Joseph McKinney

Joseph McKinney is the founder and CEO of the Startup Societies Foundation, a think tank that studies and connects special economic zones, charter cities and network states. He founded the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, publishes the Journal of Special Jurisdictions, and co-authored Founding Startup Societies: A Step-by-Step Guide.

He founded the Startup Societies Foundation in 2015 and built it into a network of researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers, running conferences that put zone operators and academics in the same room at a point when the field had no common venue. He co-authored Founding Startup Societies: A Step-by-Step Guide and published the Journal of Special Jurisdictions, the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to the subject.

The Catawba Digital Economic Zone took the theory into practice. Created with the Catawba Indian Nation in South Carolina, it uses tribal sovereignty to establish a jurisdiction inside the United States with its own commercial code, aimed at digital assets and financial technology, and McKinney has served as its chief executive.

It is one of the few zones in a developed country that needed neither a new treaty nor a constitutional amendment, only a sovereign that already existed and had never used its authority this way.