Balaji Srinivasan built his network-state school inside Malaysia's $100B ghost city

A residential school teaching coding, governance and Srinivasan's network-state doctrine, run from a hotel-turned-campus on a reclaimed Malaysian island.

Ideologically aligned technologists will pay to live in a startup society — and bootstrapped network states can eventually win diplomatic recognition.

Srinivasan — Counsyl co-founder, a16z general partner, ex-Coinbase CTO and author of The Network State — announced the first enrollment in an August 2024 blog post, pitching directly at the like-minded: the more you respect legacy institutions, the less suitable you are.

Students spend mornings in product sprints and coding sessions, afternoons in seminars from the Meiji Restoration to decentralized governance, and follow a protein-heavy longevity regime. Attendees have quit jobs or relocated startups to Forest City; one student's project won $20,000 in a third-party pitch competition.

In February 2025 Srinivasan wrote that Network School will build a permanent campus to house thousands, using a portable template, with planned nodes in Miami, Dubai and Tokyo.

The bet needs cheap physical space with light oversight, and Forest City needs occupants — a failed $100 billion metropolis is the cheapest stage available.

Srinivasan's network-state doctrine says online communities can bootstrap into recognized states, so a physical school is the prototype factory.

Crypto's political tailwind after the 2024 US election made his brand of anti-establishment statecraft feel newly fundable to his audience.

A movement that cannot pay its own rent borrows someone else's white elephant: dead megaprojects and utopian experiments need each other.

As of late August 2025 the school was running with nearly 400 students and a promise of a permanent, replicable campus nearby. Precedents for the experiment are mixed: Vitalik Buterin's Zuzalu drew about 200 people for two months in Montenegro, while Honduras' Prospera became embroiled in a legal dispute with its host country.