Self Custody Insurance: Protecting Your Bitcoin without Giving It Up | Bitcoin 2026

All right. We're wrapping up the conference here on the enterprise stage with a discussion about insurance. So, everyone in here is a glutton for punishment, apparently. Uh but, no, I think you're all the most concerned about your Bitcoin, and you want to make sure that it's protected. So, I'm Aaron Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Resolver. We're building insurance technology that connects the insurance industry to the Bitcoin economy. Uh we've got an amazing panel here of pretty much everyone in the Bitcoin space who's working on insurance products, but not just any insurance products, products that will help you insure your Bitcoin in self-custody. Sovereign Bitcoin that's insured. So, I'm going to throw it uh first to Chris to introduce himself. We'll go down the line, and then we'll get into it. My name is Chris. I'm the CEO of BitInsure, and we launched in 2021, and in 2022, we signed the very first policy to insure Bitcoin in self-custody against physical risks, $5 wrench attacks, fire, water, extortion, these things. I'm Kevin Loaec, uh CEO of Wizard Sardine. We're a Bitcoin security company, and we build a wallet called the Ledger wallet, uh which currently has an integration uh with Resolver to offer uh insurance on your self-custody. I'm I'm Rob Hamilton, co-founder and CEO of AnchorWatch. Uh we are we are a uh Lloyd's of London cover holder offering Bitcoin insurance for your Bitcoin in cold storage using our Trident Vault, which will Kevin and I will have a lot of fun talking about mini script shortly. Not too much, I promise. We won't get too technical. So, >> [laughter] >> you're laughing. That's what the open-source stage is for. Um so, okay, insurance on self-custody Bitcoin, but qualified custodians and exchanges have insurance policies. Why shouldn't I just put my Bitcoin there if I want insurance, Rob? It's a great question and it's one that I think all of us on stage have probably gotten that question at some point. Uh it really comes down to the details of what is the insurance policy, right? Um this immediately uh as a term of art is a typically a third-party policy, meaning you as a customer at these exchanges are not actually on the insurance policy. The person who is the custodian has an insurance policy and further then there is a disproportionate amount typically of the amount being custodied versus the limit on the insurance policy. And this is just a structural insurance problem where if you are at a single point of failure at a single custodian, there is a concentration aggregation of risk that makes it not economically viable to have one-to-one insurance. Coinbase maybe has like a 350-ish million-dollar policy. They have 300 billion dollars of assets under management. So you start understanding the scale pretty quickly of the power of being able to get your Bitcoin insured in your own self-custody. Yeah, exactly that. Uh so the fact also that um it's it's very related but the fact that what you care about is basically not losing your Bitcoin. So having an insurance where it's one-to-one denominated uh and you know that if you lose your coins today, you're going to get the same amount paid paid out by the insurance company is basically what you want, right? Um and this is very important because most of these uh custodians or exchanges or whatever, every time there is a problem and we have problems all the time, you know? Um or we see problems all the time. Uh every time it happens, you go to like a 5-years-long plus payout period where actually the claims are denominated in dollars and again, it's really not insured to the levels of um of the holdings. So when you see the payouts for things like, you know, Mt. Gox or whichever that happened since then, it's really tiny compared to what you would have had if you could just have, you know, your Bitcoin insured in the first place. Yeah, and Bitcoin as an asset, um if you have it on Coinbase or if you only have exposure through an ETF, um like you're forgoing a lot of the great qualities of Bitcoin. So, we set out to insure Bitcoin in self-custody. We want to remove the counterparty risk, but we also want to be like the final piece of the puzzle. We're not the first piece, like your Upcycle, your setup, like these are the things that you take care of, but the the risk of the physical scenarios that threaten you, those can be taken care of with insurance, and we never touch a private key. You stay in full control, but you have much more security. And I'll start with you, Chris. You know, everybody up here is going about insuring self-custody Bitcoin a little differently. So, can you explain like your process, and then, yeah, maybe we'll, yeah, talk about it down the line. Yeah, we launched as a B2C product with low limits, and we are directly integrated in the most popular hardware wallet in Europe, the Bitcoin only edition of the BitBox. Um the idea behind that is we want to give two kinds of customers the option to have insurance. First, the people that for the first time ever move their coins off an exchange into their own self-custody. They enjoyed insurance on the exchange, and now they their friends tell them take it in self-custody, and with Biturance, you can have a very small policy for 0.3% of the covered sum, and then have