A Borderless World with Joshua Lapidus, Yev Muchnik, Ivan Fartunov , and Cameron Browne.

Uh, I'm I'm Joshua of Opouls and Sporkdow that we helped put on E Denver. Thank you for coming. Um, I've invited Ivonne, a professional global nomad who's at Aragon. Uh, Cameron, who is a professional uh, tax person, also a global nomad, and Yev, who is a lawyer, but not your lawyer unless you hire her. Very local, like 20 minutes away from here.

I think we have to do like real close to the mic because Yeah, the internet is loud. Cool. Uh so the title of the talk is a borderless a borderless world. Um the thesis is the globalization has made the world much smaller. Ethereum and web3 technology have um uh made borders obsolete in a sense.

Uh money should be able to go across borders. People should be able to go across borders. Um co COVID happened. People realized that they could take a laptop and work from anywhere in the world. Uh this has caused um well a great deal of people experiencing other cultures.

Uh but also there's been some clashes if you look at Lisbon between uh the expats and global nomads and and the locals. Um, and and my my thesis is that we could use uh and I'm just going to explain OPOS real quick. My my day job uh it's a memberowned employment cooperative that makes it so that individuals and and DAO workers can be compliant in their payroll. Uh, right now it's only in the US and Canada, but basically you can go anywhere in the US and we're able to take out the relevant local, state, federal taxes so that you're compliant and that the IRS and whatever state versions of the IRS are not coming after you. And theoretically, this tech could be applied globally.

And if we are able to scale it and and using the Ethereum blockchain, uh we could start negotiating with governments to say, "Hey, you don't have to worry about all these work tourists coming in. They're going to be compliant in paying taxes." Uh and this is the question I want to pose first. Unless you guys want to introduce yourselves first. I don't know.

Sure thing. We can do brief intros. Uh hey everyone, I'm uh Ivan. I'm head of ecosystem over at Aragon and uh a pleb in a couple of other uh onchain native collectives. Uh I'm uh based out of Dubai but I spent about 10 11 months of of the year on the road.

So putting the knowing nomad. Uh I'm Cameron. I'm CPA partner Darian Adviserss for tax practice. Um I've been living on and off outside the states the past eight years. Uh we have an entire team both onshore and offshore.

So balancing both like compliance and nuances and also like the positive economic impactish of digital nomadism. Um and there's a lot of ways we can make it more legitimate to actually do work within the community. I'm Yv much Mushnik. I'm a web 3 corporate and securities attorney. Um I am based in Denver but I have moved around a lot.

Um, I started my career in Moscow, the Russian Federation. Um, and had to navigate a lot of the complexities of of working abroad. And that's, um, hopefully something that I can share more about the legal aspects here with you today. All right. Cool.

So, back to the the for the question. Thank you for introducing yourselves. How how do we do this? I mean, I think the easiest way is through some like short-term visa program like either tax exemption, tax encouragement, but like a legitimization like I think going from tourist to tourist to tourist visa, you're gaining all the benefits but not paying any of the tax. But I do believe you should pay tax where if you're consuming goods or services, etc.

Align it not all income taxree. I I I shared this in the chat so you know it's coming. Uh well like one of the reasons why Aragon was created was you know to to empower individuals to coordinate and and independently of nation states and uh I think financial sovereignty is the foundation of any other type of sovereignty and because of you know this industry that we're a part of we can actually achieve through global mobility which means that governments would be pushed whether through such incentives programs to actually deliver better service. Like you can go anywhere. Uh which which technically would would hit the the the you know an underperforming government on their tax base.

And that's why they would be pressured to provide better conditions for for digital, but also for like people that just want to stay home and are moving somewhere else because they're not getting good value for money of of of the place where they're based or born. Just legally, I mean, it's a little bit hard to hear everything that you guys said. So, I apologize if some of this is repetitive, but um you know, it's important to differentiate between being a remote worker and being a a global nomad. Um there's a differentiation for employers that are um you know that are state side from a tax perspective that Cameron can talk more about. Um but you it's it's really important to look at each individual country's visa requirements.

Some, you know, require require you to check in with the police within x amount of days of of coming there. Some require you to have your own health insurance. Some require you to, you know, pay anywhere from zero to $2,000 for that particular visa. Um, so there's various requirements depending that that that vary from country to country. Um and then you if you leave the country and try to get a visa stacked against your prior the expiration of your prior visa that can be difficult and there they're you know there's potentially terms around there but generally if you stay over 180 days over um in in a country then you're you potentially subject to their tax regime as well and that could be more favorable but you may still have uh reporting obligations here.

