Nadia Elwartowski is a Thai entrepreneur and a co-founder of Ocean Builders. She and her husband Chad Elwartowski were among the first people to live permanently on a seastead, aboard a floating home in international waters, and she has since helped develop the company’s floating home projects in Panama. Ocean Builders lists her as its chief sustainability officer and describes the remit as the sustainability of the homes and the aim of living at sea in step with the surrounding ecosystem.
She was born Supranee Thepdet and also uses the name Nadia Summergirl. She ran the site Bitcoin Girl Thailand from 2017, posting cryptocurrency news under that handle, and in May 2018 published her own interview with Elwartowski about seasteading and blockchain. On 2 February 2019 the company raised its first seastead in the Andaman Sea, a six metre octagonal cabin on a twenty metre steel spar, at what Ocean Builders gives as twelve nautical miles off Phuket, and the two of them moved aboard as its first occupants.
On 12 April 2019 the Royal Thai Navy filed a police complaint accusing them of undermining Thai sovereignty under a provision of the criminal code that carries death or life imprisonment. Thailand did not claim the seastead sat inside its territorial waters; it asserted jurisdiction over the contiguous zone beyond them. The couple left the country within about a day and reached Panama by way of Singapore, and they married in exile that June. On 22 April the navy cut the cabin from its spar and took both parts to Phuket, where they were held as evidence. Ocean Builders now works from Linton Bay Marina on the Caribbean coast of Panama, where it builds the SeaPod, a home raised above the water on a support column.