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Carly Jackson: Hello seasteaders. I’m happy to share this conversation I had with the people behind Arktide. Ben Silone is the CEO, Mike Doty is the Co-Founder and Advisor, and Mitchell Suchner is the Chief Operating Officer. The Arktide team has been moving quickly, so some of their plans have changed since we recorded this interview. Most notably the basic design for their modular floating structure. You can find a clear explanation of their design process on their website. archie.org are at the links in our show notes. Welcome Ben, Mike and Mitchell.
So for our listeners, let’s have each of you say your name and how you came to be working for Arktide. So go ahead, Ben.
Ben Silone: All right. Uh, yes. So Ben Silone and, uh, I’ve been tracking seasteading for quite a number of years and just about a year ago, started getting serious about it. So I flew down to Panama actually and hung out with, uh, the Ocean Builders folks for a little bit, talked to them for a while, and started just getting to meet people that were, had been, I guess, working on various projects.
And then Mike and I started talking and he had already sort of started a few things, including coming up with a name and entering XPRIZE. And so then about July of last year, we started Arktide and I’ve been full time with running this since it’s been awesome.
Carly Jackson: Great. And so, Mike, I found a video of you from our 2012 conference. So you’ve been involved with seasteading for a long time. So how did you decide to, to found Arktide.
Mike Doty: Well, time seems good that we have a problem for instance, with sargassum and it can be harvested and converted into useful products while removing a big nuisance and with artificial upwelling and bringing up more nutrients like such as with OTEC, we can grow as much of it as we walk like a renewable resource. Can be used for a lot of different things, energy, maybe fluid additive, and also biochar, soil amendments.
So it has a number of different uses and I’ve had an interest in seasteading for a long time back when it was just the nation builders mailing lists. And after that, The Seasteading Institute was founded. So yeah, the, uh, video he referred to that’s, we were working with an aquaculture project, Singapore. Uh, that’s still a very big interest in mine, and I see that as a major economic business that will support seasteading. Give us a reason to be out there.
Carly Jackson: And then Arktide, how did you come up with, you know, is there, is there a story behind the name and, and why found a new organization?
Mike Doty: Well, the, um, the name Ark, of course, it’s sort of this all encompassing boat that was built to, um, house and they, uh, the animals and people to survive the great flood.
And that’s one of the idea of this. It’s a way that all of humanity can benefit by building and developing the oceans and eventually even use it as a stepping stone to outer space. That’s a great source of, to promote abundance, personal prosperity.
Carly Jackson: All right. And Mitchell, how did you get connected with Arktide?
Mitchell Suchner: So I actually found out about seasteading, um, a little over a year ago in January of 2021. And when I, I guess I’d heard of it before then, but I didn’t really understand the concept. And when I learned more about it, I was really inspired by the idea. And, uh, I decided to come up with an idea to kind of set up my own seastead.
And, uh, I looked at, you know, what, what Chad had done over in Thailand and what they had built. And I started thinking to myself, you know, what would be something cost effective that I could maybe throw it together, like some kind of minimum viable product. And I came up with these ideas. I started posting them on Reddit and, uh, in the seasteading subreddit.
And then I kind of got connected to Ben through that. We exchanged emails a little bit in October. Um, he told me that they needed a website developer and I kind of came on board and started getting more and more involved. Cause I wanted to see this project take off. I wanted to see things actually get built and it just kind of built up from there until I was very heavily involved with the Arktide and trying to get things off the ground.
Carly Jackson: That’s great. Y’all, you, so you met each other through some of the online forums at The Seasteading Institute has been hosting. Is that, that’s correct?
Mitchell Suchner: Yes.
Carly Jackson: That makes me very happy. That’s exactly our purpose, is to provide a space for people who wanna build seasteads to find each other and develop these projects. So that is excellent news.
So can you tell us a bit about the incorporation or the creation of Arktide from the business sense? Because I’d also like to let our listeners know, you know, what’s involved in starting a seasteading business. It’s a whole new industry. So are there unique challenges and then what are the normal challenges of any startup that you have to deal with?
Ben Silone: Uh, yeah, I mean, our, our initial… Initially, we looked at a number of different countries to incorporate, um, looking at, especially when we’re building on the water, where can we do that? Construction facilities and labor, and, and then just a market of where, where are people going to be most interested in these initially what we’re building.
And I ended up moving here to Florida. And so we’ve started the company here initially. Uh, we are branching out to the Philippines pretty quickly here, which is where Mitchell is gonna be heading in a few weeks. And we’re gonna be doing a lot of construction there. As Mike mentioned, Singapore, that’s a really big market, I think, because they’re a really small country with a lot of water, like connection to the water already is an island nation.
And they have interest in this kind of thing. Uh, as far as we can determine. So, you know, we see this from, I don’t know, I would say day one really we’ve planned this as a global company and be operating from the water on the water. We would like to as quickly, even though we’re going to the Philippines and we may, we’ve looked at Panama and Honduras and other places to do construction.
We really wanna have mobile construction facilities that can build where the customer wants to be. And so that may be a single unit somewhere may be like an entire marina and hotel or something like that. And we can take our ships to where they, they are and build in the water on site. And, um, obviously a lot of environmental benefits to doing that versus shipping stuff all over the world.
So yeah, we kind of view ourselves as a global, uh, entity, I guess, from the start.
Carly Jackson: So when you’re looking for customers, are you looking for people who want to participate in aquaculture or need space? How are you sort of shaping that customer roadmap?
Ben Silone: Yeah, I’m really open, like I view this as us building the blocks or the, the Legos, something very basic like that, that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. My background is partially in real estate investment. So I see this and think of it as a, for what I would personally buy, buy them for, as a unique stay Airbnb that’s a few miles off the coast or near oil reefs or things like that. I think it would be pretty incredible for that. I can see resorts using them.
We’ve had interest in offshore marina, obviously people just living, for example, in, in Singapore, where space is short and there’s high demand for housing, places like that, resort areas like Maldives, and then going out further into sea, especially I would say areas that as far as the aquaculture side of it, I think that would apply almost anywhere.
But I personally would love to see it in areas that have been, I guess, depleted of sea life, like the dead zone out of the Mississippi here in the states and the Gulf, and just out in the middle of the ocean where we have these massive ocean deserts, where there just isn’t a lot of sea life. And so incorporating into the platform is a under sea component where sea life will be able to thrive whether or not somebody just wants it for a hotel.
That’s great. We will have the structure under water for sea life to thrive whether or not they use it for aquaculture, but that is certainly a market that we wanna target as well, especially from, I don’t know, really from any country, people who want to live there and be able to work off of their home and produce sea life, which seafood obviously is pretty expensive, a lot of market for it.
