Balaji Srinivasan

Yes, AI is rapidly advancing mathematics (and theoretical physics problems that are essentially mathematical). Like Ramanujan’s notebooks, human mathematicians will spend months (years?) poring over the stream of papers that AI effortlessly generates, hoping to verify and understand them, probably until math itself (via Lean) becomes a branch of computer science like almost everything else. However, after math and physics, there is still a next scientific frontier: chemistry, and especially biology and medicine. I mean, it was already the frontier, but it’s the next one too. AI can crush deterministic math problems on the computer, but biom…

AI will make virtual reality visually indistinguishable from physical reality. Or: the metaverse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Or: what’ll people do if AI actually does take their jobs? Play amazing AI video games while robots do all the work. That future is also already here, and also not yet evenly distributed…

Towards the New York City Network State?! Mamdani has still unfortunately declared himself the tribal enemy of many of my colleagues, but one has to be bullish on him as the future of the Democrats after this. He’s a live player who can jettison democratic socialists for venture capitalists in one week — and rise to power on abolishing the police while then very publicly embracing the police. Like Trump, the man is not really ideological. He can pivot, he’s smart. This is a real problem for the Republicans. Along with Xi overseas, Mamdani’s faction of immigrant strivers represents an IQ bailout for otherwise mathless American wokes. After …

Mamdani is interesting. Shows a kind of Deng potential. To be clear, he’ll use leftism to tax and harass his tribal enemies till they leave town. The Curley Effect. But once he’s consolidated power for life, he could ally with Chinese communism to bring a stern order to New York City. Similar to Mark Carney’s emerging playbook in Canada. Ultimately he’s a pragmatic and ruthless statist, not an anarchist. Mamdani is far less ideological than the typical woke. He’s an accomplished actor (literally) who can emote on demand and then return to sobriety once the cameras stop rolling. Due to his identity, he has so much clout within his party tha…

34 - Network State Conference 2026 - Closing Address by Balaji

All right. So, just going to wrap up with some I I think some pretty fun stuff, okay? [snorts] Um save some of the best for last. Uh so, basically, I think that was pretty awesome. I don't know if you guys liked everything so far. Um So, what next? So, the core idea of the network state is that you can found your ideal society. That's the whole point of the book or you can find your ideal society and that's the point of the dashboard. So, for example, you can do citizenship migration like Henley and IMI and CitizenX. You could find an existing society uh like, you know, the citizenship in the Bitcoin age and so on and so forth in CitizenX. Um…

33 - Network State Conference 2026 - Bayan Konirbayev on Alatau City: A Territory of Digital Economy

Uh so thank you very much for this honor. Uh the main point for the development and like uh the main point for the wrap-up part it's going to be dedicated to the holy tokenized city which we are trying to develop in central Asia. So my name is Bayan and basically what I want to tell you I want to just uh tell you more about Kazakhstan by itself because uh thanks to Balajia I think I hope more people will be able to know about it. But the main point with Allat with Central Asia is that the Kazakhstan is developing really fast and the main idea for us is to use that kind of uh new technology development coming from Asia and Europe and Europe to…

32 - Network State Conference 2026 - Niall Ferguson and Balaji on Reinventing Education

So, so British Empire meetup just got Neil just got off a plane and got here. Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> I just got off the flight uh from London which some of you will know. Uh so don't expect high levels of coherence from me. I'll do my best. >> No, you uh you are the you know British gentleman from Central Casting. Um and >> I'm not a gentleman at all. I'm from Glasgow. >> Okay. Okay, fine. Well, you're you're like Sean Connory, who's you know, well, I guess he's Scottish, but whatever. Okay. So, we have had a conversation over the years >> which is similar to one I've had with others, but you have a interesting twist on it because being …

31 - Network State Conference 2026 - Xen Baynham-Herd on Capital Without BordersDescription:

