Emily Dallara has been an entrepreneur and marketing professional with almost a decade of experience under her belt.
As part of the global “Digital nomad” movement she has been recognizing swiftly the potential for cryptocurrencies to ease the life for her tribe for which banks and cross-boarder payments have to be proven again and again to be a major pain point in conducting their global business activities.
She has been joining in 2018 the bitcoin.com team as Social and Product Marketing Manager and since then moved on to support various projects in the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain ecosystem.
She serves currently as the CMO of honest.cash and runs her marketing and business development collaborative Hyppr.io .
Emily is currently living in Saigon / Vietnam and can be followed on her Twitter
BV News: Hi Emily! We are glad to have the opportunity to get some minutes out of your busy day. You are currently wearing many hats and seem to be shouldering a workload that suffices “normal” people for at least three jobs. How are you able to handle all of these projects and business so gracefully – any livestyle advice for our readers who “want to get more done”?
Emily: I just time manage really well. I listen to my body, take note of my energy levels and work really productively in a few hours at a time. I don’t put pressure on myself to perform when I’m exhausted and I live a fairly chilled, but also very sociable life. I don’t have strict working hours, I don’t travel so much–and when I do, I ensure I have a team/ people to hold up the work whilst I am out of office. I surround myself with people who boost me, and can get quality work done to my high standards, and encourage the team to take ownership. I have just taken on a big, seperate–super exciting contract this month, so will just be overseeing hyppr as CEO and letting my COO Adrianna Mendez and my marketing team look after the day to day, including Honest Cash.
BV News: You left Europe behind several years ago and decided to make a permanent move to South East Asia; built up your base in Vietnam. What is it that made you realize you had to make this move and why did you choose Saigon as your home base among all the other choices you have here in the region?
Emily D.: I decided to settle in Saigon, after trying places like Bali and Thailand and South of Spain for two reasons; The high caliber, super talented, incredible people, both local and expats and the physical and mental stimulation that Saigon offers day to day. As you know, it’s beautiful chaos, and no where else does it for me like Saigon does. I also am very libertarian, so you can understand why I decided to leave the uk…
BV News: For quite a few of our readers the “Digital Nomad” lifestyle sounds like an aspiring route to take – but for whatever reason they have not taken the plunge yet. What advice do you have for young people who are looking to take up a similar route – and also what pitfalls they should look to avoid if they want to make their choice a sustainable one?
Emily D.: Hmmm, I don’t feel like I am a digital nomad–I don’t really travel, I prefer to have a base. But one thing I do encourage is remote work. Or at least flexible. The ability to take your work with your wherever you go works well for me. If you can find a project that allows you not to be tied to a desk, then you’re halfway there.
BV: When did you get the first time in touch with Cryptocurrency – and what was it, that draw your fascination to it in such a way, that you decided to focus your further career on it?
ED: I first became aware of Bitcoin back in the Silk Road days as a young twenty something in the UK. I wasn’t involved in it directly again until 2017 when I met Matt Aaron who runs the podcast at Bitcoin.com. Bitcoin.com then gave me a job in Marketing and then I fell right down the hypothetical Rabbit Hole. The main reasons I am in this business, and why it’s pretty much my life is this; economic freedom, personal privacy and giving people choice. Oh and using cryptocurrency as cash, without a middleman of course. I am big on crypto adoption and launched ecommerce platform peacefulwarrior.cash for that reason, to empower merchants to accept it and customers to pay in it.
BV: You are especially big on Bitcoin Cash. Can you tell us why that is?
ED: See above answer 😀 I also work closely with their incredibly skilled developer team, and the people at Bitcoin.com and Bitcoin Cash are the most insanely intelligent, forward thinking, supportive and talented team I’ve ever been involved with. Their passion is contagious. They’re working for a better world, economic freedom and the ability to create their own world–one that doesn’t involve banks and one that requires no KYC 😉 Oh and shoutout to Akane Yokoo my sis and (was) business partner at Peaceful Warrior–she heads up the biggest Bitcoin Cash meetup in the world in Tokyo.
BV: While cash2vn allows for remittances into Vietnam using Bitcoin Cash; currently no popular exchange offers direct VND – BCH conversion. BitcoinVN Cloud currently requires you to go through USDT before you get into VND – other notable exchanges like VBTC had been completely ignoring BCH so far. And the ban of the State Bank of Vietnam in regard to crypto payments for goods/services in Vietnam does assumably not help an adoption-focused cryptocurrency community like Bitcoin Cash either. How do you see the current status of infrastructure for Bitcoin Cash in Vietnam and what would it take to increase the popularity of Bitcoin Cash locally?
ED: I would like the infrastructure to evolve into a more customer focused system rather than a ‘bank focused’ system. Giving people the opportunity to pay with cryptocurrencies like BCH or DASH will open local merchants up to a faster, cheaper transaction experience and customers, for example, tourists will face less barrier to entry- no credit card blocks and no need to convert currencies. Vietnam is what, 7th in terms of trading volume globally right–why not support local businesses whilst we’re at it?
BV: Thank you Emily for your time! Wish you all the success in your career!
ED: Thank you BitcoinVn Team!
