Aleks Svetski – A Social Network for Sovereign Individuals | BTC Prague 2025 Special Announcement

On the BTC Prague stage, I announced the launch of Satlantis — a social network built for sovereign individuals, powered by Bitcoin and Nostr. This is the story of why I built it, and why I believe the next wave of Bitcoin companies will make Bitcoin invisible.

How It All Started

In 2019, I left Australia for what was supposed to be a four-week trip. One conference led to another, one city to the next, and before I knew it, my digital nomad journey had begun. Then March 2020 happened. My Airbnb host kicked me out, every hotel shut down, and I found myself homeless for a night — saved, of all things, by a Tinder date who offered me her couch. Those few nights turned into the most awkward three weeks of my life, quarantined with a pro-lockdown communist. I planned my escape as soon as humanly possible.

Over the next few years, I visited around 50 countries, lived in four of them, dodged mask mandates, PCR tests, and jabs — and found my wife along the way. We became genuinely good at navigating travel apps, nomad communities, and building a life with real location independence.

The Coffee That Sparked an Idea

In 2023, at the Adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador, my wife and I were hunting for good coffee. Every highly-rated place on Google was a disappointment. The only great one came from a friend’s recommendation — with a mediocre rating. It sounds small, but it ignited something. I realised trusted recommendations from real people in your network will always beat anonymous reviews from strangers. That moment planted the seed for Satlantis.

From Social Media Back to Social Networks

About a decade ago, social networks mutated into social media. And because it’s media at its core, it metastasizes into a vortex of content consumption — rage bait, clickbait, AI slop. What I call the sloppening. These platforms stopped being about connection and became about consumption. Meanwhile, travel apps like TripAdvisor are static, impersonal, and dead. Neither world serves sovereign individuals who want to connect in the real world.

What we’re building with Satlantis is an attempt to bring back genuine social networks — built on Bitcoin as a monetary layer and Nostr as an identity layer. People, places, and events. Real connections, not content feeds.

The Next Wave of Bitcoin Companies

The first wave was exchanges, wallets, miners — Coinbase, Ledger, you know them. The second wave is Bitcoin treasury companies, which, between us, is mostly financial engineering. Respectable, but pretty fiat in spirit. The next wave will be companies that make Bitcoin invisible — that use it as infrastructure the same way we use the internet, and build products that genuinely improve people’s real lives.

That’s what Satlantis is. Sovereignty isn’t just a label you give yourself after reading The Sovereign Individual. It’s about your community, your connections — who you’re able to be sovereign with.

Download, Invest, and Join Us

The mobile app launched just days before this announcement — it’s early, it’s a little buggy, but it’s getting better every week. You can download it, create an account, and find your people. We’re also announcing the first-ever Bitcoin-denominated equity crowdfund in history, SEC registered and hosted on Timestamp. The community can invest from $250 up to $50,000 — alongside investors like Axiom Capital, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, Time Chain Capital, and Ross Stevens. I hope to see you all on Satlantis.