So, so I can see a way where people can fund themselves just through doing that.
Carly Jackson: So can you tell us a bit about fundraising and funding? Like, do you have a traditional investor relationship or are you funding in a different way?
Ben Silone: We’re self-funded. Fortunately we can get through prototyping and initial sales and things like that with funding that we have now. So that makes things a lot easier. We are working right now, actually on a way of allowing people to invest. Uh, we’re creating a blockchain that will allow people to be basically early investors, sort of crowdfunding, uh, mainly through Ark and Solar are the two cryptocurrencies that we’re looking at doing that through.
Carly Jackson: That’s great. I definitely wanna talk more about that, but first let’s talk about your model. So the 2,120 square foot model. And can you describe a little bit what the structure is? It looks to be many cylinders of concrete. So can you tell us a bit about developing that model?
Mitchell Suchner: Yeah. So what we wanted to do was, and I know that for a lot of companies, there’s this, I guess, idea to start coastal and then to move out deeper and, and head out into deeper waters and make these things more and more independent over time, kind of add on to the engineering. And what we wanted to do was start off initially with something that could be used in the deep sea. So we’ve been engineering, this thing to handle, uh, five meter waves to be, uh, stable on its own, to be, like Ben was saying, kind of produce its own food, produce its own electricity with solar panels, potentially be able to produce its own fresh water once we have, uh, an OTEC system. And we might talk more about that later.
But, uh, what we’ve, uh, found is a really good way of doing this is using something that, that we’ve been calling seasteading cement, which is we’ve been going to these concrete and cement companies and getting this kind of special mix that’s going to allow us to produce these very, very quickly and very efficiently. And they’re very strong. It’s gonna be higher strength than ordinary concrete. And, uh, the basic shape of the hole itself of the seastead is, it is just a cylinder. It’s basically what you’d see above water is this kind of cylinder with windows on the side, coming up out of the water, and then below it, you would have this heave plate that’s being used as a ballast, which would be detachable or adjustable.
And that’s also where we would have our aquaculture. We would have potentially shellfish or other seaweed or kelp or other kinds of life that we can grow down there. So we’re kind of building it in all around unit that can be used for anything for hotel rooms, for ordinary living quarters, businesses, restaurants. We wanna keep it as universal and broad application as possible.
Carly Jackson: So, can you tell me the dimensions of, of the cylinder again?
Mitchell Suchner: Yeah. It’s uh, 30 feet in diameter and 28 feet tall. That’s the first model that we’re working on right now. There’s this slight chance that we might make some variations to that still, but I think we’ve mostly settled on 30 feet diameter and 28 feet height.
Carly Jackson: So 28 feet height, is that two stories or three stories?
Mitchell Suchner: That would be three stories.
Carly Jackson: And would you say like if it was three stories, the bottom story would be devoted to aquaculture or, or is it living space and then aquaculture below that?
Mitchell Suchner: Oh, yeah, it’s living space in the aquaculture below that. So all three floors are areas that you can walk around in.
And we, and we’ve been talking about having a windows at water level. So as the, as the waves are coming by, you kinda see the waves push up against the window while you’re in the middle floor. And that would be really cool. And that kind of effect is, you know, these kind of underwater restaurants use that. It’s, it’s really cool. You know, that’d be very popular, I think.
But, uh, the whole interior of the cylinder is living space and then the aquaculture would occur on the ballast or the heave plate, which is below the cylinder. And it, it’s kind of, you know, I guess I’m getting into the engineering side a little bit and maybe we, we could bring on someone from the engineering team too, that would’ve been fun.
But I think that it’s a really efficient use of space that we’ve come up with.
Carly Jackson: And so you said it could withstand up to five meter waves. And so what, as far as like potential locations, where, what does that open up to be able to withstand five meter waves?
Mitchell Suchner: So that basically puts us anywhere in the tropics for the most part near the equator. Several degrees north or south of the equator, I think. And we haven’t gone through all of the wave data for places like the Mediterranean, but I think that it would probably do reasonably well. And I think most areas of the Mediterranean. And again, you know, I don’t want to like say a hundred percent for that is, again, we haven’t gone through all of the wave data yet, but we have for some areas down by the Philippines, for instance.
And I know that there was one area near the Philippines that we were looking at. And in the year of 2020, the highest wave that it recorded was 3.75 meters. So, and that, and that wasn’t on the equator. That was, uh, seven, uh, that was the seventh parallels. That was seven latitude north of the equator. And so in theory, you could take these things significantly farther north than that. It can be actually quite flexible with where you can put it and because the ballast is detachable or adjustable, you could also put it in very shallow water, like a harbor or bay.
Carly Jackson: And so you shared a picture with me that it looked like several cylinders attached together. I hope we can share that on our social media when we release the episode. Yeah?
Mitchell Suchner: I think so, yeah.
Carly Jackson: Okay, great. So connecting these cylinders together, will that give you even more stability?
Mitchell Suchner: Yeah, I think it should give more stability. And also what it does is it allows us to use that flat deck on top. And you know, when people are listening to this podcast, they’ll be able to see the picture, but also just kind of describe it.
So it’s a cylinder. But it has a square deck on top, which is going to be able to hook into the neighboring structures, the neighboring cylinders. So allow you to join together and form these floating communities very, very easily. And like Ben was saying, they’re like building blocks, they’re like Legos.
And we can lay a kind of road surface, kind of, if you can imagine unfurling a rubber mat, but we wouldn’t necessarily use rubber for this. We could lay down a road over top of those and you could have intersections. You could have a single lane connecting to an intersection over here that branches off into three more lanes in the other directions.
And we could have a road system. We could have utilities, we could potentially share electricity, like by running cables between neighbors and, and maybe even fresh water. And again, that kind of stuff. It’s all kind of in the distant future, especially when it comes to sharing fresh water, cause we need kind of a hose or pipe system, but we haven’t quite gotten that far, but there’s a lot of benefits to being able to join these things together because it really allows you to build it into a floating city.
And I think that’s one of the end goals. If you look at a lot of the art that The Seasteading Institute has used in the past, I think that we would want these to kind of be connected in the long run.
Ben Silone: And another thing on the structures we’re although most of our focus has been on the 30 foot diameter with the 2120 square feet. We are planning, I guess, the bigger picture of things of having about 30 foot diameter, 40 foot diameter, 50 foot, 60 foot, getting up into about, I think about 50 foot is probably the largest for a single family home. And then beyond that you get into business and restaurants and stores and office space, apartment buildings, things like that.
