Where You Should Incorporate Your Crypto Company and Why

Everyones a crypto tax haven these days

Ive just spent 6 months or so on and off deep diving into the world of offshore structuring, crypto regs, reading hours of legislations, talking to lawyers, contracting people to do stuff and in the end eventually realising you can know more than all these people by simply being good at googling and reading some stuff. This is probably going to be a giant wall of text but if youre struggling with this question hopefully your search engine will take you here, welcome friend.

Today I want to talk about the journey many crypto founders and teams go through when thinking about setting up an entity for their project and the pros and cons and things to consider when doing so. The usual preface of this is I am not a lawyer so blah blah all advice isnt advice but is taken at your own risk etc. Anyway, on with the show

Laying the Ground Work

Ok so firstly there is no ‘best place’ and ‘best structure’ so if youre hoping for me to name some magical island somewhere which you can then search up to find out more about you’re out of luck. We begin with identifying what you actually want or are looking for and this is going to vary WIDELY depending on the type of business but I will list some examples below to consider.

Project A:

• Is a DeFi protocol or non custodial project of some description
• Does not custody user assets
• Technically anyone with a wallet can interact with it
• Has a remote team in different parts of the world
• Has or is thinking of creating a token to fund itself
• Does or does not have some DAO structure with voting with the token
• May or may not not sign contracts with other individuals or entities
• Wants to pay no tax to anyone
• Values privacy
• Pays team in tokens or may want some payment processor to pay fiat sometimes

Project A is a typical asset light project common throughout crypto, this could apply to data companies, NFT projects, DeFi and other things which have no assets other than some code and do no not custody user assets.

This projects team is remote, nomadic or has anons who push code but arent doxxed. Therefore the particular brand of country which they stamp at the top of their letterhead is irrelevant, theres 180+ countries out there, all of them have some companies law, this project isnt really concerned where.

Team members may not want to be doxxed or at least keep a low profile on any public records. Project doesnt need to be in a particular country so taxes on that entity should be in a locale which has no taxes. Project intends to or already has created a token and will as part of the allocation of supply, retain some tokens for the project to use to fund future development.

Project B:

• Provides some centralised service which may mean a user pays them to do something somewhere
• Does custody user funds
• Does interact with the real world in some way eg office space
• Does sign contracts with individuals and entities
• Wants to raise money from VCs by selling equity
• Doesnt want to pay much tax
• Privacy not as important as team is doxxed anyway or at least to investors
• Pays team in crypto or fiat

Project B is a project which is akin to centralised exchanges, on/off ramps, seeks VC funding, has a founder who really wants to live and hire in a particular place. Its the classic startup business model applied to crypto and is a business that isnt as wild west shooting from the hip as a DeFi project

They often might want to base themselves in one real country, hire a team there, have an office, get a piece of paper saying theyre regulated there and have proper banking connections in a place where payment providers and finance intermediaries are actually going to want to do business with you (some offshore place isnt gonna cut it there).

Two very different projects with different goals and their structuring will also need to be approached differently, I’ll address both separately.

Everyones a Foundation These Days

Another key question to ask is what sort of corporate structure will you have? This is super critical and there does appear to be an emerging pattern. Heres the TLDR

Companies:

• Have shareholders
• Shareholders have the actual control over the project, not suitable for DAOs etc as shareholders centralise the entire thing and could rug treasury at any time by shareholder vote
• Useful for operations, money coming in or out
• Useful for raising money from funds / professional investors
• Limit liability of shareholders
• Often mandatory for projects needing licenses for their operations

Foundations:

• Has no shareholders
• No shareholders means nobody can rug the treasury tokens by closed door shareholder vote
• May have a concept of ‘beneficiaries’ by which you can define what benefit some ppl may have
• Has a constitution you can say what the purpose of this entity is
• Can still sign up to stuff (bank accounts, legal, anything) as a real legal entity
• Limits liability of anyone involved as the people involved dont own any shares
• Can still engage in profitable operations but only within its constitutional mandate
• Usual setup is a foundation handles the tokens so founders cant rug and foundation 100% owns an operational company which does profit seeking real world stuff

Trusts:

• Is a legal entity to limit liability of parties involved but isnt an entity issued by a government, is literally a piece of paper thats an agreement between people
• This structure means you dont need govt approvals to do things or need to renew any fees with a govt for setting up a trust
• No shareholders
• Has a concept of Trustees, Enforcers and Beneficiaries. Very flexible in their and mandate.
• Can own property or assets however may be some restrictions depending on jurisdiction on what you can do with said assets (eg earning yield might be a financially regulated thing in some places and your trust may need a license)
• Useful for DAOs in some cases and beneficiaries can be anons and nominated by token vote and quite decentralised. Cool writeup here by DYDX

