Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A wealthy bitcoin investor’s company helped draft a new law passed on Nevis that will enable the group to build a proposed libertarian community on the Caribbean island.
A company owned by investor Olivier Janssens, the man behind the planned Destiny community on Nevis, is aiming to buy 2,400 acres of land for the scheme. Janssens wants Destiny to have its own court system, the FT has reported, and to use crypto as an everyday currency.
In summer 2025, the St Kitts and Nevis government passed the Special Sustainability Zones Authorisation Act (SSZAA), which allows the government to enter into agreements for developments such as Destiny.
A person familiar with the situation said Destiny was “largely responsible” for writing the law.
Dawn De Coteau, who deals with Caribbean legal issues at Destiny, posted on LinkedIn after the passage of the SSZAA: “I’m proud to be a member of the legal team, contributing to the creation of this model.”
De Coteau, who is dual-qualified in England and Wales and in Caribbean jurisdictions, added that the bill “required years — of negotiation and alignment to balance the needs of stakeholders and benefactors”.
Destiny declined to comment. De Coteau and the Nevis government did not reply to requests for comment.
Islanders opposed to the development have long suspected that Destiny had a hand in the law.
James Milnes Gaskell, former owner of the Montpelier boutique hotel on Nevis, wrote in September for a local news site: “When you read the SSZ Act, you can see that it could very well have been drafted for this libertarian group.”
In December, the St Kitts and Nevis Bar Association passed a resolution saying it had “deep concerns regarding the structure and operation” of the law, particularly about what it said was the effective granting of executive powers to a developer.
The law sets out areas that the government exclusively controls, such as foreign policy and the military — but does not specify this in areas such as immigration, policing or labour protection, suggesting powers covering these could be handed to a developer, said Kurlyn Merchant, the association’s president.
The association called for the law to be “fundamentally restructured to eliminate the adverse consequences . . . to democracy and the rule of law”.
Kelvin Daly, a member of the opposition Nevis Reformation Party, told the FT: “When attorney-general Garth Wilkin was questioned about who wrote the SSZ bill, he danced around” an answer.
Destiny is part of a trend in which wealthy figures in technology and crypto try to establish their own, more libertarian, territories, known as the “network state” movement.
Mark Brantley, Nevis’s premier, told a press conference in late January that he had sent an agreement with Destiny under the SSZAA to the federal government of St Kitts and Nevis for approval.
“We have signalled to the prime minister that we are comfortable with what has been proposed,” he said. “We stand behind this project because we think it’s a good project for Nevis.”
Some local politicians have criticised the fact that Sharon Brantley, who is married to Nevis’s premier, is the real estate agent assisting Janssens in the land purchases.
The law has a provision for developers to set up their own “dispute resolution services and mechanisms”, which has worried islanders, several of whom have expressed fears that Destiny could become “a state within a state”.
Janssens has rejected that accusation, saying Destiny will be open to all islanders and will ultimately be subject to the government’s jurisdiction.
Islanders fear that the scheme will consume existing water and power resources, that it is displacing long-term residents by buying their land, and that it will be cut off from the rest of the island.
The scheme, a series of lush green terraces and pools, has been designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects behind 7 World Trade Center in New York and the Broadgate Tower in London. Properties will cost $500,000 to $3mn, Janssens told the New York Post.