Hi, I'm I'm Zen from Bass. We recently launched tokenized stocks. These are issued by Coinbase, fully backed by shares held within a regulated custodian and give you complete legal ownership over the underlying share. You can use them in your wallet. You can use them on DeFi and you can trade them 247. And tokenized stocks will expand who can invest, who can raise capital, and what people can build. For many people around the world, buying a US stock is painful. It can mean very high fees, lots of friction, lots of paperwork, and finding a broker willing to serve you. With tokenized stocks, buying a stock can be as easy as ordering a takeaway…

30 - Network State Conference 2026 - Christopher Smith on Why a New Country Needs a New Currency

Hello everyone. So I heard you want to start a new country? Well, you're probably going to need a new currency. So the motto of Network State is win and help win. This is the essence of free market capitalism the ideal of humans voluntarily collaborating to solve our collective problems. It's the foundation of civilization. I like to say money is love and love is a circle. The idea of money has been dramatically over complicated. It's actually very simple. You do things for other people and your number goes up. Other people do things for you and your number goes down. That's making and spending money. Of course, that's just an ideal. It doesn…

29 - Network State Conference 2026 - Alex Recouso on Plan B Passports

Anyone here can use cryptocurrencies to send $1 million across the planet before I present myself. But you can't move freely. Crypto solved capital mobility. Human mobility still requires permission. I'm Alex Rigosa and for the past 5 years at Citizen X, I have created the easiest way to diversify your passport portfolio. Because no serious investor holds 100% of their wealth in one asset. But for some reason, somehow, most people still leave their mobility options to a single jurisdiction. From all the elements of your sovereign stack, your citizenships, residencies, your visas, your passport is the most critical one for your mobility, your …

28 - Network State Conference 2026 - Rory McDaid on Building Optionality for a Global Future

We're in a room today filled with individuals who very much epitomize thinking beyond borders. You're all part of a international network and a global community. But when we strip that back, how many of you on an individual basis can consider yourself to be truly global? How many of us are still linked to one individual country? One individual country that gives all of our rights, all of our access, and any benefits that we may bring. Only one country. We diversify all aspects of our life. We diversify our investments, our wealth, our businesses. We diversify the technology that we rely on. We also consider risk mitigation and decentralizatio…

27 - Network State Conference 2026 - Christian Henrik Nesheim on From Subjects to Customers

Hello everyone. I have five minutes to explain to you how we can set the world free. Please wish me luck. So let's start with the fundamental problem. States do not treat individuals well. They subject us to taxation. They restrict our movements. They regulate us. And they even conscript us and send us to war. And the question that we need to answer is what is a practical way of making the state respect individual freedoms and property rights. Crypto is part of the answer, but of course crypto doesn't do you much good if your physical person is in say a goolog. Is the answer voting harder? No. Doesn't work for reasons we don't have time to ge…

26 - Network State Conference 2026 - Parag Khanna on Where to Find Alpha on the Map

Thank you. Good afternoon. So, when I was a teenager, what one source did every geek like me turn to to devour all of the information we could consume about all of the countries in the world that we had never been to? The CIA World Factbook. Who remembers that if you're old enough? Okay, good. So, you may or may not have known uh or might not know that it was actually discontinued earlier this year. But, in the last decade or so, I'm sure it's web traffic declined pretty significantly because it's more or less been replaced by a vast plethora of hundreds of different rankings and data sets purporting to explain uh political stability, the eco…

25 - Network State Conference 2026 - Chad Cascarilla and Balaji on Fiat Currency

Chad >> allergy. >> So, you know what's funny is uh you're a Chad and you have the Chad. Chad was a Chad before the term Chad was a thing. >> There was no Chad when I was a Chad. >> Yes, exactly. He has a Chad jaw. Chad, you're CEO of Paxos. Uh you also should you you want to tell them about how you got into Bitcoin and how how we met like you know in New York and so on and so forth like in the early like the financial crisis origin story. >> Yeah. These aren't like uh our origin story isn't well known. Yeah. >> Um I was an investor and uh we did a good job at understanding the financial crisis. We were short subprime >> going into the financ…

