Blake Sieders

I'm a Canadian that has migrated to Brazil after many years of experience with the people and the country. When I moved I was already building a cross-border payment product using stablecoins, the Stripe for the immigration industry. But I discovered that there was a new instant payment method that had been introduced by the Central Bank, Pix, that was growing quickly and being adopted by most consumers and businesses for all types of payments. However, non-resident visitors to the country are blocked from using it and this is creating more difficulties for nomads to pay for their travel expenses. I decided this was a more interesting product to build in the moment and got to work with some engineers. After some time I learned that this problem exists in other countries and more will be adopting similar systems in the coming years, including others in LatAm. So what was a product to connect visitors to Brazil to the Pix system grew into becoming like a global Venmo (but also for retail sales). I already did the research in Argentina about Mergado Pago / Modo, and that's the first expansion market. Initiatives such as "Accept USDC" are growing in the US, but not yet in LatAm, whereas Emigro is a great way to get a broad distribution of people spending at retail stores using USDC and EURC, foreign visitors that would have otherwise used cash. There's a market of 10's of millions of digital nomads to choose from that can become ambassadors to spread acceptance of USDC and EURC on Base in LatAm and beyond. My original immigration industry product is a good expansion use-case once there is broad acceptance by the nomads, bringing Base to the legal / overseas workers / overseas education / travel industries.