On 8 June 2026, with Bitcoin trading at $63,194, the all-in cost of a Vanuatu citizenship file for a single applicant is 2.295 BTC. Round it however you like: about 2.3 Bitcoin, or roughly 229 million sats, for the fastest serious second passport in its class. That is the headline, and it is almost the wrong way to think about it. The dollar price is fixed; the sat figure floats with the market, and it will be a different number by the time you read this. What does not move is the structure underneath, and the structure is the reason a Bitcoiner does this at all.
Citizenship by Investment, for anyone arriving cold, is a legal pathway by which a sovereign nation grants citizenship in exchange for a government-approved contribution. Vanuatu runs the fastest credible one on the planet. The reason to read the price in Bitcoin is not a gimmick; it is that the people who buy this passport increasingly hold their net worth in Bitcoin, and the only honest way to show them the cost is in the unit they actually denominate their lives in.
The number, in sats.
cbi.vu publishes the full ladder, not a single teaser figure, so here it is converted at this morning's spot. The government contribution, paid directly to the Republic of Vanuatu, is $130,000, which is about 2.057 BTC. The 21 CBI advisory is five percent of that contribution, flat, which is $6,500. Due diligence and screening by the Vanuatu Financial Intelligence Unit, the body that vets every file, is $5,000. Birth registration and national ID filings run $2,500. Passport enrolment is $1,000. That is $145,000 all-in for one applicant, or 2.295 BTC at $63,194. Most firms in this business charge fifteen to twenty-five percent of the total with the line items buried; the entire cbi.vu margin is the five percent, and the rest of the arithmetic is on the screen.
If you would rather invest than donate, the Capital Investment Immigration Plan is the other Vanuatu track: $110,000 to the government plus a $50,000 subscription to a redeemable fund, $174,000 gross, around 2.75 Bitcoin today, and approximately $124,000 net once the fund redeems after four years, closer to 1.96 Bitcoin. And if $130,000 is simply ahead of where your stack is right now, São Tomé and Príncipe starts at $90,000, about 1.42 Bitcoin, and is the one cheaper way in worth naming. For everyone who can fund the contribution, Vanuatu is the file to run.
None of these sat figures belong in a screenshot. The calculator on the pricing page pulls the BTC rate live and reprices the whole ladder on every refresh, because a number you might act on should never be stale. Treat 2.295 as true for this paragraph and check the live figure before you wire anything.
The contribution is denominated in dollars. That is the whole trick.
Here is the part a Bitcoiner notices before anyone has to point it out. The contribution is fixed in dollars. $130,000 is $130,000 regardless of where Bitcoin trades. So the cost of the passport, measured in sats, moves inversely to the price of your stack. At $63,194 the all-in file is about 2.3 Bitcoin. If Bitcoin doubles from here, the same file is about 1.15 Bitcoin. If it halves, the same file is about 4.6 Bitcoin. The passport gets cheaper in sats exactly as your conviction gets vindicated.
The low-time-preference reflex is to read that as a reason to wait: hold, let the number appreciate, buy the passport later for fewer sats. Sometimes that is right. But it quietly assumes the thing the passport exists to insure against will politely wait too. The reason you hold Bitcoin and the reason you hold a second citizenship are the same reason, stated twice. A single passport under a single government is a single point of failure, the same architecture as a single bank under a single currency. You already refused the second arrangement. The first one is the same trade, unsolved.
The cost of the passport, measured in sats, falls as your conviction is vindicated. Timing that is fair. Treating the exit hatch as a trade to time is a category error.
Timing the sat cost is a legitimate consideration. Treating the exit hatch itself as a position to trade is a category error, because the moment you most need a second jurisdiction, a closing banking relationship, a capital control, a border that changes its mind, is precisely the moment your fiat-denominated options are worth least and the file takes thirty to sixty days you no longer have. Low time preference on the money. Low time preference on the jurisdiction. The discipline is the same discipline.
The disposal question nobody answers honestly.
You have probably seen the pitch elsewhere: pay in Bitcoin, skip the tax. It is wrong, and a firm that tells you otherwise is selling you a future problem. In most jurisdictions that matter, the United States, the United Kingdom, much of the European Union, spending Bitcoin is a disposal: the same taxable event as selling it. Pay 2.295 BTC that you bought years ago at a fraction of today's price, and you have realized that gain in the eyes of your tax authority whether a counterparty handed you dollars first or not. The payment rail does not change the tax character of the transaction. Anyone who implies otherwise is not being clever; they are being careless with your filing.
What paying in Bitcoin genuinely saves you is the fiat round-trip. You do not have to move the coins onto an exchange, sell, wait on a bank wire, and present the proceeds to a banking system that increasingly treats a large, crypto-funded transfer as a reason to freeze first and ask questions later. That is a real benefit, and it is a benefit about rails, settlement speed, and counterparty risk. It is not a benefit about tax. Keeping those two ideas separate is the whole of honest advice here.
