The Building Blocks of a Digital Nation

What is a Nation?

The standard definition of “Nation” states:

“A Nation is a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language inhabiting a particular country or territory.”

Moreover, usually, a nation corresponds to a state that maintains the monopoly on the “legitimate use of violence” both internally and externally to grant the existence of the Nation-State itself… The State also plays a crucial role in Nations by enforcing law and property rights for citizens of the Nation-State.

It is important to note that a Nation is nothing physical; it is a “Fictional story,” a shared idea or collective illusion, just like religions, corporations, and the value of money. Despite not being physical, such fictional stories as Nations are very powerful coordination tools and allow for large-scale collaboration between individuals who do not know each other, going far beyond the limits of Dumbar’s number.

Authors like Jouval Harai argue that the capacity to build and believe in such fictional stories is what sets us, humans, apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. You can well convince a human to behave to go to heaven, die for a nation, or work in exchange for paper bills, but you can never convince a chimpanzee to behave to get bananas in heaven…

But let’s go back to Nations. Can we frame Open Metaverses based on Web3 as Digital Nations that exist over and beyond traditional Nation-State Leviathans? We will explore the components of such a Digital Nation compared to the “physical” one.

Let’s start with the objects and, in general, everything that exists in Open Metaverses. In traditional nations, most of the objects over which the Nation-State has jurisdiction are physical: territory, houses, people, goods, and so on…

The laws of physics grant physical objects’ existence, but what about digital ones? In Metaverses, there are no physical objects at all. Everything that exists is purely digital. But that raises a problem: how can we assure that something digital has a permanent existence if it just exists in a central database that can be erased with a click? And how can we enforce property rights on those non-permanent objects without the Nation-State protection?

The NFT standard grants the existence of digital objects in Open Metaverses. That also draws a clear line between Closed (central company-owned) Metaverses and Open (community-owned) Metaverses. In Open Metaverses, the NFT standard not only solves the permanent existence of objects — granted by the underlying blockchain infrastructure — but also defines and grants property rights.

In Physical Nation-States, property rights on assets are enforced through the monopoly on the use of legitimate violence; in Open Metaverses, such property rights are enforced by smart contracts. There are no courts, police, army, or jails in Open Digital Nations, just cold logic encoded in smart contracts and executed by a virtual machine.

Another fundamental component of a Nation is its territory. In traditional nations, the territory has a natural scarcity that makes it valuable and an object of dispute between Nations, which may claim ownership of it for different economic, political, and religious reasons. Such conflicts are usually resolved with violence and create a semi-stable equilibrium between nations.

There’s no such thing as a natural scarcity of territories in Open Metaverses. On the contrary, Metaverse territories are by definition abundant. There is no theoretical limit to the extension of a digital territory. The dimension of an Open Metaverse territory is defined by its architects and is guided by its citizens; scarcity is an artificial feature of such territories engineered to boost the value and/or usability of the Metaverse itself. As we saw for objects, the territory of Open Metaverses is also defined by the NFT standard. Ownership of virtual Lands in the Metaverse assigns publishing rights of anchoring content to such virtual locations, similar to what happens on the web with web domains.

But let’s talk about the most important actors of such digital nations: its citizens, the bearers of the collective illusion that hallucinates nations into existence.

In traditional nations, citizens are defined by the Nation-State that assigns identities to unique physical persons. Citizenship comes with rights and duties, and notably, as a citizen, you automatically become a taxable entity, a vital resource of the Nation-State.

Identity in a digital nation is not defined by a specific Metaverse platform nor by a traditional Nation-State. There is no unique identifier linked to a physical person in Open Metaverses — at least for the moment -. Wallet addresses define identities, and each physical person can create multiple addresses. And so, how do we define a citizen of an Open Metaverse? There is no straight answer to such a question, yet in general, a citizen of an Open Metaverse digital nation is someone who has a tokenized stake on such a platform. The tokenized stake can be represented by fungible tokens powering the economy of such a digital nation or NFTs representing publishing rights on its digital territory.

Such a stake also enables governance rights in digital nations. DAOs are the coordination tools of Open Metaverses, allowing tokenized stakeholders to control the evolution of the digital nation itself.

DAO governance is a very vast landscape of experimentation. Depending on how a DAO is structured and how the governance voting power is distributed among the community, it can range in the whole spectrum between an oligopoly and a direct democracy.

John Perry Barlow in 1996 published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”

where he eloquently wrote:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. […]

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.“

Back then, we did not have the tools to build such a “Civilization of the Mind” over and beyond Nation-State Leviathans. Today, thanks to the Web3 paradigm, we have an uncensorable foundation to build upon.

Let’s gather and build a brave new future in the Open Metaverse.