What Are Freedom Cities?
Brian Armstrong says Freedom Cities would set aside 10 or 100 square miles of federal land so builders can skip ordinary permits and test nuclear power, drug discovery, crypto, drone delivery, and data centers in a contained sandbox.
Coinbase invested in Prospera, in Honduras, to learn what was going on. Prospera has had a mixed up and down with the local government and is getting closer to a resolution. He thinks Prospera will make it. A little more interest in the approach showed up before the most recent Trump administration, because deregulation has created a lot of opportunities in the United States. The campaign idea uses pockets of land the federal government already owns. On the chosen land, builders would skip normal EPA red tape and the local community process, build data centers and nuclear power plants, and run unlimited drone delivery without FAA approval. If an experiment works, it can go through the normal process in the rest of the United States.
In many cases there is no sandbox, which is incredibly stifling, because an entrepreneur cannot solve a problem without iterating. Shenzhen, Singapore, and Dubai have been very successful with special economic zones and have driven a ton of economic growth. The United States is already 50 special economic zones because of federalism and the state system, and that competition has allowed the country to lead globally. He wants the country to go even further.
