Within the sphere of traditional finance, at least, crypto has a custody problem. The problem? Crypto is complicated, security is tricky and — if we’re being frank — the suits don’t know a bit from a byte (or a blockchain from a cloud server).
In fact, you could rightly say that what makes crypto, well, crypto actually makes them nervous. Unlike settling traditional assets, you can’t reverse a bitcoin transaction, the blockchain offers no internal or centralized controls and there’s no one to go to if you muck up a transaction. Bitcoin is everything that the traditional finance sector is not, so it’s understandable that Wall Street and friends would be wary of holding an asset they don’t understand and can’t control.
And holding is precisely the issue. In its many ETF rejections, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission returns to the same problem (among others like market maturity) ad infinitum: ETF providers must ensure proper custody for crypto assets so mismanagement doesn’t throw investor funds into the void.
So how do we give these institutions proper custody to appease both them and the regulators? Striking up a partnership with Legacy Trust, a Hong Kong-based asset management firm, French hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger thinks it’s whipped up a solution.
Introducing Ledger Vault
“We want to be the technology provider for the folks who want self-custody, [to] have their own keys and be their own bank, but we also want to provide it to the larger institutions that want to provide a service into the marketplace,” Demetrios Skalkotos, global head of Ledger Vault, told Bitcoin Magazine.
The Ledger Vault bills itself as the world’s first institutional-grade, multi-authorization wallet management tool. During our interview, Skalkotos told us that the Ledger Vault separates itself from other custody solutions by being