Uh, as you scale up, obviously things generally get cheaper per, on a per square foot basis. So these, again, going back to the building blocks, we wanna have a whole bunch of different sizes and methods of connecting these so that people will just be able to come together in whatever kind of form of community they want, uh, wherever they want, within reason, of course, based on wave, wave height and hurricanes and that kind of thing, and be able to build out these communities.
So we’ve from the sales end of it, looking at things like, okay, what if, what if a developer wanted to create a retirement community? What if a developer wanted to create a hotel and marina and restaurant and bar and whatever kind of thing, what kind of building blocks would we need to provide for them to be able to build what they wanna build?
And then beyond that, of course, there’s gonna be a ton of things that I’ve never even thought about, uh, which is exciting. So , so the more building blocks we, we can provide and the, the methods of connecting them and then people will have the freedom to, you know, build out whatever they want.
Carly Jackson: That sounds great. And so I do wanna talk a little bit about how OTEC will work. So OTEC is ocean thermal energy conversion. And a few years ago, I did a podcast about that based on the seasteading book, cause there’s explanation of OTEC in our, in the seasteading book by Joe Quirk. So tell us how, how that will work alongside your cylinder.
What sort of structure needs to be attached? What is OTEC and how does that work?
Ben Silone: Yeah, OTEC is central to a lot of things, especially for the XPRIZE, which we’ll get to as well. So the goal is in tropical areas where the surface water temperature is in the seventies, uh, Fahrenheit, I think it’s north of 75 typically and then 3000 feet down, we hit stable temperatures that are about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. And when you pump up that water from 3000 beat down and run it through a heat exchanger, then you can generate 24/7 electricity off of that.
So the, if you think of the entire ocean and especially the tropical areas as being a, a massive battery for solar power, where it stores in all that heat and then, and then the lower layers stay a consistent colder temperature, then really, we’re just drawing off that solar energy, which is theoretically, if these were all around the tropical regions and we could move the power, it would power of the world. And the huge advantage in my mind, as far as pure power generation is this is a 24/7 system. It doesn’t, you know, that solar energy stays in overnight, of course.
So as far as needing massive battery banks and things like that, a lot of that stuff is kind of probably completely unnecessary. Maybe you would want a few batteries, but, and that’s probably half of a half the cost of the solar system being off grid. So the downside, as far as power, power generation goes is, OTEC is probably only really efficient under or down to about a megawatt, maybe maybe 500 kilowatt, something like that.
So we’re looking at having like a central hub or one of the platforms that these connect to that would be the OTEC power station that could supply power to, let’s say, 50 plus of the individual homes slash businesses, et cetera. And then, sorry, did you wanna ask something else in there?
Carly Jackson: Well, I just wanna make sure we cover the basics of it. So that you’re bringing cold water up, running it through a turbine. And so what is that? You said heat exchanger. So what is that doing exactly in lay terms as much as possible?
Ben Silone: Yeah, so you can use something like, uh, it’s, it’s a pretty traditional approach. At that point, you can use something like ammonia or a refrigerant. And so the warm water is going to warm up that, that fluid and cause it to expand, run through turbine, and then the cold water will cause it to condense back down and then the warm water will cause it to heat back up and expand. So it just cycles round and round and around through turbines.
Carly Jackson: And so what is the environmental impact of that?
Ben Silone: Yeah, so that’s the cool part is, so sort of our, you know, other uses, I guess the, the waste of it, uh, which isn’t waste, but , we have that cold water when it runs through that cycle. It’s really easy to desalinate it, which is pretty huge for being out in the middle of the ocean. We have unlimited water. It’s just really salty. So it’s really efficient way to create clean water. Which is not only needed on floating seasteads, but by most of the rest of the world at this point. So if we figure out a, a efficient way to do that, then that’ll benefit a lot of people in the world. And then we’ve also pulled up that cold water, which after we generate power off of it, it’s gonna be a little bit warmer, but it’s still gonna be pretty cold.
And so there’s something called seawater air conditioning, SWAC, which is used in a lot of parts of the world right now. So that reduces our energy needs substantially because we can cool all of these stations for incredibly cheap at that point. And then, you know, again, calling it our waste water, which is incredibly valuable is this mineral-rich water as everything in the ocean, minerals tend to sink down.
And once you get down to a few thousand feet, you get this deep sea water that has a lot more minerals in it. And so that’s incredible for aquaculture. Uh, so as we bring it up, we’re generating electricity, we are getting clean water really efficiently. We are cooling all the facilities there really efficiently, and we are promoting a lot more sea life growth, both from aquaculture and just everywhere in the ocean.
Everything that comes around will benefit from that as we have plankton and algae, and like sort of the, the basic building blocks of sea life in the ocean will thrive off of that. And then as far as CO2 sequestration goes, obviously all of that sea life growth will benefit that as we are growing algae and for plankton blooms and things like that. So.
Carly Jackson: Sure. And so Mike referencing your presentation again, you talked about polyculture. I was wondering if you could explain the basic philosophy of polyculture.
Mike Doty: Yes. The idea that polyculture is instead of monoculture, where you’re only focusing or raising one species, is that you have an entire food chain, so that the waste of feeding one species is used by, uh, the, as a feed by another.
So often it’ll be a combination of seaweed and invertebrates, say oysters, mussels, or snails, and shrimp and vertebrates like fish and a balanced ecosystem. And that’s one of the things Shannon found when he was working on the Singapore project, the invertebrates he was growing, he was experimenting with polyculture in raceways.
He was saying that invertebrates that he could grow were actually more valuable than fit that everything they’re kind of synergistically combines to create more value. This is a problem now with current aquaculture, it’s close to the coasts and it’s seen as a source of pollution because you just have this monoculture of salmon, usually, and a lot of waste feed and their waste creates pollution underneath the fish pads.
So that, we’re avoiding that with polyculture. Yeah. There’s a project, a company in Long Island, sound, that’s pioneered a lot of the work. That’s very interesting. They’re growing oysters with seaweed.
Carly Jackson: So can you grow those oysters? We did a book club of eat like a fish with Brent Smith and he talks about developing these vertical farms with oysters and seaweed. And is it possible to grow those invertebrates in the tropics?
Mike Doty: Yes. There’s different species for, since Florida has a very big oyster industry. That’s what grows here. Mussels grow farther north, like along the coast of California. In fact, with the ocean’s gotten a bit too warm for them to properly breed for some species in the good California coast. And they’re actually having to hatch the larva in tanks, and then seed the, uh, ropes they use for the culture. But yeah, different areas have different species. For instance, the tropics is not a good place to grow kelp, unfortunately, it doesn’t grow several feet a day, but that’s where, uh, sargassum grows a lot more.
