"We will soon not just fly into nations. We will log into them."
"We will soon not just fly into nations. We will log into them."
"We will soon not just fly into nations. We will log into them."
That idea no longer sounds like science fiction. When a digital artwork, a JPEG by Beeple, sold for 69 million dollars, it did more than shake the art world. It marked a turning point: value officially became verifiable without borders. It signaled that trust, once grounded in geography and physicality, could now exist entirely online.
The same technologies that once authenticated a JPEG are now being used to authenticate people, credentials, and even residencies. Governments from Estonia and Ukraine to Tuvalu and Palau are experimenting with digital identities and blockchain-based governance frameworks. Many of these initiatives are making it clear that sovereignty no longer has to be tied to geography, contrasting with how, for centuries, nations have always been defined by their physical territory.
But as identity moves on-chain, belonging itself is being redefined. In the decades ahead, nations will no longer be bound by land but by networks. Communities will be linked through code, values, and shared trust in the same digital infrastructure. The passport of the future might not sit in a drawer; it could live in your digital wallet.
The question is no longer whether this shift will happen, but how prepared we are to navigate it. Because as identity becomes portable and governance programmable, the idea of a nation itself begins to evolve - from something we are born into to something we choose, log into, and help build. This transformation will likely mirror the industrial revolutions of the past. Just as the industrial age helped resource-limited nations like Singapore and Taiwan rise through infrastructure and smart policy, the Web3 era will create a new generation of winners. Only this time, resources will not be mined from the ground but built in code - in data, design, and digital infrastructure. Nations will compete not on natural resources or military might, but on connectivity, neutrality, and fiscal intelligence. In a world where belonging can be digital and borders can be optional, these will become the new metrics of global appeal - and perhaps, the new foundations of power itself.
The Network State of Mind
Geo-arbitrage is becoming a way of life for many. Entrepreneurs today maintain homes in multiple countries, manage teams across continents, and feel more connected to global communities than to a single nation. For them, governance is no longer a single template. So why should identity and belonging remain static? We are moving towards a world where citizenship or residency is not just a legal formality but a choice, a portfolio of affiliations that reflects who you are, what you value, and where you can thrive.
Early experiments are underway. Charter cities and purpose-built communities such as Prospera in Honduras are piloting blockchain-based identity and legal frameworks, while Zuzalu, a pop-up “network state” initiated by Vitalik Buterin, explores how governance and community can exist natively online. For a generation weary of bureaucracy and rigid systems, these prototypes represent something larger: the pursuit of more freedom, more transparency, and the ability to build society with intention.
The Onchain Citizens
A few years ago, I met a 35-year-old software developer from Bengaluru. He was supporting 2 different DAOs, held a Portuguese Golden Visa, and had just moved to Bali for the next few months. "I don't really belong to one country anymore," he said. "I think I belong more to the networks I help build."
His outlook captures a defining sentiment among Millennials and Gen Z: that identity and community can very well migrate to decentralized networks. Blockchain technology - once narrowly seen as financial infrastructure - has the potential to help us reimagine citizenship, governance, and belonging in the digital age. Blockchain offers a way to create ledgers and systems that are decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant. For finance, this means digital currencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that allow value to move without traditional banks. For governance, this means the possibility of smart contracts running organizations or even entire communities, where rules are enforced automatically and transparently. The on-chain citizens will be internet-first and territory-second. And with the rise of these on-chain citizens, the world will likely be less about where you come from but more about where you are headed.
Bankless by design: Lifeline for the un-bankable
Billions of people in developing countries lack access to banking or identity documents. Young populations in places like Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia are ironically some of the most tech-savvy, leapfrogging to mobile phones without ever having had landlines or traditional bank accounts. Blockchain-based solutions can give these “unbanked” individuals a way to save, borrow, or prove their creditworthiness with only a mobile phone. Initiatives for blockchain land registries, for example, aim to secure property rights for people in countries where title deeds are unreliable. If you’re a young farmer in rural Kenya and you can secure your land title on a blockchain, you suddenly have collateral to get a loan – a potential game-changer for upward mobility. It’s easy to see why youth in emerging markets often embrace blockchain: it’s a chance to build trust where institutions are weak, effectively skipping to a more advanced model of governance and finance.
