Every applicant who calls asks a version of the same first question, and it is the wrong one. They ask whether the price is really $1,000,000. It is. The question that actually matters, and the one almost nobody asks until the second or third conversation, is where that million dollars goes once it leaves a wallet. Not in the abstract sense of “it funds the country.” Literally: which address receives it, what it becomes on the other end, and what the government that receives it is willing to disclose about the rest. This entry is not a pitch for the program. It is an itemized accounting of the money, held to the same standard we would want applied if we were the ones spending it. Every dollar that 21 CBI charges is disclosed to the cent. The government’s use of the contribution is disclosed in one specific, sourced respect, and, beyond that respect, it is not itemized anywhere in the public record this firm has. Both of those sentences are true at once, and holding them side by side, rather than quietly featuring the first and skipping the second, is the actual value ledger.
The fee stack, itemized to the dollar.
Start with what is fully priced, because this is the part no one has to take on faith. The government contribution is flat: $1,000,000, regardless of family size, non-refundable once a file is in motion. It settles only in BTC or USDT, on-chain, direct to the government’s own wallet. There is no fiat path for the contribution itself, no Lightning rail (the transaction size does not fit it), and no other stablecoin; BTC and USDT are the only two assets the government will accept. Bring a spouse or a child onto the same file and the number barely moves: each additional applicant adds $999, not a second contribution and not a percentage, a flat $999 per head.
Layered on top of the contribution, and paid separately from it, is the 21 CBI advisory fee: a flat 5 percent of the contribution only, which comes to $50,000, and nothing else. It is not 5 percent of the all-in total, and it does not scale with family size the way the government’s own per-head figure does; one contribution, one family, one $50,000 fee. It is due at approval and can move on rails the government’s wallet will not accept: BTC, Lightning, USDT, or fiat, settled through BitSettle, the firm’s settlement rail for everything that is not the contribution itself.
Before either figure is ever asked for, there is a third, smaller number: the strategy call, the first paid conversation with Adam. It runs $4,750 in Bitcoin, Lightning, or USDT, or $5,000 by card, the $250 spread being the same Bitcoin-native alignment logic that governs the rest of the fee stack, scaled down to a single hour instead of a seven-figure file. That fee is not the government contribution and is never described as one; it is a paid strategy session, not administrative processing, and no obligation attaches to it beyond showing up. Retain 21 CBI within 90 days and the full amount is credited toward the $50,000 advisory fee, so a client who proceeds effectively pays for that first hour once.
Add it up and the all-in figure for a single applicant is $1,050,000: the $1,000,000 contribution plus the $50,000 advisory fee, with the strategy-call fee credited toward the second number rather than stacked on top of it. We state the full figure on purpose. It would be easy, and it is common practice elsewhere in this category, to advertise the contribution alone and let a prospective applicant discover the advisory fee later in the process. We do not round $1,050,000 down to sound smaller, and the family figures follow the same discipline: a couple’s all-in comes to $1,050,999, a family of three to $1,051,998, a family of four to $1,052,997. One contribution, one family, permanent and hereditary citizenship, priced the same whether the file covers one person or four; the only per-head cost is the $999 add-on, not a second run at the six-figure fee. The full breakdown lives on the pricing page and the cost page, both carrying a live BTC calculator that prices the contribution against the current spot rate; the external mirror at 21cbi.io/calculator runs the same arithmetic if you want an independent rate check.
How the contribution moves, and who never touches it.
The mechanism matters as much as the total. The $1,000,000 does not pass through 21 CBI’s hands at any point. It moves on-chain, from the applicant’s wallet directly to the government’s own wallet, in BTC or USDT, and the firm never custodies that sum, not for an hour, not as a pass-through. That is a narrower claim than “the money is safe,” and we mean it narrowly: we are describing custody, not making a promise about what happens to the funds after they land. The advisory fee is a different transaction on a different rail, settled through BitSettle, and the two should never be confused with each other; one is a government contribution to a sovereign wallet, the other is a service fee to a private firm, and conflating them is the single most common error we correct on the first call. Timing matters too: the contribution does not move on day one. Due diligence, run jointly by the Bitcoin Office and the DGME (Dirección General de Migración y Extranjería), takes roughly two to three weeks inside a process that runs six to eight weeks in total, and only a cleared file reaches the point where the government’s wallet address is actually provided. The money does not travel ahead of clearance; that is a mechanism decision, not a courtesy.
What the contribution buys, stated once.
The output side of this ledger gets one paragraph, since program fit is a separate question covered elsewhere. What $1,050,000 buys is a permanent, hereditary citizenship, not a renewable status subject to periodic review; a passport reaching 132 visa-free destinations at Henley Passport Index rank 36, including the full Schengen Area, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, though not the United States or the United Kingdom; Non-CRS standing; and the Four Zeros tax treatment for foreign investors on Bitcoin, 0 percent capital gains, 0 percent income tax for non-residents, 0 percent inheritance and wealth tax, and 0 percent VAT on Bitcoin itself, against a standard 13 percent VAT on everything else. None of that is new information, and none of it is this entry’s argument. It belongs here only so the cost side of the ledger and the value side sit on the same page once, before the piece returns to its actual subject: which parts of the spend are itemized, and which are not.
