Crypto and tech entrepreneurs are attending Network School, founded by Balaji Srinivasan in Forest City, Malaysia, to test his concepts about the Network State
Balaji Srinivasan wants to design a new kind of nation state, and he's making a troubled megaproject a testbed for his ideas. LinkedIn: Anders Melin and Ryan Weeks LinkedIn: Anders Melin : Much has been written about Forest City, the troubled moonshot $100 billion development in southern Malaysia. Now a new chapter has begun: the Network School. … Ryan Weeks : In a hotel-turned-campus on a reclaimed island in Malaysia, crypto and tech entrepreneurs are building software, chomping down Australian ribeye …
Context & Ripple Effects
Network School turns Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State from a proposal into a place-based experiment. Earlier coverage described the model as online communities crowdfunding land in pursuit of eventual statehood; this campus supplies a practical setting in which to test whether that community can form and operate.
It also joins a small set of crypto-adjacent co-living and startup-city efforts, including Zuzalu’s Montenegro experiment and Itana’s planned city near Lagos. Its location gives a troubled, large-scale Forest City development a new use case, while Johor has separately been drawing technology investment around data centers.
First-order effects
- Network School gains a concentrated cohort of crypto and technology entrepreneurs to test its community and governance ideas in a shared physical setting.
- Forest City gains an active campus use case tied to Srinivasan’s Network State project, rather than relying solely on its original development proposition.
Second-order effects
- The project gives other network-state and startup-city initiatives a visible operational comparison point: whether a temporary or campus-based community can sustain participation beyond an event format.
- Forest City’s repositioning toward a tech-community experiment may complement the broader data-center investment flowing into Johor, though the coverage does not establish a commercial link between the two.
Third-order effects
- If these projects repeatedly move from online membership to physical campuses, the Network State idea may evolve less as a near-term substitute for countries and more as a model for organizing talent, capital, and services around opt-in communities.
- The recurring pattern—from Zuzalu to Network School—will test whether crypto-backed community formation can produce durable institutions rather than short-lived gatherings; the available coverage does not yet show that outcome.
The trend: Network-state thinking is shifting from online theory toward bounded, real-world community experiments embedded in existing jurisdictions.