Bitnation was formed on the notion that every person has the right to choose and become part of their own self-selected communities. The Bitnation platform is a ‘Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation’, where its ‘citizens’ can join one of its many ‘nations.' Nations are entities created on the platform providing nation based notary services, birth, marriage, or refugee certification, or business agreements. Early setbacks ultimately led to a failed ICO— the core dev team submitting open resignations due to moral and legal concerns. The core business team that stayed found replacement developers and the project as of 2018 has thirty full time developers working on the product. The Pangea Arbitration token, PAT, was released in three sale rounds, with the initial stage completed in December of 2017 and raising about $300k. The second round, completed on April 24th, 2018, raised only $1 million out of a $27 million hard cap.

The platform consists of ‘nations’ and ‘citizens.’’ At its core, each nation is defined by the following mechanisms:

Codes of law are the smart contracts that govern the nation.

Mediation and arbitration are processes used for dispute resolution amongst citizens.

Incentivization and enforcement are systematic rewards for compliance with national laws.

Area of Defined Responsibility restrict users from partaking certain functions in order to preserve governance.

Citizens have the choice of joining as many nations as it seems fit to them. Anyone can create nations, and forks of other nations. As of July, 2018, the platform has 500+ nations with 15k citizens; it is unclear how many active users there are. The project has been in development since 2014, and has used different technologies throughout the project’s development.

The Pangea Arbitration Token plays multiple functions on the platform: It can be used as a form of payment, and certain PAT tokens can be used to make money from the transaction fees the platform generates through contract execution and arbitration. To earn PAT tokens on the platform, the user has to build up their reputation by following the rules set by nation for contract creation and execution. The token falls under the broader category of social services, as users can receive specific services from a given ‘nation.’ As the platform gets more mature, the intended users of the platform are going those needing services of a specific ‘nation,’ like marriage certificates and birth IDs. A total of 42 billion PAT tokens were created, of which 34% will be released as a reward to the token holders, 34% will be sold in the token sale, and another 32% is reserved for Bitnation founders, contributors, advisors and potential bounties. All tokens are held under Bitnation Americas Ltd. Belize until transferred. The company (Bitnation Americas Ltd. Belize) plans to sell its remaining tokens (~23%) over a 24 month period on exchanges.