Balaji on Decentralized Democracy and Yarvin on American Monarchy (Network State Conference 2026)

So, thanks for coming all the way up. Um, so, American monarchy, decentralized democracy. We've had a conversation for a while. Um, I want you to well, there's 15 different things we can go back and forth on, but let me throw out a few statements and then you tell me whether you agree, disagree, and so and so forth. Um so first you still do believe America can be turned around. It can be fixed. >> Absolutely. Amazing property. >> Okay. And as its current institution or as like a the reboot. >> Well, what a reboot means I think varies a lot. I think the level of a reboot that's needed is um certainly goes much farther than we've seen with the …

Good crowd at Network State 2026. Many people interested in starting new communities. https://t.co/7mxim3npOs

12 - Network State Conference 2026 - Will AI Break Cryptography?

uh preemptively I will be running off for a flight before this panel ends. So I'm going to uh hand off moderator responsibilities to hib for the end. But to get us off kicked off, we had a tweet that rocketed around the world last night from Justin Drake uh telling everyone to not panic. Um >> of course they panicked. >> Of course they panicked. And this is about uh the correctness the the validity of cryptography and math. Um and I do want to talk about crypto in the longer term but now because people are panicking I think we need to talk about math and cryptography in the short term. Uh the fear is that AI has truly accelerated timelines on…

11 - Network State Conference 2026 - Fireside with Mike Maples of Floodgate and Balaji

Thanks for flying all the way out. >> Yeah, it's a nice flight. >> So, why don't you just tell everybody about your background? Early investor in Twitter, Twitch, you know, Floodgates being a major a major angel for many years. >> Yeah. So, I guess I'm one of the OG seed investors. So, I invest uh either too early or way too early in startups. So, uh you know, when I invested in uh Twitter, they were trying to decide whether to call it TWWTR or uh voicemail 2.0 You know, Lyft started out as Zimride. Octa was Sasher. Uh, and so, uh, yeah, too early, way too early, or legally ambiguously too early. >> Well, you you were one of the seeds of seed…

10 - Network State Conference 2026 - Tom Howard on Zcash & Communism

Hello network states. Raise your hand if you like freedom. Anybody like freedom here? All right. You like communism? I think it's kind of anti-freedom, right? So the problem with communism is that it requires surveillance to work. So as communism wants to grow, it is always seeking to acquire new information. via surveillance. It's trying to surveil every part of your life. Now, why is that? Surveillance equals control. The more information that you have about somebody's life, the easier it is to control them. In a communist economy, every asset of the economy is top- down planned, which means you have to have a lot of control, which means yo…

09 - Network State Conference 2026 - Evan Forbes on Multi-Gigabit Zcash

Hello. So, I'm an engineer on Zcash. Zcash's development is very decentralized. So, the taxonomy can be a little bit confusing. But, more specifically than Zcash, I work at Valor Group. More specifically than that, I work on Zecora, which is the really high-performance Zcash client. And then, more specifically than that, I make the blocks big and fast. So, what we really want is these payment systems that work like Zcash. So, they're permissionless, they're censorship resistant, and they preserve privacy. And this is really difficult because there's so many different bottlenecks in different areas. So, as other speakers have presented today, …

08 - Network State Conference 2026 - Josh Lee on People First Crypto Wallets

Cool. Uh hello everyone. My name is Josh Lee and I'm co-founder at Fiser. And Visor is uh currently the fastest growing wallet in Ccash. Um Visor is currently available on both mobile and desktop. And we built Visor because we basically wanted to connect this powerful technology that's been building for Zcash into an experiment into an experience that the average person can use. Um, ultimately, you know, I feel like Zcash is one of the most underrated uh cryptocurrency and and protocol in the entire world. uh from my experience interacting and getting to know Zcash um it leads in in zero knowledge cryptography uh and applying that to privacy …

