“Farewell to Westphalia” Explores Blockchain as a Model for Post-Nation-State Governance
[PRESS RELEASE – Zug, Switzerland, September 19th, 2025, Chainwire]
Logos Press Engine has introduced the discharge of “Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance”, a new guide by Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow, out there in print and on-line beginning September 18. The publication examines the historic foundations of the trendy nation-state and argues that its governance mannequin, formalized in 1648, is not suited to modern digital realities. In its place, the authors introduce the idea of the “cyberstate”, a new political mannequin enabled by blockchain expertise and voluntary digital communities.
Jarrad Hope, Founder of Logos, a motion and expertise stack devoted to preserving digital freedom, and Peter Ludlow, Director of the Research Institute for Philosophy and Technology, are releasing their radical collaborative mission, Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance, on September sixteenth. Published by the Logos Press Engine, the guide argues that the trendy nation state has change into out of date, with its successor mendacity in a shocking place: the blockchain.
Hope and Ludlow envision a future belonging to cyberstates and communities organised round blockchain, new political entities tailor-made to the digital age, and the more and more international points we face at the moment. These entities leverage blockchain expertise, the identical infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, to enshrine belief, accountability, and civil liberties, whereas decreasing corruption and the ability of unelected intermediaries in any respect ranges of human coordination.
The idea of a cyberstate, first launched by early cypherpunk communities, is now receiving renewed consideration due to current developments in blockchain expertise. The authors outline them as “on-line communities”, which “perform capabilities often related to conventional nation states”. They may present safety, help with healthcare, sponsor arts and tradition, or help enterprise by way of negotiating commerce agreements and inspiring enterprise improvement.
Unlike nation states, nonetheless, the guide explains that cyberstates must be organised round shared values and voluntary membership relatively than “arbitrary political boundaries”. They describe them as “geographically unencumbered” with a cyberstate’s territory outlined by “its footprint in our on-line world”–“limitless in scope and scale”.
Furthermore, and most radically, cyberstates would conduct all governance actions utilizing blockchain expertise, a shared, digital ledger completely recording data throughout a community of computer systems. Just as anybody can view the total historical past of cryptocurrency transactions on such a ledger, so too would all votes, insurance policies, and communications undertaken by a cyberstate be viewable on one too, guaranteeing full transparency.
“Governance, whether or not it comes within the type of public governments or different types of human governance, is completely important to each facet of our lives. The hassle is that it typically appears to be damaged”, the authors write within the guide’s opening pages. However, for Hope and Ludlow, “crypto shines a shiny mild on actions that at the moment happen behind curtains and in smoke-filled rooms with little to no accountability”, offering the “instruments that make authorities exercise clear and immutable and our private enterprise private and personal.”- Hope and Ludlow.
“Farewell to Westphalia makes it crystal clear that the nation-state is not the perfect governance system for at the moment’s digital society. More vital than formulating the issue is to develop an alternate societal governance system that serves residents, and that is precisely the principle power of the guide. It imagines a future society constructed on blockchain expertise, creating what’s desperately wanted at the moment: a human society.” – Bob de Wit, writer of Society 4.0 and Emeritus Professor of Strategic Leadership at Nyenrode Business University.
“It’s a compelling manifesto on the way forward for governance. A critique of the nation-state and a visionary look into blockchain-based political techniques. It’s thoughts boggling how well-researched and multidisciplinary it’s.” – Frederico Ast (Kleros Founder).
The collaboration of those two foundational voices in post-nation-state concept is devoted to Julian Assange and the reminiscence of pioneering developer and activist Hal Finney. As such, Farewell to Westphalia is steeped in cypherpunk and hacktivist tradition, establishing itself as a necessary textual content for the way forward for such beliefs. It calls for critical consideration from anybody within the intersection of expertise, politics, and human freedom.
As governments worldwide grapple with declining public belief and the challenges of governing in an more and more digital world, Farewell to Westphalia presents a well timed and provocative roadmap for the longer term. Hope and Ludlow’s imaginative and prescient of blockchain-powered communities and cyberstates goes additional than theoretical hypothesis, marking out a blueprint for a future the place communities looking for alternate options to conventional governance constructions can construct new networks that serve their wants. Readers can study extra at https://logos.co/farewell-to-westphalia
Farewell to Westphalia shall be out there in print and on-line on September 18th, marking a pivotal contribution to ongoing conversations about governance within the digital age. It is printed by Logos Press Machine and shall be licensed below Creative Commons to encourage free remixing, redistribution, translation, and copying, with attribution to the authors.
Readers can study extra at https://logos.co/farewell-to-westphalia
About Jarrad Hope
Jarrad Hope is a pioneering developer in blockchain expertise, as nicely as being one of many earliest contributors to Ethereum; he has since based Logos to construct digital techniques to shield civil liberties, digital freedom, and virtually help the constructing of future cyberstates.
About Peter Ludlow
Peter Ludlow is a thinker specialising in linguistics, digital applied sciences, and digital communities. He edited the basic MIT Press anthology Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (2001), which explored the early political constructions rising on the web within the Nineties as laboratories for new societies and governance.
About Logos
Logos describes itself as “an open supply motion to create a self-sovereign community state”. It supplies a decentralised expertise stack that permits the formation of autonomous digital territories. Logos embeds privateness straight into its expertise, guaranteeing transactions and governance stay censorship-resistant and confidential. In doing so, Logos is working in direction of the cypherpunk imaginative and prescient of enshrining consumer sovereignty and privateness in expertise by default.
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