Swan Is Building Bitcoin Custody Split Across Three Companies, With No Key for the Client

Swan is building a custody product that splits a client’s bitcoin across three separate companies, with the client holding no key at all, founder and chief executive Cory Klippsten said on Monday’s episode of Unchained.

“We’re doing it now, so we will actually have that out hopefully by Q4. It’s called Swan Trinity,” Klippsten said. “We’ll have a key. BitGo will have a key, and we’re evaluating the third partner.” The third, he said, would probably be a well-known UK company.

Swan has not announced the product. Its published custody line-up does not list it, and no release names it.

Collaborative custody, the model Swan already sells as Swan Vault and that Casa and Unchained Capital also offer, is a two-of-three multisig in which the customer holds two keys and the company holds a third as backup. Losing one of your keys does not lose the coins, and if the company disappears you still control two. (Unchained Capital is a bitcoin financial services firm in Austin and is not affiliated with this publication, which shares its name.)

Trinity inverts that. The customer holds none of the three, and each key sits with a different institution. Klippsten’s case for it is that it removes both single points of failure at once.

“You’re not gonna get two institutions colluding to steal your coins, and if one institution goes under, gets hacked or something, nothing happened to your Bitcoin,” he said. “Nobody actually owns your Bitcoin.”

He placed it at one end of a five-step range he uses to describe custody, running from unassisted self-custody, through advised self-custody, collaborative multisig and ordinary delegated custody with a single company, to what he called the fifth stop.

“The fifth stop on the far right would be multi-institutional, where you don’t have any keys,” he said, with “your three keys are split across three institutions.”

Klippsten credited the idea to Mike Belshe, BitGo’s co-founder and chief executive, who he said pitched him on it about four years ago, and said one or two very small companies already offer something like it.

Swan and BitGo have worked together before. The two said in September 2023 they would form a bitcoin-only trust company, and BitGo Trust is among the custodians Swan already uses, alongside Bakkt and Equity Trust. The pieces Trinity needs are, in that sense, already in place: Swan’s existing custody stack already spans three regulated institutions. What Klippsten described is a different arrangement of keys, not a new set of counterparties, except for the third holder he has not named.

The product arrives after a month in which self-custody took a public beating. Several thousand Coldcard hardware wallets were drained earlier in August. Klippsten put the loss at “1,400 or 1,500 coins or whatever it was” and said one holder he saw reported losing 60 coins. We covered the legal fallout at the time.

His argument was that the damage was small measured against custodians. Something “north of 1.5 million coins” has been lost across Mt. Gox, Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager and Quadriga, he said, which he put at a thousand times what the Coldcard incident cost.

That figure is his own and Unchained has not verified it independently.

He said demand moved after the hack. Swan Sovereign, an advised self-custody service Klippsten said began in May and which Swan announced formally on August 17, days after the exploit, has “1,300 or 1,400 clients already in Swan Sovereign.” Collaborative custody, he said, “is probably the right move, especially in a post-ColdCard world.”

Whether Trinity ships on the stated timetable, and who the third keyholder turns out to be. Klippsten named neither the company nor the criteria, and a model whose entire security argument rests on three independent institutions depends on the third one being genuinely independent.

Listen to the full episode of Unchained.

Related Listen: Inside the Coldcard Hack That Drained Over $100 Million in Bitcoin: Uneasy Money

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/unchainedcrypto.com\/swan-is-building-bitcoin-custody-split-across-three-companies-with-no-key-for-the-client\/#arve-youtube-cd-_g0jvf_e","@type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/cD-_G0Jvf_E?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=1&autoplay=0"}

The post Swan Is Building Bitcoin Custody Split Across Three Companies, With No Key for the Client appeared first on Unchained.