So that's again more of the tax scheme, but from a legal perspective, um it is important to let your either employer know or the the um the Dows that you're working for, you know, as as an independent contractor as well. You you you you mentioned health health benefits and I think that's one of the things that we haven't figured out. Like to be a digital nomad, you have to be healthy and or wealthy basically. Like usually any sort of short-term healthcare benefits are emergency only. Or you can do like something like global coverage which is going to set you down like between 10 and $20,000 per year which so either healthy or wealthy.

And this is I think one of the bigger pain points we have today. Yeah. Well, I think each country is going to is different. Um I I lived in China for a few years and I got bitten by a dog and I I had insurance kind of through work. Um but they never asked me for it.

We went in and I paid 6UN which is the equivalent of$1 US and I skipped the entire line. I don't know I don't know what happened. Well, my my now wife was translating um but like saw me immediately got me taken care of and my co-pay ended up being a total of $1 US. But like in the US, you would have gone away with like a multi,000 ER bill. I I have a similar story in England.

I studied I did my law degree in the UK and I got bit by a bug and my arm swelled up insanely and they thought they were going to cut off my arm and I went to the hospital there for stayed there for a week had the attention of all of the the specialists I paid zero I paid nothing on the national health wow this okay so leading to what I think is the most important question is like what is the first step or what are the steps that we need to take to create a borderless world and it sounds like we're we're honing in on health care being one of the biggest problems is like is a global health care system is that what we need healthare as well as like access to money and like I've been living abroad access to money like actual capital uh I find that you know I've been through tourist visas and now we've been working on a resident visa in a country for the past six odd nine months but we've been living in there participatory spending and still wait on like an ID card and I can't get banked. I can't do transfers. I can't get a cell phone plans on prepaids and just like these little things of like making that a little bit less frictionless. So, it's like p like naturalization but like paid into the employer retirement equivalent or whatever social social security HMRC etc. um national insurance but you have at least a network you can draw upon for being a legal employee in said country.

the the favorite loop is you need an address to open up a bank account and you need a bank account to to rent property uh and you're just unless you have a friend in that country you're you're stuck chicken and egg right um one of my friends I don't want I don't want to like dox her but she's moving to or trying to move to to Paris and like you to rent an apartment you need a phone number to get a phone number you need an address so people like borrow phones. I love my notary. Yeah. Well, and then and then to like what if you you put a deposit down, you pay rent, you sign a lease, and then you don't get the visa, and then now you're paying rent on an apartment that's not yours cuz you you can't physically be there. Maybe maybe we can do like a Dow where instead of house swapping when you go on vacation, we can do like healthcare benefit swapping.

Hopefully that could work. I think in a lot of countries they call that fraud. Well, especially in the US, like if if you use your healthcare card and you give it to somebody else to go to the ER, that's just straight up fraud. You can't pay somebody else's meter. Wow.

At a global scale, you can't you can't feed other people's meters. No, you've had I've had like parking attent. Just 25 cents. What a dumb world we live in. Does web 3 fix this?

Well, well, the access to capital kind of does, right? It's I mean, good good luck getting a mortgage abroad, but you can use DeFi, too. And And let's be real, we don't have real assets. It's all it's all magic internet money. So, you can't borrow against that anywhere else except in DeFi.

Except in DeFi. And you still got to pay via bank transfer. Okay. So, that's the healthcare side. Let's move on to the governmental side.

How do I just want to go live wherever I want? Do you want to buy a property there or do you want to just No, I don't have that kind of money. Maybe just like rent, float around, be a sponge. Sailboat. Sailboat.

Okay, that works for not landlocked countries. No. All right. So, but seriously, in the um in terms of visas, there's a there's like 49 countries that have a global nomad visa, and you're saying there's a difference between a global nomad and a remote worker and well, so I if you guys have experience outside the US, so I know in the US there's immigrant and there's non-immigrant visas and work happens in between them. is so so non US related but one one of the interesting things is uh one when one when one of you brought you know the friction between uh you know the wealthy digital nomads coming in and like the local communities and at the same time funnily enough governments don't care about that because a lot of the the the digital nomad visas you have to prove you have a certain level of income which is usually substantially higher than the average loco.

