*This publication is rebranded from “Stranded Technologies” to “The Infinita City Times”. If you’ve followed Stranded Technologies, Infinita VC or Vitalia in the past, this is the new home of content. The Stranded Technologies Podcast will continue to exist on this platform. This is the founding manifesto of “Infinita City”, an update from the Infinita Manifesto 1.0.
By Niklas Anzinger
1-Sentence Version
Infinita is a network city for founders to build world-class companies building towards longevity, through biotechnology, computation, and science.
1-Paragraph Version
Infinita City builds a network of small hubs—starting in Próspera ZEDEs Roatán jurisdiction —where founders can develop biotech and healthcare solutions with much reduced and streamlined red tape. Building on the success of the Vitalia popup city, Infinita City build a permanent hub within a regulatory sandbox where new therapies can be launched in months instead of years, using approaches like medical reciprocity and streamlined approvals. While our primary focus is on longevity, any innovation needing real-world testing and faster iteration is welcome. By reducing regulatory friction, Infinita aims to unlock a new frontier in life extension.
Full Version
Two years ago, we introduced Infinita Manifesto 1.0.
The idea was (and still is) bold: What if we could give founders and researchers a way to fast-track new technology development in regulated industries? Reopen innovation in the world of atoms? We set out to build an ecosystem—call it a “startup city” or “network state” if you like—where people can experiment, innovate, and push boundaries in ways that are often prevented by regulatory capture.
What changed?
The Vitalia Experience & Focus on Longevity Biotech
Vitalia emulated the “Zuzalu” popup city started by Vitalik Buterin.
Vitalia was tremendously successful in activating a community of techno-optimists and longevity enthusiasts and exposed close to 1,000 people to Roatan, the location of Próspera ZEDE, some of which decided to move there as a result. In the process, we developed the conviction that “longevity is the ultimate technology” and should be the main priority of Infinita.
Regulatory Acceleration Becoming Mainstream
Javier Milei in Argentina was a trailblazer. Warpspeed “afuera” deregulation has influenced the formation of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) by Elon Musk and Vivek Rawaswamy, accompanied by ideas such as “effective accelerationism” (e/acc) that are pro-growth and techno-optimistic. Infinita was early to promote these ideas.
This is a unique moment in history that makes Infinita City possible.
Why Infinita City?
We started as a community of biotech, crypto and other frontier tech people who believed that accelerating technology development—especially life extension—is not just due to a lack of breakthrough science, funding gaps (a “Manhattan Project for Longevity”), a problem of PR, or will be solved by AGI; it’s a governance problem. Regulations, licensing, insurance, approvals, you name it, all culminating in “Eroom’s Law”. We realized that if we want to beat aging and death, we need to cut timelines and costs, and allow for rapid iteration cycles.
So we iterated from “Infinita 1.0” to “Infinita City.” A new name for a broader project.
Longevity is the Ultimate Technology
Infinita has a broad definition of longevity.
The narrow version of the longevity ideas commonly expressed are the one of healthy lifestyle longevity (e.g. Peter Attia) and of “radical life extension” best expressed by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship’s (LBF) Roadmap, i.e. actually achieving indefinite healthy lifespan through technology like bioengineering, cryo-preservation or body replacement.
The north star of Infinita is the LBF Roadmap, but it’s broader in two ways:
Balaji Srinivasan’s “longevity is the ultimate technology” idea; all technology aims to achieve us more with less, i.e. freeing up time to expand the frontier even further. That doesn’t mean we literally do B2B Saas or generative AI, but it means we draw a larger circle around biotech as whole, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, as these are the models of delivery for accumulating life extension and health improvement
Governance is the enabler for business model innovation in healthcare as a whole: to build a scalable model to achieve life extension for billions of people, we need to build different insurance models, different healthcare delivery models, different models for legal liability, incentives for better behavior & many more things like that. Robin Hanson’s health-life insurance combo may be more important than your scientific breakthrough of choice, because it sets the incentives right to scale any given technology
In short, Infinita City is the necessary enabling layer for technological progress and longevity is the ultimate arc of technological progress, directly and indirectly.
What is Infinita City, really?
To answer this question, we have to first talk about “where is Infinita City”?
Where is Infinita City, and why is it there?
The most innovative special jurisdiction in the world is Prospera ZEDE. It is our launchpad, and represents our vision for the future - it is based on Tom W. Bell’s polycentric law and Robin Hanson’s mandatory liability insurance, enables Alex Tabarrok’s medical reciprocity, Jessica Flanigan’s pharmaceutical freedom, and Vitalik Buterin’s crypto governance pluralism.
If these ideas are new to you, check Scott Alexander’s “Prospectus on Prospera” and my “Ultimate Guide to Prospera for Entrepreneurs” - it’s a bit of a rabbithole.
What is there right now?
Prospera ZEDE has its special jurisdiction on the Caribbean paradise island of Roatan, in the country of Honduras. On Roatan, Infinita currently harbors 40-50 permanent residents. It has another popup city in January & February 2025, aiming at 1.000 total visitors.
We have a large Dome for events (up to 200 people capacity), lease out 30-50 apartments regularly, a co-working space with futuristic art, and there are startups residing there such as “Symbiont Labs” and works developing more infrastructure and institutions such as 1) the “Roatan Institute for Science and Technology”, an academic program on quantum biology, biology of aging and economics of science, led by Professor Terence Kealey. 2) the “Human Health Initiative” that start by providing necessary emergency and primary care services. Together, the people and institutions based locally form Infinita’s “Roatan Hub”.
