Onboard your family & friends to self-custody with Unchained Connections

Today we’re introducing Connections, a new feature for Unchained vaults that lets you secure your bitcoin with your closest friends and family, and let them secure bitcoin with you. 

What is Unchained Connections?

Unchained’s multisig vaults have long been the best way to take control of your bitcoin in the safest way possible, ensuring your wealth is not exposed to the risk of hacks and exchange failures. Now, Unchained clients can connect with others on the platform to build collaborative custody vaults with shared keys. When you share one key with a friend or family member, you become their trusted backup, helping them get off the exchange, protecting them from attacks, and ensuring they have a proper succession plan for their generational wealth.

Get your friends & family off the exchange

As their trusted bitcoin guide, you’ve already explained to your loved ones that keeping bitcoin on an exchange is risky. But taking the first step towards self-custody can still be daunting! Now you can more easily help your friends and family withdraw bitcoin from exchanges, transition from ETFs, or upgrade from singlesig. They can secure one key in collaboration with you, or you can team up with another person to build a fully managed custody solution for them. 

As someone already controlling the keys to their bitcoin, you’re an invaluable resource to help your loved ones get started. But we’ve got your back: Unchained provides extensive educational resources on the basics of bitcoin self-custody, and with Concierge Onboarding, you and your loved ones can receive hands-on guidance from the most professional team in the industry.

Help safeguard their bitcoin savings

By including your key in their wallet, you can be a source of helpful friction to protect your loved ones against mistakes. If your family member is a victim to a phishing or impersonation attack, they won’t be able to move bitcoin without a co-signature from you or Unchained. 

You can even offer emotional support as they learn to weather bitcoin’s volatility. In a configuration where you hold one of three keys, they can always move their bitcoin on their own—Unchained will always sign at their request—but your participation can open the door to conversations that can help prevent expensive mistakes.

When they have any issues, they can call on Unchained—whether that be for technical support or to co-sign with our enterprise-grade Unchained key. But they can also call on you for support to recover their bitcoin in the case of theft or loss of their key. 

Never worry about bitcoin inheritance again

Building on the work we’ve done with the Unchained Inheritance Protocol, Connections makes it easier than ever to ensure you or your loved ones’ bitcoin will get to its intended recipient should something happen. With Connections, you don’t have to worry about locating bitcoin after someone passes—Unchained will work with the authorized representatives of the estate to determine the applicable transfer process. 

With great control comes great responsibility

Connections allows you to create vaults where other people besides Unchained are now involved in securing a multisig wallet. However, that also means there are more participants that need to protect private keys and other information. Existing Unchained clients are better positioned than anyone else in the world to be at the forefront of peer-to-peer key sharing, but before you share a key, we highly recommend you read our operational security guide. 

An ever-growing network of bitcoin keys is not just about ensuring you and your connections never lose bitcoin to theft and mistakes. It’s also about making sure the global bitcoin network is robust, decentralized, and ready to weather new monumental threats it hasn’t yet faced. That’s why we believe a network of keys is the future of bitcoin custody—from global hubs to local neighborhoods.

Bitcoin is a story of grassroots adoption. With Connections, we can build a stronger bitcoin network controlled by millions of keys together—one connection at a time.

Get started

Unchained Connections is available right now in your Unchained account—log in to your account to get started and watch the video below to learn more about how it works.