So there is on the ground there is a friction between the nomads coming in and like pricing out locals and the locals but on a governmental level the government is like let me bring in the wealthiest people so I don't know if I want to say this this could sound really bad but we're going to try it anyway. Is this like because what what you're describing kind of sounds like it well it's gentrification but like in in the terms of a global scale of gentrification there's no borders. I never understood the like oh this has been my homeland for thousands of years. As an American that's just not a thing that we think about cuz it's only been around for 200 years. So there's there's a lot of just moving around.

And if borders come down, we'll and there is access to capital and theoretically we could do this through Dows or through governments making it available so that people could free flow throughout the world. Would most of the global population be within 100 miles of the eastern seabboard of China? Right. I I don't know. Are you guys afraid to touch it?

Yeah, we're waiting for a question cuz that was just a statement. Agree or disagree? I don't know. No, but but going back though to the question of like working on a tourist visa is like a tourist visa, you're there for pleasure. You're not able to conduct commercial activities generally.

And a lot of people kind of skirt around that by going 90 days, 90 days, 90 days, which opens you up to potential issues. The authorities like, well, how you been earning money? You've been here for 12 years on border runs. You got to have legitimate status in certain aspects if you're, you know, spending some time there. I had to do that.

I had to go to Hong Kong like a bunch of times per year. There's like a whole flow of people who go from mainland to Hong Kong to like they get an embassy appointment, you stay in a hotel for two nights because you drop it off at 2 p.m., you go back 10:00 a.m.

and then you fly back. Yeah, it just it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I think Spain just opened up their um global nomad visa recently and I think that's becoming a very popular company to go to. What can we do to get rid of these inefficiencies? This is the thesis.

Does anyone have an answer to this? I mean the the visa is the one bit that is probably hardest to work around. But as we as we said there are like a bunch of other problems that could easily be solved by private initiatives, you know, like access to capital, you know, getting your cell phone, getting rent, getting healthcare, like like all of that stuff doesn't have to depend on a local government. So I mean I know like the the government stuff is is kind of like the big easy to to to look at target but there are like a lot of things around that that can probably be solved sooner than you know result figuring out the visa stuff. So, um, it's a it's a pretty constant that tech moves faster than government, right?

And we're we're at a place where we're I mean, we're still experimenting, but we're still very far ahead of where governments are. Where do you see this this clash going? I mean, I've seen it in some countries I've been as of recent. I see a more like gated visa process. Like there used to be the concept of likeista, hubalista visa in a lot of like South American countries where you have proof of income, you get paid a pension, come retire kind of thing.

They were used for digital nomadism etc. And uh we found through a couple other countries the path to get there is more stringent requires more capital more connections previous time spent. So I see that kind of being gated to bring certain types but like this like free open digital nomadism I guess like Caribbean is a place that want something other than tourism coming to their economy. Um but yeah it's been more restricted I've seen as of late. I'll just add I I saw a project um being developed at Biddle Week um using ZK to um essentially take all of the fields of your passport that needed to be submitted to a a government agency and submit them, verify them, and have that process kind of more streamlined.

So, I'd like to see governments, you know, maybe with private public partnership adopt some of these initiatives on privacy that we're seeing built out. Um, that sounds really useful. It's super useful. Yeah. So, they basically took your passport and you could verify that you were over the age of 18, but you don't have to disclose your birth date or your birth year.

So one of one of the OOS use cases um as as we talk about global expansion I'll meet people from like Southeast Asia and South America who say that the number one problem they have is the off rank off the offramping of crypto but specifically from the not the compliance standpoint but from the the tax and afraid of the bureaucracy standpoint because if you you claim you say yes I make you know USDC for working in a DAO you you offramp that uh crypto is associated with being wealthy and now like some local like mid-level bureaucrat has your address as is going to come $5 wrench attack you. And so what one of the things that we do through our paycheck process is we take the crypto, we we sell it and then we direct deposit fiat or cash into your personal bank account. And then the payubs you get don't talk about crypto at all. And this is kind of a a money laundering to fiat, but I don't think it it is money, right? So, it's money laundering in the sense that it's paying the taxes.

What's what's legal moneyaundering? Detergent. What is the word for legal legal moneyaundering? Tax optimization. But like I see that right now like I have team members in Argentina and like because the banks aren't fully into crypto or like we paid we sent a wire from a crypto company got froze for like three four weeks.