that. And then on the other spectrum, we insure a high net worth individuals who fear that the threat of a $5 wrench attack or an extortion or a robbery um threatens not their Bitcoin, but their skin. And so, we want to protect essentially your skin and give you the option and negotiation ship that you can give up your Bitcoin and knowing that it will be replaced through insurance in the hopes that you're not getting abducted, something that we've seen very much on the rise. >> an interesting So, So, what you're talking about there is not 100% of your policy holders Bitcoin would necessarily be on one Trezor, for example, or one BitBox, but it's a significant amount that is insured and it's a and it's amount that if there's an attacker, you give it to the attacker, they see, "Oh, it's 100,000 euro. This is probably all you've got. I'll take that." Meanwhile, the rest of their stock is is somewhere in a multi-sig or something like that. Yeah, so after a certain amount of Bitcoin, I always recommend to have a multi-sig geographically like distributed multi-sig. You can play with time locks. Uh if you under the rest of somebody threatens you or your family, like you can take out the flip chart and draw the charts and tell them, "Oh, I can't access it." And maybe that is convincing to some robber, but maybe somebody will pull out your fingernails. Having just a small amount, like even 10,000 or 50,000 euros worth of insured Bitcoin on an old ledger, on a secondary hardware wallet, might just be enough because we've seen cases in France where people have been abducted for as little little as $6,000. And if you can say like without resisting, "Here, take it. Be gone." And maybe that will, you know, save your health. Yeah, I think to add to that, it's it's it's clear from what you said that there is different risks that can be covered with insurance. Um you don't have to cover all of them. You can choose what you need and what you want. And of course, the kind of technical offering is also different. Um so, for example, what we can do uh with Liana is very different from what you can do with AnchorWatch. We cannot uh give you insurance against theft, against ransoms, just because of the way the the the wallet works, right? You are in full control. We are not a cosigner. There is no one to verify the legitimacy of the transaction you're sending outside of your wallet because you are in control. It's just your wallet. So, what the insurance uh can cover here is loss. Is if you lose all your keys and you cannot recover them, we have a system where a trusted third body can hop in and try to recover your coins. And if this trusted third body just cannot recover your coins, then this is insured and you basically get your Bitcoin back. Um but of course, like with this design, we cannot prevent theft because you have the keys. So, up to you to just, you know, verify what you're signing, basically. So, there is a there is also like a kind of a a choice to make between what kind of coverage you want and a compromise as well to make into how much control are you willing to give away, right? Yeah, and I would say to add to that, uh and you mentioned the word cosigner earlier, that's kind of the core premise of what we've built at Tried and Vault. Uh when AnchorWatch was originally founded in 2022, I remember having a conversation with my co-founder, Becca, around we didn't want to get deep into the technical stuff. We just wanted to manage the insurance piece. And we realized over time to be able to build at scale an insurance solution, we had to go down to the foundational layer of the Bitcoin blockchain. And we leveraged the term we've used around miniscript. I promised Daniel, I won't get technical, but it allows us to encumber more advanced spending conditions. Primarily, the way we use it at AnchorWatch is we serve the role of a cosigner, which means that whenever for the length of your insurance policy, any funds need to move, we have to actively participate in the process, which requires its own back office operation for checking the integrity of the transaction, making sure it's going to the right destination, that you're not under duress, and kind of overseeing the safety of your vault. Fascinatingly enough, too, as a cosigner, we're able to actually link behaviors that can increase or decrease risk with your insurance premium. For example, we have what we call the hoddle discount, where if you have no intention of sending your Bitcoin at any point, this is your deep cold storage, once we set up your vault, we turn off the save the send Bitcoin button, so you can't even execute a transaction without us. The UI won't let you do it. If there's an incident or for some reason where you need to, you can reach out, but that allows us also to lower premiums because Bitcoin is most often at risk when it's in flight and being moved. Once the Bitcoin ever arrives at an address, assuming the keys are secure, there aren't going to be things happening. And so, monitoring the transactions at rest, as well as in flight, allows you to provide this comprehensive security solution. And that kind of also brings up another question that I think everyone gets asked up here, um and that relates to fraud, insurance fraud. How do you know that someone who has one of these insurance policies hasn't just committed fraud lied that they lost the