I see most sargassum is that it doesn’t need an infrastructure support, that just floats on the surface of the ocean. So in effect, you’re converting all the open surface area of the ocean to a big solar collector. I mean, um, fish farm sargassum, and it could support other species underneath it as well. Also we’re using ropes infrastructure, we can grow other species too. Yeah. But whatever climate there is to summarize, there are useful species that can grow in it. For instance, papano grows well in the tropics and grouper down in, uh, Columbia, they have grouper farms.
Carly Jackson: So can you anchor these farms off of one of your cylinders or would you need two cylinders to sort of support?
Mike Doty: Either way, the heat plates, um, as mentioned earlier are like an artificial sea floor and they’re to good depth. Usually your best growing area is around 20 feet under the surface where you’re below most of the wave motion, but still getting enough light. But you know, your best diving is usually at top five feet of water. Get down lower than that. Get a lot less light.
So that’s a platform and groups of seasteads, though, can string cables or ropes between each other. There are struts to grow off, but we’re also investigating tensegrity structures. So that is really actually the support to hold these cylinders rigidly in an array that they won’t be moving too much relative to each other for the wave motion, not just for the platforms, but also for being able to use ’em for aquaculture.
And then those cables, they’re actually doing a couple ways, you know, not only from anchoring ropes and buoys from the bottom of the ocean, but also you have buoys and suspended ropes from the top of the ocean polyculture. Yeah, essentially it’s an oceanic food forest, familiar with permaculture and good forest and that. Brent, he’s, I believe he’s doing this for, uh, school and *unintelligible* so.
Mitchell Suchner: Yeah. And, uh, if, if you need more space than what’s just on the kind of artificial sea floor that we’ve made with our heave plate, you can just attach hanging baskets to grow, you know, shellfish and, and things like that. You can always increase the space, cause those could hang down from the cylinder. They could hang down from the ballast below that. So those are even more space to expand that out. If you wanted to grow more shellfish like oysters or clams, or if you were, uh, farther north, mussels.
Ben Silone: Yeah. That’s, that’s one of the things looking at, uh, aquaculture versus agriculture is that we are working in three dimensions. And so we have a ballast at the bottom. That’s about 700 square feet and it’s, uh, there’s about a 20 foot space in between the bottom of the cylinder structure and the ballast. So that isn’t seven hundred square feet, that is hundreds of cubic feet, um, thousands of cubic feet that we can have coral reefs and baskets of oysters and fish habitats and things like that. So it multiplies substantially just within that small area.
And then of course like Mike, I said a few buoys outside of that and you can grow, I don’t know, unlimited I would say. It’s, it’s just incredible. Especially when we add in mineral-rich water and sea life just expands, it thrives. So I find it exciting, even looking at the comparison of if I want to plant a field where there’s currently a forest, I have to clear cut the forest and plant my field.
And maybe the deer benefit from that a few creatures. But for the most part, I’m killing off a lot of life. Whereas with aquaculture and a polyculture in particular, we can grow a lot of food and benefit sea life, wild sea life, tremendously. It’s, there’s, it’s just such a win-win. I love it.
Carly Jackson: And how is this? Is this all related to the XPRIZE?
Mike Doty: The relation to the XPRIZE is that we can sequester carbon. So by two ways, one way the materials, the concrete we’re using to build the seastead that permanently sequesters, the carbons made out of a calcium carbonate. Limestone is part of the mix and that’s sequestered for a hundred years, which is the requirement for the XPRIZE.
And then also by, um, harvesting sargassum or other algaes is the portion which is converted into biochar or, um, carbon materials that are used in building seasteads. We can even ferment it and create polylactic acid or a ethanol to build, you know, polypropylenes, other plastics out of it. Those all sequester it and permanently remove it from the atmosphere.
There’s also that portion, which goes into food is sequestered for a while, until the food is considered. But if it’s a, at least a closed loop system that anything that’s used for the food and energy is still carbon neutral rather than carbon additive, but we’re looking at a combination of carbon neutral and carbon negative technologies.
Carly Jackson: So when the XPRIZE was announced for carbon removal, did you see that as sort of a side project that complimented arche tide’s goals? Or was it fully in line? Like how, how does that fit?
Mike Doty: It’s a side, side project, you know, it’s fully in line.
Ben Silone: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, as far as promoting the growth of sea life and polyculture and things that we already wanted to do, we, we’re not really doing things much different than we would do otherwise, if this had never existed. We view natural ocean processes, the carbon cycle, which is primarily that anything in the ocean that dies and sinks down below a few thousand feet, that carbon stays in that .Plankton blooms is a, a great example of that. Of, they bring in carbon CO2 from the atmosphere and then whatever dies and sinks down typically stays down there for thousands of years.
It’s a very natural process that the Earth is used for its existence. So. I’m not a huge fan of methods of having, say, a giant machine that pumps through a bunch of air and draws out the CO2 and pumps it into a well in the ground, for example. I really would like to see how the Earth naturally does it and has done it for millennia and just help the Earth do what it does best.
And so that’s gonna be a little harder to measure, but, um, I’m not even interested, I guess, in hitting a, the, the prize is a gigaton of CO2 sequestered for at least a hundred years. The top prize is $50 million. Um, that’s great. I hope that we can allow sea life to thrive so much that we will well exceed that.
And again, I would, I would do that without any prize money. That’s not really, that’s a great extra, I guess that’s why I would see it as an add-on, but it doesn’t really change what we wanna do. And our slogan is the oceans, our future. Um, and I view that. Ways of food, energy, clean water, clean atmosphere, housing, everything that we can think of. I, I don’t see humanity thriving in the future without getting into our oceans.
Mike Doty: Right. The tide in the name, a tide is the idea, uh, tide raising abundance for all humanity, and really it’s a lot more productive. We’re interested in sustainable productive uses of the carbon sequestration. So really increasing the fish populations and other sea life populations in the oceans so that it increases the abundance of food as well as wildlife and diversity. That’s the main goal.
And even though we don’t get any credit for doing that in the, um, XPRIZE, that’s again, it’s the case with XPRIZE is more of an add on. It’s a nice to have, and it’s a great way to promote seasteads and bring a positive publicity, but it’s not the main goal. What we really want is a sustainable economic foundation for seasteading that yields useful products, as well as increasing, you know, enhancing the environment.
Ben Silone: And that’s one of the things with this ballast being a platform, a seabed for sea life to grow and having fish habitats and coral reefs and things on those is even if your interest is purely and having an Airbnb investment or just living on the water or having a hotel or anything else, the fact that that’s there already life will come to it and thrive.
And so, so looking at the ability to scale this thing globally, and to surpass that gigaton scale of CO2 sequestration, I think we can appeal to the business sense in people and just the desire to live on the water and the desire to grow food and the desire to do all these other things. We, we don’t necessarily need a person who is willing to invest a lot of money into CO2 sequestration.