So a lot of these funds stay offshore and like US dominated accounts euros etc. and don't make it back in. Now that friction is uh frustrating even for our team go to Argentina. Well, you you me you mentioned offshore, but basically the simplest setup would be find a find a jurisdiction that's friendly towards crypto. Set up a company there, service contract between your employer and that company and then that company pays you a fiat-based salary wherever you want to stay.

The problem is like then moving around becomes a challenge as well unless the fiat account is in that same crypto friendly country. But like there is there was always bureaucracy around the offramping and we we have a lot of projects that are solving like the purely financial element of converting Eid to to to dollars or whatever. But like that source of like like legitimate source of funding and like all of that stuff is is is rarely tackled holistically. The the last kind of topic that I wanted to touch on is the the concept of like a brain drain. So, uh, for people who don't know what that is, it's the people will leave places that don't have as much opportunity for the shining cities on the hill like Boston's a good example.

Like places that just attract talent, uh, Silicon Valley, New York, San Francisco, um, or from like for many years, and I don't know if this is still true, not the US to the US. Um, does because does what we're talking about kind of it's it solves or reverses or elongates the a reverse brain drain because people leave expensive areas to go live in not expensive areas, fall in love with the local area, and then like now that's their home. And now if you're paying taxes into that jurisdiction, I I think it makes it a bit more human friendly because historically the you know capable people would flock towards an area that has given a big tax break to a corporation to set up an office there and provide employment opportunity. Now the employment opportunity is global. So people would flock towards places that offer good quality of life, not good tax breaks to corporations.

So it it like undoubtedly substantially positive for individuals. I mean, you're a good example, right? What do you mean? But you left the US to live in somewhere that's beautiful. Yeah.

I mean, I love for a myriad of reasons, but like I have two kids, healthcare, I like a socialized medicine. It's been challenging. Like I was soulreneur for five, six years. That's that's a heavy weight. And like if I only knew existed back then and before I and sort of my journey outside.

Um but yeah, it's everything's a little bit bittersweet. I think that e that exodus is a real issue, that brain drain. Um, but now we have this additional layer where it's not, it is borderless, right? We don't have to be in a physical location to exchange information. We're less kind of nation state oriented and we're more this like ethereal layer of citizen citizenry.

Um, yesterday I heard an interesting presentation about like a network state that's being set up somewhere in the Bahamas and it's like this utopia of like sovereign land where they have Montasauri schools, they've got like developers there and they're like it's really alluring. Like I would I would take my family potentially and and move there because it's so aligned politically val values-based. So I it is an issue. There's a lot more out there in the world that is becoming more interesting and kind of I guess aligned but we have to kind of maintain that that web 3 layer that allows innovation to kind of be more global and valuable to everybody. I mean to the culture diffusion like starts with ETH Denver there's Eth Argentina there's ETH Paris or ECC like there's all these little buds out there from cultured exchange from the impact of probably someone you know going to some trendy coffee shop in Medigene and there we have you know ETH Bogata you know whatever it is like there's such a beautiful part of it where you see this interaction of humans ideas that like allows that mesh to continue through because they wouldn't have satellite versions of this if it wasn't cool it's like office reproductions in French so in the interest of avoiding chaos us like as as geopolitical borders come down and like ethereal borders or rails go up like do do you think we'll be able to to do that without creating chaos?

Do you think we're a long way off? Humans adapt. Chaos is opportunity. Chaos is what? Opportunity.

I guess I would say that property has like the ownership of property has led to a lot of wars historically and whether that new type of property is intellectual property I think it you know potentially does lead to chaos and um yeah hopefully we can avoid as much chaos as possible. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hey, we're just almost out of time.

I want to leave on just a positive note. So, let's do just the quickest round robin for you guys on uh what are you most excited about for the future somebody else the regenerative movement like seeing more things at roots organic local people caring more like feel we gotten a little better than that in the past 10 years so that's positive yeah high rural co- livingiving better governance Those are good answers. Um, everybody having a bufforn. Be be the buff of cornorn. Enjoy your time at Eat Denver.

Thank you for coming. Thanks so much for uh being our steward and for this panel and for this concept. This is uh we're making the future here. This is really great. Thank you.

So, we're just going to take a three or four minute break before getting on with our next panel. So, uh, you know, take a stretch and we'll be back in just a moment.