The Architecture of Smart Governance
Across the world, apart from blockchain-based protocols, governments are increasingly incorporating AI agents into the architecture of public administration to transform how states deliver services and manage complex processes. While decentralized technologies reshape how trust is built, AI is transforming how governments execute it. From Estonia’s long game in digital governance to Ukraine’s AI-assisted workflows, you can spot the pattern: code taking on the routine tasks so humans can focus on critical tasks. The concept of an Agentic State is fast developing with the rollout of State-backed AI agents such as Ukraine’s Diaa.ai that anticipates needs, cuts bureaucracy, and lets citizens interact with government like they do with a friend or an app. Albania has taken this logic from the back office into the political spotlight, unveiling an AI-generated “minister” to advise on public tenders, scan contracts for red flags, and symbolically signal that algorithms, not just officials, will be watching over corruption risks. In UAE, At GITEX Global 2025, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, MoHRE, presented Eye, an agentic AI system that handles all 13 categories of work permits, verifying passports, certificates, and contracts with minimal human touch. Approvals that once took weeks now complete in hours. Eye represents a philosophical shift: a government system that does not just use AI but is actually acting through it, delivering tangible outcomes.
Identity Turns into Infrastructure
Digital identity is shifting from policy talk to production. Governments are wiring up common standards so people can prove who they are once, sign once, and reuse those proofs across services and borders. The European Union has locked in a legal and technical framework for national-scale wallets. Member states are working toward broad availability by late 2026. The goal is a verified wallet that residents can use for banking, healthcare, travel, university enrollment, and everyday signatures.
The World Wide Web Consortium approved Verifiable Credentials 2.0 in May 2025. The standard lets issuers create portable proofs that can be checked anywhere. Users can reveal only what is needed. Show that you are over 18 without sharing your birth date. Prove a professional license without exposing your full file. The model is privacy-preserving and machine-verifiable, which lowers friction for both sides. As adoption of digital identity grows, projects like World.org also gain traction as a proof-of-personhood layer, preventing bots from stealing your digital identities, which is going to be an important area to watch.
Why It Matters Now
A shared trust layer compresses onboarding from days to minutes, cuts fraud by design, and smooths cross-border transactions. Sectors that run on verification see the gains first. Banks, telcos, insurers, universities, and employers can plug into a common stack rather than build one-off integrations for each market. Several countries and platforms already show what good looks like in this arena.
- Singapore’s Singpass serves more than five million users across thousands of services. It handles tens of millions of monthly transactions for taxes, health bookings, insurance renewals, and more.
- UAE PASS reports millions of users and thousands of public and private services. Its e-signatures carry legal force.
- Estonia’s X-Road connects hundreds of databases and adds a national tamper-evidence layer so records cannot be quietly altered.
- MOSIP (Modular Open-Source Identity Platform) offers a vendor-neutral ID stack that governments can adopt and adapt. Deployments now span more than two dozen implementations and well over one hundred million issued IDs.
- Ukraine’s Diia kept core state functions running during wartime stress. Digital ID’s gained legal standing and dozens of services moved online.
Across the globe, the shift to true digital economies begins with a strong and trusted national ID system. Once that layer is in place, states can develop accurate civil registries and efficient public services that reach people in many ways, enabling quicker disaster relief, greater climate readiness, easier company formation, and broader access to finance, health services, and schooling.
Conclusion: The Nations You Can Log Into
We are not far from a world where you will log into nations instead of landing in them. Your identity will live in a secure digital wallet, and your citizenship may be something you choose, not something you inherit. Communities will form on-chain, cities will be built through code, and network states will rise from shared values rather than shared borders. The metaverse will not replace our physical lives, but it will expand them, offering new spaces to live, work, and connect across continents.