That’s a byproduct of having a successful business or having a new life in a new community and things like that. So I think that our ability to scale for the XPRIZE is concerned is maybe better than any other team. I could say that. Better, I think, it’s better than every other team, but also with what the judges say, I thought that, I guess, so.
Carly Jackson: When is that decided? What’s the timeframe?
Ben Silone: It’ll be spring of 2025 when the grand prizes go up. So they, they just did a milestone prize. They actually did a student prize last fall. They just did a milestone prize, which was 15 teams up to 15 teams get a million dollars. Each, some of the teams that had a lot more academic background, like lab results and things like that.
I don’t think they’ve actually announced as winners yet, but the teams that had sort of laboratory results, I think will be the ones that probably get through that first milestone phase. Which is great. And we’ve talked to, I actually run a discord for that prize, trying to bring people together and communicate because overall the feel that I’ve gotten through that, which is, I don’t know, a thousand teams plus from all over the world is that everybody wants to work together and benefit the world.
And so we’ve already talked with several teams about partnering with them, and that’s kind of my main goal with that is to learn from others and help others and team up and partner and, yeah.
Carly Jackson: Sounds amazing. I did wanna kind of go back and talk, Mitchell, you’re going to the Philippines and I wanted to ask about manufacturing. So is that why you’re going to the Philippines, to look at manufacturing possibilities?
Mitchell Suchner: Yes, we’re definitely looking at, uh, some manufacturing over there. So we have hired on, we have three people right now that are helping us with engineering. They are all located. Well, actually we just brought on SAC, too.
So most of the people that we’re working with are over in the Philippines. We have someone for social media over there, and then we have some engineers over there and we’ve been running our wave simulations in, uh, I don’t remember what the name of the software was, but I know that we’ve been looking at warehouses to construct and shipyards and places like that in areas like Cavite, which is kind of near the capital city of, of the Philippines. And then further down south in the Philippines.
And initially when we were looking at shipyards, we were thinking that it would be. More kind of cost effective to use a, a shipyard in the Philippines. And that’s still true. But what we found is that the model that we’re designing, this 30 foot diameter cylinder, is actually something that we could kind of just construct our own facility to build, because it’s a really not super complex design. It’s not something you really need to build in a shipyard. It’s something that we could build just about anywhere in the world, actually. We could build it on a barge. We could build it on a large floating platform, or we can build it on a warehouse that we just kind of put up ourselves on the coast on some, you know, relatively low cost real estate in a country like the Philippines.
So it’s that kind of flexibility. That’s benefiting us in getting our prototype out early, within the next few months, and also is going to benefit us in the long term when we want to do construction in every area of the world. Again, it kind of goes back to, we can expand really quick. We can build a lot of these really quickly because they’re very efficient in what they do. I think we just have a really good model.
Carly Jackson: And getting materials to different parts of the world is not too complicated?
Mitchell Suchner: So we’re still working on like exactly what formula we’re gonna use for our seasteading cement that we’re gonna build this out of. But right now it’s looking like in most areas we can kind of get the materials that we need.
We can get them in Florida. We can get them in the Philippines. I’m sure we can get them in a place like Singapore, but exactly the specifics of those materials. Maybe some of them would need to be shipped to different areas, but even if that were the case, it would be relatively low cost shipping.
Carly Jackson: That sounds-
Ben Silone: Yeah we- Oh, go ahead.
Carly Jackson: I was just gonna say it sounds very promising. So go ahead, Ben.
Ben Silone: Yeah, now just going back to Singapore again, they’re the, uh, I think they’ve been voted the maritime capital of the world repeatedly many years and they’re, I think it was the second busiest port in the world. So most, uh, I don’t know if the most, I don’t know how much traffic there is, but a huge amount of traffic that goes from China, Taiwan, all these different countries in Southeast Asia, go through Singapore.
So, and that’s not very far from the Philippines, which also has incredibly busy ports as well as Indonesia and Malaysia. So this whole area is, I would say probably more beneficial as far as just sourcing raw materials and doing the construction that we need to do than anywhere, probably in the Americas, north or south, from what I’ve been able to determine. So it is the hotspot of shipping.
Mitchell Suchner: Oh yeah. It’s, there’s tons of material. It’s very tropical waters. It’s better for OTEC than most of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s got a huge gradient in temperature. That whole area is, generally, there’s a big swath of it that doesn’t get typhoons, doesn’t get hurricanes, very low wave height.
It’s very safe for seasteading. There’s tons of trade. And then when it comes to like Singapore, like Ben said, there’s a lot of trade there. There’s also a lot of trade in the Philippines, but it’s also the number one country in the world for hiring on people to work on cruise ships, because there’s just a lot of people who are used to working on boats there.
So when we did wanna take a boat that we want to build our seasteads on and maybe move that boat to America or move that boat over to the Indian ocean or wherever we can just take this same crew that we were working with for the prototype ideally, or a crew that, you know, kind of watch what happened and we know who we’re working with and just kind of say, hey, you know, you guys wanna come along with us and just have these mobile construction factories, which is a cool concept.
Ben Silone: Mm-hmm
Carly Jackson: Very cool. Okay. So let’s talk about blockchain and it’s a very broad topic. So I wanna let you lead it. Like, how do you as Arktide approach blockchain technology, and you did mention that you’re thinking of doing some crowdfunding using cryptocurrency. So wherever you wanna start, how did Arktide enter into the blockchain space?
Mitchell Suchner: Uh, do you want me to start, Ben, or do you wanna start?
Ben Silone: Yeah. Well, let me, I’ll give a, I’ll give a really broad overview to hopefully give the concept simple. And then Mitchell is far more the expert than I am on that, uh, as is Mike. So a lot of people have heard of NFTs. That’s a hot, uh, term, I guess, to use nowadays for things.
It is really just anything that is, let’s say serialized. So a car, a house, there’s only one of that particular thing. You can’t just swap your house for your neighbors, whereas like a quarter you could swap with your neighbor’s quarter and it’s still worth 25 cents. So that’s been done for digital art and gaming things and things like that that are digital, but, I think the real power of them is in that anything that you could title normally like a house, a car, anything like that can, that title can rest in an NFT. It’s the same thing. It’s again, it’s just an individual serialized, one of a kind, that’s only applies to this thing. And so when we do that, then as again, we, I said in the beginning, we wanna start out as a global company and allow these to be the building blocks to be used anywhere, so.
So we’re trying to create a universal, but also decentralized system to be able to, uh, store the title and even things like rental and mortgages and things like that. So that as communities go out into, further out into waters, there’s going to be people from dozens of different nations, probably bringing their seasteads together into communities. So we wanna come up with again, universal, but also fully decentralized method of allowing people to do that.
