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.

507,000 People Lost Since 2021

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 Know How Many. We Don't Know Why.

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.

Reasons Surface One Founder at a Time

We mustn't settle for founders who are born or educated in the UK or who incorporate their businesses here, only to build their unicorns elsewhere. Here's another reason by Arun Krishnakumar.

Krishnakumar has lived in Britain for nearly 21 years. He studied at the LSE and Oxford, worked at Barclays and PwC, and credits London's "great schools generating great minds." But when he chose an entrepreneurial career, he was constantly told that "if you were doing this in Silicon Valley, you would be in a much better place". Citing American capital, culture and regulation, he plans to move to the US.

Capital has been heading in the same direction. In January 2025, a16z scaled back its UK presence to refocus on the US, less than two years after choosing London for its first office outside the US.

Stories like theirs tend to surface one at a time. Reasons why people leave the UK are largely anecdotal and often self-reported, either in the form of a LinkedIn post or an X talking head video.

The Brain Drain Wall, which I lead at Superteam UK, is our attempt to gather them in one place. Between 16 July and 21 October 2026, it received 576 submissions. Of those, 61 percent want to stay in Britain, 32 percent plan to leave, and 7 percent have already left. About 157 respondents, more than a quarter, are founders or C-suite executives. This group includes 63 people whose job title is founder, the most common designation on the Wall. Nearly half are based in London. All the responses were voluntary, so the Wall reflects people who chose to share their reasons with us.

Of the 226 who are leaving or have left, the most common reasons were quality of life (25.2 percent), the tax environment (24.3 percent), job opportunities (20.4 percent) and capital (12.4 percent). Together, tax and capital account for about 36.7 percent, more than quality of life alone.

Of the 350 staying, nearly half (48.9 percent) cited family and relationships, followed by career and opportunity (20.3 percent) and quality of life (12 percent).

One Question That Points to Brain Gain

We believe that, through network effects, if we can get enough people to share their main reasons for leaving the UK, it'll give us a better understanding of which policy recommendations we can solidly present to the government instead of it just being a guessing game.

The goal is to find the causes behind the brain drain, then minimise or remove those barriers altogether. Hopefully, that will give people a compelling reason to stay in Britain.

Britain has spent years counting the people it loses. Now it's time to ask them why. We're asking because we want to know what would make them stay in Britain. So I put that question to Sinha: if the UK had matched what RAK DAO offered, would he have kept Moongate in London?

"Yes, it was another hassle to set up a company in a different country."

Disclosure: Cessiah Lopez created and leads Superteam UK's Brain Drain Wall project. This piece wasn't written for the Brain Drain Wall bounties, wasn't entered for a prize and wasn't a paid placement.