Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
-John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

Nation-states evolved to regulate human beings (the main cognitive and physical resource in the 17th, 18th 19th and 20th century) and Ethereum, blockchains, and similar systems that could be called "virtual states" are evolving to regulate information technology.

Nation-states, signal control, cybernetics, and regulatory systems in nature

A nation-state, by design, exerts control by applying physical force (under a monopoly on violence) and also a bit of economic incentives, whereas in cyberspace, control is often based on math (similar to control systems and regulatory systems in cells and within animals and plants), and so cyberspace is outside the reach for nation-states.

The ability of the nation-state to author the direction of evolution of a system, through authority, is limited to their reach, and the nation-states as an organism cannot reach into cyberspace to regulate information technology, which necessitates innovation in state and governance for the information age.

Stigmergy, swarm-based organization and in-direct co-ordination without central planning

Stigmergy (Wikipedia) is often used in the same way as "swarm organization", and it is a consensus mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. How ants use pheromone trails for example, is a stigmergic system.

Stigmergic systems organize by indirect co-ordination, the use of gold as a currency for example, rather than political systems that organize by direct co-ordination and central planning.

When stigmergic systems are perceived to be operating as political systems, that is often a projection from a world-view that is ruled by politics, onto a world that runs on indirect co-ordination.