Cyberdiplomacy: Can Smart Contracts Govern Cyberspace?

Transcript

[Music] Hello, welcome. Happy to see you here. So, we're going to talk about cyber diplomacy and we're going to see if uh smart contracts can govern cyerspace. First question for you, who knows about the concept of network state? So great. So you you already have the basis of the of the subject.

So I'm going to uh read you this quote of the cipher punk manifesto. We cannot expect governments, corporations or other large faceless organizations to grant us privacy. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. This quote is very important because we are in 2025 and this sentence is from uh 19 93 and we can see that we are in the problem.

Actually this is uh the following uh topic of the last year. Last year I talked about DAO and Micronation and I talk about uh participatory sovereignty. Why participatory sovereignty? Because with digital we can own our own territory because today we think about digital as tools. But digital is not tools. Digital is a is a territory and this territory has to be the territory of communities and uh and uh has to be owned by the users.

Why am I talking about this? Am I talking about this? Because data is digital oil and we know it because we work in the digital field and we are aware of that. But we have to do education for others because others are not aware of this and this is uh in our um in uh our um community that we have to on board the others. So in this digital territories we can have individual sovereignty and we don't need to have physical territory to organize ourselves and we can have a participatory sovereignty because our

territory is digital. So we have to build a territory by the community for the community. in um in uh 2023 uh we build with one of my friend the Burman Island DAO. This is a micronation and to build this micronation we claimed a territory on Google map and this is also uh for us a way to act uh a map. So we can act a map by just claiming a territory and saying this is ours. So this territory is virtually is virtually in a sense that this is just a big rock

on a map but this is also a symbol of our um of our actions and of our project. So the main question is is it possible to build a public state blockchain governed by by its citizens as a national digital commons. Citizens today want uh to become an auditor of the actions of companies and state in order to fight against excesses of domination. Why? Because today if we talk about sovereignty we have three states that have a real sovereignty. US, China and Russia. So are we all the rest

of the world just digital colonies? We have to think about this. So how to make our state, our community and us as just as just individuals people independent and free to organize ourselves and to uh have action to um to make us available to reach our own goals. Experiment in the future of governance. We're here today. That means we have the real world. We have the virtual world.

But these words today are independent. It means that when we are not in the real world, our identity continue to live in the in the virtual world. So we have to find a way to govern all this uh in a in the future. So are we natives of a brand new territory? So a territory that is decentralized mean that the territory is for everyone and we can uh take actions and uh and um and we can organize that ourselves without uh having a territory in the real life and it is very

important to us to keep in mind that digital is a territory and digital is not tools. That mean we always talk about business in digital but okay there is business but if we don't talk about politics and geopolitics we are going to be cooked. So sovereignty for uh for every uh entities in this world we need sovereignty. So there is nations there, there is corporations, communities, avatars and even even AI agents because AI agents are going to uh to live with us in the in the digital territory and so they also need rules

and they also need regulations uh because we need to have justice in our uh big territory. If a single entity can shut it down, then it's not truly decentralized. Why uh do I say that? I say that because in the blockchain uh you know that we have public blockchain, we have hybrid blockchain and we have uh private blockchain. So if we have a private blockchain, this is not a territory that is uh that was made or built for the community and we need to organize ourselves to develop blockchain on the public uh blockchain to have something

that is uh really for us and governed by us with our own rules. So classical diplomacy represents states and their citizens and cyber diplomacy will have to represent protocols, users and even agentic AI because these are going to live in our territory. We can have sovereignty with blockchain. So monetary sovereignty with Bitcoin, organizational sovereignty with Ethereum and interoperable sovereignty with uh Polcadot. So we have all the tools to make uh this world ours before uh having it uh taken by the big

corporation and the states. So centralized vs decentralized governance we have to go from leaders to builders. We are the builders. We have to go from people to avatars. That mean we have uh to find solution to protect our anonymity. We have to go laws from smart contracts because with smart contracts there is uh no decision taken arbitrary and uh we have to find a way to have an economy that is traceable and that is viable.

So for this we have to think uh of three layers. The first layer is the protocol, the second is governance and the third is legal. If we think about these three layers, we can build something strong for us and we can be uh independent from the big corporations and from the states and for justice we also have tools. We have tools for everything today. We don't have a very major technology. So we experiment today but we have to keep on experimenting to develop all the tools we have and to find the right way to create our own governance in our own

territory. So we had the presentation of Claros just uh before my my um my intervention uh so you you already know about this and you also have Lex Dao that is a community of legal experts developing smart contracts. So smart contracts can uh help us um find all the solution to create our own world because all that we have today in the physical world is going to be in the digital world. And the problem we have is that people that want power knows about these things and are organized to take the power. But we want that our technology

uh make us be independent. So we have to experiment now with all the tools we have. So regulation is an art of protocol design. We think we have to think about regulation and about law first because we also have the problem of cyber security and if you we don't have smart contracts that are rightcoded it can be very dangerous for our territory. uh I will give you two examples of governance uh one centralized and one decentralized.