Deciding on the above is the first step, usually DeFi projects are using foundations to hold tokens and limit liability of project owners and then have the foundation own companies which do stuff (pay salaries, get licenses, rent office space etc). Projects without tokens often go straight to company route as its the stock standard approach and if youre HNW 100x leverage baller or looking to preserve and distribute assets at some stage then Trusts are the go

Where to Boss?

Generally youre going to want to look at:

• Free Trade zones around the world, many have their own laws, tax free and useful for remote businesses (Project A/B)
• Some island somewhere which doesnt care about anything and is happy for you to pay them some money once a year to keep the company going (Project A)
• ‘Real’ country that has advantageous laws if you dont do business within their borders, overseas customers only (Project A/B).
• Ensure that your jurisdiction of choice doesnt have burdensome ‘crypto’ regs they made up a few years ago at behest of a consultant who sold them on that being necessary (Project A).
• New innovative real countries which have some solid crypto regs and get you access to funding and fiat rails (Project B).

Some popular examples:

• Caribbean- most Caribbean islands are the same laws copy paste these days (insert BVI, Anguilla, St Vincent, Nevis, Caymans etc)
• Seychelles / Marshalls / Cook Islands (non Caribbean island tax havens)
• Panama
• UAE Free zones
• Kazakhstan AIFC
• UK tax havens Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man
• Labuan / Singapore / Hong Kong

Now of the above examples, all of them have some unique intricacies and may or may not be suitable. Lets explore some of those intricacies next.

Name Them Then

Carribean

Formerly the poster child of tax havens

First up, Carribean jurisdictions, I generally throw them all in the same basket here as share many commonalities

• Most of all of them sign up to a VASP regime which is some trash thing made up governments (US/EU) who hate how crypto evade their taxes and controls and strong armed small island nations into it. Basically if you are a crypto company you may need to do alot of reporting to a regulator on payments you do, customers you have, products you sell and so on. The kicker here is you wont know if you fall under this until you pay a lawyer to tell you and even if you do you might pay them to tell you you cant go there anyway as your project doesnt fit the mould

One thing to realise with lawyers is when they dont know the answer to something or the rules on the paper arent clear to this specific use case, theyll just tell you to do everything anyway. There is no incentive for them to advise you on how you *dont need* to comply, and every incentive for them to tell you that you do. For example you might be a DeFi protocol which doesnt custody user funds so you might think you dont fall under VASP, however if you sell ‘services’ relating to a ‘trade’ (aka integrate a dex aggregators widget or something) that may mean you are ‘selling/advertising/arranging’ those services even if YOUR entity isnt the one ‘arranging’ (lawyer speak for being a principal counterparty to the trade) of the transaction.

We wasted alot of time on Cayman, BVI and Nevis and the answer we got was we would need to pay a lawyer to investigate why we dont come under the regs and even then we could pay them and they might say that we do in which case we cant proceed. So we would be paying someone to tell us we cant buy their product, kinda a waste of time given other options out there.

Cayman is generally considered the ‘high spec’ jurisdiction of the bunch, more expensive, has its own free zone, pretends its not a tax haven (avoids saying those words), but I cant see it being worth the effort here given competition, it offers no tangible benefits and only drawbacks for Project A or B. Most carribean countries have some ‘crypto regs’ which were made up in 2018 when DeFi/Depin/Web3 didnt exist and is mostly existing boomer financial regs made in the 80s applied to a crypto business. dumb.

Even for Project B who is trying to be legit and get licenses, even if you get a license here, banks wont bank you and payment providers (mastercard/visa) often wont accept your business or itll be with big caveats or restrictions. So you might be better off getting a license in another place thats higher up the ‘legit’ scale and isnt a small island with a population of 80k and you’d still get same tax benefits (more on that later). If you want a holding company for VCs to invest in your thing, generally thats fine to use a carribean entity for, but that still doesnt solve where your regulated business will take place, so your BVI or whatever will need to be 100% shareholder of some other entity somewhere else. VCs like BVIs and Caymans though as they can reuse their same investment agreement docs they use for all investments.

