About

This is the newsletter of Luis Cuende (@licuende).

I’m a freedom maximalist, a bureaucracy minimalist and a rational optimist.

I advanced the freedom to organize through Aragon, which I cofounded in 2016. Aragon took DAOs from $0 to $20bn in assets under management, powering some of Ethereum’s heavyweights, like Lido and Curve. (For goosebumps, watch this).

I am now advancing the freedom of movement with CitizenX, which I cofounded in 2023. CitizenX allows you to find and fund places that welcome you as a citizen.

I am an angel investor in freedom-enabling technologies that will define this century’s progress: crypto (sovereign money), longevity(sovereign health) and network states (sovereign citizenship).

I have invested in 20+ startups like Dune, Molecule or Polkadot. I have coinvested alongside other angels like Balaji Srinivasan, Ryan Hoover, Alexis Ohanian, Ashton Kutcher and VCs like a16z, USV and Placeholder.

I started my career making open source software at age 12. I first started a Linux distribution called Asturix, building a new desktop environment from scratch and cool features like facelogin (way before Android and iOS had it!).

I have also advised projects like Decentraland, and institutions like the European Commission (which didn’t work out very well).

I didn’t go to college and I attribute much of the West’s cultural decline to our Industrial Age education systems and boomers.

My utopian dream is to live in a new country that doesn’t exist today — where creativity is praised, private property is respected, bullshit jobs don’t exist and parents actually get to spend time with their kids.

Some beliefs I hold strongly:

• Unconditional love is the most humane thing that exists. Morality and creativity are only second to it. Knowing what’s truly humane will help us navigate a period of confusion as AI keeps exponentially improving.

• Humans, as the leading species, are morally responsible for safeguarding Earth and its creatures.

• Becoming multi-planetary should be the #1 goal of our times.

• The second one should be to build new networks — powered by crypto — to move on from the collapse of Western civilization.

• Teenagers are people too. They can think, they can create, they can build. They have the most energy, and the most neurons. Confining them to buildings that resemble prisons is a crime against humanity.

• If you are a teenager/young person, you should earn your freedom as soon as you can.

• Most of the money, news, and regulations are fake. Boomers have created a fake world, which looks very proper from the outside, but it’s all fugazzi. You want your president to look like this, not like this.

• Western boomers have been the worst generation in the current generational cycle. They have failed their children and are collapsing a great civilization.

• We don’t know why we (and the universe) exist. Apart from procreation, there’s no universal answer to what to do with life. That’s why happiness is subjective and to be achieved individually.

• Central planning is evil as a group imposes their formula to happiness to the rest.

• Individual liberties and capitalism are our best bets to happiness and prosperity.

• Communists are failed capitalists.

• Humans are incredible, Earth is a wonderful gift, and we are undermining both. Seeing human beings imprisoned in bullshit jobs and bureaucracy is such a lack of respect for our own species.

If something resonated here, drop me a line at first letter of my name@ this domain.