What the state discloses: the reserve the contribution funds.
Here is the one specific, sourced claim about the contribution’s destination that this firm, and the government’s own public materials, will stand behind: the contribution feeds El Salvador’s sovereign Bitcoin reserve. That reserve is not a promise; it is a running, on-chain balance, currently around 7,711 BTC as of July 2026, built through a combination of treasury purchases and state geothermal mining, and independently verifiable by anyone at bitcoin.gob.sv. The naturalization pathway that produces the contribution rests on Legislative Decrees No. 918 and No. 286, administered jointly by the Bitcoin Office and the DGME, and it is that statutory framework, not a marketing description, that routes the contribution toward the reserve rather than toward general revenue. You can check the reserve figure yourself, today, against the same source we cite; the Verified Facts Library and the Official Source Library collect that citation alongside the rest of the primary sources this program is built on, so the claim is never asked to stand on our word alone.
A fee stack you can audit to the dollar and a sovereign reserve you can audit on-chain are two different kinds of transparency. Neither one is a granular government budget, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What the state does not itemize.
Now the part of this ledger that is easy to skip and should not be. Beyond “the contribution feeds the reserve,” El Salvador does not publish a line-item public budget breaking the $1,000,000 down by spending category. There is no official disclosure reading something like a stated percentage to health, a stated percentage to infrastructure, a stated percentage to debt service, or any comparable breakdown, in the record available to this firm. We are not going to manufacture one. Anyone who hands you a specific percentage allocation for a sovereign government’s internal use of citizenship-contribution funds, beyond the one figure that government itself has made checkable on-chain, is telling you something nobody can actually source. We would rather tell you plainly that the breakdown does not exist than dress up a guess as a fact.
That gap is real, and naming it is the entire point of calling this a value ledger rather than a sales page. What is fully itemized is the side of the ledger under this firm’s control: the $1,000,000 contribution, the $999 per additional applicant, the $50,000 advisory fee, the $4,750 or $5,000 strategy-call fee and its 90-day credit, and the $1,050,000 all-in figure, none of it rounded, none of it deferred to a later conversation. What is not itemized is the side of the ledger under a sovereign government’s control: its own internal accounting for a treasury it has already told the world it is building. Those are different institutions with different disclosure obligations, and collapsing them into a single number does no one any favors.
Why the gap is not a red flag.
It would be tempting to read an undisclosed government budget as a warning sign, and for a lot of programs in this category, it would be. It reads differently here for a specific reason: the Freedom Passport is not a mass-market revenue program built to fund a sprawling state apparatus. It is capped at 1,000 approvals a year, first-cleared-first-issued, run by a Bitcoin Office whose entire stated mandate is a sovereign Bitcoin position, not a general appropriations fund. A program that small, with a use of funds that specific, does not need a granular public ledger to be coherent; it needs the one figure it has actually published, the reserve balance, to keep moving in the direction it says it is moving in, and it has. Consistency with a stated, checkable purpose is a different thing from an itemized budget, and we are drawing that line deliberately rather than blurring it into reassurance the record does not support.
This entry is also not the place to relitigate whether the program fits you in the first place; that is a separate question, covered at length in the million-dollar question, and worth reading before this one if you have not yet decided whether $1,050,000 is a number you should be spending at all. What this entry adds is narrower and, we think, more useful once fit is settled: not whether you should spend the money, but what happens to it, itemized where it can be and named as undisclosed where it cannot.
The arithmetic you can actually check.
Strip the whole piece down to a single instruction. On your side of the ledger, verify every number yourself before you move anything: the $1,000,000 contribution, the $999 per additional applicant, the $50,000 advisory fee, the $4,750 or $5,000 strategy call, and the $1,050,000 all-in total, all of it live on the pricing page and priceable against the spot rate through the calculator there or at 21cbi.io/calculator. On the government’s side of the ledger, verify the one figure that is published: the reserve balance at bitcoin.gob.sv, cross-referenced against the citations on the Official Source Library. Do not expect, and do not let anyone tell you to expect, a category-by-category government budget beyond that. It is not there, and inventing one to make the ledger feel more complete would be the least honest thing we could put in an entry about honesty.
This is not tax or legal advice, and nothing above should be read as a representation about how any specific government will allocate funds in the future. Program terms, contribution mechanics, and the tax treatment of a second citizenship are specific to your situation; confirm your own position with a qualified advisor before treating any figure in this entry as the final word on your file.
Adam Juchniewicz, CEO, 21 CBI
The Ledger · July 2026