Wyoming e-Residency

Christopher Allen

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Executive Director / Principal Architect

Blockchain Commons

Christopher Allen | Executive Director | Blockchain Commons

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• Co-Author of SSL/TLS
• Co-Inventor & Architect of�Decentralized Identifiers
• Author of Design Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity

• Founder/Chair of Rebooting the Web of Trust
• Former Co-Chair of W3C Credentials CG
• Former Principal Architect of Blockstream
• Former CTO of Certicom
• Former Faculty at Pinchot.edu

Email: ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com

Twitter: @ChristopherA

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ChristopherA/

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What is e-Residency?

The first e-Residency program was offered by Estonia 🇪🇪�in 2014

It allows non-citizens online access to Estonia government services, in particular the ability to register EU corporations.

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e-Residency is NOT…

… legal residency or citizenship

… visa or travel documents

… tax avoidance

In fact, it comes closest to being a combined digital Commercial Registered Agent (possibly without local residency) & Communications Contact for any corporations registered.

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Estonian e-Residency Business Benefits?

• Low startup costs & minimal fees, all available online
• Fast setup of banking services including merchant credit card
• Transparent taxation & no tax on reinvested profits
• Access to Estonia & EU courts, eurozone business markets & capital
• Receive contracts from eurozone NGOs, foundations, EU, OECD, NATO, government agencies, etc.

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Why Wyoming e-Residency?

You have already set the legal stage!

• 2018 HB 101 — shareholders represented by keys
• 2019 HB 70  — state corporate filing system
• 2019 HB 185 — stock records on blockchain
• 2019 HB 125 & 2021 HB 43 — digital assets�under UCC
• 2021 SF 38 — support of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations)
• 2021 SF 39 — definition of personal & corporate digital identity

Collin Kinniry

• Wabash College, 2023
• Politics, Philosophy and Economics & Rhetoric major
• Pre-law

email: ctkinnir23@wabash.edu

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/collinkinniry

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Estonia pipeline to EU company vs. WY potential

• Establishing business in Estonia is easy due to low bureaucracy, ease of collaboration/doing business
• The result? Most startups per capita in EU (e-Estonia)
• Wyoming can leverage intrastate entrepreneurship with global collaborative efforts
• Not about forming an LLC but utilizing blockchain to register assets in Wyoming to enter US economy

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Revolutionizing Economic Development

• We must ask a different set of questions.
• Business Development & Attracting New Companies: excellent for manufacturing, inefficient for ‘new’ entrepreneurship and collaboration.
• Talent Acquisition: Although physical locations would not be necessary at the beginning for most eResidency businesses, it would make sense to dwell in Wyoming.
• Business-friendly tax climate
• Room to grow (metaphorically and literally)
• Instead of trying to fish for the already established companies, SMEs have the chance to develop their business under Wyoming law 🡪 some are bound to succeed, and they will remain in the state.

“ESTONIAN E-RESIDENCY AND CONCEPTIONS OF PLATFORM- BASED STATE-INDIVIDUAL RELATIONSHIP”

2022 study by Piia Tammpuu, Anu Masso, Mergime Ibrahimi, Tam Abaku

University of Tartu and 2Tallinn University of Technology

Estonian eResident Quotes

• “I found it really cool that a country was so welcoming and would say: “Ok, if you want to be an additional type of citizen [...], you are more than welcome. You don’t have the same exact rights and you can’t vote but you can create a company and do things for the country.” So, it was a kind of mix of e-residency and e-citizenship in the beginning, and I found it very attractive because it was very welcoming (eR6 French).”
• “I just liked the idea and wanted to support it – the fact that it is a novel way of looking at citizenship. [...] There is a country that wants to make you a citizen of the digital country or digital world. [...] In a world where everybody is trying to close the bar and stay out, there is a country saying everybody is welcome. Yeah, that’s a nice message (eR10 Belgian).”

Conclusive Findings

• “…being an electronic resident can also imply a value- based opt-in ‘digital membership’ in a state, and thus serve as a basis for collective identification and transnational belonging (pg. 18).”
• “...it should be noted that indeed the digitalization of business processes of enterprises opens new horizons and opportunities for the formation of added value in almost all sectors of the economy. In addition, in the post-pandemic period, digital technologies will become an integral part of the socio-economic life of Society 5.0 and identify key vectors for the development of government digital policy (Kraus, Kraus, Manzhura).”

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WHAT: Wyoming > Estonia

• Advantages over Estonia; we can do it better!
• Leverage W3C Standards
• aligned with US Homeland Security efforts
• Support UCC Filings
• Offer certifications, tax receipts, and fee remittances
• sales tax, licensing, authorizations, energy, oil & gas
• WRDA: Unique new offering!
• Other Wyoming offices:
• Educational credentials
• Offer trusted oracle for Wyoming statistics that can be by smart contracts

HOW: Secretary of State Office

• Have with digital signatures and issuing verifiable claims
• Wherever possible, partner with rather than implement
• Select Committee creates law or regulation to enable a “digital registered agent” (“DRA?”) with additional duties:.
• Can be delegated to do KYC and other due diligence, rather than SoS.
• SoS then only needs to be able to verify true Wyoming residency of DRAs, define duties and responsibilities, and audit the DRAs.
• SoS accept applications for new corporate digital identity (“CDID”)
• Based on evidence from verifiable presentations by a DRA.
• SoS can issues publicly verifiable credential proofs
• certify date of inception and current status.
• Offer WRDA and other services to corporations first, and then individuals