“I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” Dryden Brown
posted on X a week after Donald Trump won reelection in November. “Here’s what happened.”
That sounds like the setup to a joke, but Brown is entirely serious. He is part of a cadre of iconoclastic, very-online men looking to found the city of the future, with funding tied to crypto organizations, venture capital and libertarian billionaires.
As the co-founder of
Praxis, a theoretical city-state aiming to “restore Western Civilization,” Brown has had designs on Greenland as a home base since 2019, when President Donald Trump
first started talking about buying the territory from Denmark. With the new administration
bullying Danish diplomats on the phone and
reiterating its interest in acquiring the island, Praxis finds itself in an enviable position relative to other futuristic city projects: with its goals and its financial backers aligning with the current administration.
The most prominent investor linked to Praxis is Peter Thiel. A member of the “
PayPal Mafia” and erstwhile frenemy of Elon Musk, Thiel was one of the first Silicon Valley elite to support Donald Trump when he became a presidential candidate in 2016. He is also an outspoken supporter of “seasteading,” an effort to build floating city-states in international waters, and has gabbed with Joe Rogan about moving out of California to pay less taxes. So it’s no surprise that he backs
Pronomos Capital, a venture which has become a hub for funding experimental cities, including Praxis.
Founded by Patri Friedman — grandson of Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist — with seed funding from Thiel, Pronomos Capital has a portfolio of city projects in countries ranging from Palau to Nigeria. The most widely known is
Próspera, located on the island of Roatán in Honduras. Developed as a Zone for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDE, with a highly autonomous administrative structure and its own civil code, Próspera is far and away the leader in the “city of the future” category for the simple fact that it actually exists.
That may not be the case for very long, however, as the city has had several disagreements with its host country. As of September, the top court in Honduras
declared the legal underpinnings of ZEDEs unconstitutional. Another Pronomos investment is
Itana, formerly known as “Talent City,”
which is under development in Nigeria roughly 50 miles east of Lagos; it operates under a similar model as Próspera with backing from the Nigerian government.
All of the cities present some amalgam of laissez-faire principles, tech-evangelist mindsets and visions of a crypto-native economy. Lower taxes and fewer regulations, the artchitects behind them say, would promote innovation and foreign investment. Praxis goes a step further, calling itself “the world’s first Network State,” a concept developed by tech entrepreneur and former CTO of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan. He called for a state that “crowdfunds territory around the world” before gaining recognition from existing countries. Praxis claims to have over 87,000 “Praxians” as part of its currently internet-only state.
“As the warrior-kings once sought the sacred Grail,” reads Praxis’s so-called
Declaration of Ascent, “so too shall we build an empire where true power flows from heroic courage and alignment with the divine order.” Brown’s description of Praxis builds on these pseudo-mythological themes: Praxian architecture would be “hero futurism,” with their first city on Earth a stepping stone to expanding to Mars for their “Network Empire.”
While all this gravitas has yet to translate into a definite location, it has translated into strong financial backing. Their newest financing round,
announced in late October, totaled up to $525 million, to be released in tranches upon the development of “the next great city”; investors include Arch Lending (crypto-backed loans), GEM Digital (digital assets) and Manifold Trading (crypto trading). That’s a far cry from their 2021 funding round, which went to the tune of $4.2 million,
according to The New York Times. In that announcement, Praxis
thanked Thiel-backed Pronomos Capital as early investors.
Back to Greenland: According to his tweets, Brown and his Praxis co-founder, former hedge fund analyst Charlie Callinan, landed in the city of Nuuk in the summer of 2024, at which point they jogged around the capital before promptly going “Praxis mode” by jumping into the ocean.
During the trip, he claims to have met with members of parliament and found that, despite a majority of Greenlanders desiring independence from Denmark, which has officially overseen the territory since 1953, there were several hurdles to his plan. As Rasmus Jarlov, a member of the Danish center-right party,
tweeted back at Brown: “I can guarantee you that there is no way we would approve independence so that you could buy Greenland.”
For Praxis, the negative response may seem insurmountable, but there are also tailwinds: President Trump has
nominated Ken Howery, another member of the PayPal Mafia, to become the ambassador to Denmark. The official response from Denmark’s governing party to inquiries from Trump has been sullen as well, but the president’s efforts have landed a request for a meeting from the
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen amid attempts to ease security concerns in the region. Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte B. Egede also signaled he was ready to speak with Trump, though he drew a line in the sand on the issue:
“We do not want to be Americans.”
Besides a reticent Danish government, one of the major impediments to buying the country is the roughly half-billion in annual block grants the country receives from its European benefactor. If Greenland were to come under U.S. control, however, the inconceivable prospect of Praxis becoming the newest, shiniest city of the future might become much more conceivable.
