win-win here? And we need to get more creative in figuring that aspect out. So when I sit back and imagine 10 years from now, it's like you're an African citizen, right? You navigate the world with your African passport. You have a sense of freedom that the same child in San Francisco has, whether it's the child in Kenya as well, right? Like, you feel like the world is your oyster. And you also have the freedom to transact. You're able to get paid for the value and the productivity that you put out into the world. And you're not judged by, you know, where you've been born or the color of your skin. You, you show up and you're judged in a fair manner.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  And I think we're not asking for a unicorn, like some, or, or people are like, is this a utopia? No, we're just trying to raise the baseline of competence for our people so that when we show up on the world stage, if there's another Berlin conference, now you know you have African voices actually speaking up for their own interests, and that's very important for us.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I would simply say this, uh, because recently I saw a, um, video of the Paris Climate Summit, right? And I believe it was the president of Zambia.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  Um, and also, uh, the president of South Africa, right? And, um, so both of them were given an opportunity to speak and address this wide audience. And basically, they were saying, we're tired of being bitter, right? Like, we want a seat at the table. And the fact that in 2023, a president of an African nation is saying, we want a seat at the table. Is a challenge, right? And so I think if we were to look forward in the future of Afro-Politans 10 years from now, what it looks like is a president not saying that anymore, right? And saying, we are here, our voices are heard, we are considered, we are invited to the G20 summit, we have an equal vote at UN. It doesn't look like Africa has a smaller

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  vote, and it doesn't look like we're begging other countries to come. And even in the context of when we talk about China and US and even Russia, the conversation is about Africa is still, oh, well, they're coming to get something versus it should be the other way around, right? And so I think for us, a future state of Afro-Politans is we're aiding in those conversations, and we're able to have, you know, people are able to see Africa from a global perspective and be included. I think that the inclusivity would probably be the number one thing I would love to solve through Afro-Politans.

• 1:26:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's fantastic. And it's very cool that we're doing this in this new frontier of the internet where a new table is forming, and anyone can have a seat. And, you know, it's fantastic to see what you guys are doing. So, of course, we are supportive of helping the world go bankless, and we are very excited about these digital nation, these network state ideas that are flourishing, and super excited to see what you continue to do in the future. So, thank you so much for sharing it. Eche, Chica, to the bankless nation.

• 1:26:56Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items for you, Bankless Nation. You gotta watch or listen to the episode that we did with Balaji, which we've referenced a few times. It's called Rise of the Network State. We'll include a link in the show notes to that. Also, I read from portions of the Afro-Politans Manifesto today. It's fantastic. You've got to read it in full. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. Got to remind you as well, of course, this crypto thing is risky. So is building digital nations, I guess. But this is definitely the frontier, and we are headed west. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.