Chad Elwartowski

Chad Elwartowski co-founded 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. He has since stepped back from running it day to day, and works on decentralised systems and AI businesses alongside seasteading, Bitcoin and Free Private Cities.

On 2 February 2019 he and Nadia Elwartowski moved aboard a six metre octagonal cabin on a twenty metre steel spar in the Andaman Sea, at what Ocean Builders gives as 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. It did not say the seastead sat inside its territorial waters; it asserted jurisdiction over the contiguous zone beyond them. On 12 April the navy filed a police complaint under a provision of the criminal code that carries death or life imprisonment, the couple left the country within about a day, and ten days later the navy cut the cabin from its spar and took both parts to Phuket, where they were held as evidence.

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.