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Techno-Utopia Rises in Malaysia's $100 Billion Forest City Flop
Balaji Srinivasan wants to design a new kind of nation state, and he’s making a troubled megaproject a testbed for his ideas.
Forest City, Malaysia in August.
Photographer: Aparna Nori/Bloomberg
By Ryan Weeks
August 29, 2025 at 7:00 AM GMT+8
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Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
In a hotel-turned-campus on a reclaimed island in Malaysia, crypto and tech entrepreneurs are building software, chomping down Australian prime ribeye, hitting the gym — and getting schooled in a radical blueprint for creating new sovereign states from scratch.They have descended on Forest City to attend Network School, the brainchild of former Coinbase Inc. executive and The Network Stateauthor Balaji Srinivasan. In this troubled megaproject once envisaged to house some 50 times its current population, they’re conducting a real-life experiment of sorts with Srinivasan’s vision of “startup societies” defined less by historical territory than shared beliefs in technology, cryptocurrency and light regulation.