In this new era, belonging will be less about where you are born and more about what you believe in. You might hold one passport but several digital ones. You might be part of a city that exists both in a skyline and in the cloud. You might trust a network more than a government department.
This is the next phase of human organization, where the building blocks of governance, identity, and community are reprogrammed for a connected planet. Geography is no longer destiny. The next generation will not just inherit nations; they will log into them.
About Nirbhay
Nirbhay Handa is the Co-Founder & CEO of Multipolitan, The Platform for Borderless Living. He co-founded Multipolitan in 2024 with Lee Smith (Co-founder and CTO of Japanese Unicorn Paidy). Together, they’re building freedom infrastructure for global living - combining a product-led immigration platform with a mobility application that makes it effortless to live, work, move, and thrive anywhere. Nirbhay formerly served as the Group Head of Business Development & Asia Head of Private Clients at Henley & Partners. Nirbhay has advised presidents, ministers, and governments on sovereign innovation strategies that generate tangible FDI.
As a globally cited authority on cross-border living, Nirbhay’s commentary appears in publications such as BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes. Governments, Universities and wealth management forums invite him to speak on the evolving dynamics of international mobility, foreign direct investment, and sovereign strategy.
That idea no longer sounds like science fiction. When a digital artwork, a JPEG by Beeple, sold for 69 million dollars, it did more than shake the art world. It marked a turning point: value officially became verifiable without borders. It signaled that trust, once grounded in geography and physicality, could now exist entirely online.
The same technologies that once authenticated a JPEG are now being used to authenticate people, credentials, and even residencies. Governments from Estonia and Ukraine to Tuvalu and Palau are experimenting with digital identities and blockchain-based governance frameworks. Many of these initiatives are making it clear that sovereignty no longer has to be tied to geography, contrasting with how, for centuries, nations have always been defined by their physical territory.
But as identity moves on-chain, belonging itself is being redefined. In the decades ahead, nations will no longer be bound by land but by networks. Communities will be linked through code, values, and shared trust in the same digital infrastructure. The passport of the future might not sit in a drawer; it could live in your digital wallet.
The question is no longer whether this shift will happen, but how prepared we are to navigate it. Because as identity becomes portable and governance programmable, the idea of a nation itself begins to evolve - from something we are born into to something we choose, log into, and help build. This transformation will likely mirror the industrial revolutions of the past. Just as the industrial age helped resource-limited nations like Singapore and Taiwan rise through infrastructure and smart policy, the Web3 era will create a new generation of winners. Only this time, resources will not be mined from the ground but built in code - in data, design, and digital infrastructure. Nations will compete not on natural resources or military might, but on connectivity, neutrality, and fiscal intelligence. In a world where belonging can be digital and borders can be optional, these will become the new metrics of global appeal - and perhaps, the new foundations of power itself.
The Network State of Mind
Geo-arbitrage is becoming a way of life for many. Entrepreneurs today maintain homes in multiple countries, manage teams across continents, and feel more connected to global communities than to a single nation. For them, governance is no longer a single template. So why should identity and belonging remain static? We are moving towards a world where citizenship or residency is not just a legal formality but a choice, a portfolio of affiliations that reflects who you are, what you value, and where you can thrive.
Early experiments are underway. Charter cities and purpose-built communities such as Prospera in Honduras are piloting blockchain-based identity and legal frameworks, while Zuzalu, a pop-up “network state” initiated by Vitalik Buterin, explores how governance and community can exist natively online. For a generation weary of bureaucracy and rigid systems, these prototypes represent something larger: the pursuit of more freedom, more transparency, and the ability to build society with intention.
The Onchain Citizens
A few years ago, I met a 35-year-old software developer from Bengaluru. He was supporting 2 different DAOs, held a Portuguese Golden Visa, and had just moved to Bali for the next few months. "I don't really belong to one country anymore," he said. "I think I belong more to the networks I help build."