On Vanuatu's own side, the facts are clean and worth stating precisely. Vanuatu levies zero personal income tax, zero capital gains, zero inheritance, and zero corporate income tax; the only material tax is a fifteen percent Value Added Tax on local consumption. That is a fact about Vanuatu, not a statement about where you are a tax resident today. Vanuatu also participates in the Common Reporting Standard, the OECD framework under which financial account information is automatically exchanged with your country of tax residence, so it is not a place to hide an account. Self-custodied Bitcoin sits outside that standard because the standard covers institutions, not your keys, which is the honest Bitcoin-native point and not a claim that the jurisdiction is a curtain to stand behind. If you are a US citizen, citizenship-based taxation follows you regardless of any second passport you hold. Consult a qualified tax advisor about your specific residence before you treat a single sentence of this as a plan.
What "pay in Bitcoin" actually buys.
BTC, Lightning, and USDT are the payment rails; credit cards and bank transfers are accepted as needed. The point worth understanding is that the entire file settles this way, government contribution included, after compliance clears. cbi.vu completes the statutory payments with the Vanuatu authorities on your behalf, so the rail you settle on with the advisory is not quietly swapped for a bank wire at the one step that matters most. Your on-chain history is the starting point of the file, documented up front, not a red flag produced at the end. The source-of-funds reconstruction is the one part of a Vanuatu file that genuinely rewards a Bitcoin-native advisor, because the failure modes are particular to how Bitcoiners actually hold.
One honest caveat about the process, because the rest of this site refuses to hide it. The file is remote except for one mandatory in-person biometric visit, where fingerprints and a facial image are captured to the ICAO standard introduced in 2025, at Port Vila, Dubai, Hong Kong, or New Caledonia. Anyone who promises a file with zero in-person steps has not read the current rules. One visit, one afternoon, against a passport that follows your children. That is the trade, stated plainly.
Two-point-three Bitcoin for what, exactly.
The honest question is not whether 2.3 Bitcoin is a lot of money. Of course it is. The question is what it converts into, and whether that thing is worth more to you than the coins. Four mechanical facts carry the answer. Velocity: thirty to sixty days from a clean file, no residency, no language test, no interview, with the Financial Intelligence Unit reporting within about a week. Structure: the tax zeros above, plus a tax-exempt International Business Company framework in force since 1993 that pairs natively with self-custody. Sovereignty: citizenship that is hereditary and permanent under the Citizenship Act, Cap. 112, in a Commonwealth and Pacific Islands Forum member state. And Bitcoin-native settlement, the reason you are reading the price in sats at all.
What those four facts convert into operationally is both mundane and large at once: a banking identity that does not hinge on your birth country's standing, the ability to hold the tax-exempt IBC framework as a Bitcoiner rather than as a suspect, and a residence-independent legal status that a hostile policy change at home cannot quietly cancel. The passport is the credential the rest of the stack hangs on. That is why a serious Bitcoiner treats a second citizenship as infrastructure rather than a souvenir, and why the sat price, whatever it is on the morning you run the calculator, is the smaller half of the decision.
The trade-off belongs in the same paragraph as the strengths, because that is the whole posture of this firm. The Vanuatu passport reaches eighty-seven destinations, concentrated in the Asia-Pacific corridor: Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Pacific Islands Forum bloc. Schengen visa-free access was permanently revoked in December 2024, and the United Kingdom now requires a Standard Visitor visa; the passport sits around fifty-second on the global rankings as a result. If Europe is the center of your life, Vanuatu is not built for that, and no amount of sat math will change it; the file owner will tell you so on the call rather than take the engagement. If Europe is a trip and what you actually want is the fastest legitimate jurisdiction you can fund and hold, then 2.3 Bitcoin buys a permanent, hereditary citizenship that no single government can revoke from you by decree. Weigh it against one passport under one authority, and decide which is the larger risk to keep running.
Low time preference does not mean no action. The sat number floats; the structure does not. Run the live calculator for today's exact figure, get the Vanuatu Brief if you want the whole thing on paper first, and if the file is real, the first call is the file owner. The math, not the marketing, is the reason.
Sources & Authorities- The fee ladder
- DSP, single applicant: $130,000 government contribution, $6,500 advisory (5%, flat), $5,000 due diligence and VFIU screening, $2,500 birth registration and national ID, $1,000 passport enrolment; $145,000 all-in. The CIIP investment route is $174,000 gross, approximately $124,000 net after the four-year fund redemption.
- Bitcoin price
- $63,194 per BTC, CoinGecko spot, 8 June 2026. The sat equivalents above are calculated at that price and are illustrative; the calculator on the pricing page prices the file at the live rate.
- Legal basis
- Vanuatu Citizenship Act, Cap. 112, for the hereditary and permanent grant; the Development Support Programme fee schedule under Order 33 of 2019; biometric enrolment to the standard of the Vanuatu Passport (Amendment) Act 2025.
- Tax and reporting
- Zero personal income, capital gains, inheritance, and corporate income tax in Vanuatu; a 15% VAT on local consumption. Vanuatu participates in the Common Reporting Standard. Nothing here is tax advice; consult a qualified advisor regarding your residence.
- The mechanics
- The full cost ladder and live calculator are on the pricing page; how the all-in BTC, Lightning, and USDT settlement works is on the pay-in-Bitcoin page; the on-chain provenance method is on the source-of-funds page.
Adam Juchniewicz, CEO, 21 CBI
Buenos Aires · June 2026