Start Your Own Country: What Actually Works (2026)

On 22 July 2026, a city council in southern Malaysia did something no navy, court, or rival government had managed in a decade. It shut down the most fashionable attempt to start your own country on the planet. Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School, the flagship experiment of the “network state” movement, lost its business licence in Forest City overnight. Within 24 hours, Balaji had signed a deal with Kazakhstan and announced the whole project was moving 5,000 kilometres north.

One government evicts you. Another rolls out the red carpet. That single week tells you almost everything about the strange, stubborn dream of founding a new libertarian country.

People have been chasing this dream for six decades. They have dredged sand onto Pacific reefs, occupied rusting gun platforms in the North Sea, planted flags on unclaimed Danube floodplains, and carved semi-sovereign charter cities out of Honduran islands. A few of these projects are still alive. Most are cautionary tales. And one of them is currently suing a sovereign nation for nearly $11 billion.

This guide covers every serious attempt to start your own country, what each one got right, how most of them died, and what the survivors can actually offer you today. It also answers the question that matters more than any of the romance: is there a smarter way to buy the freedom these projects promise?

Can You Legally Start Your Own Country?

You can legally start your own country on paper, but no law forces anyone to take you seriously. The 1933 Montevideo Convention sets four tests for statehood: a permanent population, defined territory, a government, and the capacity to deal with other states. In practice, a fifth test decides everything: recognition by existing countries, and they almost never grant it.

That gap between theory and practice is where every micronation lives. Declaring independence costs nothing. Printing a constitution, designing a flag, minting coins, all of it is legal theatre that harms nobody. The hard part is territory. Every square metre of useful land on Earth is already claimed by a state with an army, and states treat territorial integrity as sacred. The United Nations has admitted plenty of new members since 1945, but nearly all of them emerged from decolonization or the breakup of existing states. Not one was conjured from scratch by a private citizen.

The sea offers no escape either. Under Article 60 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, artificial islands and platforms generate no territorial waters and possess no island status. Build a floating city in international waters and you have built an expensive boat, legally speaking, flagged to somebody or pirate to everybody.

So the founders got creative. Six decades of attempts sort into a handful of repeatable strategies, and each one has a body count.

How to Start Your Own Country: Five Steps Nobody Has Finished

Now for the projects themselves, starting with the one that has survived longest against the odds.

Sealand: The Micronation That Outlasted Them All

Eleven kilometres off the English coast stands a rusting World War II gun platform called Roughs Tower. In September 1967, a former British Army major and pirate radio operator named Paddy Roy Bates occupied it and declared the Principality of Sealand. The longest-running experiment in DIY sovereignty on Earth had begun.

Bates got one genuine legal win. In 1968, his son Michael fired warning shots at workmen servicing a nearby buoy. An English court then ruled that the fort sat outside Britain’s three-mile territorial waters, so British law could not touch it. The family has dined out on that ruling ever since. The kicker came in 1987, when the UK extended its waters to twelve miles and swallowed the fort whole. The 1968 precedent would not save Sealand today; Britain simply finds it cheaper to ignore the place than to storm it.

Sealand’s history reads like a film script. In 1978, a German lawyer who styled himself Sealand’s prime minister hired mercenaries, stormed the platform, and took Michael Bates hostage. Roy Bates retook his fort in a dawn helicopter raid flown by a stunt pilot from the James Bond films. He then held one of the plotters as a prisoner of war until Germany sent a diplomat to negotiate. The family counts that visit as de facto recognition. In the 1990s, a Spanish crime ring sold an estimated 150,000 fake Sealand passports, forcing the family to revoke every passport ever issued. In 2000, the platform hosted HavenCo, a “data haven” that promised servers beyond the reach of any government and made the cover of Wired before collapsing. The academic post-mortem on HavenCo is brutal and instructive: customers fled because no real legal system protected them. The lawlessness was the product, and the lawlessness was the problem.

