Mitchell Suchner

Mitchell Suchner is the founder and chief executive of ArkPad, a naval architecture company in the Philippines that designs and builds floating platforms, aquaculture systems and vessels. He is based in Davao City, across the water from the Reef Resort his company built and runs off Samal Island.

He came across seasteading in January 2021 and began posting his own low-cost designs in the seasteading forums, where Ben Silone found him and brought him into the floating-platform venture Arktide, first as its website developer and then as its chief operating officer. He split ArkPad off as a company of its own, set up in the Philippines for the workers available there, its freeports and its tourism, and began by selling floating structures to hotels and resorts in shallow water. Joe Quirk credits The Seasteading Institute’s documentary about the manhunt for Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl with putting him on that road.

The floating homes are built to be joined together, so that a single unit works on its own and several share water, electricity and internet between them. The prototype was launched at Nabas on the coast of Aklan in September 2024, shown then as the ArkPad-C and since renamed the ArkPad-D, and it came through two storms that overturned cars and wrecked homes on shore. Around the homes goes the Hexafarm, a hexagonal polyculture fish cage whose walkway carries a ring of glamping units, and the two together became the Samal Reef Resort, which opened off Samal Island in September 2025 and now takes guests and hosts events.

His case for seasteading is economic rather than legal: aquaculture and tourism earn a floating structure its running costs, and that is the stack he set out on the Free Cities Podcast and at Foundation conferences from 2024 onwards. ArkPad launched a token in 2024 to crowdfund construction in place of a mortgage, and it runs research into self-driving boats, underwater drones and minerals taken from seawater. He received the Free Cities Conference Innovation Award in Prague in 2025, and gives interviews from a floating unit off the Philippine coast.