Egypt — Citizenship by Investment.
The most restrictive program in our directory on digital assets.
At a glance
Why this program is different from the rest of our directory
Every other program in our directory — even the strictest, Portugal — has at least an indirect or agent-mediated path for crypto-originated funds. Egypt does not. Egypt's financial institutions operate under compliance rules that explicitly prohibit facilitating cryptocurrency transactions, and every major Egyptian bank blocks crypto-related payments as a matter of policy, reinforced by a 2018 religious ruling from Dar al-Ifta classifying commercial Bitcoin transactions as impermissible. The combined effect: there is no route — direct, agent-converted, or indirect through a fund — by which crypto-originated wealth can currently fund an Egyptian citizenship-by-investment application through the banking system the program requires.
What this means practically
An applicant holding meaningful crypto wealth who wants Egyptian citizenship today has no shortcut through the program itself — the funds would need to be converted to fiat and documented through channels entirely outside Egypt's domestic banking restrictions before ever reaching an Egyptian bank account eligible for the contribution. This is a meaningfully different situation from "accepted in select cases via licensed agents," the language used across most of our Caribbean pages — Egypt isn't cautious about crypto, it's structurally closed to it.
The four investment routes, for context
- Non-refundable donation — from $250,000
- Real estate — $300,000 minimum
- Business investment — $350,000 plus a $100,000 donation
- Bank deposit — $500,000
All four require standard fiat banking rails, with no residency requirement to maintain citizenship once granted, and dual citizenship is permitted under Egyptian law.
Why we still cover it
A directory that only lists programs with some crypto pathway would understate how restrictive parts of this landscape actually are. Egypt is the clearest evidence in our directory that "how does crypto move through this program" sometimes has the honest answer "it doesn't, at all" — exactly the kind of plain statement our Mandate commits to over vaguer marketing claims.