The service, marketed as "collaborative," involves one collaborator who is a company and one collaborator who is you.
A Bitcoin custody firm has generously offered to relieve the nation's families of the heavy burden of holding all of their own keys — proposing instead to hold one of them itself, purely as a kindness.
The arrangement, marketed as "collaborative custody," is collaborative in the sense that the family and the company each hold a key: a partnership in which only one partner has a compliance department, a quarterly earnings call, and the ability to be acquired.
"We're not a custodian," the firm clarified, holding a key to the customer's money. "We're a co-pilot." Asked who flies the plane if the co-pilot is acquired by a larger plane, the firm scheduled a follow-up call.
Competing products were reviewed. One backs the dollar value with a Lloyd's-of-London policy and a premium that grows with the vault. Another routes everything through a chartered trust company. A third — the Bitcoin IRA — simply holds the keys outright and is at least upfront about it.
"Not your keys, not your coins" — a phrase, it turns out, also available for licensing.
Each, observers note, solves the real difficulty of inheritance by reintroducing the one thing self-custody existed to remove: a company in the middle.
Everything above is satire. Here is how it actually goes when you fix it.
What these services trade away
These are real, often well-run products, and they solve a real problem: inheritance and recovery are hard, so they bring in a company to help. The trade is explicit — a company holds one of the keys, or a premium scales with your vault, or a chartered trust company sits in the middle, or a custodian holds everything outright. Each adds a third party to a setup whose entire point was not having one. (For the named, side-by-side comparison, see The Paper Side.)
How bitcoin-assistance helps
The assistant is what makes the unbundled, no-company version actually doable for a normal family. bitcoin-assistance builds and maintains the family vault — every key in the family, no company on the recovery line, no premium tied to vault value, no chartered entity in the middle. It handles the technical hard parts (building the vault, the recovery path, the periodic review) that were the reason people reached for a custody firm in the first place. The attorney does the paperwork; the assistant does the Bitcoin; no third party holds your coins.
The competition solves a hard problem by adding a company. The vault solves it by making the company unnecessary.
Background, not legal or financial advice; product details change. See The Paper Side for the full comparison.