There’s a Dan Sullivan book from 2019 called Free Zone Frontier. It’s aimed at entrepreneurs, the Strategic Coach audience, people who already run successful companies and are thinking about what comes next. The concept in the book turns out to be surprisingly useful for cypherpunks, and I want to explain why.
The mechanism
Sullivan’s argument is that the most successful entrepreneurs don’t escape competition by getting better at competing. They escape it by stepping sideways into territory where the competitive frame doesn’t apply at all. He calls that territory a Free Zone. You get there by collaborating with people from outside your own industry, combining your unique capabilities with theirs, so that together you build something neither of you could build alone, and which doesn’t fit any category that already exists.
In his own words: “this new form of collaboration doesn’t use competitive skills, so it just blows right by them.”
And: “As soon as you bypass competition in your mind, your progress and achievements immediately disappear from the zone of competition. Competitors no longer see you as competition, and they don’t see any of the new breakthroughs you’re having.”
Sullivan isn’t writing about cypherpunks. He’s writing about entrepreneurs who want to escape their industry. But the mechanism he describes is exactly what Bitcoin did.
Bitcoin, unrecognizably
Bitcoin was never an attempt to out-bank the banks. It wasn’t a faster PayPal or a cheaper wire transfer. Satoshi combined cryptography, game theory, distributed systems and monetary economics into a thing that, to a 2009 regulator, did not look like a financial instrument at all. It looked like nerds mining Magic cards (see what I did there? Yeah, MtGox:). It was unrecognizable. It had no competition in its actual category, because its actual category did not exist yet. By the time regulators built a category for it, it was already a fact on the ground. You can’t un-ship a global peer-to-peer currency once millions of people are using it and thousands are running the node.
Aave did it again for lending. Pseudonymous overcollateralized on-chain credit matched no compliance framework, so it wasn’t recognized as “lending” in the regulator’s mental model. It grew for years in the gap between what the regulators understood and what they had rules for. Now they’re catching up, but the market already exists, the contracts are already deployed, the users have already moved.
Instantly invisible advantages
This is what Sullivan means by “instantly invisible advantages.” The thing you are building is invisible to the people whose job is to stop you, because their perceptual apparatus is tuned for a different game. A bank regulator is watching for banks. A broadcast regulator is watching for broadcasters. A trust and safety team is watching for an application with a company behind it. What none of them is watching for is a protocol with no company, a broadcast with no broadcaster, a bank with no bank. These things don’t appear on the dashboard until somebody tells the regulator what they are, and by then the zone is too big to close cheaply.
Every Free Zone expires
Sullivan also makes a point cypherpunks need to take seriously: every Free Zone has an expiry date. “A newly discovered, uncontested area, a Free Zone, only stays new for so long before it becomes the new normal and fills up with numerous people.” The moment the zone is recognized, rules get written, competitors pour in, and the freedom decreases. This is already happening. Bitcoin is being absorbed. MiCA exists. Exchange KYC is universal. The zone that was free in 2009 is not free in 2026.
The mistake is to mourn this. The correct move, which Sullivan is explicit about and which the cypherpunks who are still shipping have internalized, is to keep building the next frontier. Bitcoin, then Lightning, then ecash mints, Fedimint, DLCs, then peer-to-peer fiat rails that never touch a bank. Vexl, then peer.xyz, then whatever comes next. Signal, SimpleX, Nostr DMs. The parallel polis is not one zone. It is the discipline of always creating the next one, faster than regulators can close the last one.
You can’t do it alone
One more thing worth pulling from Sullivan. He is clear that you cannot create a Free Zone alone. You need collaborators from different fields, each already 10x at their thing, combining into something 100x none of them could have built alone. This is what the early Bitcoin community actually was: cryptographers, game theorists, hobbyist coders, monetary economists, Austrian-school libertarians, privacy activists, back-of-the-room weirdos. Nobody in that room was playing the same game as anybody else. That is why it worked. Homogeneous communities produce incremental improvements. Heterogeneous collaborations across different 10x capabilities produce things that don’t fit any box.
Case in point: Liberation.travel
A great example of this is Liberation.travel. It serves crypto people by providing them with residencies and strategies to become more free. The main brain behind it is Wilder, who is insanely good. Knows everyone, speaks at conferences, lives the life and understands the needs of people in this niche like no one else. What many people don’t know is that the first product was (and still is) a collaboration with an insanely good provider of residencies (we will keep her low profile). She and her company are also 10x. When you meet her, you know she’s not like anyone else you’ve met. If you need someone, she knows who to call and how to make it happen in a way that I have not seen anywhere else. But this was fun – when people started pouring in, she was surprised how this was possible, where these weird people from countries she had barely heard of were coming from. And why Liberation.travel insists on paying in Bitcoin. But the strange thing was also from the other side – Wilder had mostly bad experiences with “lawyers” and residency providers. Slow, not adaptable, etc. Together, they had no competition. Fine-tuned services for a specific niche, delivered in the best way possible. Wilder is now doing the same thing again. “Competitors” are looking at providing the same thing cheaper, he is already walking on a completely different map. The frontier is moving and it will take a few years for people to catch up.
Shameless plug
Need more examples? The characters in my novel Tamers of Entropy run a few Free Zones of their own — in Sullivan’s sense and in the literal one. A cypherpunk/lunarpunk read about entrepreneurs rewriting the maps. Out May 2026. Preorder here.
The discipline
If you are trying to build in the cypherpunk space in 2026, the lesson is: stop trying to compete with the existing system on its terms. You will lose. The existing system is very good at the competitive game. What it can’t do is play a game it doesn’t recognize. So build the thing it doesn’t yet have a category for. Collaborate with people who bring capabilities from outside your own stack. Ship before the category exists. When the category finally gets written into law, you should already be in the next zone.
Sullivan wrote this for entrepreneurs. He didn’t realize he was writing an operations manual for the parallel polis. But he was.