4Seas
= co-working place and community for crypto nomads, based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
URL = https://www.4seas.xyz
"A globally recognized and the only ethereum cultural community in Chiang Mai dedicated to advancing the crypto ecosystem."
Description
1.
"4seas is a crypto nomad start-up society with its first site in Chiang Mai, aiming to foster the integration of crypto technology and innovative societies. We provide an ideal workspace, living environment, and activity space for digital and crypto nomads, allowing members to experience the world while transforming it with new technologies.
We practice on-chain governance through crypto tokens, DAO, and other methods, recording the micro-history of the society and accumulating iterative methodologies. We encourage members to think, discuss, and make decisions collaboratively, establishing and enhancing a sustainable and positively impactful crypto nomad start-up society. In the post-nation-state era, we explore solutions for digital personal sovereignty for future global citizens and the citizenship of network state.
4seas' values are rooted in sustainability, open-source, freedom, and diversity. We firmly believe that a healthy society culture depends on the collective safeguarding of these values by all members.
We welcome you to Chiang Mai, Thailand, the capital of the ancient Lanna Kingdom with a rich history and culture. Chiang Mai is also considered the contemporary capital of digital nomads and an emerging crypto city. Join us in Chiang Mai, Thailand!"
2. From a 'Crypto Residency' report written by Parallel Citizen (Michael B.):
"4Seas is a permanent Zuzalu node based in Chiang Mai. It is built on values from the cypherpunk lineage: a counter-cultural hacker tradition that treats strong cryptography as a practical tool for individual freedom. Privacy is not secrecy, but the ability to choose what you reveal, to whom, and under what conditions. Cypherpunks favor encryption, pseudonymity, open-source code, censorship-resistant systems, and peer-to-peer networks because these technologies reduce dependence on centralized institutions. The belief reaffirms that personal sovereignty, over our physical and digital selves, is a human right.
In a Northern Thai context, this alignment is more cultural than it might first appear. Cypherpunk tools support a quieter, voluntary, community-based life: people gathering in local hubs, exchanging trust through relationships, preserving personal boundaries without needing everything mediated by state or platform. The Buddhist resonance is strongest around non-attachment to status, suspicion of hierarchical domination, and the value of intentional community, though cypherpunk individualism sits in productive tension with the Thai and Lan Na emphasis on harmony, merit, interdependence, and social responsibility.
The physical space is in Nimman, Chiang Mai’s densest nomad-friendly neighborhood. Three coworking floors, free and open 24/7, with a café on the ground floor. The Zuzalu Library next door with books in English, Thai, and Chinese. Upstairs, an art exhibition called One Way Function, tracing the cypherpunk movement’s intellectual lineage: Snowden, Assange, the Bitcoin whitepaper, Ethereum. A calendar of events that run the range from useful to atmospheric: language exchanges in English, Thai, Chinese, and Burmese, meditation sessions, AI workshops, community debates, movie nights, badminton. The building is residential too: rooms are available for people who want to live here while they’re in town.
I got pulled in sooner than planned. I intended to visit 4Seas this year, but unexpectedly got accepted into their crypto residency program. In their own words: The 4Seas Residency is a community-based residency program in Chiang Mai for builders, artists, researchers, founders, creators, and long-term thinkers who want to live, work, create, and contribute inside a real community. I was the first recipient. An honor and a guinea pig role simultaneously, which meant walking through unresolved friction points that come with launching a new program: payment logistics, onboarding gaps, the small but important maintenance loops needed to sustain and grow such living projects.
...
Underneath the experiment is a more conventional operational reality. People are always curious about who actually owns and runs a place like this, especially in a movement that talks so often about decentralization. The unglamorous answer is that any permanent physical node still needs some kind of legal and administrative wrapper. If you want to lease or hold property, employ people, pay bills, manage liability, and operate with permanence, the physical world still requires recognizable scaffolding.
That scaffolding is not the soul of the thing. It is the interface between the experiment and the world as it currently exists. Strip the branding and you find a small place-based operation with an open community front-end. Strip the operation and you find an aligned community with capital, conviction, and taste, trying to make a permanent node of this movement real somewhere. Both descriptions are true at once. The trick is not to let either one cancel the other.
It’s worth noting that nearly every serious experiment in this space still takes this legally necessary step first. A decade into the crypto era, I was hoping structures like DAOs would have made a greater dent here. They have, in some domains. But for the parts that involve property, employment, maintenance, local relationships, and keeping the lights on, DAOs still have not replaced conventional legal infrastructure in any widespread practical sense.
That does not make the experiment less interesting. What sits on top of that scaffolding, is where the experiment actually lives: in the culture, the open doors, the values practiced daily inside a building that a company structure technically owns, but a community actually runs."
(https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/4seas-2026)
Characteristics
Open Doors Policy
Parallel Citizen:
"The most obvious difference between 4Seas and other experiments in this space is accessibility. There is no membership fee, gate, or scan-to-enter system. In a very “welcome home, you’re in Asia” sense, you take off your shoes at the entrance as you walk in. The coworking floors are open to anyone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The library has posted hours but functions in practice as a neighborhood living room where kids, parents, nomads, and locals drift in to escape the heat, read, or work.
Most coworking spaces in Nimman charge a daily or monthly rate. That fee acts as a filter: it selects for people who have decided they need a desk and are willing to pay for it and exclusively lock in. 4Seas removes that filter entirely. The population that walks through the door is broader and more unpredictable than what you’d find behind a paywall. University students from nearby institutions come to study because the space is free and has everything they need. Older adults take a break if they’ve been out too long running errands. Nomads hear about the space from someone at a café. Locals wander in through the library. People come for a community event and keep returning.