His outlook captures a defining sentiment among Millennials and Gen Z: that identity and community can very well migrate to decentralized networks. Blockchain technology - once narrowly seen as financial infrastructure - has the potential to help us reimagine citizenship, governance, and belonging in the digital age. Blockchain offers a way to create ledgers and systems that are decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant. For finance, this means digital currencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that allow value to move without traditional banks. For governance, this means the possibility of smart contracts running organizations or even entire communities, where rules are enforced automatically and transparently. The on-chain citizens will be internet-first and territory-second. And with the rise of these on-chain citizens, the world will likely be less about where you come from but more about where you are headed.
Bankless by design: Lifeline for the un-bankable
Billions of people in developing countries lack access to banking or identity documents. Young populations in places like Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia are ironically some of the most tech-savvy, leapfrogging to mobile phones without ever having had landlines or traditional bank accounts. Blockchain-based solutions can give these “unbanked” individuals a way to save, borrow, or prove their creditworthiness with only a mobile phone. Initiatives for blockchain land registries, for example, aim to secure property rights for people in countries where title deeds are unreliable. If you’re a young farmer in rural Kenya and you can secure your land title on a blockchain, you suddenly have collateral to get a loan – a potential game-changer for upward mobility. It’s easy to see why youth in emerging markets often embrace blockchain: it’s a chance to build trust where institutions are weak, effectively skipping to a more advanced model of governance and finance.
The Architecture of Smart Governance
Across the world, apart from blockchain-based protocols, governments are increasingly incorporating AI agents into the architecture of public administration to transform how states deliver services and manage complex processes. While decentralized technologies reshape how trust is built, AI is transforming how governments execute it. From Estonia’s long game in digital governance to Ukraine’s AI-assisted workflows, you can spot the pattern: code taking on the routine tasks so humans can focus on critical tasks. The concept of an Agentic State is fast developing with the rollout of State-backed AI agents such as Ukraine’s Diaa.ai that anticipates needs, cuts bureaucracy, and lets citizens interact with government like they do with a friend or an app. Albania has taken this logic from the back office into the political spotlight, unveiling an AI-generated “minister” to advise on public tenders, scan contracts for red flags, and symbolically signal that algorithms, not just officials, will be watching over corruption risks. In UAE, At GITEX Global 2025, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, MoHRE, presented Eye, an agentic AI system that handles all 13 categories of work permits, verifying passports, certificates, and contracts with minimal human touch. Approvals that once took weeks now complete in hours. Eye represents a philosophical shift: a government system that does not just use AI but is actually acting through it, delivering tangible outcomes.
Identity Turns into Infrastructure
Digital identity is shifting from policy talk to production. Governments are wiring up common standards so people can prove who they are once, sign once, and reuse those proofs across services and borders. The European Union has locked in a legal and technical framework for national-scale wallets. Member states are working toward broad availability by late 2026. The goal is a verified wallet that residents can use for banking, healthcare, travel, university enrollment, and everyday signatures.
The World Wide Web Consortium approved Verifiable Credentials 2.0 in May 2025. The standard lets issuers create portable proofs that can be checked anywhere. Users can reveal only what is needed. Show that you are over 18 without sharing your birth date. Prove a professional license without exposing your full file. The model is privacy-preserving and machine-verifiable, which lowers friction for both sides. As adoption of digital identity grows, projects like World.org also gain traction as a proof-of-personhood layer, preventing bots from stealing your digital identities, which is going to be an important area to watch.
Why It Matters Now
A shared trust layer compresses onboarding from days to minutes, cuts fraud by design, and smooths cross-border transactions. Sectors that run on verification see the gains first. Banks, telcos, insurers, universities, and employers can plug into a common stack rather than build one-off integrations for each market. Several countries and platforms already show what good looks like in this arena.
- Singapore’s Singpass serves more than five million users across thousands of services. It handles tens of millions of monthly transactions for taxes, health bookings, insurance renewals, and more.
