Wifi? Check.
Laptop? Check.
Picturesque surroundings and white sandy beaches? Check.
What about that business structure…?

 

Digital nomads – the rising phenomenon of the past decade, shaking up the traditional ways of living, working and traveling. The remote souls, the nomads, digital doers and free radicals born global. The ones unbound by national borders, industry sectors or conventional models. Those who settle for nothing less than a larger purpose, crafted by intrinsic curiosity, self-reliance and perseverance.

While nomadism itself isn’t new, the digital revolution enabling less friction has given way to the possibility of designing your very own lifestyle. Live, work, travel. Typically portrayed to take place somewhere tropical where sipping a Negroni is what you do for living, but as many of us know – the reality is often quite different.

Setting foot into the space of nomadic lifestyle can be daunting. Without a clear recipe how things should work, there are numerous different ways of transitioning into a digital nomad – and at least an equal amount of ways of making things work. In the absence of universal frames supporting this shift, the void is filled with ambiguity of visa regulations, work permits and tax filings. And that’s just your personal end of things. What about setting up a business? International banking? Or how about protecting your IP rights or raising funds?

For the purposes of this post, we’re going to focus only on the work-part of the lifestyle. Simply because we know you are completely capable of taking care of that wanderlust-planning yourself!

 

Getting started

For those of you aspiring to embark on to your own entrepreneurial journey, there are several ways to get started:

  • Becoming an entrepreneur from the scratch
  • Moving your existing business online
  • Acquiring another business for passive income

While no legal establishment is required for doing what you plan to do per se, the minute you start invoicing customers and have your first paid transaction against your product or services, it also marks the start of your legal liability. Some people choose to operate as a sole proprietorship, but this poses you to risk your personal credit and assets over business operations. Others choose E-Residency for digital identity but are subject to Estonian social taxes. Then of course, many people choose to register their business in their home country, simply because it feels like the safest bet.

However, there are multiple options that have emerged recently that enable easier ways to manage remote business.

We’ve reviewed multiple options of company formations for digital nomads. And having experienced the headaches of the lengthy and costly red tape, here’s our take for you on setting sails as an entrepreneur:

#1 Understand your options. Do your homework about your specific business needs as well as your personal needs.

#2 Before setting up your business, make sure you understand the distinction between the place of legal incorporation and the place of business operations: where you set up your company does not have to determine where you do your business. Therefore, where your company is incorporated does not necessarily determine where you pay your corporate income taxes.

#3 Draft out your product and business model. And always leave extra room for changes and the unpredictable.

#4 Consider your budget, how much play time you’ve got to make the business work and the necessary admin involved from invoicing to accounting.

Having all this in mind, do your research and choose what works best for you. To expand your pool of options, we’d like to introduce a model specifically suitable for the digital nomads community: the Smart Company (SC).

 

What is a Smart Company?

Designed to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs working from wherever they want to, a Smart Company runs on Ethereum blockchain. As a fully legal entity, it is versatile enough to serve countless types of business models and operations. As a technological platform, it is transparent, immutable, verifiable, error-proof, fast a cost-effective way of managing business.

The Smart Company stands as a hybrid model between International Business Company (IBC) and a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). It is 100% legally compliant with a touch of blockchain technology. One of the most unique creations of a Smart Company is the ability to convert corporate shares into tokens. These shares are registered on the chain as unique ERC-20 tokens modified for security laws. These tokens carry information that makes them unique to each company and tracks the history of their movements, without interfering with the legal validity of the share.

 

What does this all mean?

As Smart Companies run on the blockchain, we enable drastically different ways of doing things.

Compared to the global average time needed to set up a company, we are able to shave off 99.7% of the time. This also costs our users 99.9% less on any transactions when sending shares to investors, advisors or team mates.

How is this possible? Because we are a Smart Company ourself and therefore able to scale our invention we’ve built on the blockchain. This is not optimization of the management structure, this is a fundamental systems shift that will transform how future businesses are run.

And the list goes on. Here are some of our favorite benefits of the Smart Company for remote entrepreneurs:

1. Time and Money

We all have the same 24 hours a day. And we’d all rather spend our budget on anything else other than bureaucracy we don’t even understand. While every corporate transaction in a legacy company requires multiple steps, time, paperwork and costs, performing these same steps via our dApp, every event happens as soon as the Ethereum’s block for the specific transaction is confirmed, in real time.

Therefore, this opens up the potential for completely rethinking how you run your business, reducing human error and most importantly, increasing speed, accuracy, efficiency and efficacy.


