Private Placement Life Insurance (PPLI) is an institutional life-insurance policy that holds your investment portfolio inside it. The portfolio grows tax-deferred, sits behind the liability protections of an insurance structure, and passes to your beneficiaries income-tax free at death.
It's not just for crypto — PPLI can wrap nearly any asset: hedge fund and private-equity interests, real estate, art, concentrated stock. Geneva's edge is being the first carrier built to also take digital assets in kind: 800+ tokens under qualified custody.
Every year you're taxed, you're compounding on the smaller number. Sell to diversify, rebalance, or move into yield, and each gain is clipped before it can grow again. Over twenty years the drag isn't a fee — it's a second portfolio you never got to own.
The same $5M, the same 10% gross return, the same twenty years. The only variable is whether the growth is taxed as it happens.
Hypothetical illustration only. Not a projection or guarantee; actual returns, costs, taxes, and laws vary.
An institutional life-insurance chassis that holds your portfolio — so it grows tax-deferred, sits behind real liability protection, and passes to your beneficiaries income-tax free.
Along the way, liquidity comes through policy loans and withdrawals designed by counsel — access without forced sales. It's succession planning and asset protection in the same structure that fixes the tax drag.
No annual capital gains, no yield drag — the portfolio compounds on the gross number, year after year.
At death, the policy passes to your beneficiaries free of income tax — decades of deferred growth, never taxed.
Assets held inside an insurance policy, out of personal title, off public wallets — a hard target for lawsuits and claims.
Paired with trust planning, the policy becomes the orderly transfer mechanism — no probate scramble, no forced liquidation.
Income tax clips the growth. The estate tax takes the pile. Everything above the exemption faces a 40% federal toll at death — and a portfolio compounding at 10% doubles roughly every seven years, while the exemption only creeps.
Most people who "have this handled" don't. The structures that fix income tax usually do nothing for estate tax — and a portfolio built this decade outgrows last decade's plan.
A revocable living trust avoids probate — it does not remove a dollar from your taxable estate. Unless assets were moved out irrevocably, the 40% applies as if the trust weren't there.
Act 60 addresses income tax. For a US citizen who moved from the mainland, the federal estate tax still reaches your worldwide assets — the beach didn't change that.
Today. At 10%, a $5M portfolio passes $15M in about twelve years — the growth is racing the exemption, and the growth is winning.
Any PPLI carrier can hold funds and securities. Geneva was built for the asset class nobody else would touch — direct, in-kind funding of digital assets under institutional custody.
§953(d) election — taxed as a US taxpayer. For US-connected clients.
Non-953(d) vehicle for non-US clients and international structures.
Funding a policy with appreciated assets is a taxable event. Moving assets in is a disposition at fair market value — the embedded gain is recognized at funding. Anyone who tells you the entry is tax-free is selling you something.
But the entry can be engineered. Our bench of attorneys and licensed agents does exactly this — structuring the funding event to minimize the upfront hit or spread the recognition across a multi-year schedule: staged funding, installment structures, planning around the gain rather than into it. What's possible depends on your facts; that's a design conversation, not a promise.
And what the wrapper does after entry, it does exceptionally well: decades of compounding with no annual tax drag, liability protection throughout, and a death benefit that passes income-tax free.
We lead with the caveat because the math survives it. That's the whole point.
Committable, long-horizon capital — not the trading stack, not near-term liquidity.
Large embedded gains or tax-inefficient assets that get clipped every time you touch them.
You're building for decades and you intend the wealth to pass to the next generation.
If that's not you, we'll say so. Sub-$5M, need the liquidity soon, want to keep trading the assets yourself, or hoping to dodge the entry tax — PPLI is the wrong tool, and we'd rather tell you now.
$40M in ETH on a $1.8M basis — diversifying without surrendering the future growth to annual tax.
~1,400 BTC, 98% of net worth — one asset, one wallet, no structure around it.
A holding that outgrew the estate exemption while nobody was planning for it.
On-chain wealth anyone can trace — asset protection and privacy by design.
Structuring before US residency starts the tax clock.
Cases are illustrative composites, not specific clients or outcomes.
A conversation, not a pitch. We'll walk the mechanics, the caveats, and whether the fit is real — then connect you with Geneva's structuring team, who work alongside your own attorney and CPA.
Geneva's 23-page Advisor's Guide — the structure, the two carriers, the Barbados advantage, and the planning applications. We'll email it to you.
The Advisor's Guide is headed to your email. If it's not there in a few minutes, check spam — or write us at mike@dekryption.com.