Ott Vatter

Ott Vatter was an Estonian digital-government specialist who served as Managing Director of Estonia’s e-Residency programme from 2019 to 2020. He later worked for Próspera, the ZEDE in Honduras, as managing director of its e-governance arm, ePróspera.

He joined e-Residency in its early years and led it from March 2019, having first run it in an acting capacity. By the time he left, more than seventy thousand people worldwide held Estonian e-residency and had registered roughly fourteen thousand companies through it, enough that around one in six new Estonian companies was being founded by someone who had never lived in the country.

That programme remains the clearest working proof of a Free Cities premise: a government can unbundle its services and offer them to people who are not its residents, and a small state can compete for a global population simply by being easier to deal with than larger ones. Vatter took the idea to Honduras, where ePróspera was built to give a new jurisdiction the digital administration Estonia had spent two decades assembling.

He died in 2024.