Today Sealand is run by Prince Michael Bates and his sons, with a single permanent caretaker on guard. The money comes from Lord and Lady titles sold from around £30, dukedoms for a few hundred dollars, and e-citizenship subscriptions bought by fans in over a hundred countries. No state recognizes it. It survives because it threatens nobody and sells a great story. As a sovereignty play, let’s be blunt: it is a gift shop with a moat.

From Minerva to Seasteading: The Ocean Graveyard

Before Liberland and the network state crowd, the libertarian imagination belonged to the sea. If you wanted to start your own country in 1970, you looked at the water. The logic felt airtight. Land is claimed; oceans are free; build your platform beyond territorial waters and live under no flag. Every generation since the 1960s has tested that logic, and the ocean has won every time.

The most serious attempt was the Republic of Minerva. Michael Oliver, a Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor who rebuilt his life as a Nevada property millionaire, spent 1971 dredging Australian sand onto the Minerva Reefs, 260 miles southwest of Tonga. He declared independence in January 1972, issued coins, and planned a tax-free city of 30,000. Tonga’s response was magnificent and final. The King sailed to the reefs with a convict work detail and a brass band, tore down the flag, and annexed the lot. Neighbouring states backed Tonga within months. When a splinter group tried to reoccupy the reefs in 1982, Tongan troops removed them inside three weeks. Oliver later bankrolled separatist movements in the Bahamas and the New Hebrides, the islands that became Vanuatu, with equally dismal results.

He was not alone, and he was not the last.

The modern chapter belongs to the Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 by Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, with $500,000 of Peter Thiel’s money. Thiel eventually put in around $1.7 million before conceding in 2017 that ocean cities were “not quite feasible from an engineering perspective.” The institute’s one near-win, a 2017 agreement with French Polynesia for a floating pilot community, sank the moment local politics turned. And the 2019 Thai episode should chill anyone who thinks international waters mean safety. A couple living in a floating cabin off Phuket were charged with violating Thai sovereignty, an offence carrying up to the death penalty. Their crime, as they saw it, was floating in free ocean. They escaped by boat and never returned.

Bottom line: the sea is not empty space. It is the most heavily lawyered territory on Earth, and platforms have no rights in it.

Is Liberland a Real Country?

Liberland is a real place with a real claim but no real recognition. Proclaimed in 2015 on Gornja Siga, a seven square kilometre Danube pocket claimed by neither Croatia nor Serbia, it has a constitution, a crypto treasury, and 700,000+ claimed citizenship applications. No UN member state recognizes it, and its passport offers zero visa-free destinations.

Of all the attempts to start your own country, Liberland has the cleverest legal theory. The Croatia-Serbia border dispute leaves odd pockets along the Danube that each side’s preferred line assigns to the other. Czech politician Vít Jedlička spotted the largest one, argued it was terra nullius (land belonging to no one), and planted a flag on 13 April 2015, Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Croatia calls the claim provocative but pointedly declines to claim the land itself. Serbia shrugs. That ambiguity is Liberland’s entire oxygen supply.

For eight years, Croatian police kept everyone off the territory, arresting visitors (including Jedlička) for illegal border crossing. Then Croatia joined the Schengen zone in January 2023 and the hard border dissolved. Settlers moved in, built solar arrays, a well, and Starlink-connected cabins, and stayed for months. Croatia’s answer arrived that September. A state forestry company, escorted by police, demolished the camp while one settler played the violin. Jedlička was arrested and banned from Croatia for five years. The settlers came back anyway. Since late 2023, police have unofficially tolerated visitors arriving on foot or by bicycle, while still blocking boats from the Serbian side. The village that actually functions, complete with cottages, sauna, and jet ski rentals, sits across the river in Apatin, Serbia. Even Liberland’s 11th anniversary summit in April 2026 was held on the Serbian bank.

