US Attacks in Venezuela and Greenland Lay Groundwork for Billionaire Fiefdoms [View all]

https://truthout.org/articles/us-attacks-in-venezuela-and-greenland-lay-groundwork-for-billionaire-fiefdoms/

On January 3, 2026, Tim Stern, a German investor, was sleeping peacefully at his Venezuela residence when the phone on his small bedside table suddenly went wild. As he explained to Timothy Allen of the “Free Cities Podcast,” calls streamed in immediately after news broke that the United States had bombed Caracas in the early hours of the morning. Within hours, it was clear that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had been captured and was being sent to the United States — a change, Stern said in the podcast, that “is going to be the start of an absolute bonanza here in Venezuela.”

Oil interests were at the center of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela; U.S. President Donald Trump has made clear his intentions to reclaim nationalized Venezuelan oil for U.S. companies and to oversee the sale of Venezuelan crude. However, Stern is not involved in the oil industry. Instead, he’s the co-founder of a blockchain-based residential settlement called CryptoCity, a luxury real estate development spanning 35 hectares on Venezuela’s Margarita Island. Margarita, an island with duty-free port status and a population of around 490,000, depends largely on the tourism industry and has suffered hardships due to Venezuela’s economic crisis. However, CryptoCity is promoted to German and other foreign investors as a highly exclusive enclave. It boasts of luxury living for “high net-worth” entrepreneurs fully vetted and selected through a rigorous process. All transactions in the zone must be made in crypto, and residents form part of a “brain pool” aimed at generating joint business ventures through a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

CryptoCity is one example of how Trump’s foreign policy is benefitting a venture-capital fueled private city and “network state” movement. The project is featured on the page of the Free Cities Foundation, a leading private city promotor led by German economist Titus Gebel that has also championed the crypto-libertarian movement’s flagship project, a self-governing jurisdiction in Honduras called the Próspera ZEDE (Economic Development and Employment Zone). According to Stern, property in Margarita sold so rapidly after the U.S.’s attack on January 3 that their company was running out of apartments to sell. Property values shot up, properties for $20,000-$30,000 were nowhere to be found, and CryptoCity experienced an influx of investors interested in visiting the island, he maintained.

While libertarians have long fantasized about sovereign, “free-market” enclaves, a movement for so-called private cities, built in highly autonomous special jurisdictions, gained new momentum after the 2008 economic crisis. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is one of the most prominent backers of the movement. The billionaire first backed the Seasteading Institute — an organization promoting ocean colonization — and then VC firm Pronomos Capital, an early investor in Próspera. In 2022, crypto investor Balaji Srinivasan took the tech-futurist and land-hungry movement to the next level, coining the idea of the “network state.” A network state refers to an online community that pools capital, forms a blockchain “nation,” and then crowdsources land and exploits legal exemptions to build para-national territories.

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