The Seasteading Institute

The project picked up mainstream exposure after PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel donated $500,000 in initial seed capital In 2008, Friedman and Gramlich said they hoped to float the first prototype seastead in the San Francisco Bay by 2010 followed by a seastead in 2014. TSI did not meet these targets. In January 2009, the Seasteading Institute patented a design for a 200-person resort seastead, ClubStead, about a city block in size, produced by consultancy firm Marine Innovation & Technology. The ClubStead design marked the first major engineering analysis in the seasteading movement. In July 2009, Friedman launched Ephemerisle, intended to be a week-long event that modeled seasteading in the Pacific Ocean. Ephemerisle was held on a number of watercraft and makeshift floating platforms in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Friedman abandoned the project the next year, but Ephemerisle continued as an annual event with a decentralized organizational structure. In July 2012, the vessel Opus Casino was donated to the Seasteading Institute. The Seasteading Institute held its first conference in Burlingame, California, October 10, 2008. Forty-five people from nine countries attended. The second Seasteading conference was significantly larger, and held in San Francisco, California, September 28–30, 2009. The third Seasteading conference took place May 31 – June 2, 2012. ==The Floating City Project==

In the spring of 2013, TSI launched The Floating City Project. The project proposed to locate a floating city within the territorial waters of an existing nation, rather than the open ocean. TSI claimed that doing so would have several advantages by placing it within the international legal framework and making it easier to engineer and easier for people and equipment to reach. In October 2013, the Institute raised $27,082 from 291 funders in a crowdfunding campaign TSI used the funds to hire the Dutch marine engineering firm DeltaSync to write an engineering study for The Floating City Project. In September 2016 the Seasteading Institute met with officials in French Polynesia to discuss building a prototype seastead in a sheltered lagoon. On January 13, 2017, French Polynesia Minister of Housing Jean-Christophe Bouissou signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with TSI to create the first semi-autonomous "seazone". TSI spun off a for-profit company called "Blue Frontiers", which will build and operate a prototype seastead in the zone. On March 3, 2018, French Polynesia's government said the agreement was "not a legal document" and had expired at the end of 2017. No action has been announced since. Blue Frontiers then began a search for a new host country for the project. In November 2018, it attempted to raise US$3 million for the project using cryptocurrency, but failed. ==See also==