About a month has passed since the last news release, so it’s time to briefly share a summary of the progress made.
The fact that we bought a hectare in Montenegro has finally been officially entered into the required registries. To be honest, I didn’t have the brains to personally verify this on the Montenegrin cadastral website; I have to take the word of those who understand its functionality and be content with scans of the documents. As part of the reward for my participation in the project, I reserved the right to buy back two hundred square meters at cost, but for now, anyone wishing to do so can still buy a piece for themselves—the shareholders are already threatening to start selling new land tokens with a markup soon, but they haven’t made a final decision yet.
The development of the land is going briskly in some ways and barely at all in others. The local contractor is taking forever to finish the requested volume of work for the rough laying of the road route. On the other hand, it’s still illegal to build a road until September 15, so it’s hard to make any complaints. However, our landing party is already actively engaged in the complete clearing of the plot from all kinds of unnecessary woody debris and has completed about a quarter of the work. For further road filling and concreting, the installation of electricity and water, digging the sewage system, and actually the construction itself, we have started creating a separate construction company and searching for specialized equipment to purchase, so as not to depend on unreliable local contractors in this regard.
As of today, 11 project participants have relocated to Montenegro. To avoid losing count, a counter was even added at the very bottom of the project’s main website page. We should also start assigning sequential numbers to the settlers, like in the Free State Project, so they can brag. I, for example, would have number 3. So, if someone creates a cool design for a project participant’s booklet (or image), that would be sweet, especially when handing a child a document with number 6.
At one point, we failed to meet with Titus Gebel, the author of the book on charter cities and creator of the foundation promoting them—his “Titus-related” business took him past Montenegro at the time. But now, next week, another interesting meeting is lined up—with Vera Kichanova, a distinguished activist of the Russian libertarian movement, who emigrated long ago and is now, among other things, professionally involved in the topic of charter cities. We hope Britain doesn’t put Montenegro in the red zone at the last moment, the meeting doesn’t fall through, and it proves quite educational for all participants.
One of the serious downsides of Montenegro for freelancers is turning out to be a very unfriendly banking sector. To encounter Montenegrin banks as rarely as possible, we began creating a network of horizontal connections allowing for exchanges like “I need cash euros in Bar, and the counterparty from Budva needs rubles via bank transfer to Sber.” For this, a specialized Telegram chat is mainly used for now; however, our project recently launched a private ad aggregator in the form of a website. I haven’t looked into the functionality in detail yet, but I already see what feature the site is missing: new ads should automatically be broadcast to the chat, because in Telegram a person receives notifications, whereas the website must be monitored manually, which is inconvenient. This is, of course, a makeshift solution for a transition period to build liquidity; it can be disabled later, especially when the need for the chat disappears entirely, except for very complex multi-step transactions.
