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 or you could find a new one, which is, you know, network states of the internet and going and getting a new society off of the network state dashboard. That's what we're all about, which is the consent of the governed and choice, freedom, liberty, consent, cooperation, and decentralized democracy where you're voting with your feet, your wallet, and your ballot for all these different startup societies, each of which has an explicit or implicit social smart contract that you're signing by entering. And so, you have a transition from, you know, the uh the two-party or, in some cases, one-party system to the thousand community system. So, you have true choice. So, that's the third kind of thing, basically, to have those thousand communities. We go from starting internet companies and internet currencies to internet communities. And really, that's, you know, when I say the third kind of thing, you know, Netscape, first internet company, 1994, Bitcoin, first internet currency, you know, 2009. Can we start an internet community? Can that be a thing? Can we print out these internet tribes? That's the question. So now we're taking the next step. And Network School is going to become a very serious school. Um we're going to help build Kazakhstan into digital state and build the foundations of the network state. So what does that mean? Um so you've you've seen some of this. We've signed a series of agreements that essentially fuse network and state, right? So first the country level and as you're going to see for campus a coin college consulting placement company incubation a whole flurry of things to basically set the foundations for essentially building an internet first school and internet first society. So first as you know, we signed this agreement with the Republic of Kazakhstan and we're going to be building a tech hub in Astana and a crypto city in Alatau and then a digital state at Kazakhstan itself. And Kazakhstan's role is provide the permits and in a sense a platform and then we're the capital, the talent, the execution and that combination could be very good. Step one, we moved into our new city campus in Astana, Kazakhstan. Here's like a fun video. I'm going to play a few just you know, fun videos. Here we go. >> [music] >> Hello Kazakhstan. >> [music] [music] >> So that's pretty cool. That gives you a sense of what Kazakhstan is like, okay? And so it's poised to become divine north. It has a global visa program. We're working with them to add nonstop flights. So we think we can turn Astana into a true tech hub. And here's you know, some shots of just people signing up in Astana itself. Now the thing is Astana is actually a hyper-growth city that, as the kids say, mog San Francisco. I mean, this word has been around for a while, but it's more popular now. This graph shows that if, you know, if you look at Astana's uh number of residents, it actually is now double San Francisco. It passed San Francisco about 10 years ago. And in the bottom graph, it builds housing at 100x the rate of San Francisco. And if those were two, you know, companies and the the red line was the incumbent and the blue line was the disruptor, Astana is actually now bigger than um only only four American cities are bigger. New York City, LA, Chicago, and I think Houston. It's It's like the fifth largest city of its in the US, right? So, this is what a hyper-growth city looks like. It's, in my view, the next Dubai, the next Singapore. And it's also really beautiful. It's like, you know, uh spotless, clean, amazing. You You just won't, you know, you won't even believe it unless you see it. It's just like, you know, anybody who's come up there really really finds it very impressive. And so, it means you can build spotless, beautiful, inexpensive, fast, the, you know, much faster than many Westerners think possible. So, that's why that's like a really great place to bring people. Now, step two, we're actually gaining accreditation to issue real STEM degrees, okay? So, it's like Harvard started as a one-room schoolhouse and built the Massachusetts Bay Colony and from that Massachusetts and then built, you know, what became the early US and and so on and so forth. A school, the wetware engineering, is actually really a key thing. So, we're going to become a real school. So, I'm going to play a clip from uh Minister Sayasat Nurbek, who's the Minister of Higher Education and Science in Kazakhstan. So, here we go. Ready? >> Good morning and greetings from Astana, Kazakhstan. I am Sayasat Nurbek, Minister of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan, and I'm thrilled to announce that we have officially signed a memorandum of understanding with the network school to build an internet-first academic institution. One that we will plan to turn into a full degree-granting university. Kazakhstan is rapidly establishing itself as the academic center of gravity in Eurasia. We have already opened our borders to global knowledge, hosting 40 international research-intensive universities that built branch campuses on our soil. Founded and endowed by Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford PhD, Network School will combine the rigor of traditional academia with the speed of the internet. First, we're shifting to graduation by examination, not duration. Rather than forcing students to spend 48 consecutive months in a classroom, we're spreading those 48 months over 48 years by building