keys, and they're really hoddling it, or they give it to their children, uh and it's a forced hoddle for >> [laughter] >> Like, what what what are what are the different ways that, as insurers, you are mitigating against that risk of fraud, which is pretty much the single one of the single greatest things an insurance company has to concern themselves with? As with any insurance, if there's an insurance claim, um I'm the claims authority. We have a plausibility check, um depending on the amount, like the FBI equivalent would be involved. And with everything that is being insured, like you can insure watches, fine art, gold bars, all of these things are, I would say, much easier to to like fake or fraud. Um with Bitcoin, like I can to a certain extent uh track and follow the money without even putting pants on. So, a gold bar that has this quality and I have been in this industry and I've I'm very familiar with the ways to uh have enhanced privacy on chain. It is very It's quite difficult and we protect against outright fraud that we only so far ensure lower limits comparatively in countries where it's not that interesting to look 10 years over your shoulder for half a million euros. So, there are easier ways to to make money. You can always turn criminal. But, yeah, don't try us. Yes, so for us technically, again, we're just allow an insurance of a service over loss. So, it's much easier. Um like if the user just move their money elsewhere, like this is not insured. Um what we're insuring against is the loss of their keys. So, if they lose their keys, as I was saying earlier, what we're using basically is a time lock, again, mini script. Um so, after a time lock, a third party, typically what you can call a custodian, but they are not really a custodian in this case. They are a recovery partner. Uh they have a key and if the time lock or when the time lock expires or when the funds haven't moved, let's say, for more than a year, these third party would be able to recover your coins and send them back to you. If this third party also lost their keys, and again, they are like a professional, typically regulated entity. If they also lost their keys, the insurance that is covering them is going to pay out. So, risk of fraud here is pretty much non-existent. So, very different, again, depending on the type of risk, right? And I would even just take a half step back here, right? Um Bitcoin as an asset in the risk markets is what's usually called under this PC market. And so if my wife's engagement ring I wanted to get insured and we wanted to stage insurance fraud and hide the ring, collect the payment and get the ring back later. That is infinitely easier than doing that with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a transparent ledger of transaction activity and history. Even for examples like proving you lost keys, if someone went to go file a claim with you guys and they said, "Oh, I lost the keys." But you saw that there was a transaction the day after the claim pays out. Not really a great structure, right? Um additionally for we also use a recovery partner in a slightly different context uh where in the last 30 days of your insurance policy, Anchor Watch as well as a third party we use Coin Corner out of the Isle of Man uh a long-time running Bitcoin exchange, they are able to work with us to return the Bitcoin back to you. And that is something that as a asset like Bitcoin is such a great asset to insure. Yeah, that's that's a a great point that compared to something like physical jewelry um Bitcoin is a much better risk from an underwriting perspective. So, is that playing out in the premiums that people are seeing on Bitcoin versus something like fine art jewelry or is that still we're still bringing the insurance industry along to understand the the benefits that Bitcoin the technology has natively, right? To make it that better risk risk asset. So, I mean we are very early in this industry in insuring Bitcoin and when we started me and my founders like we went and talked to all of the insurance companies in Europe and most of them laughed in our face and then the financialization happened and like suddenly you get calls back. Um Bitcoin like the the the risk that an insurance company takes on usually like a lot of these risks are connected whereas with Bitcoin like that is an entirely new product and like the the number of claims is not like geographically located or like concentrated. And that makes it a very interesting insurance product. So far since it's such a small market and any financial or any insurance product is only as good as the math behind it like we need much more data to then in order to be able to lower also the premiums. So we have like 0.3% is the premium that we are targeting and we are quite competitive that way. Um if you compare it to a uh regular like watch insurance like very similarly and um I I agree Bitcoin is much easier to insure but it is very difficult to explain to insurance companies why that is unless you're dealing with Bitcoiners. So we are working on that. Yeah. And also like as with everything we need to really have the risk spread out across a lot of users for it to make sense for the insurance company. And this is why of course like insurance company cannot just offer you like the one-to-one insurance on Coinbase because then if Coinbase has an issue your