{"id":128120,"date":"2025-04-28T13:15:32","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T13:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/?p=128120"},"modified":"2025-04-28T13:15:32","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T13:15:32","slug":"why-do-crypto-bros-like-freedom-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/?p=128120","title":{"rendered":"Why do crypto bros like freedom cities?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: Cointelegraph.com NewsWhen Donald Trump was running for president, he pledged to build 10 new US cities, dubbed \u201cfreedom cities,\u201d from scratch, designed to improve the quality of life for Americans.\u00a0
\nThese new high-tech communities were to be created on public land, and they were going to be free of the \u201cnightmare of red tape,\u201d including lengthy environmental reviews, that had hampered the development of affordable housing in many parts of the US.
\nFreedom cities aren\u2019t really a new idea. They are a rebranding of charter cities, which have been around since the late 1800s. Still, Trump\u2019s proposal won the gung-ho support of many of Silicon Valley\u2019s tech bros, whose backing helped tilt the last US presidential election in his direction, and many of whom \u2014 e.g., the PayPal mafia consisting of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan \u2014 were also enthusiastic early supporters of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.\u00a0
\nIn mid-March, the new administration made some tentative moves to make freedom cities a reality. Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced a Joint Task Force on using underutilized federal land suitable for housing.
\n\u201cAmerica needs more affordable housing, and the federal government can make it happen by making federal land available to build affordable housing stock,\u201d they wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
\nHow serious is one to take this idea of new, free-floating cities to be built on federally owned land? The administration says freedom cities are needed to help quell the national housing crisis.\u00a0
\nBut others suggest that building new communities free from many state and federal laws and rules, like the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act, is to create places that are, in effect, outside of the law \u2014 \u201cwhere the rules are suspended and don\u2019t apply anymore to certain people.\u201d And if so, what does that mean for the rest of the country?
\n\u201cThese are not normal times\u201d
\n\u201cIn normal times, I might say the idea that the US federal government would spearhead a program to build any number of master-planned cities is rather preposterous,\u201d Max Woodworth, an associate professor in the geography department at Ohio State University, told Cointelegraph, adding:\u00a0
\n\u201cBut these are not normal times, and the current administration seems open to things that might previously have been dismissed, fairly or unfairly, as impossible or misguided.\u201d
\nFreedom cities have their critics. They have been called a \u201cdevious scam,\u201d aimed at bringing back \u201cthe bad old \u2018company towns\u2019 of yesteryear with a fresh coat of modern cryptofascist varnish.\u201d\u00a0
\nIndeed, company \u201cscrip\u201d was the medium of exchange in towns like Pullman, Illinois, built by George Pullman, owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company, in the late 19th century, whereas today \u201ccryptocurrency is a key component of freedom cities,\u201d the New Republic reported.\u00a0
\nThe history of chartered cities is checkered at best, commented Woodworth, and looking ahead much will depend on how they are designed and managed. \u201cOver the years, there have been \u2018new city\u2019 plans intended to manifest fascist, communist, social-democratic, libertarian and post-colonial political agendas. For better and worse, urban space is very commonly used as a laboratory for different overt political projects.\u201d\u00a0
\nBut maybe these are mischaracterizations. \u201cAnyone who thinks Freedom Cities would be lawless should read fewer comic books and more copies of The Wall Street Journal,\u201d Tom Bell, a professor at Chapman University\u2019s Fowler School of Law, told Cointelegraph. \u201cBuilding cities takes money, and investors don\u2019t like lawlessness.\u201d He added:
\n\u201cThat is not to say that all the usual regulations would apply in Freedom Cities; investors don\u2019t like red tape, either. The goal is not getting rid of all regulation but rather finding new and better ways to guide investment, construction and business.\u201d
\nBell, who has been working with others to develop a Freedom Cities Act, would require a city\u2019s board to favor developers\u2019 applications that achieve the same outcomes as applicable current federal regulations, \u201cbut through alternative and more efficient enforcement regimes.\u201d\u00a0
\nPart of the Freedom Cities Act, outlining self-governance. Source: Tom BellJeffrey Mason, head of policy at the Charter Cities Institute, also supports enabling federal legislation for freedom cities. \u201cWe\u2019ve proposed that a process be created by which freedom cities could propose the waiving or other modification of highly burdensome regulations in sectors of strategic importance or in frontier technologies, much like the regulatory sandboxes adopted by various states in recent years,\u201d he told Cointelegraph.