residential learning communities that meet for roughly 1 week per quarter. We are modeling the continuous lifelong learning seen in medicine, keeping our members constantly abreast of new technologies. Second, we are eliminating the siloed paper diplomas. Students will earn portable, provable skill passports based on blockchain technology and crypto credentials that are digitally and globally verifiable. Through our Omni University Academic Mesh, Network School students will be able to tap into the courses of our entire national university network and branch campuses, building their own fluid, customized educational pathways. But access is only half the equation. To truly prepare our students and and participants for the post AI age. This network will be powered by our proprietary one-to-one Socratic teaching agent. We're deploying AI not as a shortcut engine to write essays, but as a relentless intellectual partner that questions assumptions, demands productive cognitive struggle. Network school will recruit the dark talent of the world, those without resources or training from all over the world. >> [snorts] >> And it will work towards getting any meritorious student in an inexpensive and ideally free education via scholarships thanks to our donors and partners, and towards placing them in a job starting with a tech job. Ultimately, Network School's goal is to ensure that students in a post age of AI have the proper wetware, the software in our brains that is still upstream for any AI prompt, any AI challenge. We look forward to building Network School here in Kazakhstan, and then scaling this model around the world into a network of schools. So, thank you Balaji for your trust, for the speed of your trust. There's a great book by Covey. Uh uh and let's get to work. >> TLDR, on-chain diplomas, so you can actually prove your your credential, right? Okay. Third point. Um so, we're actually going to become a real school. We're going to become a real STEM Academy. It's going to be pretty pretty awesome. So, we signed with companies like Kazakhtelecom to place grads. And the key idea here is pass an exam, get a job. And so, we're going to be graduating people based on really just how quickly they can learn skills. Not 4 years fixed. If you can learn in 4 months, wonderful, but you have to take a rigorous offline exam to prove you've learned it. And so, this is a little bit like, you know, the deal with Kazakhtelecom it's got 18,000 people. It's like the, you know, Verizon or actually it works with Starlink. Um, just on this basically, think of if Stanford was vertically integrated with its own career development center and McKinsey. So, it would it's like built to place, right? Okay. So, this, you know, we we we signed this recently. We're also recruiting venture capital and startups to Kazakhstan. So, this is Shervin Pishevar, early investor in Uber and DoorDash and many other companies. Um, and you know, my view is, you know, Shervin is going to be setting up operations in Astana and many other investors are going to be announcing over the months and years to come. My view is we're just at the very start of a global wave of re-domiciliation. If, you know, tech billionaires had to leave California and Washington on short notice in places they'd lived for 20 years and contributed literally billions of dollars in tax revenue, then many other people are going to also have to leave and find new homes as well as homes for their corporations. And so, express re-domiciliation of entire businesses is going to be very, very important. So, we're just beginning that and recruiting VCs and startups to Kazakhstan is one major piece. Binance is also coming there, that was announced publicly and you're going to see a lot more. Um, and then we're recruiting global talent to Kazakhstan. Now, think about this, you know, uh, I I told Neil he was going to get the last word, but I will say something which is, yes, it is it is true that historically the US absorbed a lot of talent. Recently it's become much harder to get visas for student visas into the US and because of that an arbitrage opportunity has opened up. What country will embrace that model of selectively recruiting talent from around the world? And so, you can watch this clip, um, I'm not going to play a video, but just a this is just a still, um, on the Astana Hub Instagram where they talk about how quickly they were able to get visas for our community members. And, you know, they're are from Latvia, from India, from Japan, from America, and all over the world. And Kazakhstan, obviously they filter, they want to make sure that they are talented, but there's no minimum income. So, you know, places like Singapore and Dubai, amazing countries, but they often filter on income or on net worth, and that selects for somebody in their 30s or 40s, a little bit more established, which is fine. But, for the dark talent of the world, the people who are, you know, have weak passports, but they have strong work ethics or strong skills or strong talent, who would be able to recruit them? You have to be someone enlightened, and you have to be able to have some way of betting on people who are not yet legible, you know, who haven't yet achieved something, but have potential. That's what venture capital does, that's what angels do. You bet on people who haven't yet made it, because you want to help them make it. And so, recruiting global talent Kazakhstan, we want to bring thousands and then tens of