- UAE PASS reports millions of users and thousands of public and private services. Its e-signatures carry legal force.
- Estonia’s X-Road connects hundreds of databases and adds a national tamper-evidence layer so records cannot be quietly altered.
- MOSIP (Modular Open-Source Identity Platform) offers a vendor-neutral ID stack that governments can adopt and adapt. Deployments now span more than two dozen implementations and well over one hundred million issued IDs.
- Ukraine’s Diia kept core state functions running during wartime stress. Digital ID’s gained legal standing and dozens of services moved online.
Across the globe, the shift to true digital economies begins with a strong and trusted national ID system. Once that layer is in place, states can develop accurate civil registries and efficient public services that reach people in many ways, enabling quicker disaster relief, greater climate readiness, easier company formation, and broader access to finance, health services, and schooling.
Conclusion: The Nations You Can Log Into
We are not far from a world where you will log into nations instead of landing in them. Your identity will live in a secure digital wallet, and your citizenship may be something you choose, not something you inherit. Communities will form on-chain, cities will be built through code, and network states will rise from shared values rather than shared borders. The metaverse will not replace our physical lives, but it will expand them, offering new spaces to live, work, and connect across continents.
In this new era, belonging will be less about where you are born and more about what you believe in. You might hold one passport but several digital ones. You might be part of a city that exists both in a skyline and in the cloud. You might trust a network more than a government department.
This is the next phase of human organization, where the building blocks of governance, identity, and community are reprogrammed for a connected planet. Geography is no longer destiny. The next generation will not just inherit nations; they will log into them.
About Nirbhay
Nirbhay Handa is the Co-Founder & CEO of Multipolitan, The Platform for Borderless Living. He co-founded Multipolitan in 2024 with Lee Smith (Co-founder and CTO of Japanese Unicorn Paidy). Together, they’re building freedom infrastructure for global living - combining a product-led immigration platform with a mobility application that makes it effortless to live, work, move, and thrive anywhere. Nirbhay formerly served as the Group Head of Business Development & Asia Head of Private Clients at Henley & Partners. Nirbhay has advised presidents, ministers, and governments on sovereign innovation strategies that generate tangible FDI.
As a globally cited authority on cross-border living, Nirbhay’s commentary appears in publications such as BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes. Governments, Universities and wealth management forums invite him to speak on the evolving dynamics of international mobility, foreign direct investment, and sovereign strategy.
That idea no longer sounds like science fiction. When a digital artwork, a JPEG by Beeple, sold for 69 million dollars, it did more than shake the art world. It marked a turning point: value officially became verifiable without borders. It signaled that trust, once grounded in geography and physicality, could now exist entirely online.
The same technologies that once authenticated a JPEG are now being used to authenticate people, credentials, and even residencies. Governments from Estonia and Ukraine to Tuvalu and Palau are experimenting with digital identities and blockchain-based governance frameworks. Many of these initiatives are making it clear that sovereignty no longer has to be tied to geography, contrasting with how, for centuries, nations have always been defined by their physical territory.
But as identity moves on-chain, belonging itself is being redefined. In the decades ahead, nations will no longer be bound by land but by networks. Communities will be linked through code, values, and shared trust in the same digital infrastructure. The passport of the future might not sit in a drawer; it could live in your digital wallet.
The question is no longer whether this shift will happen, but how prepared we are to navigate it. Because as identity becomes portable and governance programmable, the idea of a nation itself begins to evolve - from something we are born into to something we choose, log into, and help build. This transformation will likely mirror the industrial revolutions of the past. Just as the industrial age helped resource-limited nations like Singapore and Taiwan rise through infrastructure and smart policy, the Web3 era will create a new generation of winners. Only this time, resources will not be mined from the ground but built in code - in data, design, and digital infrastructure. Nations will compete not on natural resources or military might, but on connectivity, neutrality, and fiscal intelligence. In a world where belonging can be digital and borders can be optional, these will become the new metrics of global appeal - and perhaps, the new foundations of power itself.
