The Terminus Fund
If you can start a new company, why not a new country?
Today, we launch the Terminus Fund with $100,000 in support for sovereign communities and the tools that make them possible. Inspired by the Network State movement and the idea of Terminus as a civilization archive, we’re backing internet communities that materialize in the real world and grow into new societies. From monthlong villages and popup cities to permanent territory, we support opt-in experiments that can be shared, forked, and scaled.
We believe Artizen itself is core infrastructure for network states. To peacefully exit failing systems and build new ones, communities need a way to pool capital, coordinate priorities, and fund the creative work they depend on. That’s the layer Artizen provides: social technology—curation and game mechanics—combined with financial technology that lets communities fund what matters most.
My fascination with Network States traces back to a single afternoon in 2013. I was sitting in a cold auditorium at YC’s Startup School when a talk cracked open my brain.
Startup School was exactly what you’d expect. Smart people. Sensible advice. Nothing radical.
Then Balaji took the stage and gave a talk called Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit.
It hit me like a thunderbolt.
If you can start a new company, why not start a new country?
When a system is failing—whether a corporation or a nation—you have two options. Voice: reform it from within. Or exit: leave and build something new. Exit isn’t quitting. It’s creation. Forking. Founding. Opting out peacefully instead of fighting.
Just a few weeks earlier, my childhood best friend and roommate, Ross Ulbricht, had been arrested for creating the Silk Road. I was still reeling.
Inspired by the idea of what Ross had built—consenting adults trading without permission from the state—but heartbroken by the outcome. It felt like proof that trying to radically reinvent the system will end only in your destruction.
But Balaji offered another path.
Not through violence. Not through revolution. But by building new opt-in societies so compelling that people freely choose them.
That’s the promise of the Network State. Communities form online around shared values. If they’re strong enough, they gather in the real world. Most fail. Some persist. A few harden into institutions, territory, and eventually international recognition.
But there’s a piece of this story that often gets skipped.
None of it works without a way for communities to pool money and fund the work they care about.
Culture doesn’t appear by accident. Tools don’t build themselves. Experiments cost money. Creativity is the engine—but funding is the constraint. Without aligned capital, sovereignty stays theoretical.
That’s the problem Artizen exists to solve.
For a long time, I thought Artizen and the Network State were adjacent ideas. They aren’t. Artizen is core infrastructure for the Network State movement. We build the social and financial technology that lets internet-native communities coordinate capital and fund their own priorities.
That’s not just useful for artists or scientists or builders. It’s foundational for any sovereign community. If people are going to peacefully exit failing systems, the alternative has to function. Every real community needs funding that works.
That’s why we’re launching the Terminus Fund.
We’re already backing projects like Grandmatopia in Arizona, stewarding land and artists in a highland sanctuary; Ipê Village in Brazil, prototyping internet-native governance in a month-long pop-up city; Agartha, a solarpunk R&D lab mapping and incubating regenerative communities; and Regenera, a living systems laboratory launching experimental sites across Europe and the United States. Different contexts. Same pattern: organize online, gather in the real world, and test new systems.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Terminus wasn’t about ruling the empire. It was about preserving knowledge, running experiments, and forking civilization when the center became too brittle to survive.
That’s why the Terminus Fund exists.
And why Artizen exists.
Not to fight the old system.
Not to reform it from within.
But to build something better.
Fund alternatives.
Make exit real.
Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen