Bitnation, as a social infrastructure which was defined in 2014, is built on the ambassador network and diplomacy, a human layer within the evolution of the web 3.0, to be able to network with people who are mediated by nation-states and/or international organisations like the United Nations.

Within that social infrastructure, that is based, as defined in 2014, on self-organizing principles and holons, agency and markets, in a way to mirrors the Nakamoto consensus, there have been plenty of connections formed between Westphalia and the new world, Pangea. This paper, under UNESCO, was an early one, as with any grass-roots movement it is difficult to cover everything that happens because it organizes by stigmergy, not direct co-ordination.

How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance? - UNESCO, 2016

In other words, Bitnation declared sovereignty in 2014, that is why it has ambassadors, and does diplomacy, similar to settlers in the USA who took a leap, and built out infrastructure gradually in the new world,

Whitepaper: Bitnation: Governance 2.0

As for the state itself, no need to declare sovereignty, to declare etc is a social process (i.e. "nation-layer").

Sovereignty is a verb, not a noun

To declare sovereignty is a verb, and it is done per-se with blockchain technology, as it is "above" the nation-state in a hierarchy of control, which is the reason Bitnation organised as an ambassador network, since the state was already sovereign the "nation layer" had to conform to that.

Metaphors, symbolic language, and thought as a process of discovery

Bitnation uses metaphors as a way to get people to think, and to learn to perceive, the new forms of infrastructure that have been developed, gradually, over the past decades, so that new "consensus technology" such as blockchains can be acknowledged and integrated into society, as part of a broader reformation from nation-states and the Westphalian age to a "network-state", the Pangea jurisdiction, that is as different from the nation-state as the nation-state was from monarchies, or, the smart phone from the mobile phone, electricity from fire, and so on.

From nation-states to network-states

Blockchain technology, and whatever comes after that, is not based on processing state within human brains, which nations have been (they use rigid, static hierarchies to process information in a deterministic way, and also majority consensus to signal allegiance so select which state to use), in that sense it replaces nations similar to how the computer replaces "human computers", will not be demand for using "nations".

So, decentralized borderless virtual nations (DBVNs) is a metaphor, just like smart contracts, or "taxemes" (a concept I've developed. )