Overall TLDR Score? B

• Fine for holding company when you raise equity from VCs
• Useless for crypto reg businesses
• Better options for DeFi

Seychelles / Marshalls / Cook Islands

No jokes about coconuts allowed

These are the non-standard island tax havens. Unlike the Carribean which are all former British overseas territories and share a common law and legal systems. These ones can vary more. The Marshall Islands company law takes its queues from USA Delware company law (one of the most widely used incorporations in the world), Seychelles has a mixed Civil Law jurisdiction and Cook Islands is a Common Law territory thats all about privacy.

I like them as theyre a bit more whacky and experimental. They also dont all follow the pack and get their orders from London like their compatriots. Having said that because they dont so easily bend the knee to their overlords they are under more pressure from criminal organisations like FATF, CARF and CRS to create more compliance related laws and not accept certain businesses but they generally have more flexibility and freedom in creating rules that can be used in various ways. Some standout examples:

• Seychelles companies used to be cool and easy, till Arthur Hayes made a joke about paying regulators in coconuts for Bitmex then the US DOJ got mad and went after them and put mega pressure on Seychelles, theyre now kissing the ring and making some crypto regs so not really that useful anymore
• Marshalls have a cool setup for DAOs, there are some carve outs in their companies law which recognises onchain governance decisions. The only hold back here is there is a 3% tax on revenue (lolwut) for DAOs like this unless theyre non-profit seeking then its 0%. Cool setup but just the tax thing is dumb. Might work for some people.
• Cook Islands is known as the #1 Privacy jurisdiction in the world for the most part. Pretty cool for crypto stuff, flexible companies law for trusts, foundations, LLCs and companies. Common Law but independant from the carribean crew. Nothing specifically ‘crypto’ about it tho, but thats good as no specific regulator setup saying what you can and cant do for crypto businesses.

Project A projects would see value in some of these jurisdictions, mainly for DAOs, Trusts, Foundations and offshore companies/LLCs. They wont be useful for Project B who wont be moving their team to an island locale of 50 000 people or getting any licenses from local regulators and banks here so theyre better off looking elsewhere.

Overall TLDR Score? A-

• Flexible corporate structures
• No dumb crypto laws
• They take privacy seriously
• Cost effective

Panama

Average Panamanian Offshore Company Specialist

Buenos Dias amigo, Panama rose to fame for normies for the Panama Papers saga years ago. Basically a bunch of rich oligarchs, corrupt presidents and other random rich people used Panama offshore entities to hold their assets and do business due to the strong privacy laws and the fact Panama didnt bend the knee to many international regulations.

Panama has a thriving offshore industry due to these privacy features and flexible companies law. No tax for offshore entities and minimal reporting the only downside being its pretty old school, no digital companies registries and flexible new structures here. The use of company secretaries persists (people you pay to file stuff with the registry and do any changes to company structure aka assigning ownership to shares, annoying admin work) 3 directors needed for companies instead of standard 1 and paperwork is all in spanish (if thats an issue for you).

Foundations laws here is solid and quite flexible, Offshore Companies law here is tried and tested and you may even be able to get a Panamanian bank account for your entity which given Panama is a real country not some island means its probably a bit more legit place to hold money, the downsides is that thats true in theory but in reality the banks all kinda suck are have UIs from the 90s and quite expensive to do wires from. The play is to get the Panama entity then bank somewhere else.

We had decent interactions with our investigations with Panama, the general consensus from lawyers is ‘Yeah that can prolly work from a Panama entity, just needs some docs”. No stupid crypto rules either, reporting is low or non-existent. The 3 directors thing is somewhat annoying for 1 or 2 cofounder businesses as it means youll likely need to hire an extra nominee director to sign stuff where needed too. Overall, just solid.

Overall TLDR Score? A-

• Tried and tested privacy
• No crypto laws and reporting
• Old school with some annoying admin work
• Is a real place

UAE Free Zones

One of 10 billion consultants in UAE ready to tell you its great

Ok look I have an axe to grind here. Every grifter, influencer and annoying person is in Dubai these days and they say its great, look I think its pretty cool too, its a solid middle ground imo, but it isnt the hallowed place its made out to be for crypto via their extensive marketing.

Ok so background here is UAE is a proper country, low tax (not no tax anymore, more on that later), but you dont incorporate your company ‘in dubai’ or ‘in UAE’, you incorporate in any of the 26 or so Free Trade Zones which all have their own companies laws and regulations. This is really cool conceptually. It means there is room for experimentation and competition between these freezones as they compete for business on being the easiest and best place to make an offshore company. These FTZs in the beginning all kinda copy pasted the offshore Caribbean islands laws, tweaked and updated them a little, put the admin stuff online and made a FTZ. Very solid idea. The only issue is for crypto stuff, its not that great anymore.

