Got some bitcoin burning a hole in your digital wallet? And paradise on the mind? You could use it to buy a second passport.

Vanuatu, the South Pacific archipelago of some 80 islands, will now let outsiders use the volatile cryptocurrency to apply for so-called investment citizenship. Fork over the equivalent of about $350,000, and your family of up to four can receive passports from what the New Economics Foundation, a Britain-based think tank, calls the fourth-happiest country in the world. (It ranked No. 1 when the list was first published in 2006, but like the vagaries of the market, happiness can be a fleeting thing.)

With bitcoin reaching a record price of $US5,209 on Thursday, more than five times its value at the start of the year, passports for the whole clan cost about 53.8 bitcoin.

Vanuatu isn't the only island that offers citizenship for a price - the list includes Antigua, Grenada, Malta, and St. Kitts and Nevis - but it's the first to allow payments via bitcoin. The development was announced in a press release on Investment Migration Insider, a website focused on investment citizenry.