There is a slogan that follows bitcoin everywhere: not your keys, not your coins. It is a fine warning and a terrible way to run your financial life. If holding your own keys is the only safe option, then borrowing against your bitcoin, putting it in a retirement account, or handing it cleanly to your children all become someone else's problem - usually a custodian's, and usually with strings attached. Unchained, a company that has spent since 2016 working on exactly this tension, thinks you should not have to choose.
Founded in Austin by Joe Kelly and Dhruv Bansal, Unchained sells bitcoin financial services, but the phrase undersells the idea at the center of it. Almost everything the company offers is built on a single security arrangement called collaborative custody, and once you understand that arrangement the rest of the product line reads like a series of logical consequences.
01 / THE IDEAThree keys, and no one holds all of them
Bitcoin has a native feature called multisignature, which lets funds be locked so that moving them requires more than one private key. Unchained's version is a 2-of-3 setup. The client holds one key. Unchained holds one. A third-party partner holds a backup. Any two of the three can authorize a transaction, which means the client can always act with either the backup or Unchained, and Unchained can never move a client's bitcoin on its own.
The practical payoff is that self-custody stops being a tightrope. Lose a hardware wallet and your bitcoin is not gone; two other keys still exist. Worry that a company might vanish with your funds and the math says it cannot, because it never had unilateral control. This is the same principle large custodians and institutions use, repackaged for people who would rather not become their own single point of failure.
"Clients share control of their bitcoin between keys they hold themselves and keys held by Unchained and other partners."
- Unchained, on the collaborative custody model02 / THE PRODUCTSA bank-shaped thing around coins you still control
Once a client's bitcoin sits in one of these vaults, Unchained layers on the services a holder tends to want over a lifetime. There is a trading desk that lets you buy bitcoin with settlement straight into your cold-storage vault, skipping the custodial exchange and its withdrawal queues. There is a bitcoin IRA - traditional, Roth, or SEP - that the company markets as the only bitcoin retirement account that lets you hold your own keys. There is inheritance planning, so heirs can receive bitcoin without a scavenger hunt for a seed phrase. And for ultra-high-net-worth clients and businesses, a concierge tier called Signature adds dedicated advisory.
The headline product, though, is lending. Unchained originates bitcoin-backed loans: you post bitcoin as collateral, it stays locked in multisig, and you keep a key that lets you verify on-chain that your collateral has not been quietly lent out to someone else. That last detail - no rehypothecation - is not a footnote. It is the whole pitch. The loans carry fixed, transparent pricing, which is another way of saying there are no surprises hidden in the fine print when bitcoin's price swings.
The customer base widens from there. Individuals are the obvious audience, but Unchained also builds for businesses that want to hold bitcoin on their balance sheet, for bitcoin miners who need somewhere secure to park what they produce, and for the ultra-high-net-worth end of the market where a dropped hardware wallet is not a story you want to tell your family. In 2023 it went a step further and powered a bitcoin-backed private credit fund in partnership with Build Asset Management, extending the lending model to institutional investors. A separate partnership with Coincover added another backup key option, widening the network of parties that can hold that critical third key.
03 / THE MOMENTWhy the boring model won
To see why any of this matters, it helps to remember 2022. Crypto lenders like Celsius, BlockFi, and Genesis had built businesses on taking customer coins and lending them out - rehypothecation, in the industry's word for it. When markets turned, that plumbing failed, customers were locked out, and several of those companies collapsed. The lesson landed hard: an IOU for bitcoin is not bitcoin.
Unchained had spent years building the opposite. Because it never takes sole custody and never rehypothecates collateral, there is no maturity mismatch to blow up, and clients can check their holdings against the blockchain rather than a monthly statement. So while competitors were failing, Unchained did something unusual for the moment - it raised money. In April 2023 the company closed a $60 million Series B led by Valor Equity Partners, with NYDIG, Trammell Venture Partners, Ecliptic Capital, and Highland Capital Partners taking part. By late 2023 it reported roughly $2 billion in bitcoin assets on the platform.
"Loans keep bitcoin in secure multisig custody, with a key you control to verify your collateral is never rehypothecated."
- Unchained, on bitcoin-backed lending
04 / THE PEOPLEFrom a Craigslist gig to a custody company
The origin story is unglamorous in the best way. Kelly, a college dropout, and Bansal, then a physics graduate student, met through a Craigslist post - Bansal's department needed a website. They started Unchained in 2016, originated their first bitcoin-backed loan in 2017, and pioneered collaborative custody in 2019. In 2020 they released Caravan, an open-source, browser-based tool that lets anyone build and manage multisig wallets, which is a slightly unusual thing for a custody company to give away and a decent signal of how they think about the space.
Today Kelly serves as chief executive and Bansal as chief strategy officer, over a team of roughly 140 people. The internal north star is easy to say and hard to earn: zero capital losses. Everything conservative about the company - the refusal to rehypothecate, the insistence that clients keep a key - flows from treating that number as non-negotiable. It also shapes the tone of the business. Unchained publishes a steady stream of educational writing, runs conferences, and pushes a message that is closer to financial planning than to trading hype, aimed at people who intend to hold bitcoin for decades rather than days.
That patience is visible in the numbers the company raised along the way. Before the 2023 Series B there was a $25 million Series A in 2021, backed by NYDIG and Trammell Venture Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $102 million. For a company that spent its early years building custody plumbing rather than chasing headlines, the outside capital arrived only after the model had proven it could survive a full market cycle without losing client funds.
05 / THE MARKETWhere it sits, and who it isn't
Unchained lives in the gap between two worlds. On one side are pure self-custody tools and hardware wallets that hand you total control and no services. On the other are custodians and exchanges - Coinbase, BitGo, Anchorage, Fidelity's digital assets arm - that offer services but hold the keys. The closest philosophical neighbor is Casa, which also builds around client-held multisig. Unchained's wager is that a serious, growing group of holders wants the middle: real financial services wrapped around bitcoin they still control.
The company has started acting like a long-term institution, too. In 2025 it launched the Bitcoin Legacy Project, a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort - beginning with a $1 million commitment - to fund education, open-source development, and advocacy across the ecosystem, directing early support to hubs in Nashville, Austin, and Denver. It also partnered with the University of Austin to create what they describe as the first long-term university endowment held in bitcoin, targeting $5 million kept invested for at least five years, which Kelly seeded with a personal donation of 2 BTC. The same year, Unchained secured a Wyoming trust charter through its Gannett Trust entity, a step toward regulated custody and trust services.
None of this makes bitcoin simple. It is still volatile, still early, still a thing you can lose in ways that dollars in a checking account cannot be lost. What Unchained has done is narrower and more useful than a revolution: it took the one feature that makes bitcoin genuinely different - the ability to require multiple keys - and turned it into loans, retirement accounts, trading, and inheritance planning that behave the way people expect financial products to behave. The keys stay with you. Everything else is the service.