In UAE’s fervour to be the best place to do business, they latched onto the crypto bandwagon a while ago and especially their financial FTZs decided that to ‘be the best crypto jurisdiction’ that meant ‘making more laws’. As is always the slippery slope in western countries, more laws isnt the answer, but the consultant circlejerk crew there in between trips to the coffee machine and planning their next thought leadership event decided to make a regulator called Vara which oversees even the FTZ companies (even thought theyre meant to be separate) in addition to individual FTZ laws.

Heres our experience there

• Spoke with big fancy law firm and consultancy Baker Tilly there all about our needs for incorp, they brought like 12 ppl on the call, all wanted our business and would get back to us. They didnt.
• We contracted another lawyer to investigate DIFC, ADGM and RAK Dao for Foundation / Company setup.
• Turns out there is a clause for ADGM (and likely DIFC) Foundations that if they hold tokens specific types of tokens may need approval by Vara, the regulator, to do so. Makes it unviable for like 99.99% of crypto foundations/companies if you need approvals to own a token you issued previously or in future.
• ADGM is expensive and has lots of reporting and limitations on what you can and cant invest in in some circumstances. At that point if youre trading crypto assets youre better off just being some island offshore location, ADGM brings you nothing. Have heard stories from friends incorp’d there as VC funds and not able to deploy capital coz of dumb restrictions on what they can and cant do and high costs of compliance.
• RakDAO is marketed as ‘Crypto focused FTZ’ and yet go look at the ‘accepted activites’ list and its a generic list for any old FTZ, nothing crypto about it. Go read the laws for it and theres nothing specifically crypto about it at all. Can you even pay fees there in crypto in? We asked, no response. Turns out you cant do any regulated activities there, or even just normal crypto activites (you need to play pretend and try to fit your defi protocol into some BS category they have there) and even if you did any activities that might not be regulated, well, Vara keeps expanding and expanding its scope and making up dumb rules that make it unviable to be there. So then youre forced into the expensive ‘financial’ FTZs.
• Every FTZ now has a 9% Stealth Tax which they just randomly put into law recently. Completely unviable now as an offshore place, many better options. UAE Marketed itself for years as tax free, and even made guarantees you wouldnt be subject to taxes of mainland UAE if you were in a FTZ. Turns out they just changed their mind on you and now FTZ companies are. Literally rugged. This is the same as the 5% VAT they added a few years back under pressure from western countries. You cannot trust what the rules will be there as they can just rug you at any time, the influencers wont tell you that though.

Project A teams would be better served elsewhere and Project B teams may see some merit in getting their regulatory papers done here but banking still sucks in UAE as local banks are very conservative, not crypto friendly (often shut down accounts).

UAE was almost there, almost the holy grail, then screwed it up. You can live there and pay 0% income tax thats fine, maybe have an office at the excellent coworking spaces there, everyone speaks english and its lower tax than shit western countries, I get that. But for crypto, nah it aint it chief. If youre remote theres better options and if youre local well youre local anyway and already made your choice.

Overall TLDR score? C-

• Dumb niche crypto rules that are in fine print
• Rugged everyone on taxes in FTZs
• Expensive and has bunch of reporting annoyances in the financial zones
• Not competitive with other options

Kazakhstan AIFC

Very Nice

This one is actually cool and nobody knows about it. So a few years ago Kazakhstan, a gas rich country in central asia wanted to setup a financial free zone. They knew that the rest of the world thought Kazakhstan was borat and wouldnt trust the laws there if it was just an extension of Kazakhstan and therefore to attract capital from the world they needed to do something different

So they copy pasted the laws from Dubai DIFC and Cayman (generally the best companies law for offshore finance) and made their own Financial Zone, Astana International Financial Center (AIFC) with its own separate courts and judges which are on rotation from western jurisdictions, its own separate regulator and a one stop shop process to do anything there. Actually, thats pretty sick. Nice one Kazakh.

I’ve been to Almaty in Kazakh before (was prob first one to tell govt there to get into crypto mining many years ago, now its a giga hub for it, just sayin) and its was super cool city, I hear Astana is too. Nice, orderly city, low tax, high on freedom and easy admin for investors. AIFC also has existing crypto participants there, Bitfinex is there with Bitfinex Securities, Bybit incorp’d their exchange there, BigOne a large chinese exchange and many others- legit people are there coz its legit a good place to be.

