Unchained forms strategic relationship with Kingdom Trust

We’re excited to announce that Unchained has entered into a strategic relationship with Kingdom Trust to be a key agent on Unchained’s collaborative custody platform. As part of this relationship, Kingdom Trust will be a key agent for both multi-institution vaults and loans.

Vision for collaborative custody

At Unchained, our primary mission is to empower more individuals and businesses to hold their own keys and to achieve a higher level of security for their bitcoin. Collaborative custody is foundational to how we’re expanding access to private key ownership while also improving security posture for a wide range of clients, with a variety of goals, priorities and technical knowledge.

Through collaborative custody, our clients hold their own keys with the benefit of a financial institution as a trusted security partner. For clients who value Unchained as a partner, our goal is to help take care of everything else they might need, including the ability to buy bitcoin, borrow against bitcoin, or hold bitcoin in an individual retirement account (IRA) fully integrated within one platform.

From a security perspective, clients benefit from easy access to multisig security, with Unchained assisting in setup, sharing the operational security burden of holding private keys, and providing technical support should the need arise. By providing this service, holding private keys becomes more accessible to more people and earlier in their bitcoin journey.

While Unchained clients are always empowered to hold their bitcoin in a sovereign, censorship-resistant manner, collaborative custody also enables individuals and businesses to rely on multiple institutions as key holders, which not only further expands access to private key ownership but also allows for innovative custody solutions and financial services that would otherwise not be possible. This is why our relationship with Kingdom Choice is so strategic.

Strategic value of Kingdom Trust relationship

Kingdom Trust is an independent chartered trust company and qualified custodian regulated by the South Dakota Division of Banking. Founded in 2009, it has provided qualified bitcoin custody services for its clients since 2016. The opportunity to form a relationship with Kingdom Trust was strategically valuable to Unchained for a combination of reasons:

• Kingdom Trust has a core focus on bitcoin, independent from Unchained
• Kingdom Trust’s prior investments and track record in bitcoin custody
• Kingdom Trust has a well-established regulatory structure

From a lending perspective, Kingdom Trust’s role as a key agent will further improve our existing multi-institution security model. Our clients will benefit from having a qualified custodian facilitating bitcoin custody independent from Unchained as a second key holder. Clients will maintain the assurances that exist today including multiple institutional keyholders, with fully-segregated key management processes, participating in the security of bitcoin collateral that is not rehypothecated.

Over the course of the next month, we will be transitioning our new multi-institution loan originations to Kingdom Trust as the third-party key agent holding a single key in our 2-of-3 model and we will also be communicating with current clients about our plans to transition existing loans as well in the coming days.

From a custody perspective, our relationship with Kingdom Trust will allow us to expand our multi-institution vaults offering. For many individuals and businesses, full sovereign control of bitcoin is not a preferred path for a range of reasons. An individual may not be ready to take that step from a technical perspective, or may have the need (or preference) for inheritance purposes to not have full control. Similarly, businesses often have shareholders that prefer the managers not be in unilateral control. Or, depending on regulatory requirements, a business may not even be allowed to take full control. In each of these cases, a bitcoin holder can enhance their security by holding one of three keys while ensuring any one institutional partner is not a single point of failure.

A bright future for bitcoin

Our strategic relationship with Kingdom Trust represents an important milestone for Unchained and will have meaningful benefits for current and future clients. It also provides bitcoin holders with a differentiated approach to custody, with two independent financial institutions participating in the safe-keeping of assets. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to custody and choice is good for bitcoin. The alignment between Unchained and Kingdom Trust was founded on the value each institution places on choice and expanding market access to bitcoin, which made this strategic relationship and the innovative services it enables possible.

We look forward to working with Kingdom Trust and to the benefits it brings for our clients and the bitcoin marketplace more generally. Please stay tuned for more updates in the future about our strategic relationship and if you have interest in our multi-institution custody offerings, please schedule a consultation or email us at clientsolutions@unchained.com.