Then there is the crypto-state layer. Liberland runs its government on a blockchain, holds its reserves mostly in Bitcoin, and elects its congress by token stake. Justin Sun, the Tron billionaire, has been elected Prime Minister five consecutive times without any evidence he has ever set foot on the territory. In June 2026, the project fired its own Secretary of Technology for seizing control of the chain’s admin keys and blocking the president’s voting power for months. A trustless system, it turns out, still trusts whoever holds the sudo key. You could not script a neater lesson.

How to Get Liberland Citizenship (and What It Costs)

Liberland citizenship requires an application at liberland.org plus 5,000 Liberland Merit (LLM) tokens. That works out to roughly $5,000 at the token’s face pricing. A premium package marketed around the 2026 anniversary runs to €10,999. Applicants must show a clean criminal record and sign up to the live-and-let-live ethos. Roughly 1,200 people have actually completed the paid process, against those 700,000+ claimed applications.

Every few months a client asks us whether Liberland citizenship can anchor their plan B. Our answer has not changed in ten years: treat it as a donation to a cause you believe in, not a travel document. On the Passport Freedom Index, a passport is only as good as the doors it opens, and Liberland’s opens none. The people who come to us wanting a startup-country passport almost always leave with something duller and far more useful: a second citizenship from a state that actually exists.

What Happened to Próspera in Honduras?

Próspera, a privately governed low-tax zone on the Honduran island of Roatán, lost its legal foundation in stages. Honduras repealed the ZEDE law in 2022, and the Supreme Court ruled the zones unconstitutional in 2024. It continues operating under a claimed 50-year legal stability agreement while its parent company pursues an ICSID arbitration claim of nearly $11 billion against Honduras.

Próspera matters because it is the closest anyone has come to making this work. Instead of claiming sovereignty, it rented autonomy. Honduras’s 2013 ZEDE law allowed special zones with their own courts, regulators, and tax systems inside Honduran territory. Próspera’s founders, led by Venezuelan-American Erick Brimen and backed by Silicon Valley money including Peter Thiel’s Pronomos Capital orbit and, later, Coinbase Ventures, built exactly that on Roatán from 2021. Businesses there choose their own regulatory code from a menu of other jurisdictions. Taxes run at 1% on business revenue and 5% on personal income. Bitcoin circulates as an accepted unit of account, and you can even pay the zone’s taxes in it. E-residency costs $130 a year. The zone became a magnet for medical tourism that mainstream regulators would never allow. That includes the follistatin gene therapy famously taken by longevity influencer Bryan Johnson, priced from around $25,000 a shot.

Here’s the kicker: all of it stands on Honduran law, and Honduran law changed its mind. President Xiomara Castro campaigned against the zones as a sovereignty giveaway, and in April 2022 Congress repealed the ZEDE law unanimously. Not one vote in favour of the zones. The Supreme Court followed in 2024, declaring the regime unconstitutional. Próspera’s response was to sue Honduras through the ICSID investor-state system for roughly $10.8 billion. That figure approaches two-thirds of the national budget of one of the poorest countries in the Americas. In February 2025, the tribunal waved the case forward over Honduras’s objections. It is still running as of mid-2026, and the US State Department has taken enough interest to publish reports on American investment in the zone.

The November 2025 Honduran election then flipped the board again. Nasry Asfura, a pro-business, Trump-endorsed candidate, won narrowly and promptly reversed Honduras’s withdrawal from the ICSID system. That signals warmer weather for investor protections. What it does not signal, and nobody should pretend otherwise, is a restored ZEDE law. Próspera’s future currently rests on an arbitration panel, a friendly-for-now president, and a stability agreement the host state’s own top court has rejected.

