From a regulatory, taxation perspective, do we want to set up our corporation in a country where it’s extremely difficult to fire people – at-will clauses or contracts with a bunch of arcane taxation rules – complete with the general regulatory policy oversight of do-nothing-until-you-have-permission? These are deal breakers from an incorporation perspective, but where places like Delaware excel, Singapore excels, said Mitchell Amador, founder and CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi.
In this installment of Crypto Founders on Crypto Hubs, CoinDesk senior editor Jeanhee Kim interviewed Mitchell Amador, a Canada-born crypto entrepreneur who lives in Portugal, where he founded Immunefi in 2020. Immunefi is a bug bounty crowdsourcing platform for decentralized finance.
Amador explained why he chose Portugal as Immunefi’s hub. The Number One question is: Where is your hub? To make it sustainable for a crypto founder, that should be where you live. And you should live in a healthy place. With healthy people. Portugal really excels on that whole gradient. When you compare it to a London or a Paris, our level of social harmony is much higher. The Portuguese are more united. They have a greater sense of camaraderie. They’re less violent; they’re less angry. These are a very calm, chill, relaxed people. Walk around and it rubs off on you.
He also discussed why he chose Singapore for Immunefi’s incorporation. From Singapore’s perspective, the whole world is foreign to it. So you can engage with the world as a business in Singapore in an excellent way as opposed to, in the U.S., having a different set of restrictions for foreign country owners in the world’s largest market.
Singapore is amazing for incorporation, with the added advantage that it’s not America. America is a very dangerous place. It has a whole bunch of weird arcane rules. And most of what the world is familiar with is the common law system – which is not the American law system – so it’s quite unusual. But it’s still awesome to get clean corporate documentation, very reliable reports. A contract there is as good as gold. They have amazing business infrastructure. Tons of products and tools are set up so that you can easily onboard with banks, accounting providers, software providers, etc. It’s so smooth, Amador said.