Mitchell Suchner: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, uh, so what we’re doing right now actually is, generally we, we really like the Ark blockchain and the, the Ark cryptocurrency. And so Solar recently has kind of switched over their infrastructure. The, the way that they’re operating their blockchain, they’re kind of basing it off of Ark now. And we have gone ahead and set up, uh, a delegate. And right now it’s just on DevNet. But later on, when it switches to MainNet, what we’re gonna be doing with our crypto, which I think we’re gonna call it ArkT, or ArkS, we kind of went back and forth on that, but probably gonna call it ArkT is when people buy solar and then the stake it on the delegate that we have on that blockchain, they will receive their rewards in ArkT, which can then be used to give discounts to purchase a seastead in one of our models. There will be other benefits. There will be, Ben, were we saying, I think we were saying that they could…
Ben Silone: Yeah, we’re, we’re trying to, again, where we tie it in with rentals, because I think that’s gonna be a big market initially, whether it’s an Airbnb or an entire hotel. If people can redeem these credits for that, and then also exclusives like different events that we wanna host.
We are looking just, I guess, going back to the structure, but all of this, our plan is to build a prototype in the next few months and actually get it in the water. Ideally end of April, probably realistically more like May, but actually then be going into production in the summer. And so this is on our timeline going to happen pretty quick.
And so we wanna get all of this stuff in place right now, like as far as the blockchain and titling and things like that. So we’re ready to roll with that from day one. So yeah, this is basically like crowdfunding where people can, as far as the, the staking and delegates and things like that, it’s really just like putting your money in a bank account.
And instead of getting, like, if you put your dollars in a bank account, instead of getting dollars in interest back, or you would get ArkT back instead, kinda like credit card points or things like that even. And so those will be more valuable for buying the seastead, renting the seastead, or participating in, in our events than if they just got the dollars back and then spent them.
Mitchell Suchner: Right. Yeah, exactly. So for instance, if you wanted to kind of invest in what we’re doing, you can go out, you can buy some Solar, you can go on the list of delegates that are on the Solar blockchain. One of them would say Arktide. And you could stake that money with us. And then the payment that you would receive back would be ArkT and then if you wanted to spend that to rent a seastead, to buy a seastead, there would be a discount. But in addition, if you wanna just get rid of it, then you can go and sell it somewhere, probably on DeFi and it would maintain its value or the value could go up as we build more of these.
Carly Jackson: So is it accurate to say it’s something like buying shares in the company? If you have ArcT tokens, is tokens the correct term?
Mitchell Suchner: Yes.
Mike Doty: Yes, it is tokens, but no, it isn’t, it isn’t an equity share at all. It’s just the utility token, which can be used to purchase goods and services that are marketed made by Arktide, which its applied to the purchase of a seastead itself or in the rental business, ready leasing time, stay on board a nightly stay, kind of a token.
Carly Jackson: So Ben, you said something about credit card points. So it’s along the lines of if my credit card has deals with a certain hotel or a certain grocery store. And so if I use my credit card with those partners, I get more points on my credit card that I can then use either for cash or for gift cards or things like that. So it works more like that.
Ben Silone: Yeah. And you could think of it even as simply as that, if you go to the store, sometimes you can get a deal on a gift card for like I can go to Costco and get a discount on several different restaurants and things like that. Where if I pay a hundred dollars for this thing, I get a gift card that’s worth $110. Something like that. So I get more, but I can use it for that specific place. That’s probably the simplest comparison.
Mitchell Suchner: But the main difference is you don’t have to actually spend the money. You just have to stake the crypto and you, you get to keep the crypto and you also get these coins in return as kind of, you know, staking rewards, which is, again, it’s not investing in the company.
It’s more like kind of access tokens for the structures themselves. It’s not so much like the Arktide token. It’s like a token for the actual physical structure.
Mike Doty: Yeah, I wanted to clarify too, for those maybe not familiar with crypto. Yeah. Staking and with Ark and Ark based chains, actually, it’s more like voting because there is no lock in you vote and you can un-vote that particular delegate anytime, but you still can complete control with your own wallet and address of these, um, Ark or Solar that’s voted on a delegate.
So just to clarify that. You’re never having to put what you’re voting with, the Arc or Solar, into custody it with someone else. It’s always under your control. And it’s a little different. Usually staking has a lock in period that you have to leave it in a certain amount of time before you can unstake. With voting and delegate rewards, there is none of, it’s just you vote or un-vote on the fly whenever you want.
Carly Jackson: And when you stake Arktide, you’re voting for the success of Arktide, right?
Mike Doty: Exactly. That you vote on right now, we’re starting on the, uh, Solar blockchain. Cause there’s a starting up in having new delegates that you vote for the Arktide delegate. And as long as it stays within the top 53 delegates that have been voted for, then it creates blocks, and we receive forging rewards and, um, Solar, SXP. And then in return, instead of distributing a portion of that SXP, Solar, to the voters, like, um, other delegates instead were distributing the Arktide ArcT token for them instead.
So it’s a way to accumulate and really the only way at this point to accumulate ArkT, instead of receiving the SXP. That’s a way to crowdfund without actually collecting funds from anyone. Cause we’re only collecting funds that are earned by the delegate, but we’re not collecting funds directly from the voters.
Ben Silone: And, and just to clarify something about in, in comparison to like Bitcoin, for example, um, where you have people all over the world that are mining, and this has come up on the news a lot where it’s a really inefficient system, now, where it, it requires an enormous amount of electricity to run this hardware to mine, crypto, uh, my Bitcoin.
In this case for Ark, for example, there’s 51 servers that run, for Solar there’s 53. And those do not need to be extremely high end, you know, power hogging kinda machines. They’re really pretty basic. So the amount of electricity required to verify transactions on this network is millions of times less, would assume, than what Bitcoin is probably running right now, though.
And a lot of cryptocurrencies are moving to this, like Ethereum and stuff, because it was, you know, blockchain 10 years ago was fine. It wasn’t that much of a kind of environmental concern, electricity usage concern. But nowadays it’s kind of a, a big problem. So, so these are extremely efficient and go along with our environmental focus.
Mike Doty: Right. I estimate it’s probably about five kilowatts power to run the whole block chain total. You know, when you’d have little more 50 delegates, you see about a hundred watts per delegate, right? The total, like, the resources of a typical delegates uses two CPUs and two gigabytes of ram and probably around, you know, 50 gigabytes of hard drive space.
There’s no GPU involved, no monitors, anything like that. They’re cloud servers, different platforms, they’re distributed across multiple cloud platforms. So yeah, that’s that really, it limits the amount of power that’s used.
