On a disputed patch of land between Croatia and Serbia, on the banks of the Danube, crypto billionaires are building their own "state" - no taxes, no democracy, and the votes are literally bought with money. It's called Liberland, and it's closer to us than it sounds.

Physically, the place looks like nothing - a flat, marshy floodplain with sparse trees, tents and wooden shacks, reachable only by boat because the Croatian authorities block land access. The project was founded by Czech entrepreneur Vit Jedlicka long ago, as a libertarian digital state. But what makes it interesting now are the deep-pocketed people behind it.

The main financier is Chinese crypto magnate Justin Sun, whose fortune is estimated at 8.5 billion dollars. He's the "prime minister" of Liberland, and at the same time he invested over 75 million dollars in the Trump family's crypto business. That same Sun became famous when he bought a work of art - a banana taped to a wall - for 6.2 million dollars, and then ate it. American regulators accuse him of fraud; he settled for 10 million.

The way it's governed is where the story gets genuinely unsettling. Voting isn't based on democracy, but on crypto tokens: the more tokens you hold, the more influence over who runs the "state". Or as the interior minister, former controversial Croatian MP Ivan Pernar, put it without shame, when asked whether money is the main mechanism for power - "well, of course".

Liberland isn't an isolated experiment. It's part of a whole wave of proto-states funded by the crypto elite - from Prospera in Honduras to Peter Thiel's ideas about cities on the sea. What they have in common is ideological: replacing the nation-state with mini-states run by shareholders and "CEO-monarchs", inspired by the controversial thinker Curtis Yarvin.

It sounds like science fiction, but it's happening on our Danube. And here's the real question for us in the Balkans: at a time when we struggle to build and defend our own states, what does it mean when the world's richest decide the state gets in their way at all - and buy themselves one? Democracy, for all its flaws, at least assumes one person is worth one vote. Here the vote comes with a price tag.