Blue Frontiers is the environmental-technology company building the world’s first sustainable floating islands in French Polynesia. For this the organization is working in partnership with Startup Societies Foundation. The initiative takes the form of a contest which aims to encourage the creation of additional Special Economic Zones in different parts of the world that are concerned about sea level rise.
With the contest, the winning start-up will receive a prize of $100,000 and the potential contract to build a seastead in their home country. Furthermore, nine runners-up will be given an all-expenses paid trip to the fully-operational floating pavilion in the Netherlands. This type of seasteading was built by Blue21, the architects of Blue Frontiers.
Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads. The term ‘seastead’ is a combination of the words sea and homesteading. The concept is not only technological; there is a political dimension as well. Thus is because an underlying principle of seasteads is to be placed outside of any territory claimed by any government.
According to Joe McKinney, Founder of Startup Societies Foundation, in a communication sent to Digital Journal: “The idea is to encourage innovative entrepreneurs, anywhere in the world, to build government and community support to create a SeaZone, a floating Special Economic Zone and bring $60 million in investment to their country.”
The contest is in line with Blue Frontiers’ primary goal of creating fully self-sufficient, sustainable floating cities with special legal frameworks based on blockchain technology, favorable to floating communities.
The success of creating a political independent seastead has yet to be realized since no one has yet created a structure on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. For Blue Frontiers, this is their anarcho-capitalist aim, as they state on their website:
“When our homes and businesses can float to locations we choose, we can relatively easily rearrange our cities and sail our residence to other locations. Governments will no longer have a monopoly on the space where citizens live and businesses conduct their commercial activities. Instead governments will need to act like service providers, competing to attract citizens and businesses. Consequently, we will have an ever-evolving marketplace for government in a decentralized world.”
Further to the project, Blue Frontiers has recently announced the creation of Varyon, which is a cryptocurrency that will power the economies of the new floating cities.