Carly Jackson: So as Solar grows, it won’t face the same issues of needing more computing power?
Mike Doty: No, it’s, yeah. There’s no increased mining or proof of work or anything. So yeah. It’s like, regardless of the block size, it uses the same energy, same power.
Carly Jackson: Okay. So that’s talking about Solar, which is a cryptocurrency, correct?
Ben Silone: Mm-hmm.
Carly Jackson: I do wanna dig in more into the NFT idea of having a record of ownership. So, Ben, I think you explained it beautifully that it’s universal and you’re expecting people to be coming from all over the world. So not relying on, for example, when I bought my house, there’s a title company based in my city and it’s all very like specific and local. Right? And so that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if you could elaborate more on that and tracking ownership and rentals with that. How does that work?
Ben Silone: So, coming from real estate investment, where the cost to buy or sell a house requires lots of people to check titles and insure titles and record titles that is-
Carly Jackson: Insure titles? *laughter*
Ben Silone: Yeah. Title insurance, where if you buy a house, a lawyer will go through the title history and see if it’s good. Meaning the person that’s selling you. The house actually owns the house for example, and there’s no liens on the house and all that kind of thing. And if you go to some more rural county offices, which I, I subdivided a property, they literally pulled out a book that has been there for the past a hundred years.
And not everything is digital yet. And so they’re flipping through pages of this book to check for history of subdivisions and titling stuff. And so obviously that could be updated with lots of even really old technology, but with blockchain, you could instantly see this isn’t a way to make the history of a property anonymous.
Anybody can go in and see if I wanna buy your seastead, I can just look on the NFT for that and see what the history is of who’s bought and sold it, how much they bought and sold it for probably. And if there’s any kind of like mortgage against it, because once you get a mortgage, then it will be digitally tied to that NFT until you pay it off.
And so you can easily go back and see it. Maybe I think we can do that so simply that there wouldn’t even be a need for a lawyer to look through it. So it’s really cutting out this huge amount of middle men that we need right now in a lot of countries, because it’s so sort of hodgepodge and I don’t really understand how it’s that inefficient in real estate.
And I think every time I buy or sell a house, I’m really frustrated when I look through and I’m like, how do they charge me a thousand dollars for that? How is this, you know, I bought a $300,000 house and there’s like $5,000 worth of all this extra stuff on it when it’s just a little bit of data. I mean, it’s just who bought, sold the thing and who had a loan and it’s really simple information.
So I think that will alleviate a lot of that. And that’s not even, we’re not even talking about international real estate, which is a much different deal, but you have to incorporate in that country maybe, or have a sponsor or be a resident there and deal with all the different processes there. So we would just wanna simplify all that flatten the whole thing, decentralize the whole thing.
And really anybody can go through and see the title history and buy or sell titles. And then you also have the whole escrow piece of it too, which is, has been used in smart contracts for a long time, where I give you $500,000. It goes into an escrow account. You can’t access it. I can’t access it until a, a predefined time period has ended.
So let’s say we want a week or something like that to review all the title information. Obviously you would still do a physical inspection, things like that. And then if both parties sign off on it, then the title automatically goes to me and the money automatically goes to you and the deal’s done. So we don’t need to sit down with a lawyer and sign off on the papers or any of that. It’s, it’s all automated and again, decentralized and here, a simple process.
Carly Jackson: And so if you own one of your models, you’re cylinders and I wanna rent space in the cylinder. How does that work?
Mitchell Suchner: Well, to start off with, in a hypothetical situation, you might go onto a website and say, Airbnb. You would look at pictures of it. You would say, this looks like a really nice place to stay. I like the coral reef on the bottom. I like all the fish swimming around, you know, it’s really cool. And so let’s say that I wanted to pay in crypto because, you know, we’re gonna do this on the blockchain. Then basically the owner of that property could kind of rent out nights at that property.
They could say on Wednesday, the 22nd, um, or, or the 23rd, this person’s gonna come over. And then a smart contract would be kind of set up. And as soon as I pay that money into that smart contract, it’s just going to register that that night is reserved for me. And then anyone who looks on that website, as long as it’s reading that information with the blockchain would see, oh, this guy, Mitchell Suchner booked that night. He’s gonna be staying there. And that money would be automatically distributed to both the owner. And if there’s a property manager who was getting involved, who was helping to kind of alert people to, hey, this place is available for this night, they would also get a cut, and all of those proportions would be set or preset by that smart contract on probably the Ark blockchain.
Ben Silone: So, if you think about it, as far as an NFT goes, where, like I said, it can be a serialized thing, it’s this exact seastead with this exact serial number. Let’s say you can also have a fraction of that NFT where you can split it out and say, it’s this exact serialized seastead for this exact night, this exact 24 hour period.
So each of those can be its own token. And if I live there, obviously I’m just not gonna sell those tokens because I’m gonna be there every night. So it can be as simple as, hey, I’m gonna go on vacation for a week and I’m gonna offer these seven tokens for sale, which the owner of the token has the right to stay there for the night or for the week, if they buy all seven. Or I can buy it as part of a hotel or a full time Airbnb. And then I have 365 tokens per year and people can come in and buy those. Certain things will apply. Obviously, if you go with Airbnb, they’re gonna do a little bit of checks on people. If they have like a history with destroying Airbnb properties, then they’re not allowed to rent new places and a little bit of something where you have to physically check out the person and make sure that you actually wanna rent to them.
But a lot of the processes, unlike what Airbnb will do, is they’re gonna charge you money to collect the money, the initial payment for the rental. And then they’re gonna charge you to distribute that to a property manager and to distribute it to you and to the cleaners and to the different people that do these things. We can automate all of that, again, in a way that’s decentralized, which is a great component, but also in cutting out a lot of the fees for middle men. For hotels it’s great because a lot of times you can have like classes of rooms. It’s not, it doesn’t necessarily have to be for a specific room. You just have like the bigger room or the smaller room or whatever. So then you can, really, sell ’em on an open market, almost where the prices can fluctuate in real time and people can buy and sell ’em, so.
Carly Jackson: Now have you looked at blockchain solutions for governance? So like replacing an HOA for example, in a community?
Ben Silone: Yeah, I think we would like to handle a lot of that stuff. No matter what, HOAs, I think are the best example, because if we’re a mile off the coast of Singapore or we’re 500 miles off the coast of any other country, a lot of it is just gonna come down to having some kind of agreement with your neighbors and, and that’ll be something that can be open and you can review it.
I mean, even that, you buy, the last place I bought, that was in an HOA. I literally, I think I had to pay a hundred dollars for a copy of the HOA docs, which were not publicly available. And they digitized it by scanning up the, like, book that was like this big. And it was just this horribly inefficient process where I’m like, why, why do we do all this?