coins disappear right with everyone else's coins and the insurance company is probably going to go bust. Um so that cannot work out but it works out in self-custody or in you know user individual user segregated wallets where each user is covered separately. And again with a mini script and time lock and whatever so in in the from technical aspect and I think it's important to explain it here especially if anyone in the room is working for an insurance company. Um the risk here that the recovery partner get let's say hacked their keys compromised or they lose their keys the funds are not lost. The users still have their keys normally. So the only funds that would be lost is the one from the user that lost their keys and did not recover yet. So, we're talking about like a tiny tiny fraction of the total number of insured users that you would have to cover for. So, the risk is extremely low even for a large number of like Bitcoin, even if it's just one recovery partner you're covering because a recovery partner is not a custodian in this sense. They do not control the money. They do not control the coins. If they up and they lose their keys, they can just send an email to all the customers and telling them, "Hey, you should rotate your coins to a different wallet just because your recovery is is not going to work." And that's it. Nobody lost money this way. So, it's actually like I I think it's really a cheat for the insurance company at this stage. It's like it's pretty much inexistent risk that they are charging huge premiums. I'm sorry, but I don't think anything is competitive in this space right now. It's huge premium of free money they are making out of potentially very large wallets just because people are used to take insurance over things including their Bitcoin. Um I don't even think they need to have insurance. I think technically this is good enough. Like the setups we have are good enough. You do not need to take insurance. You might want to for regulatory reason for my like making your board happy or whatever, but the risk of even triggering the insurance is like tiny tiny tiny. So, yeah, um insurance companies I I really hope they're going to drop and I believe they will drop the premium to like sub 10 basis points. Like something like that. Too soon. Not too soon. The way I would think about this going back to your question about the rates online and the evolution of the industry, I think there's an important bifurcation between the panelists here on stage doing self-custody, which is relatively new, versus the specie markets underwriting the larger custodians that's been going on for over a decade. I believe Coinbase's first policy was in 2012, 2013 and they've had now well over a decade of data information gathering to be able to understand and underwrite that risk better. Um and I think that's just really important context for understanding the economic viability. I think I agree with Kevin in the long arc of history as more data gets aggregated, practices get standardized, that there will be a natural matching of supply and demand of capital. You see a version of this too though with like Bitcoin back lending, right? The rates for a Bitcoin back loan are astronomically higher than what you would need for any other asset that you're borrowing against and it's about a conversation, right? These are longer-term relationships that insurance is a very long iterative game, many years and collecting lots of data and this is why the industry is so early as being part of that infrastructure. And I think it's overtime going to have more and more importance when you think about things like if you were to get a mortgage against your house, you get an insurance policy on it. The bank won't close the mortgage until there's a homeowner's insurance policy on it. I think in the longer arc of history, you know, the actual banks of the Bitcoin ecosystem will be insurance companies. They're the ones that are going to have the balance sheets to be able to underwrite these risks and understand it. And if you are trusting your Bitcoin with someone, you want someone with balance sheet strength just like if you're a very large publicly traded company, you don't use a regional bank, you use one of the globally systemic important infrastructure banks, right? And I think in that long arc, the insurance companies are going to be the banks and this is the nascent stage of so you know, developing out the data, understanding product development, understanding how to properly structure things, getting loss and claims data, iterating on policy wording. This is you know, this is Bitcoin if it's a intergenerational project, getting the insurance infrastructure fully distributed to the point where Kevin wants is going to take another decade, two decades and that's okay because there's a lot to be able to build and advance and kind of move forward the importance of this in the meantime. So, what I'm hearing is right now insuring self-custody Bitcoin, there's an asymmetric opportunity for those who understand the risk and those who don't. And those who can enter into the market and start underwriting this risk now will start developing a larger data set and have more refined models and have a first-mover advantage against the other insurance companies. And those with larger amounts of Bitcoin now have the balance sheet strength to