A Bitcoiner's estate plan is often a beautiful thing, and often only one thing: a distributed 2-of-3, sealed instructions for the heirs, a timelock that opens a path if the owner goes quiet. What it secures is the stack. What it does not touch is the other thing a Freedom Passport buyer put into the estate the day their file cleared: a citizenship, with rights, a tax posture, and obligations a spending policy over coins was never built to carry. So the estate a holder leaves runs on two rails, the Bitcoin secured by the multisig and the citizenship governed by statute and civil registry, and this entry is about coordinating them deliberately, now, rather than leaving heirs to find that the coins and the country were never wired together.
The thing a multisig does not carry.
A multisig is a spending policy over a set of coins, and it does that one job superbly: it decides who can authorize a spend and removes any single key as a single point of failure. It does not confer citizenship, carry a tax status, or create a civil-registry entry; those are acts of the state, of tax law, and of the naturalization file, none following from control of key material. An heir holding two of three keys can move the sats; that heir does not thereby become Salvadoran or acquire the naturalization certificate. Key custody is not legal identity, and closing that gap is what an estate plan has to do on purpose, because nothing else will.
What is in the estate, and what is not.
Say the price once. The government contribution is $1,000,000, flat across a family, plus $999 for each additional applicant; our advisory fee is a flat 5%, which is $50,000, putting the all-in for a single applicant at $1,050,000. The part that matters for an estate is what the $1,000,000 is: a donation to the government of El Salvador, spent on payment, non-refundable once a file is in motion, gone from the donor's patrimony the moment it settles. Heirs do not inherit the million dollars, because after settlement there is none to inherit; there is a citizenship it purchased and a record that it was spent. The Bitcoin, by contrast, is an inheritable asset that may carry estate or inheritance tax in the heir's jurisdiction; the contribution is not an asset at all. Those two rails do not travel together on their own.
Hereditary citizenship, precisely.
The word is loose. Citizenship is not property, and strictly it is not hereditary at all: it does not pass through a will or a probate, it is personal to the holder, and it extinguishes with the holder, obligations and all. What people mean is more specific, and getting it right is where most citizenship-by-investment marketing fails.
A Freedom Passport buyer becomes a naturalized Salvadoran, and that word is load-bearing. Article 91 of El Salvador's Constitution guarantees the right to dual or multiple nationality to Salvadorans by birth, and only to them; a naturalized citizen does not hold that unconditional right. Naturalized citizens fall under Articles 93 and 94. Under Article 93, retention of a prior nationality runs through international treaties and a principle of reciprocity, not a flat constitutional guarantee. Under Article 94, naturalized status can be lost: by residing more than two consecutive years in the country of origin or by more than five consecutive years' absence from El Salvador, in either case save where the appropriate Salvadoran authority has authorized it, or by a final judicial sentence in specified cases. That loss is described as non-recoverable, and it is separate from the program's own periodic genuine-link visit requirement. An estate plan built on the Article 91 headline is built on the wrong article.
A child born abroad after the holder naturalizes appears to qualify as Salvadoran by birth under Article 90, which grants nationality to the children of a Salvadoran parent born abroad without distinguishing how the parent became Salvadoran. Read with Article 91, that would give the child the full, unconditional dual-nationality right the naturalizing parent lacks. The mechanism is the correction most marketing gets wrong: the child does not inherit the parent's status; the child acquires Salvadoran nationality by descent, in their own right, from birth. This is a reasoned reading of two articles together, not a proposition Salvadoran courts have tested for a naturalized parent specifically, so treat it as an inference to confirm with counsel, not settled law. A child born before naturalization is generally included in the family's application instead. The decrees behind the program, No. 286 of 2019 and No. 918 of 2023, amend an ordinary law, not the Constitution; there is no carve-out lifting a Freedom Passport citizen out of the Article 91, 93, and 94 framework. The fuller treatment is its own Ledger entry.
The multisig moves the sats and the statute moves the citizenship; the two travel on separate rails, and only a plan written to both moves the whole estate.
Where the will meets the wallet.
An estate plan for this profile has to make three documents agree. First is the key plan: the multisig policy, where the keys live, and how an heir reconstructs signing authority. Second is the home-jurisdiction will, which governs legal title, who owns the estate, as distinct from who can sign for it. Third is the Salvadoran citizenship record: the naturalization certificate, the civil-registry entry, and, critically, the documented status of any children. The plan is only as strong as the agreement among the three.
The failure modes are concrete. An heir can hold enough keys to move the coins yet have no clean legal title to them, because the will never named the Bitcoin or named it to someone else; access and ownership come apart. A will can be meticulous about the coins and silent about El Salvador, leaving the certificate, the registry entry, and the children's by-descent claim for heirs to reconstruct from a country whose offices they may not know. A collaborative-custody partner holds a key, a signing role, and is quietly assumed to be an executor, which it is not. Each of these is what happens when the wallet is planned and the will is planned and nobody made them read each other.
The multisig, read as an inheritance instrument.
