Sean Hastings
Sean Hastings is an American Entrepreneur, Cypherpunk Author, and Security Expert best known as the Founding CEO of HavenCo, the world’s first formal data haven. He is the Cofounder, with Eric S. Raymond, of Green-Span, an open-source infrastructure for trust and reputation management.
Sean is an Angel Investor, Game Designer, Writer, and Producer whose career spans nearly three decades at the intersection of cryptography, digital sovereignty, and alternative governance. He is also the Founder of Pirate Cat Mystery Tours, a pirate-themed boat tour and puzzle adventure on the Hudson River.
In 1997, Sean worked on cryptographic protocols and tools free of U.S. cryptographic export restrictions with Vincent Cate, who started the International Conference on Financial Cryptography in Anguilla that same year. Read Plotting Away in Margaritaville.
Sean lived in Anguilla as an expatriate, partnering with Vincent at a secure payment firm. At the 1998 Financial Cryptography Conference, he met Ryan Lackey, and together they found a common interest in building an offshore hosting service for data of any kind, safe from governmental censors and surveillance. After investigating smaller Pacific islands and the possibility of building their own platform on the Cortes Bank, they settled on the self-proclaimed, unrecognized micronation of Sealand, a World War II-era military platform in the North Sea, off the coast of England.
Sean founded HavenCo in 2000, originally incorporating in Anguilla before a second incorporation in the Channel Islands. Cofounders included Ryan Lackey, Sameer Parekh, Avi Freedman, and Joi Ito. With more than a million dollars in first-round funding, Sean and his wife, Jo Hastings, relocated their possessions to the Sealand platform and began transforming the facility into a high-tech data center.
The business plan projected $25 million in annual profit by year three. HavenCo’s launch generated enormous press coverage, including a cover appearance on Wired magazine’s July 2000 issue, over 200 press articles, and television appearances, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Read Welcome to Sealand. Now Bugger Off and The World’s Most Notorious Micronation Has the Secret to Protecting Your Data From the NSA.
Read Rebel Outpost on the Fringes of Cyberspace in The New York Times and Offshore and offline? on BBC News. Listen to Stranger Than Paradise on NPR’s On the Media.
HavenCo operated as a colocation facility that permitted any content except child pornography and spam. However, the venture suffered from the dot-com bubble, unreliable connectivity, including a 128 Kbps satellite link after the fiber-optic provider went bankrupt, and mounting tensions between the founders and the Bates family that governed Sealand. Sean departed the company in 2000 for personal reasons, and HavenCo was eventually nationalized by the Sealand government in 2002 after commercial failure. Read HavenCo: what really happened and Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world’s smallest nation.
In 2002, Sean began work on seasteading with Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. The project aimed at building floating communities free from the restrictions of existing governments.
This collaboration continued through 2009, when Sean delivered a talk at the Seasteading Institute’s second annual conference in San Francisco, reflecting on his experiences with HavenCo and Sealand and the lessons learned for future maritime sovereignty projects. Read Sealand’s failed data haven: why HavenCo was doomed from the start. Watch Sean Hastings – Experiences with HavenCo and SeaLand.
In March 2009, Sean cofounded Green-Span with Eric S. Raymond, the prominent open-source software advocate and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Green-Span is an open source infrastructure designed to provide decentralized trust and reputation management systems, reflecting Sean’s longstanding commitment to building technological alternatives to centralized authority.
Sean is the author of God Wants You Dead, published in 2007. A 350-page philosophical work examining the evolution of human ideas, with particular emphasis on parasitic collectivist ideologies, religion, governance, and individual liberty. The book blends elements of philosophy, history, psychology, and libertarian political thought, and has been praised for encouraging critical thinking and independent reasoning.
He is also the author of the children’s novel Dana Dash: First Girl on the Moon (2019), published under the pen name S.S. Hudson. The book follows a science-obsessed young girl who accidentally launches her science project to the Moon, combining STEM education with adventure storytelling. Read the review Lizards for lunch? Crazy tech? Aliens! in The Register.
Sean was the Executive Producer and an actor in The Last Generation to Die (2015), a short science fiction film exploring near-future immortality technology and the existential questions surrounding the end of aging. The film, directed by Tim Maupin, examines the cultural and psychological shifts that would occur when aging is finally conquered. Other producers included Cyan Banister and Max More, key figures in the transhumanist and futurist communities. Watch The Last Generation to Die.
Sean currently operates Pirate Cat Mystery Tours, a pirate-themed catamaran tour on the Hudson River featuring escape-room-style puzzles and treasure hunts. The tours depart from Dobbs Ferry and Dyckman Marina, offering passengers guided Hudson River sightseeing with immersive puzzle-solving experiences aboard.
He is also a game designer, having developed Ogre Chess, a chess variant with D&D-inspired mechanics, and Shattered World – Shards of Ketra, a D&D 5E campaign setting, as well as Peach Mountain Friends – The Science of the Seasons, a children’s educational project.
Sean has been an Advisor to the Signal Media Project and describes himself as a “pirate captain, angel investor, game designer, writer, producer, conference speaker, and startup CEO.” Throughout his career, he has been profiled and interviewed by major international media outlets, including The New York Times, Wired, BBC News, Ars Technica, Die Zeit, and NPR. He has also been featured in academic analysis, notably in James Grimmelmann’s 80-page law review article, Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law, published in the University of Illinois Law Review.
Sean edited If Nobody Builds It, Everybody Dies, an AI book written by Grok 4.2, a rebuttal to the Yudkowsky and Soares AI doom offering.
Visit his Wikipedia page and Linktree profile. Follow him on Facebook and X.