We investigated AIFC alot, heres my findings:

• Lots of good info on their many websites, seemed good on paper and was easy to talk to actual people who worked for the zone there, legal fees are very cheap to do anything (like 5x cheaper than UAE), quality of the laws and process is high
• We ended up speaking to like 5 lawyers…why 5? well the issue was we wanted information on setting up a foundation and every authorised law firm there didnt have a clue how to do that, even tho thats a legit type of entity offered by AIFC. All they knew was cookie cutter out of the box ‘company’ setup and as soon as you say crypto theyll quote you on setting up an exchange there…the knowledge from local law firms on crypto and the types of structures used and businesses out there is lacking.
• Eventually we did find a law firm who said they could setup us up with a foundation in AIFC however after much back and forth it came out that a foundation, even though its in the zone, isnt a regulated market participant (yes good we didnt want to be regulated, no foundation should) but without being a regulated participant we wernt able to avail ourselves of the corporate tax exemption. So was 20% on income which is not competitive. Everything else was fine tho
• The cool thing is Kazakh is cool with crypto, the banks are too, as a regulated AIFC company you could use the other AIFC crypto on/off ramps for easy settlement to your Kazkh bank account in multiple currencies and its not onerous at all
• The cryptoregs there are very good, probably one the best for regulated projects. This would be our pick for Project B projects.
• It has a few weird quirks like the concept of ‘backed’ and ‘unbacked’ tokens in their crypto regs, basically meaning stablecoins vs other things and they have a few minor things that apply you need to do in either cases

Overall I was impressed with AIFC but bummed out that it didnt quite work for us in the end there, would been perfect holy grail of online admin for all things, friendly crypto and structuring laws, cheap, crypto on/off ramp friendly could even legit move a team there and itd be viable many good coworking spaces and investor visas. Project B companies should absolutely look into AIFC tho, as many of them would be doing regulated crypto businesses they would get the 0% tax along with everyone else and because its a real country you wont face alot of the issues of being an offshore island incorp in banking etc.

Overall TLDR score? A-

• Great legal setup, low cost admin
• Crypto ramps
• Great for crypto regulated entities, Project B’s
• Unregulated crypto entites not able to avail yourself of tax benefits, annoying
• Solid pick

UK tax havens Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man

Where the British aristocracy hide their money

The channel islands are the definition of ‘high spec tax haven’. They all are tax havens with 0% corp, wealth, capital gains etc however they also try be as legit as they can without compromising those benefits. For crypto this means they have some form of crypto laws (btw george was a contributor to their open feedback on making said laws back in the day, prob didnt listen to george tho) albeit a little less annoying than real countries laws.

They actually have a kinda unique system, Isle of Man pioneered the concept of a regulatory ‘register’ and not a ‘license’. Basically you dont get a ‘license’ to do certain activities, you just get added to a registry that is under the watchful eye of the regulator and you must do some generalised compliancy things, but nothing specific to crypto really. Some countries think to be ‘crypto friendly’ you need to go write a new law into your law book and make up a bunch of new stuff that a specific category of people must do. For the channel islands theyre pretty easy going comparatively, they also have exclusions on needing to be on the register for regulated activities if you dont make much money, this is great for startups just starting out they arent assaulted in the face with needing costly licenses on day 1 when they have 0 customers.

For Project B projects it might be appealing, the mix of regulatory environment, good laws, comparatively low admin costs. For Project A projects like defi protocols, it might make some sense to have an entity here especially with the unique rules around special purpose Guernsey and Jersey Trusts (mentioned earlier) which make it appealing for DAOs.

The only downside is banking once again will be an issue as getting banked locally you have the same cabal of evil banks who hate crypto from mainland UK (literally Isle of Man complained about it to UK and Bank of England that the startups starting there couldnt get bank accounts coz theyre dependant on mainland scum banks).

In 2006 the Isle of Man also made some new laws to try to compete with the Caribbean jurisdictions and update their procedures of incorporation. A New Manx Vehicle is a company using the new laws which only needs one director, one shareholder, low paid up capital, no audit and other reqs, all very easy and competitive at the time with the leading locales in the Caribbean. You wont be scoring high here for privacy or absence of new regulatory VASP type laws but thats to be expected being so closely connected to a western country.

