03 / Custody & Controls
Held where no one hand can reach them.
The dominant way investors have lost digital assets is not market risk. It is the failure of whoever was holding them.
Held by a third party, off exchange
Assets sit with an independent custodian in segregated storage, not on a trading venue. Balances are not left where they are traded.
Multi-signature authorisation
Moving assets requires multiple independent signing keys. No single party — including Iron Hand Capital — can move them alone, which removes any one person, device or company as a single point of failure.
Separation of duties
The party that trades is not the party that holds. Custody sits outside the trading function by design, so an error or a compromise on one side cannot reach the other.
Provider
[Custodian name, jurisdiction and regulatory status — to confirm before publication.]
What we avoidLeaving balances on exchanges. Single-key control. Custody by the same party that trades.
Market Structure
The risk this industry keeps failing to price
Investors in digital assets have lost far more capital to the people holding their assets than to the market moving against them. That is a structural feature of the industry, not a run of bad luck.
The large failures were custodial
The collapses that destroyed client capital did so because assets were commingled with an operator’s own balance sheet or lent against without disclosure. The market was not the mechanism; the holder was.
Custody became a regulatory question
Institutional practice is now defined by qualified-custodian standards, segregation of client assets and independent verification — the same questions asked of a prime broker in any other asset class.
Multi-party control is the institutional standard
Serious custody distributes signing authority across independent parties, so that no single entity can move assets unilaterally. The point is not stronger secrecy; it is that no one participant is trusted absolutely.
Segregated and offline
Holding assets away from the venues where they are traded, in segregated accounts, removes both the commingling risk and most of the online attack surface at once.
Where we sit in it
We diligence a custodian the way we diligence an asset: jurisdiction, regulatory standing, segregation of client assets, insurance, audit history and how signing keys are generated and held. An investor is exposed to the custodian whether or not they were told its name, so we treat that choice as an investment decision rather than an administrative one.
Market data as at Q2 2026. Sources noted inline.