Malta — MEIN.
Abolished in 2025 after Europe's top court ruled against selling citizenship.
At a glance
What happened
On 29 April 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a landmark ruling against investment-based citizenship schemes — effectively finding that selling EU citizenship for a fixed financial contribution, without a genuine link to the member state, is incompatible with EU law. Malta formally amended its Citizenship Act on 24 July 2025, abolishing the Malta Exceptional Investor Naturalisation (MEIN) program entirely. There is no investment-based citizenship route in Malta today.
What replaced it
Malta shifted to a discretionary "citizenship by merit" route — no price tag, no fixed investment threshold, granted for genuine exceptional contribution to Malta in fields like science, innovation, sport, or culture. This is not a comparable product to what MEIN offered; it's a fundamentally different, non-transactional naturalization path. The Malta Permanent Residence Programme (MPRP) still operates, offering EU residency (not citizenship) from roughly €28,000–€58,000 plus property, in four to six months — but residency does not automatically convert into citizenship.
Why this belongs in a directory about crypto and investment migration
Malta never accepted crypto directly for MEIN, so this isn't a story about a digital-asset-specific restriction — it's a story about regulatory risk to the entire CBI/RBI category, crypto or fiat. The same legal reasoning the CJEU applied to Malta — that citizenship requires a "genuine link," not just a financial contribution — is a standing risk factor for any EU-adjacent program, and a reminder that our Mandate's point about this being "a fast-moving landscape" is not limited to crypto-specific changes. See our Insights for a fuller breakdown of what this ruling could mean beyond Malta.
What ImmiCrypt takes from this
Our Advisory vertical treats program-closure risk as a standing input to jurisdiction scoring, not an afterthought — a program's price and process matter less than whether it's built to survive the next legal or political challenge. Malta is the starkest example in our directory of why that matters.