This is my first post in the Leo Finance community since I joined Hive recently in Dec '21. I guess I'm a Leo Cub unless you have to earn the right of passage 🤣. I heard about how Estonia had built a seamless e-society and found it quite intriguing. There are quite a few posts about Estonia in the travel and photography communities on PeakD that I came across and maybe one or two about their E-residency. However I wanted to write about my thoughts on this topic as well.
Estonian E-Citizenship
Estonia's entire society functions on blockchain and their sole national card that has a chip which stores all their data in an encrypted form from banking, business, taxes, prescriptions etc. Estonia offers E-residency to foreigners as well where they can launch a startup, pay taxes and do everything online. You can also open a bank account remotely. 99% of their public services are available to its citizens as E-services!
To me what's great about this is the multilateralism and the level of buy-in from their government. I know people who run corporations remotely in the U.S. and other countries but the extent to which services are linked are limited. For example forming a Delaware corporation is easy but to setup a bank account you had to physically do that and now you can do it online but you have to get an Employer Identification Number (EIN) by calling the state office on their landline. In Estonia 99% of public services are available to its citizens as an e-service.
How Estonia Did This
They used X-Road which deploys the decentralized infrastructure needed to serve as the intersection between blockchain technology and the world’s data. It's basically a software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between organizations. This is what allowed Estonia to develop its E-society.
This is key and can play an important role in COVID passports and other data that can be exchanged easily cross border nowadays. More importantly this improves efficiency and productivity. In my line of business the amount of documentation I need to get clients to submit just to prove their identity and address is insane. I also went through a very painful experience of getting residency in Trinidad and Tobago where I now live which took 6 years for a 3 year process supposedly. Data is not even shared between the Immigration division and the Ministry of National Security. Everything is on paper in files that often get misplaces or lost😡 Every 6 months I had to get a police character certificate done and submit the same documents every visit.
An Option For Crypto Entrepreneurs
I definitely see Estonia as a good place for startups especially crypto startups or even individuals who live in countries whose governments are imposing taxes and laws to restrict access. Its pretty easy to apply for E-residency on their government website and it costs 100 Euros. Setting up a business might be a little bit complicated though so do your research properly if you're thinking of exploring this route. Look at minimum capital requirements, what you need to physically be there for, language barriers and how it applies to your type of business.
Here are some articles on PeakD on Estonia's E-residency.
@johngentry/using-estonia-to-run-crypto-currency-business
@teamhumble/holvi-for-e-residents-digital-current-account-that-s-entirely-online
@axynos/e-estonia-a-real-digital-country-running-on-the-blockchain
@dragosroua/estonia-to-launch-a-digital-nomad-visa-in-2019
Let me know your thoughts on Estonia and if any of you are from there it would be interesting to get a native perspective.