The plan is to ship the Sovereignty Stack book this year, so you’ll be hearing from us a lot more often over the coming months.

To prepare you for that, some housekeeping is in order.

What’s this newsletter?

First of all, it’s a forcing function and commitment to structuring our ideas and ongoing learnings about global citizenship into a format that’s useful and can be operationalised by people around the world.

Secondly, this newsletter is a way for us to ruthlessly curate the ideas that go into the final1 corpus. We’ve been thinking about this stuff for years at this point, and there’s an entire galaxy of things we’d like to explore. But for the reader, we reckon it’s more efficient to hone in on the concepts, and topics that actually move the needle, solve specific problems and deliver immediately actionable insights. We’ll need your help to do this. More on that in a bit.

Who are we?

Adim is a software engineer passionate about music, coffee, and creating software that solves problems. He’s based in Poland, but travels quite a bit. More about him at www.adimofunne.com

Bankole (that’s me) is a retired blogger and media entrepreneur turned camera-man. I did the digital nomad thing for a while, but in the past couple years I’ve grown land legs to focus on my creative projects, and I’m now based in the UK. More about me at www.bankole.co

We’re both Nigerian, and have known each other for a decade now. The idea to write this book came to us when we realised that the global mobility tips and hacks we’d been trading over Whatsapp for years were actually complex, proactive life design strategy, with timescales and tactics and that are fundamentally different from the kind you consider when you’re planning your garden-variety Barbados staycation. This is serious stuff that has longterm personal, financial, and professional ramifications.

Lots of successful people practice effective global citizenship intuitively, mostly in their heads, without the need for a defined framework or spreadsheets2, since it’s a muscle they’ve typically grown up exercising. But for us to share what we’re learning and doing with other people — especially those like us who weren’t born with considerable passport privilege — it’s necessary to distill it into theory, frameworks, and yes…spreadsheets.

What to expect over the next couple months

• Weekly posts with global citizenship musings and thought experiments.

• Book status updates.

• From time to time we’ll share what we’re reading from our constantly growing research archive, trends we’re watching, and tools we’re using. The spreadsheets are coming.

Sometimes we might reference current events, or even drop the occasional hot take. But as this is not a “news” newsletter, we generally won’t be optimising for recency. If anything, we’ll be jumping all over the gamut of human history in our research time machine.

Help us write a useful book

At some point we’ll start posting chapter previews for people who elect to join our beta-reader cohorts, so keep an eye out for those.

For everyone else, we’ll be hosting themed info sessions to take questions and share any insights we might have into specific aspects of your global citizenship journey.

I think that's enough throat-clearing. If you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions, I’d love to hear them! Just hit reply or leave a comment.

And of course if you think there’s someone else that might be interested in the resource we’re developing here, by all means forward it to them.

We’ll see you next week.

Bankole.

There's a scene in The Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo that the world he thinks he knows is an illusion, a construct designed to keep him in place. That moment resonates with me because, for many people, the world really does work that way—especially if you were born with the "wrong" passport.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to see the world. Growing up in Nigeria, my first window into the wider world wasn't a passport, a plane ticket, or even a map. It was books. A lot of Enid Blyton. And then, television—cartoons on NTA 2 Channel 5.

But getting to watch TV wasn't a given. First, there had to be power, which was never guaranteed. Then, the TV station had to be transmitting.

If both conditions aligned, I'd get my two-hour ticket out of Lagos, stepping through the CRT screen into the worlds of Sesame Street, Magic School Bus, Spider-Man, Dora The Explorer, Teddy Ruxpin, The Little Prince…and of course, Enid Blyton's The Famous Five, adapted for TV. The list is actually much longer, and it’s what I blame for my weird, not-quite Nigerian, not-quite American accent. By the time I finally set foot in the U.S., my first ever trip abroad, at the ripe old age of 27, it felt like I had already been there.

Yet, there was a fundamental difference between me and the kids whose lives I had lived vicariously through those screens: for them, the world was open, and they could go places. If they chose to. For me, a Nigerian passport holder, it was not, because sometime in the 1980s, the Nigerian passport’s travel access began to decline.