2. 360 Degree Digital – manage everything from your computer

This one is made for digital nomads. We offer a one-stop solution for everything you need to manage your business. From Know Your Customer (KYC) processes to voting and trading your shares to fundraising, everything can be managed in real-time on our dashboard, directly from your computer.

As an example, this means that anyone with an idea could set up their business the same day. Also, you could start trading shares immediately with real time. All of this powered by a governing system coded into smart contracts that provide accuracy, transparency and security. 

 

3. Unlocking Illiquid Assets

One of the most exciting advantages of Smart Companies is its ability to convert illiquid assets owned by the company into tradable shares with real-world value. This is because the ERC-20 tokens are legally recognized securities, corporate shares, and therefore subject to the same legal rights and limitations. Previously asset-heavy industries now have more liquidity, which itself has the potential to revolutionize entire business models. To understand this better, we’ve previously shared an example use case of this, right here.

 

4. Smart Intellectual Property

We understand that many digital nomads work in the fields with Intellectual Property (IP). The good news? Smart Companies enable smart IP management. As intangible assets, IPs such as your brand name, are governed by corporate shares. And because all Smart Company shares are tokenized with a unique code, this means your IPs can also be tokenized and secured by blockchain, while you maintain full ownership.

Just scratching the potential, the ability to register the entire life cycle of your company’s IPs can add tremendous value to your business. Furthermore, it can serve as evidence of creatorship as well as evidence of use of IP rights. For social media influencers and other personal brands, this opens up numerous opportunities.

From athletes to art collectors and singer-songwriters to independent photographers, the ability to tokenize your intangible assets can disrupt industries. Ways of collaboration within the sector, sharing profits, ownerships of content, engaging with audience and monetizing value. Sky’s the limit for the creative minds!

 

5. Transparency  

Not only does the blockchain enable transparency for your business, but it is also one of our core values as a team. From the technological aspect, all records of Smart Companies are stored on a decentralized ledger. This is distributed across the world, making it possible to immediately validate its authenticity. From our team aspect, we’re simply just not into small prints and therefore embrace a fully transparent, no hidden-costs type of a model for our communities.

 

6. Security

Blockchain-powered Smart Companies are exceptionally safe. Compared to a centralized solution, the tech architecture of blockchain distributes the data over tens of millions of computers across the globe. This reduces the risk of a single-point vulnerabilities. As an example, all you need to hack a centralized solution is an access to the server where the code is hosted. And this can then be modified at will. On the contrary, to hack the same code hosted on the blockchain would require either extraordinarily large amount of power to rewrite the rules, or a quantum computer. While it is never impossible to hack a system, blockchain does make it much more difficult for hackers.

 

7. Legal frame and versatility

The Smart Company operates in a compliant model that we’ve deployed in the Republic of Seychelles. With the same legal framework as IBCs, Smart Companies are subject to 0% corporate income tax on foreign source income and only one shareholder is required to start the company.

However, as a digital nomad, do your homework about your specific case. Needless to say, it is important to comply with the rules of an IBC in the Seychelles. For instance, this restricts an IBC from conducting business onshore, or operating certain businesses without appropriate licenses. Also, it is also important to remember that while a Smart Company is not subject to Seychelles corporate tax, foreign individual may need to pay taxes in their home countries in accordance with their domestic tax regulations.

 

Paving the way for entirely new business models

Building your life as a digital nomad, resourcefulness will trump resources in any given situation. Improvising as you go and designing that ideal lifestyle for you to manage your business is key. We built the Smart Company as entrepreneurs ourselves to empower the next generation of thinkers and makers.

Our model today enables a legal business entity powered by blockchain. This alone opens up radically different ways of doing things. As a digital nomad, having the ability to share ownership over your company, slice your Smart Company assets into a million different units, projects or models, will change the way we understand business today.

Say, you’re an artist traveling the world creating  your work as you go. You can now tokenize your art for different ownership models, and have evidence over the arts you’ve created. Not only can you collaborate with influencers, but you can also share ownership over their contribution in the IP you have co-created. How about attracting fellow artists or investors on board of your projects? This is all made possible as everything is written in codes of smart contracts and perform exactly the way they’re designed to. Last but not least, all of this can be done from a single laptop from wherever you are. In real time, with minimal costs.

Ultimately, this is a solution we’ve created in team Korporatio for founders, from founders. So that you, as a founder, can focus on what really matters.

 

Have a question or just curious to know more? We’re always happy to help. Drop us a line at future@korporatio.com or join our conversation, right here! 

Blockchain Smart Companies Startups