\nOthers see a model along the lines of New York\u2019s Brooklyn Navy Yard, the former military installation that was later transformed into an industrial park. It now houses more than 300 businesses and has become a model for other such projects in the US, writes Mark Lutter and Nick Allen. \u201cThe second Trump administration has opened the door to Freedom Cities. They can play an important role in American revitalization.\u201d\u00a0
\nRelated: Is Elon Musk plotting the mother of all blockchains?
\nIndeed, the recent joint announcement by the Departments of the Interior and of Housing and Urban Development \u201csuggests that the administration is actively thinking about how a very small share of federal land could be used to build more housing, and possibly entirely new cities,\u201d added Mason.
\nIt\u2019s in the details
\nBut more clarity may still be needed. \u201cAt this point the idea of freedom cities being bandied about is so vague that it\u2019s impossible to have clear conceptions or misconceptions of them in the first place,\u201d said Woodworth.\u00a0
\nThe devil could be in the details. \u201cThere seems to be some excitement around freedom cities among libertarian-leaning intellectuals and investors whose ideal freedom city would be places that are very business-friendly,\u201d said Woodworth.
\nAgain, this does not mean that \u201canything goes.\u201d But it\u2019s not hard to imagine a tax and regulatory regime at work in the jurisdiction of the freedom city that is favorable to corporate interests, said Woodworth. \u201cIndeed, the impetus for freedom cities seems to be precisely to create exceptional conditions that make an end run around the regulatory thicket that frustrates a lot of people, including in the crypto business.\u201d\u00a0
\nWhy do crypto bros like freedom cities?
\nHow does one, in fact, explain the strong interest in freedom cities among some of the cryptocurrency community\u2019s high-profile partisans?\u00a0
\n\u201cThe crypto community has been interested in new cities, charter cities and other innovative governance mechanisms for a long time,\u201d Mason told Cointelegraph.
\n\u201cI think the common interest in decentralization drives a large part of this, but I also think the crypto community is passionate about innovation and building new things, so there\u2019s natural alignment.\u201d
\nNew vistas of innovation may tantalize both groups, \u201cand they sense that existing institutional structures rooted in a 20th-century world hamper its potential,\u201d opined Woodworth. \u201cNew cities, theoretically at least, might offer the prospect of designing a setting that can unleash the sector to discover where it can go in terms of innovation and new applications.\u201d
\nBell added, \u201cThe crypto community doubtless sees in freedom cities the promise of a regulatory regime that at least is not overtly hostile to fintech innovation and that perhaps even welcomes it. There are lots of bold new ideas floating around the crypto space. Freedom Cities might offer a chance to put the best of them to work.\u201d
\nBell would like to see quicker progress, though. He noted that Trump proposed the creation of 10 freedom cities in March 2023 while running for office, but \u201csince then, so far as outward signs go, the administration has not followed up on the president\u2019s promise.\u201d
\nVarious parties eager to see freedom cities created have been urging Congressional members to enact the necessary legislation, he added. So far, \u201cthat effort has yet to bear fruit.\u201d
\nTwo case studies: California Forever and Pr\u00f3spera\u00a0
\nIn any event, the challenges of building a 21st-century city from scratch in the United States shouldn\u2019t be underestimated, as those Silicon Valley billionaires who invested in the troubled California Forever real estate enterprise could probably attest.
\nCalifornia Forever intended to develop new industries, novel sources of clean energy and safe, walkable neighborhoods with affordable homes in an underpopulated part of California, 60 miles north of San Francisco.