Overall TLDR score? B+

• Easy setup and flexible corp structures
• Acceptably easier regulated entity requirements
• Comparatively lowish admin costs
• Not a privacy locale, global compliance regs will affect here

Labuan / Singapore / Hong Kong

Asia has the best food, fight me

Ok so these 3 asian jurisdictions are quite different but are often some of the stock standard choices for crypto companies. Find a crypto company SE Asia and their topco entity is likely in Singapore. China is backdooring some stuff through HK these days (but not like the good old days, sigh) and Labuan is a relatively unknown but actually really good jurisdiction as a self governing state in Malaysia.

Lets start with Singapore. Ah yes, many times a crypto bro has gone there and said its the future of cities, but on the crypto front it kinda sucks but on the generic corp structure front its totally fine. For Project A projects, you can probably get along fine, you likely wont come under any MAS (local regulator) licensing requirements (hopefully) as you dont custody money and youll likely write on your incorp form and to lawyers that you are a ‘software R&D company’ which is fine. 0% tax on offshore income and first world banking infra and apps which make admin easier. You can probably hire a team there although its competitive and high cost and the best people are either taken or running their own thing so new hires often need lots of micromanaging. Banking might shut you down if they know youre crypto.

For Project B companies licensing with MAS is annoying and dumb. For example, remittance companies aka anyone who sends value overseas (payment apps often) need a 51% local shareholding of someone living in singapore, they also have specific regs for payment and store value apps (custodial wallets beware) and they have some guidelines for exchanges but it sucks which is why nobody has bothered setting up exchanges there infact many have shut down and left. Banks are often hostile, especially to newcomers and it doesnt really make much sense for running actual financial operations from there. For raising money from VCs as your top level corporate structure its fine. Thats about it though. Meh

Hong kong has seen better days, it used to be the best place in the world for crypto. Thats why Binance, OKX, Bitmex, FTX, Tether, Bitfinex and many other chinese exchanges all got their start there (and me lel). There was no rules, maximum free markets, cool place, competitive and active financial hub. But then China came along and long story short put an end to that. Regulatory rules were made that contravened the HK Basic Law (HK constitution) and now are so onerous it makes no sense to setup anything there unless you are a fund trying to funnel some money from China. Nothing interesting otherwise. Pass

Finally Labuan, my pick of the bunch. Labuan is a small offshore tax haven state of Malaysia that has its own rules and regs and theyve been quite active in crypto since the beginning. Labuan IFC is a decent mid teir jurisdiction with flexible corp structures for foundations, companies and crypto licenses, privacy, low/no taxes and more. But thats the thing, its mid tier, below the best, they have some local substance requirements that mean you need to hire people there to do stuff for some corp structures, the crypto licenses arent too onerous infact if you want to do regulated entity stuff its very much worth looking into itll be closer to the top of picks (they were the first with a framework for ICOs, a bit outdated tho now). Overall a solid location that unfortunately probably gets overlooked as its just shy of being the best in a bunch of areas. But definitely ‘good’ nonetheless and worth considering seriously for some businesses.

Overall TLDR Score? C

• Kinda meh all around
• Have solid first world infra for doing admin things
• Not really great at anything
• Useful if you live in asia I guess, but then again, why?

The Final Vote

The tribe has spoken

So ok chief, a long fricken post, too long infact, I fell asleep several times. So where should I go bro? Just tell me the place.

Well, my picks are as follows:

If youre a Project A decentralised or non-custodial thing, for token projects consider a Foundation in an island somewhere (preferably non-carribean) / Panama and an operational entity somewhere of your choosing that makes sense to you. If youre a Project B centralised custodial regulated thing, consider Kazakhstan’s AIFC, its better than Dubai in every way and a solid entity to go out into the world and offer your services globally.

There you have it, alot of other places that didnt make the cut just incase anyone asks (Malta, Cyprus, Wyoming, Swiss, anywhere in EU, and prolly others I forgot).

Honorable mentions to El Salvador for having their new crypto regs really welcoming and easy, looks like they were written by a dude who just watched a Bukele speech and was like “yeah cool, just come do crypto here man, dont worry about anything its all good” ill be curious to see how it develops as time goes on, really would like to see some online company formation platform. And Bahrain for being the forgotten GCC country that is literally one big freezone and doesnt have alot of the nonsense of UAE but without some of the flexibility of corp structure.

Oh btw where did we end up? Step Finance is a Cook Islands Foundation ;)