What it is
A Wyoming limited liability company: the plain version, which is most of the value. No state income tax, a filing fee near a hundred dollars, an annual report with a floor around sixty, and a registered agent who costs less per year than a dinner. It is one of the cheapest durable American entities there is.
The privacy is real and frequently overstated. Member names generally do not appear on the public formation filing, which is registry privacy: it keeps a name out of a search result. It is not anonymity. Banks, exchanges and tax authorities require beneficial ownership regardless, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Formation through a service such as Otonomos bundles the filing, the registered agent, the local address and a model operating agreement, and lands in a day or two. Their starter kit is priced at a few hundred dollars over the government fees.
The part that is actually unusual
In July 2021 Wyoming became the first state to let a decentralised autonomous organisation incorporate under its LLC law. The provision that matters is not the acronym: it is that a smart contract may serve as the operating agreement. The document that says who decides what, which in every other company is a PDF somebody has to be trusted to honour, can be the code itself.
In March 2024 the state added a second structure for organisations that are not companies at all, effective that July, letting a decentralised association hold property, sign contracts, open accounts and appear in court without electing a corporate form it does not fit.
Alongside the law sits the tooling. Otonomos’ sibling product assembles companies from a wallet rather than a form, and membership interests can be issued as tokens, so the register of who owns the company is a contract rather than a document about one. They have been doing this since 2020, starting in Delaware and bringing it to Wyoming on the strength of that statute.
This is the same argument as everything else on this site, applied to a company instead of a picture: a record you can read beats a record you are asked to trust.
What it does not mean
The chain is not the registry. A company exists because a state says it does. What can live onchain is the membership interest and the company’s own books, which is genuinely useful and is not the same claim as forming an entity out of thin air. Anyone describing it as the latter has skipped the part where the Secretary of State is still involved.
An LLC has no stock. It has membership interests. A SAFE, the instrument every American angel expects, converts into stock, and it cannot convert into something that does not exist. An entity chosen because it is cheap and private and suits a shop is not automatically the entity a financing can happen in, and discovering that after the first cheque is expensive.
Where a company is run from still matters. An American entity managed from somewhere else can create obligations in the somewhere else. That is an accountant’s question, in both countries, before formation rather than after.
Why this page exists
Because the decision is not made, and a page describing an undecided thing honestly is worth more than a confident one written later. The studio needs an entity for the print room and possibly a different one for anything raised through an open cap table. Whether that is one company or two is a question for counsel and an accountant, and it is being asked before anything is filed rather than after.
The small print, in our words
None of this is legal, tax or accounting advice, and no page can be. Fees, statutes and products change; everything above was read in August 2026 from Wyoming’s own law and from the providers’ published material, and the providers’ claims are theirs. Nobody pays us to be named here. Get an opinion from someone who carries insurance for being wrong.