Sondre Bjellås

In 2017 Sondre Bjellås co-founded Liberstad with John Holmesland. Liberstad is a private-city project in Norway based on voluntaryism, private property rights and Austrian economics. He has an extensive background as a software developer, working on open-source blockchain and decentralised projects.

The software he has built is used by the residents of Liberstad and is available to other Free City projects.

A Norwegian anarchist who has been writing about the ideas since 2011, he came to the project from software rather than from politics, and Liberstad reflects that: the settlement runs on tools he built, including its own registry and a local currency, so that ownership, membership and payment work without the municipal apparatus the residents have opted out of.

Liberstad sits on private land in southern Norway. It is not exempt from Norwegian law and the founders have never claimed that it is; it is a private city inside an existing state, where whatever can be arranged privately is arranged that way and the rest is lived with.

He is a Free Cities Ambassador in Liberstad.