The Network State of Mind
Geo-arbitrage is becoming a way of life for many. Entrepreneurs today maintain homes in multiple countries, manage teams across continents, and feel more connected to global communities than to a single nation. For them, governance is no longer a single template. So why should identity and belonging remain static? We are moving towards a world where citizenship or residency is not just a legal formality but a choice, a portfolio of affiliations that reflects who you are, what you value, and where you can thrive.
Early experiments are underway. Charter cities and purpose-built communities such as Prospera in Honduras are piloting blockchain-based identity and legal frameworks, while Zuzalu, a pop-up “network state” initiated by Vitalik Buterin, explores how governance and community can exist natively online. For a generation weary of bureaucracy and rigid systems, these prototypes represent something larger: the pursuit of more freedom, more transparency, and the ability to build society with intention.
The Onchain Citizens
A few years ago, I met a 35-year-old software developer from Bengaluru. He was supporting 2 different DAOs, held a Portuguese Golden Visa, and had just moved to Bali for the next few months. "I don't really belong to one country anymore," he said. "I think I belong more to the networks I help build."
His outlook captures a defining sentiment among Millennials and Gen Z: that identity and community can very well migrate to decentralized networks. Blockchain technology - once narrowly seen as financial infrastructure - has the potential to help us reimagine citizenship, governance, and belonging in the digital age. Blockchain offers a way to create ledgers and systems that are decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant. For finance, this means digital currencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that allow value to move without traditional banks. For governance, this means the possibility of smart contracts running organizations or even entire communities, where rules are enforced automatically and transparently. The on-chain citizens will be internet-first and territory-second. And with the rise of these on-chain citizens, the world will likely be less about where you come from but more about where you are headed.
Bankless by design: Lifeline for the un-bankable
Billions of people in developing countries lack access to banking or identity documents. Young populations in places like Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia are ironically some of the most tech-savvy, leapfrogging to mobile phones without ever having had landlines or traditional bank accounts. Blockchain-based solutions can give these “unbanked” individuals a way to save, borrow, or prove their creditworthiness with only a mobile phone. Initiatives for blockchain land registries, for example, aim to secure property rights for people in countries where title deeds are unreliable. If you’re a young farmer in rural Kenya and you can secure your land title on a blockchain, you suddenly have collateral to get a loan – a potential game-changer for upward mobility. It’s easy to see why youth in emerging markets often embrace blockchain: it’s a chance to build trust where institutions are weak, effectively skipping to a more advanced model of governance and finance.
The Architecture of Smart Governance
Across the world, apart from blockchain-based protocols, governments are increasingly incorporating AI agents into the architecture of public administration to transform how states deliver services and manage complex processes. While decentralized technologies reshape how trust is built, AI is transforming how governments execute it. From Estonia’s long game in digital governance to Ukraine’s AI-assisted workflows, you can spot the pattern: code taking on the routine tasks so humans can focus on critical tasks. The concept of an Agentic State is fast developing with the rollout of State-backed AI agents such as Ukraine’s Diaa.ai that anticipates needs, cuts bureaucracy, and lets citizens interact with government like they do with a friend or an app. Albania has taken this logic from the back office into the political spotlight, unveiling an AI-generated “minister” to advise on public tenders, scan contracts for red flags, and symbolically signal that algorithms, not just officials, will be watching over corruption risks. In UAE, At GITEX Global 2025, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, MoHRE, presented Eye, an agentic AI system that handles all 13 categories of work permits, verifying passports, certificates, and contracts with minimal human touch. Approvals that once took weeks now complete in hours. Eye represents a philosophical shift: a government system that does not just use AI but is actually acting through it, delivering tangible outcomes.