So yeah, I think the blockchain, we can have that as a smart contract. And hey, you wanna live in this community? Well, these are the rules that we wanna make. You can’t, uh, make a ton of noise after 11 o’clock at night, this more friendly, friendly, whatever that stuff is pretty simple. You know, having on blockchain makes it easier to manage and decentralize again.
But at the end of the day, it’s really just people coming together and saying, hey, we wanna all connect and live together. How are we going to, you know, what kind of rules do we want in place? Some of ’em might not have any. That’s fine. But again, I think we, as with all of this, the basic building blocks that people can build what they want out of it.
So I think a lot of people, you know, we might come up with a sort of HOA base contract that people can use just by default. Maybe they can tick a few boxes if they want it to be this or that, but we want to give people the tools to create whatever they want.
Mike Doty: Yeah. So as I say, decentralized autonomous organization, we also run an HOA. Ark has already had voting. For quite a while, that’s how the whole blockchain system is built. That people vote for delegates. They’re essentially like, uh, board of directors and that they have the final say in what code and updates are installed to run the chain. They can also fulfill other functions like custody of the trusted people to handle custody, but with Ark, like you could fork it and create another chain out of it and choose the number of delegates.
So if the community wants to have its own, like, HOA system and its own localized token, then it can decide it’s a, it’ll just have like 5 delegates instead of 53, and when it sets up a new chain. The other thing that it’ll be important is to have, may have a fractional NFT that you wanna make sure that a, a majority of holders of that NFT can approve a sale or a transfer.
So that’s another, it’s sort of a mini DL, DAO, in that, you know, just the majority of the token holders can approve a transfer. So that one or a few holdouts, you can’t hold the whole thing, ransom, hold the whole thing hostage or ransom in order to approve a sale. Yeah. There’s some different kinds of governance systems that are built into this.
Carly Jackson: Very cool.
Ben Silone: Yeah. Going back to just the building blocks and the decentralization of it, the ability to split apart and join together and alter the layout and things like that allows for an infinite amount of systems for this kind of thing. And so, whereas you might have a neighborhood that has an HOA with certain set rules, and if there’s new rules that come in and you don’t really like ’em, then you have to leave the neighborhood, sell your house and go through this whole process of moving.
You can just take your home with you and you can go to the neighborhood that is, potentially, if they wanna agree to it, it could only be a few hundred feet away. I mean, I don’t know, again, I think that’s where it’s interesting to think through how people can use these building blocks, because we’ve never had that kind of ability before. Even thinking at the city level where you have a civil engineer and he’s got to figure out how traffic is gonna flow and, hey, we wanna build this stadium, but we need all this parking.
We need all this stuff to go into it, how we get water and electricity and all that in a seastead, all you do is move things around. You shift it around to what makes sense. And then you, you add it and you separate and you join things together. And I don’t know, it’s like the fundamental part of the question changes at that point. And so I don’t really know how that’s gonna work precisely. So, so if we make basic enough building blocks, then I think people will be able to experiment with that and figure out what works best in those kinds of situations. Cause nobody really knows.
Carly Jackson: That’s very cool. It’s the essence of seasteading. So really glad that you all are making this happen. And I did wanna direct people to your website, especially your recent blog posts. You’ve had some really great blog posts up, just going into different aspects of what it would mean to live on the ocean and how to make it happen. So can you say your website for everyone?
Mitchell Suchner: Uh, our website is arktide.org and yeah, we plan on having more good blog posts too. So you guys should definitely check it out. We usually come out with about one a week and there are several more planned.
Ben Silone: Uh, yeah, I was gonna say we have, we have a lot of updates coming. In particular, I know a lot of people saw the mapping, “where can I live” blog posts. We are gonna make that into an interactive map that stays in a specific location so that people can add different filters. Like we started pulling in information on shipping lanes and seamounts and things like that. So there’s a ton of data that we can pull in and people can see the different layers and they can narrow down where they wanna live based off of that.
Mitchell Suchner: So, yeah. And after, after looking at the, the costs of some materials that you might use as anchors to kind of anchor yourself to, to the bottom of a seamount. You know, early on a year ago, when I found out about this one big problem that I always had was how do you stay in one place? Do you need active station keeping? Are you able to anchor in, in super deep water? You know, it’s like two miles, three miles deep. Because we’ve found the locations of these seamounts and we’re mapping these out right now and we’ll be having that up on our website soon.
I’ve found that it’s actually gonna be easier than, than we thought to be able to anchor even out in the middle of the ocean and kind of stay in one place, which gives you that kind of necessary stability, cause you don’t wanna be going with the current and get, you got a good spot where I know the wave height. I know the weather, I know what this biome is like. And I know that I’m not in anybody’s property, anybody’s territory and a current comes along. Just pushes you somewhere else. You gotta be able to anchor.
Carly Jackson: Great. Any other social media that you want people to visit?
Mitchell Suchner: Um, our social media is linked down at the bottom, in the footer of our website, but we’re active on Instagram. We’re active on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. Our YouTube channel is not active yet, but it’s going to be active soon, especially when we start construction of the prototype. And we’ll probably be uploading to both YouTube and Rumbles. So just look for Arktide, they’ll be able to find us all over the place.
Carly Jackson: Great.
Ben Silone: And I, I just wanted to throw out too, that for the crypto current or the blockchains that we talked about, Ark, ark.io and solar.network are the two that we are, the Solar is operating on an Ark blockchain. So Ark is kind of the base thing. And then Solar is what we’re running deligate on once they, they’re in development right now. But if people wanna check those out, those are the links.
Mitchell Suchner: And maybe we’ll be able to get a delegate up on Arktide as well.
Ben Silone: Yeah.
Carly Jackson: Uh, and I wanted to plug the Florida Meetup because Ben you’ve hosted a couple of those meetings.
Ben Silone: Mm-hmm.
Carly Jackson: Anything you wanna say about that?
Ben Silone: Yeah, just that I think we have a good location now. We’ve been bouncing around a little bit. We had our first one… When was it? November, December, I think it was. And it was a really cool outdoor seating kind of pub place, but it was really loud too. So, so we’ve been working on that plus trying to get like east coast and west coast going together, kind of coordinating that. And a lot of it is just bringing in people, bringing in speakers, which again, I think we have a much quieter location now where we can actually have more presentation and more interaction without lots of street traffic and things like that. So.
Carly Jackson: That’s great. Thank you all so much. I’m so happy to have you in our seasteading network, and I’m excited to see what y’all build and see your prototype in the next few months.
Ben Silone: Awesome. Thank you, Carly.
Mitchell Suchner: Thank you very much, Carly.
