Inside the experimental city testing wildly de-regulated government

Inside Próspera, the libertarian utopia on a Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras By Lauren Day and Matt Henry in Honduras Foreign Correspondent

Alice Chen opens a glass door and leads the way past a wall of stickers bearing slogans such as "Make Death Optional" and "Live on Bitcoin". The room we've entered is part messy science lab, part share-house kitchen.

"Welcome to the Maker Space," Chen says. Sunlight peeks through palms swaying in the afternoon breeze outside, but what we've come to see lives in the windowless black tent sitting in the corner.

Chen unzips the door and retrieves a beaker from a small fridge inside.

"You can't find this anywhere else in the world," she says, holding up a vivid green liquid. This is what she came all the way from Canada to Próspera, a libertarian enclave on the Honduran island of Roatán, to develop — a live algae drink she says could add 20 years to your life.

"It's only possible here in Próspera because of their meta-regulatory framework," Chen says.

In Canada, where Chen was studying for her PhD, it would have taken months, if not years, to get approval to test the product.

"I would have been kicked out of any university even for just consuming it myself," she says.

So when she heard about the libertarian utopia in the Caribbean where she could bring it to life without those regulatory constraints, she dropped out and flew south.

In Próspera, businesses get to choose their own regulations from a menu of over 30 countries — or even propose new ones.

"We couldn't find any, so we created our own," says Alice, who's already assembled a small group of willing volunteers to test the product.

"The fact is, nowhere else in the world would regulators allow us to experiment, like, is this safe for human consumption, right?"

Chen's experiment is nothing out of the ordinary among the tight-knit group of biohackers, tech entrepreneurs and crypto bros who inhabit Próspera, a private city run by an American company. Próspera itself is a radical experiment, billed as "the future of human governance, privately run and for profit".

So-called "startup cities" with light regulations, ultra-low taxes and minimal government oversight have long been a dream in online libertarian circles in the US. In Honduras, one of Latin America's poorest nations, it's become a reality. Próspera might be the most advanced test case for those libertarian ideas, which some hope to take global.