When the ZEDE repeal hit in 2022, we spent that week fielding calls from people who had built their entire offshore plan around one special zone. The lesson we now repeat to every client: a zone is a product, not a country. Enjoy the product, but keep your second residency and your banking in jurisdictions that do not depend on a single election in Tegucigalpa. Ironically, the boring route next door outperforms the exciting one. Honduras citizenship through ordinary fast-track naturalization gets you a real, recognized passport from the very country whose experimental zone may not survive its next constitutional crisis. And if you are a US citizen eyeing Próspera’s 5% income tax, remember the IRS taxes your worldwide income wherever you live; no zone on Earth changes that.

What Is a Network State?

A network state is an online community with shared values that first builds cohesion and crowdfunded wealth digitally, then acquires physical territory, and finally negotiates for diplomatic recognition. The term comes from Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book The Network State. It inverts the old playbook: community first, land later, sovereignty last.

Srinivasan, the Indian-American former Coinbase CTO and Andreessen Horowitz partner, looked at the wreckage described above and drew a sharp conclusion: everyone had tried to get land before they had people. His fix was to build the nation in the cloud, a million aligned members with a shared treasury, and only then go shopping for territory, the way a company negotiates tax breaks. Vitalik Buterin blurbed the book. A whole ecosystem followed. Praxis raised hundreds of millions in claimed commitments for a city it has yet to break ground on. Pop-up communities like Vitalia appeared on Próspera’s own turf. Dozens of smaller “startup societies” copied the template.

The Network School: Kicked Out of Malaysia, Courted by Kazakhstan

The thesis got its first real-world stress test in Forest City, Malaysia, a $100 billion Chinese-built development planned for 700,000 residents that attracted barely a hundredth of that. Into this discounted ghost city Srinivasan placed the Network School in September 2024: part university, part co-living compound, part proto-nation. Four thousand people applied for the first 128 places. Members paid roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a month all-in, heard lectures from Buterin and Bryan Johnson, and treated the whole thing as the seed of a future country. Malaysia had even wrapped Forest City in a special financial zone with 0-5% corporate tax to sweeten the location.

It lasted 22 months. In July 2026, social media allegations that Israeli nationals were living at the school collided with Malaysia’s policy of refusing entry to Israeli passport holders. The Prime Minister vowed immediate deportations and inspectors swept the campus. Immigration officials confirmed the members’ documents were valid. The local council still revoked the school’s business licence on technicalities within days. The US State Department summoned Malaysia’s ambassador over an expelled American-Israeli dual citizen. None of it mattered. The school was gone.

What happened next had no precedent in this entire sixty-year story. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence signed a five-year memorandum with Srinivasan within about 24 hours of the shutdown. The offer: expedited visas and a new campus, with talk of a “Network City” at Burabai and future expansion into Alatau City, the crypto-friendly zone President Tokayev is building near Almaty. For the first time, a startup society was not begging for tolerance; governments were bidding for it. Kazakhstan wants the talent so badly it launched its own golden visa to pull in foreign capital, and courting Balaji’s crowd is part of the same play. Malaysia, for its part, proved a point we make constantly about residency in Malaysia or anywhere else: your right to stay is only as strong as the politics beneath it.

Notice what the network state has quietly become, though. Members hold Malaysian, now Kazakh, visas. The “state” holds a licence and a lease. That is not sovereignty. That is a subscription community with excellent negotiating leverage. Its wealthy members still solve personal freedom the old way, which is why so many of the crypto rich quietly stack second passports while tweeting about exit.

Every Serious Attempt to Start Your Own Country, Compared

Strip away the manifestos and the field looks like this in August 2026. No competitor list we have seen puts current status, recognition, and joining cost side by side.

One pattern jumps out of that table. The projects still breathing are precisely the ones that gave up on sovereignty, formally or quietly, and settled for operating inside someone else’s legal system. The pure secessions are all dead. Not even close to a coincidence.

Why New Libertarian Countries Fail

New libertarian countries fail because sovereignty is the one thing money cannot buy. Existing states control all viable territory, refuse recognition to protect their own borders, and can revoke any lease, licence, or legal zone the moment politics shifts. Minerva lasted five months, Rose Island 55 days, and Próspera’s legal basis survived just nine years.

