Britain should ask crypto founders what would have kept them here

When I asked Praneet Sinha why he left Britain, he said it came down to operational and financial efficiency. He co-founded his crypto startup, Moongate, in London in 2022. The business planned to collect its fees in crypto, which would mean converting that revenue into fiat to pay salaries and running costs.

“RAK DAO (Ras Al Khaimah Digital Assets Oasis) made more sense for us from a regulatory and business standpoint,” he told me. “It offered a more crypto-friendly environment and tax advantages, particularly around converting crypto revenue into fiat to fund our operating expenses.”

That is why he moved the business from the UK to the UAE, setting up in RAK DAO, a free zone for digital-asset companies in Ras Al Khaimah. He is now based in Abu Dhabi, having moved in August 2024. Moongate Labs Ltd, the UK company, was dissolved in July 2025, and MoonPay acquired the business in June 2026.

Borders constrain ambition less than at any point in living memory, and internet capital markets mean a founder can build from almost anywhere. Yet people are crossing them anyway.

Between 2021 and 2025, Britain lost a net 507,000 of its own nationals, based on ONS long-term migration data. The figure is the cumulative total of annual net losses over those five years, with a provisional 136,000 in 2025 alone.

The count starts in 2021 for a reason. In November 2025, the ONS changed how it counts British nationals, replacing a survey that had been underestimating British emigration. The revised figures only go back to 2021.

Those figures cover British nationals across all lines of work. They cannot tell us how many were crypto founders, whether their businesses left with them, or how much tax revenue the country lost.

We can estimate the scale of this loss, but can we say what the main cause of it is?

The ONS and the Migration Observatory concede the difficulty themselves, with the ONS admitting that it cannot carry out high-quality surveys overseas or access the administrative data foreign governments hold about their populations, and the Migration Observatory saying that “relatively little is known about which British citizens leave the UK, or the reasons why.”

The absence of hard data also explains the absence of urgency. No government has designated the exodus a national emergency, or a crisis for that matter.

Founders have been asked about this before. Tech Nation’s 2025 Growth Stage report surveyed them on why they would consider moving their headquarters out of the UK. At Superteam UK, we’re hearing more and more that our best founders want to leave for cities like Dubai, Singapore, New York and San Francisco. We wanted to hear from crypto founders who had already gone, so I started asking them directly.