Storing Company Treasury in Bitcoin-Multisig with Unchained Capital

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You might want to consider storing your company's treasury and payroll in #Bitcoin rather than in banks. But you're afraid of self-custody. Here comes "collaborative custody" and a leading firm in the field, @unchainedcap. What is Unchained Capital and how can it help? 🧵 👇

1/19 Many tech companies in the US had the cold sweat during the weekend when their funds were possibly locked in the now collapsed Silicon Valley Bank. twitter.com/TimDraper/status/1634623841359237124

2/19 Keeping cash in #Bitcoin comes with the responsibility of storing your own private keys. This might be scary when you're managing large treasuries and payrolls. Here multisig vaults become useful. You're diversifying the control of your Bitcoin to multiple private keys.

3/19 Unchained Capital is a company that allows you to set up a Bitcoin vault using a multisig. Unchained can't move your funds by itself. But if you lose some of your credentials, they can step in to help you.

4/19 Multisig vault is a digital vault to store your Bitcoin. It requires multiple keys to move your funds. You have 2 keys, and Unchained has 1. Even if Unchained wanted to stop you from moving your funds, it cannot.

5/19 Unchained Capital is not only for companies. You can also use it as an individual to store your BTC. If you own a significant amount of BTC, it's not a good idea to store it all on a single hardware wallet and have the seed phrase written on a piece of paper or memorized.

6/19 What if you lose the piece of paper? What if you're physically attacked and somebody finds your seed phrase and hardware wallet? What if you get hit on the head and lose your memory?

7/19 Multisig vaults make you resistant to physical attacks because you would need multiple hardware wallets to access your funds. If a thief got access to one of those wallets you use to sign in to Unchained Capital, you could store a decoy (fake) amount in it.

8/19 The thief would walk away happily with the smaller amount of BTC, not knowing that you have a bigger stash somewhere else. Unchained Capital charges no annual fees for personal vaults. For businesses they have yearly plans ranging from $250 to $2500 and also custom plans.

9/19 The vault supports Coldcard, Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets. When setting up your vault, you will upload your extended public keys (xpub) to your account. After that, you can deposit BTC to your multisig vault on Unchained Capital.

10/19 The company launched in March 2019. Besides the collaborative custody features described above, it also offers a trading desk, BTC-backed loans on a similar multisig basis, and self-custody Bitcoin IRAs. These additional services are only available in certain US states.

11/19 The trading desk enables you to buy Bitcoin straight to your cold storage. The Bitcoin IRA helps you to save in Bitcoin with tax advantages. Unchained Capital also has a concierge service to hold your hand when onboarding.

12/19 The company states that all its keys are cold-stored on hardware devices in geographically separated, physically secure locations that require identity verification for access. Wallet seeds are stored in physically secure locations separate from the wallets.

13/19 The company doesn't store devices or seeds at its corporate offices. It's possible to opt-in for identity and intent verification for extra security by recording a video verification. This would be used to verify your identity if e.g. your tx exceeds a certain amount.

14/19 Even if the Unchained Capital website went down for some reason, and you couldn't access your BTC through the dashboard, you could use this open-source multisig coordinator to access the Bitcoin network: unchained-capital.github.io/caravan/#/

15/19 You would need to have access to 2 of your keys and to your multisig config file (which you should download to your computer when setting up your vault).

16/19 With Unchained Capital, you're more protected from "$5 wrench attacks" because ideally you wouldn't be able to access your other signing device very easily. For this reason, the personal vault could be a good cold-storage option for a Bitcoiner who travels a lot.

17/19 For privacy-conscious, a tradeoff is that Unchained Capital requires KYC. The company also knows how much BTC is stored in its vaults. If states passed laws to make BTC ownership illegal, Unchained would most likely be forced to hand over your personal information.

18/19 Because of various benefits and tradeoffs, it's important for you to find your personal solution. This could be for example having your KYC-Bitcoin and non-KYC-Bitcoin separately, and using Unchained Capital's multisig vaults for some of the KYC'd coins.

19/19 Finally, a great overview and tutorial of Unchained Capital by @BTCsessions: youtube.com/watch?v=ToMYVLrcKgo