Wealth Without a Home Address

Together, these facts define the private-client problem of this decade: an enormous, fast-growing class of wealth that can vanish with a heartbeat or a forgotten password — and which, in most cases, sits entirely outside any succession or asset-protection structure.

As Henley & Partners put it, a person can today hold a billion dollars in Bitcoin using twelve memorised words — yet traditional frameworks assume wealth has a home address, and cryptocurrency does not.

The Comfortable Belief

Ask a crypto millionaire why he loves the asset class and you will hear a version of the same creed: no banks, no borders, no paperwork — "no one can touch it, so it has never been safer."

Here is the uncomfortable inversion: "no one can touch it" includes you — the day something happens to you. No intermediaries means no recovery process, no probate path, no default inheritance. The very feature this wealth's owners love most is precisely what makes crypto the most fragile major asset class in the world at the moment of succession. Freedom without structure is not protection; it is a single point of failure.

The rest of this article is about fixing that — without surrendering the freedom. In Mauritius, much has been written about the VAITOS Act and VASP licensing. Almost nothing has been written about what sits above the licence: the trust and foundation solutions that turn a crypto business, or crypto wealth, into something that survives its founder. That is the gap this article addresses — and it is a gap in our local literature only, because internationally, this is established practice.

Two Clients, Two Problems

Crypto wealth walks through the door in two distinct forms, and conflating them is the most common analytical mistake in this space.

• The holder — a high-net-worth individual with substantial appreciated crypto held personally, often in self-custody. His problems are succession, key-person risk, asset protection, and converting and banking the wealth in a compliant, well-documented manner.
• The operator — an entrepreneur already running a crypto business: a trading desk, an investment dealer, a brokerage, a fund. He comes to Mauritius to establish or relocate the business under an FSC licence, arriving with his infrastructure already in place — banking counterparties, payment providers, custody technology, trading platforms, liquidity. He is not coming to Mauritius for rails; he is coming for substance, treaty access, and the reputational weight of a licence in an international financial centre of repute. For him, structuring is about what should own the business — and that question is where the real value lies.

Can Crypto Even Go Into a Trust?

For years, the honest answer was "probably". It is now, in common-law terms, a confident "yes".

The obstacle was doctrinal: English personal property law recognised only things in possession and things in action, and a Bitcoin is neither (Cooper, 2021). The courts resolved it faster than the textbooks did. In AA v Persons Unknown [2019] EWHC 3556 (Comm), the English High Court held crypto assets to be property. In Ruscoe v Cryptopia Ltd [2020] NZHC 728 — the leading authority — the New Zealand High Court held that cryptocurrencies are property and were held on express trust for an exchange's account holders. D'Aloia v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 2342 (Ch) extended the property analysis to stablecoins. The UK Law Commission's recommendation of a statutory "third category" of personal property (Law Commission, 2023) has since become law through the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025.

For Mauritius, this matters directly. Our courts treat English common law as highly persuasive in trust matters, and the Trusts Act 2001 defines trust property broadly enough to encompass intangible assets. There is no serious doctrinal barrier to a Mauritius trust — or a foundation under the Foundations Act 2012 — holding crypto assets, whether directly or, far more commonly, through the shares of the companies that hold and trade them.

Nor is any of this experimental. Internationally, placing crypto wealth and crypto businesses under trusts and foundations is established private-client practice: Cayman foundation companies are widely used for digital asset projects and by entrepreneurs with significant crypto holdings (Trident Trust, 2025; Collas Crill, 2025); Jersey brings a mature trust industry with growing regulator familiarity with digital asset structures; the DIFC and ADGM foundation regimes in the UAE are increasingly home to crypto founders (Cavenwell, 2025); Liechtenstein foundations serve the same market in Europe. The field even has its own practitioner text — Crypto Assets in Trusts and Foundations (Schmidt and Belhomme (eds)), reviewed in Trusts & Trustees (Taic, 2025). Mauritius is not being asked to invent anything. It is being invited to catch up — with a comprehensive, FATF-aligned licensing regime already in force.

The Custody Question

In traditional structuring, ownership and control separate cleanly: the trustee holds legal title, a custodian holds the assets. Crypto collapses all of that into one brutal question: who controls the private keys?