Something about the space being free and multipurpose changes how people use it. It’s closer to a house with a coworking layer open to the public than a traditional coworking space. People cook in the shared kitchen, warm up meals, hang out at the communal tables. The vibe has more in common with a university common room than anything corporate. You’re not there solely for the purpose of work, which means the reasons people interact are more varied and more organic. Conversations happen over lunch, during event breaks, on spontaneous smoke breaks, and on the stairs between floors. The spontaneity is the product.
For residents who live in the building, this compounds. I can walk downstairs from my room into the coworking area, see who’s around, make plans on the spot, then walk back upstairs for a nap during the afternoon heat. I can shower, change, and be at an evening event without ever crossing a street. The premium is proximity: living inside the community rather than commuting to it."
(https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/4seas-2026)
4seas' as an Embassy Model
Parallel Citizen:
"At Network State Conference 2025, Vitalik described two models for physical nodes in this movement: the monastery, where a community retreats from the world to build something internally coherent, and the embassy, where a community establishes a presence within an existing society and engages with the local culture around it.
4Seas is an embassy.
The distinction shapes everything: what the space looks like, who walks in, how it sustains itself, what it’s optimizing for.
A monastery model creates its own world. It controls the food, the fitness, the schedule, the social norms. It can iterate fast because the feedback loop is contained. It can develop strong internal culture because the membrane is thick: you opt in, you pay, you commit. Network School is the clearest example of this approach operating at scale, with meals, gym, daycare, coworking, and housing all inside the same campus on a purpose-built island.
An embassy model does something different. It establishes a permanent presence inside an existing city, with all the messiness that implies. It can’t control the surrounding culture. It can’t curate its population the way a gated community can. What it can do is serve as a translation zone: a place where different worlds overlap and where people who don’t quite fit into any single cultural container can find each other.
Which raises the obvious question. An embassy represents a country. What does 4Seas represent? There is no decentralized nation behind it, no flag, no territory. The honest answer is that it is an embassy for a movement rather than a state: for internet-first, tech-forward people.
...
The embassy approach means 4Seas doesn’t need to solve food, fitness, or housing from scratch. Chiang Mai already provides those things well and cheaply. What 4Seas provides is the reason to gather, the events that create recurring encounters, the ideological spine that gives the gathering a direction beyond “digital nomads in proximity.” The choice to partner with local gyms and restaurants rather than building those services in-house is an extension of this philosophy. Rather than constructing walls around services, you let the city provide them and direct your energy toward the thing only you can build: the cultural layer.
4Seas is not trying to be a nation or a state. That framing misreads the ambition. The goal as I understand it, is to be a successful, substantive, permanent node: present in Chiang Mai and growing alongside the broader movement. Not imposing itself over the city, but growing with it.
Having a permanent Zuzalu node in Chiang Mai makes geographic sense. The city is already a rotating host for pop-up events in this ecosystem. Where those events are temporary, 4Seas is the permanent infrastructure that remains after they leave. It hosts and supports a lasting post-popup permaculture."
(https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/4seas-2026)
Copied at: The Monastery Model vs the Embassy Model of Community
A Third Culture
Parallel Citizen explains:
"Not fully local, not fully imported. The people who make up the 4Seas community are, for the most part, people who already don’t fit neatly into one cultural container. Chinese families who left China. Westerners who left the West. Nomads whose identity is increasingly defined by what they chose rather than where they were born. Locals who engage with international communities because something about the internet-first, English-speaking, tech-forward default culture resonates with how they want to live. None of these groups are fully at home in the culture they came from, nor have they fully assimilated into Thai culture. They are integrating different cultures into something new."
((https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/4seas-2026))
(Cultural) Integration
Parallel Citizen:
""John Berry’s acculturation model (1997) is useful here. Berry mapped four outcomes when people encounter a new culture: assimilation (adopt the host culture, drop your own), separation (keep your culture, reject the host), marginalization (lose both), and integration (maintain your own while also engaging with the host).
What I observe at 4Seas is overwhelmingly integration. People bring their own cultural backgrounds, languages, values, professional identities. They also adapt to the rhythms of Thai culture and Chiang Mai: the sabai sabai pace, the afternoon heat, the temple culture, the food, the quiet. The result is additive rather than substitutive. Identity becomes layered, not replaced.
Over sushi one evening with some friends, the conversation moved from governance structures to the experience of being a third-culture kid. Members of the core team, some of whom are Chinese, described their own position: too Chinese for Thailand, not entirely culturally Chinese either. Parents who brought their children here for a different kind of life. Kids attending international schools in English, surrounded by other Chinese, Thai, and Western families, in a Thai city. Neither here nor there, or maybe: here and there at once.""
((https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/4seas-2026))
Cypherpunk Movement Values
Parallel Citizen:
"What holds the community together, in the absence of a gate or a fee, is an ideological spine. The Cypherpunks values: egalitarianism, openness, freedom to transact, privacy, peer-to-peer coordination, ownership of one’s own data and identity. These are the cultural scaffolding imported from the cloud, now manifesting physically.
The spine is strong enough to give the space coherence without being so rigid that it excludes anyone who doesn’t speak the technical language. You don’t have to understand Ethereum to use the coworking space. But the reason the coworking space exists at all, the reason it’s free, the reason it’s open: those trace back to a set of values that came out of the cypherpunk tradition and landed here.
The cypherpunk values are not abstract. The core team runs on what they described to me as a “small head” model: a compact group of roughly equal collaborators who discuss decisions thoroughly before acting, rather than a hierarchy with a single decision-maker at the top. It’s a governance style rooted in coherence and consensus. Meetings are intentional. Decisions are considered from multiple angles before implementation. It’s a form of peaceful, egalitarian coordination: pro-crypto, pro-freedom, pro-privacy, pro-community, grounded in the conviction that the people closest to the work should make the calls together."