Chad Elwartowski

Chad Elwartowski is president of Ocean Builders, which develops floating SeaPod homes in Panama. An early seasteading pioneer, in 2019 he lived aboard one of the first seasteads placed in international waters off Thailand before relocating to continue building floating communities.

An early bitcoiner and software engineer, he co-founded Ocean Builders with Grant Romundt and the engineer Rüdiger Koch, and served as its chief operating officer before becoming president.

In February 2019 he and his partner moved into a small octagonal platform anchored in the Andaman Sea about twelve nautical miles off Phuket, intended as a proof of concept for living beyond the reach of any municipality. Thailand read it as a claim against its sovereignty: the navy dismantled the structure and the couple were charged under a provision of the criminal code that carries the death penalty. They went into hiding and left the country.

The episode settled in practice what the seasteading movement had argued in the abstract, which is that the binding constraint on floating communities is jurisdictional rather than technical. Ocean Builders moved its work to Panama, where the SeaPods are built with the host country’s agreement rather than at the edge of its patience.