07 - Network State Conference 2026 - Maxime Desalle on Why Bitcoin Was Never Banned

[music] So, Bitcoin was never banned. Um, and there's a good reason for that. The the state didn't need to. And if you think about it, had the states were if the state were really worried about Bitcoin, it would have figured out a way to to ban it. But it didn't. And the reason for that is because with AI and with increasingly better surveillance algorithms, Bitcoin is turning into a true surve surveillance machine. And compared to CBDC's which are very unpopular, people willingly buy into Bitcoin and willingly enter this 360 degree uh panopticon. And there's only one currency that they would really have to ban and it also happens to be the o…

06 - Network State Conference 2026 - Dev Ojha on Scaling Encrypted Money

Uh, hello everyone. Uh, I'm Dev. And today I'm going to talk about again how we scale Zcash. And first, like what's the origin of like what we all care about? Well, starts with the Bitcoin white paper. Peer-to-peer electronic cash. It's kind of the promise we're all made. And with Zcash, the goal is to actually fulfill this. So, what's going on? Bitcoin started with the promise of being digital cash. And there's this great Nick Carter post. The narratives change over time. Starting 2019, you'll never hear anyone call it digital cash. You'll start hearing it be called digital gold or store value. With Zcash, instead we started the opposite way…

05 - Network State Conference 2026 - Josh Swihart on Building Money Without Banks

[music] tried to fist bump me on the way up and I totally missed it. I was distracted by you all. All right, so a few years ago, I applied for a refinance on my home to a bank that I had been with for over 30 years since I was a teenager. My credit was perfect. My payment history was perfect. It went to the underwriter and it came back and they said, "We're sorry, Josh. You've been rejected. You've been rejected because we don't like the company that you're working for. You do work that we don't like. Last year, the OC released a study showing that nine of the largest banks in the US were denying financial services to people because they were…

04 - Network State Conference 2026 - Eli Ben-Sasson on Zero Knowledge

Hello, good morning network state. So I want to tell you a little bit about my story. Long ago there was a time when humans could actually contribute to frontier math and I was lucky to be a member of the last generation of people who could do that. So back in the day I was one of seven authors who wrote the white paper on which Zcash is founded and I was one of the founding scientists alongside these six illustrious academics. Then I worked on some post-quantum secure cryptography. So in 2018 published the white paper about ZK Starks uh which is hashbased and pretty safe. Now, I didn't know back then that we'll be in a state where quantum th…

03 - Network State Conference 2026 - Sean Bowe on Scaling Zcash

So, I'm Sean Bo. I'm the executive director of Tachion and um I was here about a year ago in Singapore and we announced that we were going to hire for a a team of cryptographic engineers to work on sort of the next iteration of uh Zcash's cryptography. And uh we we did we hired these fantastic engineers from like Celestia and Penumbra and um Espresso and we've been working really hard for the last year or so on uh essentially scaling Zcash. We're we're taking the cryptography that's uh at this at the core of the private payments that take place in our protocol and we're removing all the cryptographic bottlenecks that are on the inside. So, if…

You can watch the Network State Conference 2026 online here: https://t.co/Yr02JaaV0E

This is the livestream for Network State Conference 2026. https://t.co/Yr02JaaV0E

The post-war order is the pre-Internet order. And the rise of the Internet means that order is ending. But what comes next? Decentralized democracy — or American monarchy? Curtis makes the case for centralization. I make the case for decentralization. Live in Singapore later today. And streaming online for free. This is Network State Conference 2026. https://t.co/kaUpKaT7qn We'll be streaming online for free. And if you're in Singapore today, come see us in person. We have ~5000 registrations, but you may still be able to get a ticket. Watch online: https://t.co/IJharQiAi1 Attend in person: https://t.co/pTfOeG6udA Watch the full conference…

Latinos really were natural Republicans.