Dig into six decades of attempts to start your own country and four failure modes repeat with grim regularity.

The host always holds the trump card. Every workaround model borrows legality from a real state, and what a legislature grants, a legislature can repeal. Honduras erased the ZEDE framework in one vote. Malaysia erased the Network School in one council meeting. French Polynesia dropped seasteading in one news cycle. The projects call this betrayal. A lawyer would call it the terms and conditions.

Recognition is a members-only club. States that recognize a self-declared nation invite their own separatists to try the same trick, so nobody moves first. Liberland’s decade of diplomacy has produced friendly meetings, a Somaliland memorandum, and zero recognitions. Without recognition there are no embassies, no banking relationships, and no passport worth carrying. The numbers don’t lie: Liberland’s travel document opens zero borders while ordinary passports on the Passport Freedom Index open well over a hundred.

The economics never close. Ocean platforms cost more per square metre than Manhattan and produce nothing. Micronations end up monetizing souvenirs instead: titles, coins, tokens, citizenship packages. When your national budget depends on selling the idea of the nation, you have a brand, not a state. Sealand knows this and leans in gracefully. Others have lost the plot entirely and drifted into passport fraud, as Sealand’s own 1990s imposters proved with 150,000 fake documents.

Libertarians are hard to govern. The people these projects attract are selected for refusing authority, then asked to accept it from a founder. Liberland’s own government fired its technology chief in 2026 for seizing the blockchain’s admin keys. Sealand’s 1978 coup came from its own appointed prime minister. Build a nation of exit-minded individualists and you should not be shocked when they exit on you.

The Smarter Move: Rent Your Freedom From Countries That Already Work

Ask what these founders actually wanted and the list is short: low taxes, personal liberty, hard-money finance, and an exit from their home government’s reach. Every item on that list is available today, legally, from real countries competing for mobile people, and none of it requires you to start your own country. No flag design needed.

That competition is the quiet story of the 2020s. El Salvador sells citizenship for a $1 million Bitcoin donation and built its brand on crypto sovereignty. Kazakhstan is dangling visas at an entire startup society. Gulf states, Caribbean islands, and half of Latin America run residency programs that would have sounded like libertarian fiction in 1972. Jurisdictional competition arrived, just not in the form the seasteaders drew. Governments became the vendors.

Most people who come to us dreaming about startup societies leave with a portfolio that looks boring beside a Danube flag-raising and works far better in practice. A Paraguay or Uruguay residency for the tax base. An offshore company for the business. A second passport in progress for the insurance. Total cost: a fraction of one Liberland premium citizenship package, with every piece recognized by every border guard on Earth. If you are weighing paid citizenship routes, our guide on how to evaluate citizenship by investment programs applies the same due diligence we run for clients.

None of this means the movement is worthless. Próspera proved a 21st-century city can run on a 1% revenue tax. Liberland proved thousands will pay real money for a flag that matches their values. Balaji proved governments will now bid for aligned communities. The dreamers are shifting the market for governance itself, and mobile individuals capture that value today by arbitraging between real jurisdictions while the visionaries fight arbitration panels and city councils.

Start Your Own Country: Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

Sixty years of trying to start your own country has produced one gift-shop principality and one unrecognized flag on a floodplain. Add a charter city fighting for its life in arbitration, and a nomadic campus that just swapped Malaysia for Kazakhstan. It has produced no new sovereign state. That record is not an argument against the dream; it is a wake-up call about the method.

The founders keep proving, at spectacular personal cost, that governance is a market. You do not need to build the product. You need to be a customer who can walk. Two or three well-chosen residencies, a real second passport, and structures in stable jurisdictions deliver the freedom Minerva promised, at retail prices, starting this year. Weigh the trade-offs the same way we help clients do it in our guide to dual citizenship pros and cons. Then, if you want to see how free your current setup really is, the Freedom Score below takes five minutes.