The sovereignty stack

In The Matrix, some people could defy physics and walk vertically up walls. In real life, international borders are semi-permeable barriers that some people can walk through, and others cannot, based on specific legal attributes. If you've ever tried to open a business bank account and been blocked because of your nationality, or struggled to get a visa to attend an industry conference that could change your career, first of all, congratulations — you’ve discovered the edge of the matrix. Except, of course, the edge is different for everyone, depending on their sovereignty stack.

A sovereignty stack is the set of attributes that determines how a person can interact with the physical and virtual world — what they can and cannot do, where they can and cannot go. Citizenship is a critical component of the typical sovereignty stack, but there are other attributes like visas, residence permits, corporate vehicles, bank accounts, dual citizenship, and more that interact to create interesting second and third effects.

International travel is typically the first place Nigerians encounter the edge of the matrix. One time, I was on a group trip with other African nationals where I had to turn back at country 3 of 5 because of "unique" visa access problems.

But in a world flattened by technology and instant communication, these edges become apparent even quicker than ever before. I first encountered the edge of the matrix years before I even boarded a plane, nearly fifteen years ago when I tried to open a PayPal account to become a freelancer on the Envato marketplace. I was enthusiastically learning PHP to develop and sell WordPress themes. At the time, opening a PayPal account from Nigeria was out of the question, and to even buy a theme from Envato, I had to seek out and pay a third party in Nigeria who happened to have access to PayPal to manually make the transaction on my behalf. Of course this roundabout workaround would not work if I was aiming to become a vendor myself. After months of research and frustration, I abandoned that enterprise and went a different direction. But I’ve never stopped thinking about what could have been, and what could still be, if I could get past the edge and expand my ability to interact effectively with the global economy. That’s where the premise of upgrading one’s sovereignty stack begins.

Leveling up

Think of it like a role-playing game. When you start, your character has default stats: strength, agility, intelligence. As you progress, you acquire stat boosts—new weapons, armor, skills—that make you more powerful.

In real life, those "stat boosts" come in the form of second passports, business residencies, international bank accounts, global work structures, and professional certifications that unlock access to new opportunities, by effectively leveling up one’s sovereignty stack.

Anyone from the “wrong” area code who aspires to build a global business or career will eventually encounter some critical speed bumps. If you're an entrepreneur from a country with capital controls, how do you raise money from international investors? If you're a skilled professional, how do you ensure you're earning at a global rate, not a local discount?

Of course most people don't think about these things in these terms. When they hit the edge of the matrix, the invisible ceiling that is defined by their current sovereignty stats, they either figure it out intuitively, or they quit.

This is the essence of the book I’m writing with my friend, Adim. We're not inventing anything new—people have been doing this intuitively for centuries. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already do quite a bit as well. What we're doing is articulating and distilling our thoughts and experiences from our journey as global citizens into a coherent framework that anyone can access and operationalise.

By optimizing your sovereignty stack, you gain access to a world of expanded possibilities. You can expand your global mobility by obtaining residencies or visas that have second-order effects. You unlock financial infrastructure by setting up banking and payment systems that allow you to operate internationally, freeing yourself from local constraints. When you incorporate strategically, you can register businesses in jurisdictions that actively support fundraising and expansion, giving your ventures the strongest possible foundation. Perhaps most importantly, you position yourself to work and get paid at global rates by structuring your employment or freelance work to avoid unnecessary local restrictions, ensuring your talent and services are valued at their true worth.

Optimizing your sovereignty stack isn't about abandoning your home country. It's about increasing options, access, and leverage, regardless of where you choose to settle.

Where we are born is not up to us, and our birthplace comes with default stats, for better or worse. But just as you probably wouldn't try to complete a game like Elden Ring with your starting character's default abilities, it makes sense to pursue a deliberate strategy for improving your hand in the game of life.

Most people will never need to bother with this concept. Some of them already won the citizenship lottery at birth, and have other things to worry about. Others will lead typical lives within the constraints of their birth circumstances without ever touching the edges. And that's fine.

But if you've ever felt like you've hit an invisible ceiling—whether in business, mobility, or financial access—then this is the red pill. You don't have to accept the default stats and settings. You don't have to be stuck playing by rules that exclude you. You can reconfigure your build. You can level up.

That's what The Sovereignty Stack thesis and framework is all about— we’re articulating a blueprint for breaking past the edge of the Matrix and unlocking your full potential. It’s a work and journey in progress.

