e-Residency Blog

What Estonia's e-residency actually means. Let's assume you have a startup and you want it to be registered in Estonia, paying taxes and using the Estonian banks for financial purposes. 1. With e-Residency you can't enter Estonia, you need a separate business or travel visa [1] 2. At present, it’s still necessary to travel to Estonia in order to apply in person for an Estonian business bank account. [2] 3. Good, fancy and catchy name "e-Residency" is actually an infinite loop of bureaucracy. You can't remotely open a bank account, you need to travel personally to Estonia, and you have a chance that banks will approve your application. But you can't enter Estonia with this "e-Residency" for this to happen. [1] https://e-resident.gov.ee/faqs/about-e-residency/#coming-to-estonia [2] https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/banking-for-e-residents-your-key-q… And this is just a little tip of the iceberg, there are a lot of articles about real experience of e-residents of how unfriendly for "e-residents" the banks in Estonia are. And without a bank you can't make your startup work. Today it's just better with the same level of bureaucracy to open a company in other, more startup-friendly countries that grant a residency and have decent, more digital-friendly banks. I hope something will change in near future, the main idea of e-residency is actually really amazing.

See also the Chicago Theological Seminary [1]; this article by Adam Rang of E-Residency [2] on "Virtual Institutes"; and this old NSF initiative [3] on "Science Across Virtual Institutes". (Just thinking on global/distributed alternatives to traditional institutes of advanced study / research institutes...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Theological_Seminary [2] https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/could-virtual-institutes-boost-aca… [3] https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=121825

e-residents also have access to Estonia's "estcoin" once it's released: https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/were-planning-to-launch-estcoin-an…

Yep, and - just to get back on topic - they (the good Estonian people) are seemingly (maybe) plainning a government backed ICO: https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/estonia-could-offer-estcoins-to-e-… Previous (few) comments on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15071682

I am an e-resident and I used it to establish a business entity for my startup. It works really well for my particular use case. I am a Canadian resident, my co-founder is an Estonian resident (physical). Both of these may change in the future and the intended market for our startup is global. Estonia was chosen as a common ground with a minimal overhead - it's easy and costs almost nothing. Using government services with an ID-card was a breeze. For banking we use a "physical" Estonian bank, once set up I have no problem accessing it online either. We didn't have any revenue the previous year, so cannot say much about taxation story here. It gets more or less complicated depending on your country of residence, but I don't think that having a business entity in Estonia is fundamentally different from other EU countries here. Slightly more personal and readable story, written by me: https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/how-to-launch-an-estonian-startup-…