Aleks Svetski and I explore the vision behind Satlantis, a location-centric travel platform that merges elements of TripAdvisor, Instagram, and Google Maps. Built on Nostr, Satlantis uses your social graph to deliver trusted reviews, quality-of-life scores, and cost-of-living insights for cities around the world. We discuss the platform’s early users, its seed funding strategy, its path to monetization, and why building with open protocols like Bitcoin and Nostr is the only way to “dent the universe.”
Aleks Svetski is an entrepreneur, author and Bitcoin advocate.
Satlantis Website
Find him on Nostr
Instagram: @svetskiwrites
X: @svetskiWrites
Check out his Substack articles
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Introducing Alex Svetski
0:28 – The Origins of Satlantis
8:45 – Nostr: Not Being Turned Off Online?
15:49 – Frequent Travelers vs Digital Nomads
18:05 – Who are Satlantis’ Users?
23:06 – Macro, Taxes, and Digital Nomads
26:48 – Satlantis’ Seed Funding Round
33:33 – Investing in People
39:39 – How will Satlantis Monetize?
50:58 – Nostr’s Social Graph
54:17 – Why Open Protocols Win: Bitcoin and Nostr
59:48 – “Denting the Universe”
1:01:12 – Consumer Product Breakthroughs
1:03:49 – The Bushido of Bitcoin
1:04:54 – How to Connect with Alex Svetski
Satlantis and the Next Era of Social Travel: A Deep Dive with Alex Svetski.
In this expansive conversation, Alex Svetski outlines the conception and evolution of Satlantis, a social-local discovery platform for location-independent individuals. Born from his earlier work building Spirit of Satoshi (a purpose-trained Bitcoin language model), and real-world frustrations with finding quality recommendations while traveling, Svetski realized the missing interface wasn’t content-driven social media, but a contextual social network powered by identity and interests. Originally branded Destination Bitcoin, the product matured through iterations into Satlantis, blending curated local guides with the open social graph of Nostr. This allows personalized, trust-based recommendations using both an interest graph and social graph.
Svetski articulates a critical distinction between social media and social networks, tracing the shift from relationship-based feeds to algorithmic engagement slop. Nostr, in contrast, restores user ownership by preserving direct audience access—a sovereign layer akin to email lists. He frames Satlantis as a new creator tool, enabling travel-based utility: users can curate collections, host events, and discover places and people tailored to both who they know and what they care about. The early target market is the 35–50M digital nomads, with aspirations to later expand into the 500M+ frequent traveler segment.
On the monetization side, Svetski outlines multiple membership tiers, from free to premium creator and merchant levels, each unlocking powerful tools—like multi-platform content scheduling and monetizable collections. He compares this layered model to Shopify, Notion, and Hootsuite. The business also benefits from Nostr’s bootstrapped network effects, solving the cold-start problem for new platforms.
Funded by Bitcoin-aligned investors like Ross Stevens, Allen Farrington, and Brad Mills, Satlantis raised $1.7M in its seed round and is now opening a community equity crowdfund via Timestamp. Svetski positions Satlantis as a zero-to-one consumer product, a novel layer in the new internet stack built atop identity and money as protocols—Nostr and Bitcoin.
