What happened to the crypto islands?

While the crypto industry has largely toned down its expectations around what can be accomplished with blockchains and decentralized finance, it was only a couple of years ago that multiple projects were suggesting that blockchains wouldn’t just help run smart cities, but would create entirely new autonomous regions in island nations.

So, what’s happened to these decentralized island concepts since the collapse of FTX and the long-drawn-out bear market? Let’s take a look.

Cryptoland

Cryptoland was a project purporting to offer soon-to-be-constructed homes on an island in Fiji, along with a planned hotel, conference center, pyramid, and other absurd lavish luxuries. Unfortunately for the project, the financing to purchase the island paradise fell through sometime in late 2021, with the island still being listed for sale for a mere $12 million today.

Cryptoland was run by a Spanish ‘entrepreneur, investor, and film producer’ named Maxim Olivier (Max Oliver) and Helena López, both of whom have since scrubbed the internet almost entirely of their existence.

However, the internet never really forgets, and traces of Cryptoland’s very creepy Twitter comments still haunt the cryptosphere, along with a podcast episode by PJ Vogt that details the intricacies of the project’s collapse.

Molly White, creator of web3isgoinggreat and Citation Needed, had also received a supposed cease and desist letter from the duo for “making statements about Cryptoland that are both false and misleading.” They didn’t clarify exactly what statements these were.

Of course, before the founders disappeared and the project disintegrated, they had enough time to create an NFT project that still exists — though the floor price has continued to plummet and there are simply no buyers to be found.

They also stated that the age of consent on Cryptoland would be when someone has reached “mental maturity.”

It’s safe to say that Cryptoland, as both an idea and a real-world proposal, is dead.

Satoshi Island

An alternative to Cryptoland, which began in 2021, is the Vanuatu-based ‘Satoshi Island,’ which still appears to be… sort of chugging along, though at a much slower pace than envisioned by the founders. A timeline on the project’s website states that “it is predicted that the first permanent population of Satoshi Islanders could move into their homes by the end of 2023 at the very earliest.”

Needless to say, 2023 has come and gone and three-quarters of the way through 2024 it seems as though the only ‘permanent resident’ is the project’s head of operations, Denys Troyak.

There could be a relatively simple reason for the delay outside of the fact that the crypto utopian concept — from home development to construction to shipping to a remote South Pacific island — hasn’t moved along as fast as was once imagined: the entire process of acquiring a piece of land for anyone who desires to live on a cryptocurrency island is incredibly complex and convoluted.

It goes something like this:

An individual must acquire Land NFT Deeds, which “provide the holder with the rights to mint Land NFTs from the area that the deeds represent.”
After these NFT deeds are acquired, the owner mints Land NFTs, which “gives a more specific geographical location of [the] actual block of land” and if an owner has any multiple of 10 of these Land NFTs, they have a sector that they can construct on. If you don’t control 10 land NFTs it means you’ll be working with another individual to decide how to build on the land that you control (already not exactly an ideal situation).
The concept gets even more absurd with the introduction of “creating non-fungible property tokens (NFPTs) with multiple Land NFT holders… achieved through the creation of an NFPT DAO consisting of the holders of the NFTs. You can decide on the rules of the DAO together prior to selecting your block and minting the Land NFPTs.”

One of the homes on the island as imagined by the creators. It seems as though almost every home will be in this style, according to the plans on the website.

None of this even touches on the fact that one must be a ‘citizen’ of Satoshi Island (which endows no actual citizenship rights in Vanuatu, where one can acquire citizenship for $115,000. Vanuatu has also been slapped with new global travel restrictions due to its lack of due diligence on new citizens) to buy these NFTs.

Lastly, there appears to be a ‘Satoshi Island Coin’ (STC) which the project claims “is the cryptocurrency that powers the Satoshi Island economy. Just like the currency of a country, STC will be required for all commerce on the island.”

This a strange proposition, considering that Vanuatu already has a currency called the Vatu that is far more stable than STC which is down 99.7% from all-time highs.

If this sounds way more complicated than buying land and getting a permit to build on it, that’s because it is. If anything, this weird NFT land concept and private island currency have created solutions for problems that no one has ever had.

So, where does this leave crypto islands?

It turns out that the idea of a cryptocurrency island doesn’t resonate with many people, and the ways that both projects attempted to implement the concepts relied on meandering, tortuous amounts of bureaucracy.

Instead of a democratically chosen government that provides permits for applicants and sells land at a fair market value, both projects inserted numerous unusual steps into a process that was already complicated enough.

Cryptoland has long slid into the ocean of bad ideas while Satoshi Island is still plugging away with its plans to implement a ridiculous process for those interested in living on a small island in Vanuatu that uses what amounts to Disney-bucks for commerce.

It’s unclear if anyone in the crypto industry has learned anything from these two projects, but at least we aren’t hearing about new islands being claimed for NFT holders and shitcoin traders… yet.

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