Identity Turns into Infrastructure
Digital identity is shifting from policy talk to production. Governments are wiring up common standards so people can prove who they are once, sign once, and reuse those proofs across services and borders. The European Union has locked in a legal and technical framework for national-scale wallets. Member states are working toward broad availability by late 2026. The goal is a verified wallet that residents can use for banking, healthcare, travel, university enrollment, and everyday signatures.
The World Wide Web Consortium approved Verifiable Credentials 2.0 in May 2025. The standard lets issuers create portable proofs that can be checked anywhere. Users can reveal only what is needed. Show that you are over 18 without sharing your birth date. Prove a professional license without exposing your full file. The model is privacy-preserving and machine-verifiable, which lowers friction for both sides. As adoption of digital identity grows, projects like World.org also gain traction as a proof-of-personhood layer, preventing bots from stealing your digital identities, which is going to be an important area to watch.
Why It Matters Now
A shared trust layer compresses onboarding from days to minutes, cuts fraud by design, and smooths cross-border transactions. Sectors that run on verification see the gains first. Banks, telcos, insurers, universities, and employers can plug into a common stack rather than build one-off integrations for each market. Several countries and platforms already show what good looks like in this arena.
- Singapore’s Singpass serves more than five million users across thousands of services. It handles tens of millions of monthly transactions for taxes, health bookings, insurance renewals, and more.
- UAE PASS reports millions of users and thousands of public and private services. Its e-signatures carry legal force.
- Estonia’s X-Road connects hundreds of databases and adds a national tamper-evidence layer so records cannot be quietly altered.
- MOSIP (Modular Open-Source Identity Platform) offers a vendor-neutral ID stack that governments can adopt and adapt. Deployments now span more than two dozen implementations and well over one hundred million issued IDs.
- Ukraine’s Diia kept core state functions running during wartime stress. Digital ID’s gained legal standing and dozens of services moved online.
Across the globe, the shift to true digital economies begins with a strong and trusted national ID system. Once that layer is in place, states can develop accurate civil registries and efficient public services that reach people in many ways, enabling quicker disaster relief, greater climate readiness, easier company formation, and broader access to finance, health services, and schooling.
Conclusion: The Nations You Can Log Into
We are not far from a world where you will log into nations instead of landing in them. Your identity will live in a secure digital wallet, and your citizenship may be something you choose, not something you inherit. Communities will form on-chain, cities will be built through code, and network states will rise from shared values rather than shared borders. The metaverse will not replace our physical lives, but it will expand them, offering new spaces to live, work, and connect across continents.
In this new era, belonging will be less about where you are born and more about what you believe in. You might hold one passport but several digital ones. You might be part of a city that exists both in a skyline and in the cloud. You might trust a network more than a government department.
This is the next phase of human organization, where the building blocks of governance, identity, and community are reprogrammed for a connected planet. Geography is no longer destiny. The next generation will not just inherit nations; they will log into them.
About Nirbhay
Nirbhay Handa is the Co-Founder & CEO of Multipolitan, The Platform for Borderless Living. He co-founded Multipolitan in 2024 with Lee Smith (Co-founder and CTO of Japanese Unicorn Paidy). Together, they’re building freedom infrastructure for global living - combining a product-led immigration platform with a mobility application that makes it effortless to live, work, move, and thrive anywhere. Nirbhay formerly served as the Group Head of Business Development & Asia Head of Private Clients at Henley & Partners. Nirbhay has advised presidents, ministers, and governments on sovereign innovation strategies that generate tangible FDI.
As a globally cited authority on cross-border living, Nirbhay’s commentary appears in publications such as BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes. Governments, Universities and wealth management forums invite him to speak on the evolving dynamics of international mobility, foreign direct investment, and sovereign strategy.
Contributors
Nirbhay Handa is the Co-Founder & CEO of Multipolitan, The Platform for Borderless Living. He formerly served as the Group Head of Business Development & Asia Head of Private Clients at Henley & Partners. Nirbhay has advised presidents, ministers, and governments on sovereign innovation strategies that generate tangible FDI.
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