ArkPad

Mitchell Suchner came across seasteading in January 2021, began posting his own designs in the seasteading forums, and through them joined the floating-platform venture Arktide, where he became chief operating officer. He then split ArkPad off as a company of its own and set up in the Philippines, for the workers available there, its freeports and its tourism. Its naval architects, civil engineers and mechanical engineers are based in the country, design and build there, and take on design work for other people’s projects alongside their own.

The floating home is the ArkPad-D, a platform of 490 square feet standing on spars. Its centre of mass is set below the waterline, which the company says means that even in the strongest storms it will never flip over, and it puts the largest wave the design has survived in simulation at seven metres. It is built in fibreglass and stainless steel that cannot rust or corrode, with a stated life expectancy of eighty to ninety-five years, carries a structure of up to eight metric tonnes, and needs ten metres of water beneath it. It is meant to be used with solar panels and water desalinators, and to connect physically to the ArkPads moored beside it, sharing water, electricity and internet with them. The prototype was launched at Nabas on the coast of Aklan in September 2024, shown then as the ArkPad-C and since renamed, and it came through two storms that overturned cars and wrecked homes on shore.

Around the homes sits the Hexafarm, a hexagonal floating fish cage built for polyculture: milkfish in the inner cage, and rabbitfish, seaweed or shellfish in the outer one, with baskets of shellfish hung inside the outer mesh and lobsters on the netted floor below. The shellfish filter the water, the seaweed raises the oxygen in it, and the rabbitfish and lobsters graze the fouling off the nets, which is labour nobody then has to spend. A walkway runs the whole way around so that guests and operators can cross from cage to cage without a boat, and one Hexafarm is built to carry up to twelve glamphouses.

Mitchell’s vision is my dream come true, plus a lot more. Joe Quirk, President of The Seasteading Institute

Fish farm and hotel are the two businesses meant to carry a seastead’s running costs, and the first place ArkPad put them together is the Reef Resort in the Davao Gulf, profiled on its own page. A second is drawn for the Caribbean, off the coast of Próspera on Roatán: hexagonal clusters of glamphouses with ArkPad units moored separately from them. The company calls it a goal and has published no construction date for it.

The longer ambition is a floating city in open water south of the Philippines, near the equator, assembled from the same platforms and pens. Its governance idea is jurisdictional arbitrage: each part of the settlement would take its laws from the country whose flag it flies, and ArkPad names Panama and the Philippines as flags already open to it. Alongside that the company runs research into self-driving boats, underwater drones, ground-effect drones and the extraction of lithium, rubidium and magnesium from seawater.