start on this currently. So, any treasury companies listening who want to be the next banks should start getting into insurance. Is that what I'm hearing? Yes. Every time I hear Warren Buffett invoked about we're going to be the Berkshire Hathaway of Bitcoin, you do realize it's an insurance company, right? Like it's a very uh having a capital balance sheet, putting it to work. Um it is it is the future, for sure. Yeah, I completely agree. Like we hear a lot about like Bitcoin yield and whatever, um but I I really think insurance is like a very low risk right now on Bitcoin compared to the actual premium they're charging. And so, yeah, that's actually the kind of yield you can you can do with a a large balance sheet. Uh sure, it's not going to be 2%, but uh hey, it's something. Welcome to Predict. [music] The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct. Your prediction, your edge. Dual bets. Predict where everything is a market. All right. So, we've talked about mostly coverage for loss, theft. Um but what about other and we hinted on it a little bit, you know, wrench attacks. What What is What other types of coverages exist in the marketplace today that can complement the loss of your Bitcoin um and the the and mitigate against the threats that Bitcoiners face when they're holding Bitcoin in self-custody? Rob, I'll throw it to you first. For these other risks, like these kidnap and ransom risks, uh it is one, we at AnchorWatch do broker kidnap and ransom insurance if you're interested, whether an individual or company. As for this part of the risk, it is actually part of our policy. Um in the event that there is violent coercion, we will be able to have that as part of our, you know, what our covered losses are. Uh as it relates to this risk in particular, I think this is just going to in general over time, right now, like the low-hanging fruit are people with Bitcoin and digital assets to be able to target. Um I think just criminals are getting more sophisticated in general. I'm not sure if you saw um there's also just very hostile government policies. There are certain countries, like France and Sweden, where um in the Sorry, France uh had someone who worked at the tax authority that was giving tax returns to people who were selling Bitcoin to criminal networks to then go to target their houses. I believe it's in Sweden, all tax returns are public. >> Yeah. So, you just scroll a database, send an open claw, and say, "Give me every single filing that has Bitcoin sales or buying." And then criminals just get a wish list of where they should go knock on doors. So, I think there's a the those are the kind of things that I think those kind of loops will get tied out over over Um but I think just in general on the internet, criminals are getting more sophisticated and I'm trying to understand how to attack new wealth. So it's a risk everyone should be aware of and think about. Yeah, that's the unique thing about Bitcoin. I always say, in my neighborhood, I'm probably the poorest person, but I'm by far the richest person based on the things that you can beat out of me. Like my neighbors, they have houses, they have boats. I only have Bitcoin. You're a big piñata. Yes, I'm a big walking piñata and there is like a target on my back. And insurance was the only solution that I saw and as you mentioned, in France, every 2 and 1/2 days right now is a 5-star ranch attack. Somebody is getting abducted, somebody is getting hit. And those cases and 2/3 of those cases from the point of view of the robber, they're successful. And they they end in mutilation, they end like in actual like physical altercations and weapons are involved. And that is not just like street criminality, that those are actually like proper, yeah, criminal underground organizations. This is just going to, you know, increase over time because Bitcoin as an asset, every time like it will do another 10 or 100 X and everybody who posted about Bitcoin in 2017 theoretically enjoyed a 100 X is potentially a target of this. And again, I don't see any other solution how to secure yourself other than insurance. Yeah, that's actually a an interesting point as well because over time in Bitcoin, we've made sure and we keep doing it that of course security of your Bitcoin is good and it's getting better, right? So we're making sure the random person hitting on you with a hitting you with a with a hammer or whatever they want. Um is not going to get your Bitcoin. So that technically we can do. But that doesn't solve the problem that someone is hitting you with a hammer, right? And that's where the insurance can help. Right. So I think if we can recap the panel, major points, one, self-custody exists. You should insure it. You can insure it with any of these companies up here. And it is a better insurance policy than you'll get with a custodian. And if you're from the insurance industry and listening, Bitcoin is actually a more insurable risk than any other financial asset in history. There we go. Great. >> [applause] [music] >> Every year, this community comes together [music] to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. >> [music] >> And every year, the stage gets bigger. >> [music] >> Sound money, center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the [music] next chapter in Bitcoin history? Come home. >> [music] >> Nashville, July 2027.