So the first one is Estonia because Estonia is a digital state and it's a very little uh country very little state. So they can experiment and they are experiencing egovernance uh since uh 2012 and they have an administration on a blockchain a private blockchain but this is centralized but this is important because this proves that uh we can do a very um ambitious uh project on uh this technology. So this is a private blockchain. So this is centralized but

that shows that this is possible. And then another project but this one on a public blockchain and this is a project in Colombia and this is a blockchain against corruption. And this blockchain is on Ethereum. And this is a blockchain uh to um uh combate uh corruption uh in uh in a in business. And so this uh blockchain can have a traceability of the the business that is made and find when there's a corruption or when there's uh information suspicious.

This topic is uh a topic that is uh very uh how to say in French we say avangardist. That means for the moment uh we are not going to see a territory fully governed by uh smart contracts because we are not ready. I mean in an education point of view but also in in the experiment there's experimentation but not that much because this is already complicated for us and we are in the ecosystem but we have to talk about it. We have to experiment and we have uh to on board uh the next generations

because we can uh see uh I mean a more equitable uh world uh thanks to the digital if we onboard the next generation. And I just put this here because this is a wink from Reddit because in 2016 uh there were there was a group that wanted to buy an island and to build a DIO for Ethereum Micronation. And I find it funny because when I talk about micronations, we uh usually try to develop little community to experiment

and we try to find territories uh very little territories and the island is the is the best place for a little community that want to experiment politics and geopolitics with technology. So we're probably already in a simulation. Who knows? Uh so this is a very important uh topic but there is also a lot of scams. Uh because a micronation is has also um a political purpose and sometimes you can um you you can be fooled by some project that are not really ethical. So do your own

research and if you have any question I'm here to to respond. [Applause] Yes. How you enforce policing and and will you have a digital police in the future or will you enforce judgment and stuff like that? No, there there is digital police but I think the the digital police is um the community that is deciding and the the real question who

is coding the rules and who is in charge of all of this and we're going to have a lot of protocols on the digital territory and we're going to have smart contracts that are going to put the rules for small communities and for a large community but also some rules there and some protocols from the state and I think that um uh the governance will be automatic and we're going to have a police but an automatic police. So it's not like in the real world we can have arbitrary uh decision based on the context. We can have it

also in the digital world and we have tools like claros for example and the community will judge if the situation uh is going to have a sanction or not but the difference is that this is decided by the community and not a centralized entity. So it's um I mean we c with the digital we can do the worst and we can do the best and uh in the real world we can have authoritarian police and this polic is going to be fair and on the digital the the the aim is to have more justice with people that can decide from the context and the

majority of the decision is from the majority of the votes. Thank you. Is there other questions? No. Ah, yeah. Okay. There's there is what got you interested in network states to begin with? Sorry, can you repeat? What was your original interest in network states? What caused the interest? Okay. uh my original interest in network state is uh because I know that the digital is a territory and if it's a territory that means this is

political and I don't want to live in a world that is authoritarian and I also know the the purpose of guys like Curtis Yarvin Peter the Elon Musk etc and I don't want to be dominated by these people and these people are very rich they are very intelligent. They know the system. They know the digital. So I don't want to be um uh on their in their world and uh oppressed by their vision of the world and my vision of the world is very I could say socialist in a sense that I think we are a community of human and we have uh to build our own world with fair uh rules with justice and I

think that if we let this territory to the dominance. We are going to be uh completely uh uh they're going to take power over us and we are uh we are lost in this world. Uh hello, sorry for my English is not perfect. I'm Italian. I'd like to to know if your protocol or network could be helpful for women that live in a sort of a cage such as Afghanistan, Iran and because for them it's difficult to have access to internet or they do maybe they

hide them to do it especially in Afghanistan they uh they don't have any type of access they cannot study they cannot go to school how can we help Dam. Thank you. Uh I think it's difficult because everything uh begins with education and you have to know at least one person uh who can help you develop a governance on a blockchain because this is not an easy thing to do. You you have to know about digital, you have to know about decentralized protocol, you have to know how how to code etc. So you need to find someone in uh every re

revolution we have to organize ourselves to find the good profile for uh the the ultimate aim. We can have one question. No, there is or there's not. No. [Applause] [Music]