\nDesigned as an eco-friendly, walk-only community that would house up to 400,000 souls on previous farmland, it\u2019s instead become a cautionary tale illustrating \u201cthe cultural and regulatory barriers to building today,\u201d write Mark Lutter, founder and executive director of the Charter Cities Institute, and Nick Allen, president of the Frontier Foundation.\u00a0
\nThe project has been \u201con hold\u201d for two years pending an environmental study of its plan.
\nCalifornia Forever hoped to build a city in Solano County. Source: California ForeverThe project\u2019s backers made some missteps, to be sure. They purchased $900 million of farmland in sparsely populated Solano County without revealing anything about the identities of the enterprise\u2019s backers or plans for a new city.\u00a0
\nWhen details finally did emerge, community relations soured. They frayed further when the project\u2019s backers filed a $500-million antitrust lawsuit saying that farmers who had refused to sell their land to them were colluding to raise prices, The New York Times reported.
\nRelated: US gov\u2019t actions give clue about upcoming crypto regulation
\nOn the positive side, the project underscored that San Francisco is not building enough housing units, which has caused a huge spike in rents there and is driving away local residents. Something similar, if less extreme, is happening in other US cities today, a key reason why the Trump administration\u2019s freedom cities initiative is gaining attention.\u00a0
\nPr\u00f3spera\u2019s island \u201cparadise\u201d
\nBy comparison, the overseas-based Pr\u00f3spera chartered-city project avoided many of those same regulatory and zoning problems that vexed California Forever thanks to a welcoming Honduras government \u2014 at least initially.\u00a0
\nThe owners of Pr\u00f3spera, a Delaware Registered Company, persuaded Honduras to give them a 50-year lease and permission to build a startup city on the the island of Roat\u00e1n with a regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs \u201cto build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world,\u201d according to the for-profit company\u2019s website.
\nPr\u00f3spera has raised $120 million in investments since its founding in 2017, including from venture-capital funds backed by tech billionaires Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen, among others.
\nIt operates in a special economic development zone within Honduras, but it has its own government, is modestly taxed, and has a flexible regulatory structure largely of its own devising. Disputes are settled by the Pr\u00f3spera arbitration center. Indeed, the new city\u2019s court system reportedly makes use of retired Arizona judges who operate totally online.
\nThe island of Pr\u00f3spera. Source: Pr\u00f3speraPr\u00f3spera has been able to persuade Western-based companies to set up new businesses within its zone, including experimental medical facilities, \u201cwhich run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards,\u201d according to The New York Times.
\nTo say that the Honduras-based startup city is crypto-aligned might be an understatement. In January 2025, Pr\u00f3spera received a strategic investment from Coinbase Ventures \u201cto expand economic freedom globally.\u201d
\nIn February, it hosted a \u201ccrypto cities summit.\u201d The island has a Bitcoin Center, which instructs visitors in crypto\u2019s whys and wherefores. Indeed, Pr\u00f3spera calls itself \u201cone of the most Bitcoin-friendly jurisdictions in the world,\u201d and it invites visitors to \u201cconnect with fellow Bitcoiners, tour Pr\u00f3spera, and relax in paradise.\u201d
\nRecently, however, the charter city may have lost its way. Pr\u00f3spera has a $11-billion claim against the State of Honduras that still awaits a ruling from an international arbitration tribunal, and some of its one-time supporters have become disenchanted. \u201cIt\u2019s like a gated community. They\u2019re just trying to isolate themselves and do what\u2019s best for them,\u201d Paul Romer, a Nobel-winning economist and former supporter, told Bloomberg recently.\u00a0
\nIn short, developing a charter city isn\u2019t always a breeze \u2014 not even in paradise.
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Source: Cointelegraph.com NewsWhen Donald Trump was running for president, he pledged to build 10 new US cities, dubbed \u201cfreedom cities,\u201d from scratch, designed to improve the quality of life for… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128120"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}