Alex Tourski

Alex Tourski is the founder of the Post-Platforms Foundation, which he started in 2020 to decouple user data from dominant digital platforms and build a decentralised data space. Originally from Ukraine and based in the Netherlands, he has worked across internet security and cryptography, and in 2025 launched the MetaState Foundation.

His argument is that the internet’s central flaw is architectural rather than legal. Data lives inside platforms, so leaving a platform means leaving your contacts, your records and your reputation behind, and that is what makes incumbents hard to displace. The Web 3.0 Data Space he has been developing since 2020 separates the data from the application, so that identity, reputation and records stay with the person and any service can be granted access to them.

The MetaState Foundation, launched in 2025 with private sponsors and European grants, is the vehicle for putting that to use: identity, voting, charters and reputation as shared infrastructure rather than as features of one company’s product, starting with communities in Amsterdam.

The link to the Free Cities argument is direct. A new jurisdiction needs a record of who its residents are and what they have agreed to, and building that inside somebody else’s platform reproduces the dependency it was meant to escape.