What will it be like in the future?
In the next 10 years, we want thousands of permanent residents, labs for research, development & manufacturing, and clinics to serve millions of patients worldwide.
And Roatan is just the start. We’re scouting for other hubs in the U.S. and Latin America offering partnership for local economic development through frontier innovation. By 2025, we might have 3–5 major “districts” collectively forming Infinita City—plus Infinita will have people and institutions in other places, e.g. the school, partner clinics or community houses that are led by Infinitians that bounce between worlds, e.g. in San Francisco, Lisbon or London.
Why would anyone go there, instead of SF, NYC, or Boston?
These places have many things that Infinita is currently lacking, of course. But Roatan is by no means a lonely island or a jungle where things are lacking. Of course, you don’t have Amazon deliveries, opera houses or 1.000+ different gym class options - but you do have great wifi, modern amenities, good restaurants, large grocery stores and schools for kids.
The biggest thing it’s lacking for professional-grade biotechnology development is modern lab infrastructure. It does not exist currently, you need to do it elsewhere. However, there is development, we’re starting with small labs, DIY makerspaces—you can play!
Infinita is a non-consensus bet on the future, you need to be attracted to be early at the frontier.
The upside is: if you truly care about saving people’s lives, you can do it now! It does have a professional grade clinic with internationally acclaimed doctors that can administer therapies and clinical trials following WHO safety protocols and collect data in FDA-compliant ways.
Also, you are surrounded by a community of like-minded techno-optimists united in the ambition to shape the course of history. If that idea just intuitively excites you, then check it out!
If you’re not ready for it yet, you can wait until we have a second or third location that you like better, more proof-points, infrastructure, etc. totally cool, choose your level of risk/reward.
Is Infinita a Network State?
Yes-ish, Infinita is highly influenced by Balaji Srinivasan’s ideas behind “The Network State”. We throw our hat in the ring to be the project closest to this vision—however with one fundamental difference: we do not seek diplomatic recognition and sovereignty. Both from a philosophical standpoint and practicality reasons, sovereignty is not at all a factor in Infinita’s vision.
How does Infinita City work?
Partnerships with Jurisdictions
Infinita does not seek to reform any whole country - although it does seek to inspire partial change. Infinita seeks to experiment on a small-scale, through positive-sum partnerships with host countries, states and innovative special jurisdictions.
The ideal partners to Infinita can be countries like Honduras, El Salvador or Argentina on a bold reform path to encourage economic development, ideally with governance service providers or special economic zone operators like Prospera, or they can be US states that are on the path to deregulation coupled with access to large markets and existing infrastructure.
Popup Cities
Vitalia was the genesis popup city that Infinita was borne out of. Infinita will continue with a popup city, in Roatan, as an entry point for more people to join us. It will also popup cities in other locations that have the potential to become permanent hubs as a “market test”.
Popup cities are a higher commitment than a conference, and are therefore a better filter to create a permanent in-person community. They allow new residents to test out how it is to live there, while they are maybe shopping around a bit between different locations.
Go-to-Market Platform
Infinita City is essentially a go-to-market platform.
It aims to develop an alternative way to get new medical drugs and therapies to market in 6 months instead of 10 years (see the full “Ultimate Guide to Biomedical Innovation in Prospera”).
In other words, Infinita is more focused on business model innovation than scientific innovation. Scientific innovation is necessary to solve aging, but we don’t see it as the only bottleneck.
In practice, Infinita seems a bit like an accelerator. We mostly focus on early-stage startups, because this is where innovations start and where the risk profile is a fit. We do programs for startups with mentorship sessions, product development, fundraising advice and demo days.
In the future, Infinita aims to have a full pipeline from idea to billion-dollar drug or treatment—including access to the largest markets in the world through approval with regulators in multiple jurisdictions, large clinical, manufacturing and research facilities partners.
What about Safety and Ethics?
Ethics and Safety should not be a stand-in for status quo bias. The status quo is deeply unethical. Millions of people lack access to life-saving drugs and treatments.
We don’t want to replace current practices to ensure ethical experimentation and safety with nothing—the plan is to continue what works and improve what doesn’t work.
In practice, our approach is actually quite conservative—in doubt go with standard best practice. Here are two key ideas that seem uncontroversial to us, but those aren’t the status quo:
Medical Reciprocity: The FDA does not allow best practices from other countries. Why not allow drugs and treatments approved by other “stringent regulatory authorities”?
Safety Trials-Only: why not allow people to take a risk on something that is safe, but not conclusively proven effective? This is done all the time, see the use of off-label.
These two ideas really don’t amount to much more than actually following standard best practice. Those would already massively reduce costs and save millions of patients' lives!
There is a whole array of other inefficiencies in healthcare delivery, let’s save those for nuanced discussions. The point is: regulations are good, we want better regulations, not no regulations. If we disagree which regulations are good and bad, let’s experiment and see what works!
Concluding Thoughts
Infinita is a network city for founders to build world-class companies building towards longevity, through biotechnology, computation, and science.
A new chapter on this journey, and a critical time period, has begun.
The next few years will be marked by tremendous changes in the world, many enabling the force of technological progress in unprecedented ways, but it will also activate enemies of progress and growth that would prefer stagnation, authoritarianism and bureaucracy.
Join us here: www.infinita.city
Great Manifesto!
You want people to trust the WHO? Hmmmm