It’s been more than a century since this axiom was said to have been coined1, and many things have changed since then. We live in an age where information, money and value move around the world in fractions of a second, and where geography is less and less a factor in the distribution of opportunity than it was a hundred years ago.

Yet, in this ostensibly flatter world, billions of people have an implicit ceiling on their potential, simply because of their citizenship, and how their country of birth stacks up in the global pecking order. If you’ve ever been denied a visa, prevented from buying and selling on the internet, or blocked from interacting with products, services and international business or finance infrastructure, because you were trying to do it from the “wrong” area code or IP address, then you know what it’s like to be a second-class citizen, physically and virtually. To put it mildly — it’s not great.

So, what to do?

Moving is an obvious way to improve one’s prospects. But less than four percent of the world’s population live in a place other than where they were born. This is because immigration — leaving everyone you know, and everything you’ve built behind, to start over from scratch in a foreign land, learn a new language, assimilate into a new culture, and altogether face very uncertain prospects — is hard. And apart from the fact that immigration is a rather fraught political football, most solutions that exist to make it less hard are generally targeted at the super rich.

After spending the past 4 years as a digital nomad, and corresponding with my friend Adim, who’s also been on a similar journey, we think we’ve come up with a pretty good, and democratic thesis about how people anywhere in the world can transcend the barriers to the global economy, and become global citizens, in ways that can be enabled by, but importantly are not limited to immigration.

The geo-economic tea leaves are constantly swirling. Countries and the gatekeepers to the global economy are always shifting goalposts across multiple regulatory variables. So, our global citizenship thesis is not a one-size-fits-all checklist. It happens to be based on all of the research we’ve done to improve our own personal prospects, corroborated by our lived experience as we have each navigated the world on Nigerian passports, and we think the general principles apply to just about anyone. But we also know that everyone’s circumstances and life priorities are different, and we’ve taken care to articulate a framework that can be adapted to unique, individual contexts.

Here’s what we think it boils down to: whether they are aware of it or not, everyone has something called a Sovereignty Stack2, which is comprised of their citizenship primarily, and other secondary statuses that determine how they interact with the physical and virtual world — what they can and cannot do, where they can and cannot go. By acquiring a curated combination of stat boosts — professional bona fides, visas, residence permits, corporate vehicles, bank accounts, addresses, second passports, and more — anyone with sufficient amounts of motivation, and grit to make a plan and see it through over a reasonable time horizon can upgrade their Sovereignty Stack. They can go from the base build they were handed at birth, to a version that allows them to traverse and affect the physical and virtual worlds around them in exponentially more effective ways than would be possible if they accepted their default configuration.

I think that anyone, at any stage of their life, should be able to visualise the full spectrum of opportunity that is available to them at planet-scale. They should be able to generate a unique roadmap tailored to their objectives, and take action with confidence and conviction towards making their dreams come true. The framework we’re articulating shows how an individual can upgrade their Sovereignty Stack, by procuring and equipping stat boosts that best support their preferred life outcomes. They can optimise for any number of things — increasing their global mobility, maximising their professional potential, exporting their skills and services to global markets, arranging their finances tax-efficiently, re-settling in a different country that better aligns with their values, or simply has their preferred climate and lifestyle options.

What for Adim and I started out as trading immigration tips and hacks in WhatsApp has evolved into a framework for proactive life design that we hope anyone can use — be they a bright-eyed high-school leaver with their whole life ahead of them, trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, or a mature professional who wants to earn what they are worth, leave a legacy, and set their offspring up for success, or an entrepreneurial risk-taker, who wants to restack their deck and have a real shot at success in the global economy.

When we first got the idea to distill our experiences and thesis into a framework, we thought that the ideal format to distribute it would be a book. Over time, we’ve realised that it wants to be a book…and a bit more. Part of that is what this newsletter is. As we work to refine our thesis, we wanted to reach out to people around the world with similar experiences and pain points to test our assumptions, attempt to answer their questions, and overall ensure that we’re making something that helps them succeed and get ahead.

That’s where you come in. If you’ve made it this far, chances are good that all of this is of interest to you, and we’d love for you to participate. Please subscribe to get development updates, join our beta/early access reading cohort, or simply support the project.

If you’ve got thoughts or burning questions, send me a DM on Twitter or email me. I’d love to hear from you!