thousands of people there. And we're also, of course, placing local Kazakhstanis into global jobs. So, it's not a zero-sum game, you know? You can you do the whole thing at the same time. To build a global tech company, you hire local and global talent, you sell to the world, and and it also, you know, works both ways. So, pass an exam, get a job. Now, step three, um so, you just met, you know, you saw uh the the head of the Alatau City Authority just spoke right before me. We actually signed with the Alatau City Authority to issue a coin to bootstrap the city. And so, imagine if a REIT, a real estate investment trust, bought the campus land for Stanford, and then as Stanford brought people in and it populated Palo Alto, and then Silicon Valley, and then San Francisco, that the community actually captures some of the value they create. You know, Stanford's almost like tree rings, where it brings people from around the world and it deposits them nearby, but doesn't capture that value. You could, though. And moreover, if people owned a stake, rather than owning, let's say, $500,000 in a house in San Francisco, if they held the SF coin, then they wouldn't be NIMBYs, they'd be YIMBYs because they would they say they wouldn't be against further development, they'd be for it since they'd want the overall area to grow in value, right? So, some of the crypto ideas, we're going to project them into the physical world, we're going to use them to bootstrap this new crypto city, which is a presidential initiative. It has its own constitutional status. So, I'm very excited about this. The ultimate real world asset will be the crypto city, um and then the network state. So, um and finally, uh last but not least, Polychain is leading around Network State at $2 billion valuation. Here is Olaf Carlson-Wee with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, and and many others. So, we're going to we're we're we're endowing a new kind of internet-first institution. Here's Olaf. >> Hi, my name's Olaf Carlson-Wee, and I'm the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital. Polychain is a multi-billion dollar investment firm operating in the cryptocurrency space. We've been around for over 10 years and have seeded over a dozen deca unicorn outcomes. The way that we've done this is by investing not just in incremental improvements, but rather in completely new paradigms where a solution is not just a a slight improvement over what exists in the world today, but uses a new business model or new technology to approach the problem in a completely different manner. So, I'm very excited to announce today that we are leading an investment round into Network State alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, and Balaji himself that values uh the project at $2 billion. Balaji and I have been friends and collaborators for over 10 years. We first met when I was customer support at Coinbase in 2013. This was before Balaji was even uh a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Over that time period in the course of our relationship, we've talked quite a lot about how Bitcoin has catalyzed a sort of digital exit from the existing financial system and through that created this entire crypto economy that's worth trillions of dollars that wasn't an incremental improvement to the existing financial system, but rather a technological approach to building something completely outside of it. Similarly, this is how I view Network School. I think that Network School is building a new form of human organization that's native to the internet. It allows us to print out the social media network and human organizational logic into the physical world. So, just in the way that much of our human society has been organized around the internet and software in the digital world, I think that this is the big step in organizing human society in the physical world. I believe that Network School offers a peaceful exit into a parallel system that we will look back on as being obvious. These digital exits and digital alternatives started by Bitcoin have built a multi-trillion-dollar industry. But, where is our physical world if we don't want to fix the system within itself, but rather have an option to exit and create a new system? We sort of have that in the digital world and have built a crypto economy that's worth trillions of dollars around it. But, where is that in the physical world? And this is of course where I think the concept of the network state is so important. To me, it's obvious that over time the logic that organizes humans on the internet will manifest itself in the physical world. This is why network states to me, I think, will be quite obvious in hindsight. We will look back at them as the sort of organizing principle that allowed us to print out social networks into the physical world. So, we can take these sort of human organization that's native to the internet and manifest it physically in a sort of network state that is really internet native even though it's a unified geographic location. >> Cool. Pretty cool, right? >> [applause] >> All right. So, we're going to build the San Tech Hub, the Latent Crypto City, and the Costa Smeralda Digital State, and come build with us at nns.com, okay? Come visit. And you can apply right there, all right? So, tell your friends, come and visit, check it out, because we're going to actually do it. All right? Thank you very much, and I hope you guys had a great time today. >> [applause]