Another Tech Billionaire-Backed Urban Project Gets $525 Million in Funding

A bizarre tech-fueled ideological movement is growing. Proponents of the “Network State” seek to create privately owned, anarcho-capitalist, “autonomous” cities—the likes of which are the urban planning equivalent of cryptocurrency. It’s basically a high-tech version of Galt’s Gulch, the utopian libertarian society in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that rich nerds have long lusted after.

One of the more prominent developments connected to the Network State movement is a proposed new city dubbed “Praxis.” Dryden Brown, the 28-year-old founder and CEO behind the project, recently said that the urban development plan was an effort to “create a more heroic, more interesting place than anything we’ve seen.” Brown hopes to eventually create his new city in the Caribbean, though he hasn’t revealed a specific location yet and the details of the project have been kept under wraps.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Praxis project had attained $525 million in new funding. A big part of that funding—$500 million—comes from a crypto investment firm dubbed GEM Digital. The money from GEM is being offered as part of something called a “drawdown financing facility,” a kind of loan wherein capital is dispersed at different periods throughout a particular deal. As part of this business arrangement, GEM will get crypto tokens from Praxis that amount to some approximation of ownership in the urban development deal. Money from the drawdown will be released to Praxis after it lists those crypto tokens on a public crypto exchange, the Journal reports. Praxis also recently secured another $25 million from financial lender Arch Lending, the paper writes.

Despite now having access to hundreds of millions of dollars, it should be noted that Praxis is still basically just an idea. And it’s an idea being championed by an Ayn-Rand-loving guy (Brown) who, by his own admission (as reported by the New York Times), dropped out of college, somehow landed a job as a hedge fund analyst, was fired from said hedge fund, and then, at some point in his mid-twenties, decided that his life’s mission should be to build a new city. Despite having a limited list of accomplishments to his name, Brown seems to have lived a fairly charmed life that has involved parties, travel, hobnobbing with the 1 percent, and vague business deals.

That would seem to make him a relatively good fit for the “Network State” movement, which is full of people who have big dreams but don’t seem tethered particularly tightly to reality. For instance, another advocate for the movement is Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, who recently started his own school, the likes of which is dedicated to teaching people about the tenets of the Network State philosophy. “California Forever,” the quixotic effort to create a new, privately owned city on thousands of acres of Bay Area farmland, has also been accused of being part of the movement.

The “Network State” worldview is obsessed with cryptocurrency and sees speculative digital assets as the key to the weird high-tech future it wants to see manifest. Such virulent, closely held beliefs lead to utopia-flecked sentences, culled from the Praxis website, like this one: “The next wave of crypto adoption, on the path to crypto civilization, requires crypto infrastructure’s integration into the core functions of society.” Or this one: “Large aligned communities in Network States will use on-chain infrastructure to power their payments, contracts, identity, communications, and physical infrastructure.” As you can see, we are dealing with a rare breed of political fanaticism here.

This would be more funny than scary were it not for the fact that the people backing this movement have so much money that they have effectively begun to hijack the U.S. political system. The crypto industry has poured money into this election cycle, accounting for nearly half of the total corporate cash spent on political action committees this year. With that kind of dough, the crypto industry has sought to underwrite the U.S. presidential election (with ample cash thrown at its favored candidate, Donald Trump), while also taking aim at its political enemies—namely, Democrats, but they’re slowly moving to the other side.