If the settlor transfers Bitcoin "into trust" but keeps the seed phrase in his desk drawer, has he really divested himself of the asset? A trustee who accepts trusteeship of assets it cannot control has accepted an obligation it cannot perform — a structure vulnerable to sham arguments and simple theft. A trustee who takes full self-custody assumes operational and cyber risks most trust companies were never built to carry (Trusts & Trustees, 2025). For substantial wealth, the workable answer is regulated institutional custody — held either by the trustee or, more commonly, through an underlying company — with multi-signature controls and a documented key-recovery protocol. The custody decision, not the trust deed, is the true foundation of the structure; the deed follows the custody model, never the reverse.

A note of practical realism: the fiat side of these structures — the accounts receiving liquidation proceeds and paying distributions — typically sits with specialised foreign banks, payment service providers and electronic money institutions that have built the compliance infrastructure for crypto-derived flows. The realistic architecture today is therefore hybrid: a Mauritius trust or foundation providing the governance, succession and administration layer, with custody and banking provided by appropriately regulated institutions abroad. Where a Global Business Company forms part of the structure, the possibility of an FSC derogation permitting its principal bank account to be maintained outside Mauritius can be assessed at design stage.

Why Put a Trust Above the Business?

The operator arrives asking for a licence. The reasons he should leave with a trust or foundation above it are more compelling than the licence itself:

Where the crypto business sits in an underlying company, properly drafted anti-Bartlett provisions — relieving the trustee of the duty to interfere in the company's trading decisions, an approach confirmed at the highest level in Zhang Hong Li v DBS Trustee [2019] HKCFA 45 — are not optional refinements. They are the load-bearing wall.

The Client Who Doesn't Think He Needs You

There is an honest objection to all of this, and it deserves an honest answer: the people who became millionaires from crypto are overwhelmingly young — in their twenties and thirties, frequently unmarried, without children. "Estate planning" is a pitch that bounces straight off them.

But look again at the story that opened this article. Gerald Cotten was thirty. The young, single founder is not the weakest case for structuring — he is the worst-case scenario it exists to prevent: no spouse, no children, and often no living person who even knows where the wallets are. For this client, the conversation is not estate planning. It is key-person risk and business continuity for the thing he actually cares about — the business he built.

The structure gets signed when it unlocks something: a banking relationship that finally accepts the file, a licence application with a credible ownership answer, investor confidence, a residence permit, a clean pre-exit position. Henley's data shows crypto millionaires actively pursuing cross-border mobility to match their borderless assets (Henley & Partners, 2025) — they are already shopping for jurisdiction; they are simply not calling it wealth planning. Succession comes built into the structure they bought for other reasons — and one day, at a marriage, a first child, a hack scare or an exit, they discover it was the most valuable feature all along. The practitioner's job is to plant the seed before the trigger event, so that when it comes, yours is the number they dial.

Where Structures Live or Die

I will say this plainly, because it is the part of the market I see from the inside: most crypto structuring proposals fail not on trust law, but on source of funds. A trustee or management company onboarding crypto wealth must evidence, to a defensible standard, where the assets came from — original acquisition, exchanges used, the wallet trail since. Blockchain's transparency, so often described as a risk, is genuinely useful here: unlike cash, a Bitcoin's history is permanently recorded and traceable with analytics tools to a standard traditional assets rarely allow (FATF, 2021). But an analytics report supports acceptance; it does not guarantee it. The evidential file must be built to persuade the most sceptical reader in the chain.

A Practitioner's Closing Word

I have spent more than a decade watching wealth move through structures — and watching what happens when it moves without them. The crypto generation is now arriving at the doors of trustees and management companies, often younger than our traditional clients, often holding more of their net worth in a wallet than in every bank account combined. Some of the industry still treats them as a compliance problem to be declined. I think that is both commercially short-sighted and, frankly, a failure of professional imagination.

The rest of the offshore world has already proven the model. Our market has written extensively about the licence — and almost nothing about what should own it. That silence is not a gap in the law. It is a gap in imagination, and it is exactly where the next generation of private-client practice in Mauritius will be built.

Nawshad Bhunnoo is a corporate and private wealth specialist based in Mauritius, with over a decade of experience in trust administration, AML/CFT compliance and licensed entity oversight. The views expressed are his own and do not constitute legal, tax or investment advice.

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