On the quiet streets of Forest City in Malaysia, the echoes of an abandoned dream still linger. Once planned as a luxury metropolis filled with skyscrapers and investors, the area now houses something very different. Inside a repurposed hotel, students and technologists are testing how code and community might redefine what a nation can be.
This is Network School, created by Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase executive and author of The Network State. What began as a billion dollar development project has become a testing ground for digital sovereignty. Students spend mornings building blockchain applications and afternoons studying philosophy, history, and statecraft. The idea is to see if shared belief and technology can form a stronger bond than geography ever did.
Nearly four hundred students have joined so far, paying about fifteen hundred dollars each month for room, meals, and access to lectures. They come from across the world to work on crypto projects and explore new forms of governance. The schedule combines software design with lessons on how nations are built and how they collapse. Discussions about decentralized governance often run late into the night.
Health and optimization are part of the culture. The school gym opens before dawn, and the cafeteria menu leans toward high protein diets inspired by longevity movements. The goal seems to be personal evolution as much as political innovation. One student summed it up by saying, “We are learning how to build stronger systems by starting with ourselves.”
Srinivasan’s broader vision is to show how online communities organized through blockchain could one day function as independent states. In his view, if startups can grow into global companies, digital societies can grow into recognized nations. The blockchain serves as the constitution, the record, and the network that holds it all together.
Other projects have explored similar ideas. Prospera in Honduras and the Seasteading movement once tried to combine technology and governance but struggled against politics and economics. Network School differs because its foundation exists in code, not in land.
Critics call it idealistic or elitist. Supporters see it as a real attempt to rethink how people live and organize power. Either way, it reflects a deeper shift inside the tech world, where builders no longer just want to innovate within systems but to create entirely new ones.
Forest City was supposed to be a showcase of architecture and wealth. Instead, it has become a quiet experiment in digital nationhood, a place where the idea of sovereignty begins not with territory but with a network.