The Sovereign Stack
Infrastructure for a planet in transition
I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure as a condition for agency. It shapes what people can do, build, and maintain. It defines how communities communicate, trade, and recover. It underwrites basic participation.
That line of thinking started crystallizing after the Startup Venezuela Summit in Miami. I came home from the event with two things: a notebook full of product demos, and the first outline of what would become “A Continent in Bloom.” That essay focused on the creative logic of constraint across Latin America—but the deeper thread was infrastructural. The way founders were reimagining access: financial, digital, spatial.
At the summit, I saw examples of this logic in practice. Founders were building financial tools that accounted for migration, unstable networks, and informal economies. Mobile wallets designed for people with no bank account. Credit systems that work without a formal ID. Payment platforms that don’t assume constant internet. These weren’t provisional hacks. They were built for durability under pressure.
In parallel, I spent time researching the space economy. AST SpaceMobile has long been a favorite of mine—partly because of the Latin American roots, the Miami base, and the way the company fits into an abundance framework. The company is building satellite-based broadband that connects directly to standard smartphones. Their target is the global population living outside of reliable mobile coverage. The system bypasses terrestrial infrastructure entirely. It’s designed for places with limited signal, limited infrastructure, and limited investment.
Taken together, these two research tracks began to form a clearer structure: a pattern of technologies designed around volatility, fragmentation, and constraint. This pattern reflects a new kind of infrastructure model—modular, resilient, interoperable at the edges. I’ve been calling it the sovereign stack.
The sovereign stack is composed of interlocking systems that deliver core functions under uncertain conditions:
Connectivity through mesh networks, satellite broadband, local signal infrastructure
Computation through edge devices, locally hosted AI, regionally optimized tooling
Climate intelligence through satellite-based monitoring, MRV systems, precision data capture
Capital movement through crypto remittances, mobile-native banking, alternative credit channels
Cultural design through products and systems that reflect user control, local logic, and autonomy
These tools reflect a shift in infrastructural assumptions. Leaf lets displaced people store and move money without formal ID. ASTS delivers cellular signal without towers. Open Forest validates reforestation with satellites and shared ledgers, not centralized oversight. These systems assume volatility and work through it, without defaulting to scarcity or simplification.
In the capital layer, there’s a behavioral threshold I keep returning to. When annual per capita GDP crosses roughly $5,000, there’s a noticeable shift in how people plan. Consumption behavior starts to include savings, credit, and longer-term decision-making. Stewarding el medio ambiente. At that level, liquidity and stability begin to compound. People aren’t just reacting. They’re projecting towards a full future.
Infrastructure enables that shift. Mobile payments, localized banking apps, and stablecoin rails give people tools to move and protect money in uncertain environments. Once those tools are in place, the planning horizon extends. Financial access leads to future orientation.
Projects like AST SpaceMobile extend the reach of everything else. Once connectivity is available, financial tools work. Once information flows, markets can emerge. Once devices sync, data becomes legible. Connectivity is not a backdrop. It is an active layer that determines what else becomes possible.
In Latin America, a number of companies are building other layers of the stack. Fintech platforms process remittances across borders without friction. Health tech tools manage care delivery in informal settlements. Climate projects verify reforestation using satellites and shared ledgers. These layers align without formal coordination. Their compatibility is circumstantial but increasingly durable.
The sovereign stack functions across geographies and use cases. Its coherence doesn’t rely on a single language, regulatory framework, or funding model. It holds together because the conditions that shape it are widely shared: migration, decentralization, ecological disruption, institutional fatigue.
I plan to keep tracking this evolution. There’s still more to understand about how this stack takes shape—and what kind of world it makes possible—but I wanted to share these early observations while the pattern is still forming.