Katie Ananina on CitizenX: Why Bitcoiners Are Buying Second Passports as a Multisig for Identity
Katie Ananina, the founder of Plan B Passport and now Chief Marketing Officer at CitizenX after the two firms merged, joined Simply Bitcoin to explain why a second passport has become a serious line item for Bitcoiners planning around capital controls and government overreach.
PASSPORTS AS AN ASSET CLASS
Ananina's framing is that citizenship is its own asset class, and that diversifying a passport portfolio works the same way diversifying a Bitcoin cold storage setup does. About 20 countries currently run citizenship by investment programs, where an applicant donates or invests a set amount of capital in exchange for a passport, and CitizenX built its platform to walk clients through that process the way an online store walks a shopper through checkout.
Pricing on those programs runs from around 100,000 dollars up to a million dollars depending on jurisdiction and family size, according to Ananina, with due diligence and background checks typically taking four to seven months. El Salvador is the outlier, processing citizenship by investment applications in about three weeks.
WHY BITCOINERS SPECIFICALLY WANT A PLAN B
Ananina drew a distinction between what different nationalities are actually solving for. Americans and Canadians rarely need a second passport for travel access, since their existing documents already open most borders. What they are buying instead is insurance against capital controls, asset seizure risk, or a government move against Bitcoin holdings specifically, paired with the ability to physically relocate if a jurisdiction turns hostile to how they hold their money.
She also pointed to a specific Bitcoiner-only workaround: many clients qualify for citizenship through a grandparent's or great-grandparent's nationality, which she called a free plan B passport that costs nothing but paperwork and gives the next generation a jurisdictional option they did not have to buy.
WHY EL SALVADOR IS HER PICK
Asked which program she would choose without pricing as a factor, Ananina named El Salvador, citing both its willingness to accept direct Bitcoin payment for citizenship and the pace at which the country is building policy around Bitcoin adoption. She described a Bitcoin-literate economy building from the grassroots up, meeting a top-down policy push that has cut capital gains taxes on Bitcoin and offered tech companies a decade of tax holidays.
Ananina also raised a structural point about why more governments have not followed El Salvador's lead in building a sovereign Bitcoin reserve: a state typically has to fund that kind of reserve with taxpayer money, which forces it to buy a volatile asset with public funds it cannot easily replace if the price falls. Selling citizenship directly for Bitcoin sidesteps that problem entirely, since the government raises the asset itself rather than converting existing revenue into it.
THE BIGGER BET: GOVERNMENTS COMPETING FOR PEOPLE
The interview closed on the sovereign individual thesis, the idea that as more people treat citizenship as a choice rather than an accident of birth, nation-states will be forced to compete for capital, talent, and labor the way companies compete for customers. Ananina pointed to Canada's own government social media accounts actively recruiting foreign tech workers and healthcare staff as evidence the competition has already started.
Her closing point was narrower and more concrete than a prediction about the whole system collapsing: she does not need most people to take self-custody of their money or their citizenship for the shift to matter, only a small percentage choosing to exercise the option. What happens to the other side of that governments that refuse to compete is the part still playing out.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