Read as an inheritance instrument, a multisig is genuinely good at this. A 2-of-3 across the holder, a trusted person, and a collaborative-custody partner removes the single key as a single point of failure, the same logic that makes a second citizenship worth holding: a single passport under a single government is a single point of failure the way a single key is. The toolkit has real inheritance patterns. A decaying multisig lowers the signing threshold as timelocks elapse. A liveness-triggered path, loosely called a dead man's switch, uses a relative timelock that matures only after a span with no activity from the owner, who keeps it from ever maturing by re-anchoring the coins to a fresh output. It keys on inactivity, not on a fixed calendar date, which would open the heirs' path while the owner is alive. And these schemes are newer than the confidence around them; the miniscript descriptors that express them still have only partial wallet support, so the tooling is to be chosen and tested, not assumed turnkey.
Every one of these instruments solves custody. Not one conveys the citizenship, the tax posture, the naturalization certificate, or the civil-registry entry. The multisig moves sats. It does not move identity, and a plan that treats a flawless key ceremony as a finished estate has planned exactly half of it.
The tax posture the heirs stand in.
El Salvador's side of the tax picture is a genuine feature, and easy to state: 0% inheritance tax and 0% wealth tax, alongside 0% capital gains on Bitcoin. The honest sentence follows in the same breath: this is El Salvador's treatment, not the heirs' treatment. A second citizenship does not relocate an estate's tax situs or switch off the home country's rules. A US person's worldwide estate stays subject to United States federal estate tax regardless of a Salvadoran passport, and FATCA and worldwide reporting keep attaching as before. The Bitcoin may be taxed on death in the heir's jurisdiction even though El Salvador would tax it at zero. And the Four Zeros are a curated set, not a blanket exemption: El Salvador still levies capital gains on non-Bitcoin assets and a 13% VAT on ordinary goods. Hold all of this as a planning input, never a promise: we say what El Salvador does and tell you to have your own counsel say what your country does.
An archetype, not a client.
Take a composite, not a client. A holder in his fifties, a partner, and two children, one born before he naturalized and one after. His coins sit in a 2-of-3: one key his, one his partner's, one with a collaborative-custody service. His will, drafted years ago at home, is careful about his brokerage account and silent about El Salvador. It is the shape enough files take to be worth walking.
The custody already coordinates: if he goes quiet, the inheritance path matures and his partner and the custody service move the stack. What breaks, if nothing is done, is everything on the other rail. The child born before naturalization naturalized with the family; the child born after appears, on the reading above, to be Salvadoran by descent in her own right, a stronger status than her father holds, but only if someone documented her birth into the record. The will governs title in a home court that has never heard of the Salvadoran certificate, so the passport, the registry entry, and the children's status travel in no document at all. The partner holds a key and assumes she is the executor, which the will does not say. The coins are safe while the citizenship is an orphan. The fix is not heroic: draft the will to know about El Salvador, record the children's status while it is clean, and separate who signs from who owns. Illustrative only, not advice for any actual family.
The honest trade-offs.
Naming what this coordinates would be dishonest without naming what it does not. A Freedom Passport does not buy visa-free access to the United States or the United Kingdom, and no estate structure changes that. The contribution is non-refundable once a file is in motion, a real cost to weigh. For US persons, FATCA and worldwide reporting persist regardless of a second citizenship, and so does the US federal estate tax on a worldwide estate. On mobility, the Salvadoran passport reaches 132 destinations at rank 36 on the Henley index, a figure that moves with each release and is worth confirming at the moment you read it. Bitcoin's legal-tender status was repealed effective 30 April 2025, so the Bitcoin-native case rests on the reserve, the Bitcoin Office, and the digital-asset framework. The Article 94 loss conditions are real, and the strongest single fact here, the child taking Salvadoran nationality by descent, is a reasoned reading of the Constitution untested for a naturalized parent, written to be confirmed with counsel. A plan that lists only its strengths is selling something; this is the other half.
Alignment, not access.
What this program offers, at the estate as everywhere, is alignment rather than access. The people it is for are not buying a document their heirs will one day locate; they are buying a legal and monetary posture that has to be coordinated to survive a generation. The reason to do it now is unsentimental: coordination is cheap and precise while it is a plan, and expensive and lossy once it is a probate. The first step is not a brochure and not a sales call. It is a paid strategy session, one hour with Adam: $4,750 in Bitcoin, Lightning, or USDT via BitSettle, or $5,000 by card via Stripe, credited in full toward the 5% advisory if you proceed within 90 days. The fee is part of the filter; it sorts the families who intend to build something durable from the ones who wanted the headline. Our broader advisory work sits at 21 CBI; El Salvador is the vertical we run here, and that hour is where the coins and the country start leaving the estate as one thing.
This is estate and tax planning as we understand it from published law and public program materials, not legal or tax advice. Estate law, tax law, program terms, and constitutional interpretation vary by jurisdiction and change without much warning. Confirm the current statutory, program, tax, and constitutional specifics, and how they apply to your own file, with qualified Salvadoran and home-country counsel before acting.
Adam Juchniewicz, CEO, 21 CBI
The Ledger · July 2026