Beyond Retail Wallets, The Next Layer of Crypto Ownership

The Custody Spectrum and Its Tradeoffs

Crypto users face a spectrum of options for custodying their assets. Self-custody wallets offer the most autonomy, requiring users to store seed phrases that cannot be recovered if lost or stolen. On the other end, users can keep their tokens on a centralized exchange, handing custody responsibility to the exchange. Both options have their drawbacks; a lost seed phrase cannot be recovered, and an exchange hack or sudden closure can also jeopardize users' assets. 

The same decision process applies to institutions, family offices, and investment firms. Self-custody often carries too much risk with a single point of failure, and centralized custodians may be too costly or built for the wrong scale. And while exchanges can offer security, they forgo onchain options such as the latest memecoin or earning DeFi yield on a new chain the exchange hasn't supported yet. 

A growing cohort of users wishes to hold assets onchain but are looking for a more secure solution than seed-phrase wallets. These users already have coins, staked assets, and DeFi positions that make it hard, if not impossible, to move into an enterprise custodian. 

Self-custody remains a preferred custody method for many holders with long time horizons, often months or years. Custodial risks from exchanges accumulate over time. Exchanges revise withdrawal policies, delist assets, tighten verification requirements, geofence entire jurisdictions, get hacked, or fail outright with customer assets commingled or lent against. While these events are unlikely for short-term traders in a given month, history shows that over a multi-year period, even some of the largest exchanges are susceptible to these risks.  Mt. Gox, QuadrigaCX, Celsius, and FTX are some of the most infamous centralized entities that ended with users holding bankruptcy claims instead of their assets. Exchange exits pose a similar problem; Binance and Bybit withdrew from Canada after regulators tightened requirements, forcing users to withdraw their assets quickly with little recourse.  

To mitigate custody risks, investors are looking to ETFs. Crypto ETFs are offered by issuers such as BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale and provide price exposure to the underlying asset in a familiar ETF wrapper while abstracting away the need to custody assets. Adoption has been fast; Bitcoin ETFs already account for 30% of total spot volume and have amassed $145 billion in AUM, indicating rapid adoption of ETF wrappers for tokens. The tradeoff for ETFs is the optionality that holders would otherwise have. Investors cannot move the ETF or use it for DeFi activities onchain. Moreover, ETFs are generally limited to majors like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, with most long-tail assets inaccessible to ETF-only investors.

While self-custody gives flexibility and enables onchain activity, it has drawbacks. To keep self-custodied assets safe, users follow strict guidelines, from generating and storing their seed phrase in a secure location to never entering it into a browser or capturing it in a photo or cloud backup. The process of storing seed phrases is complicated because users must ensure that someone will be able to recover it in the event they pass away. Wallet best practices are often rigid and easy to overlook, leading to forgotten, misplaced, or lost assets. Numerous examples exist of people who wrote seed phrases down incorrectly, lost them, or passed away, leaving their assets irrecoverable. Estimates put these losses at over $7 billion, with a large portion attributed to human error. 

What a Seed Phrase Cannot Do

Seed phrase-based wallets are great for proving ownership and control of assets but lack the planning and administrative tools needed for real-world use. These wallets cannot be recovered, survive their holder, or enforce governance. Premium self-custody platforms are an evolution of seed phrase wallets that answer some of the hardest questions. 

The first issue to solve for is recovery. Once a seed phrase is lost or compromised, it cannot be recovered. If a seed phrase is captured in a photo, handled by another person, or backed up digitally, it can be compromised. The only solution would be to generate a new seed phrase and transfer assets to the new wallet. For crypto users, this is a tedious process involving unwinding DeFi positions, unstaking coins, and physically sending assets to the new wallet. The process can take days or weeks and trigger premature or unexpected tax consequences. 

Second, if a wallet owner passes away, seed wallets offer no succession planning. Ownership and succession for wallets are hard to distinguish; nothing separates a legitimate heir from someone who happens across the seed phrase. The current workaround is to resort to detailed instructions in wills, but recipients may struggle to access the wallet, or the will may be absent entirely. 

Governance is another issue seed phrase wallets must address. Seed phrases create a single point of failure, with little recourse to freeze or delay withdrawals. Even if a user physically separates their seed phrase into two locations, key-man risk remains. MPC may help with separating key shares and requiring multiple shares to participate, but individual roles remain undefined. A 2-of-3 structure can state how many people must agree but cannot distinguish between a CIO who can rebalance but not withdraw and a withdrawal that requires 3-of-3 consensus. Similarly, seed phrase wallets and MPC do not typically define spending limits or freeze periods. In traditional finance, institutions enable security features such as withdrawal limits, cool-down periods, and settlement windows to buffer decisions. 

Oversight is another increasingly important feature. Accountants, auditors, and co-owners need read access, and seed-phrase wallets offer no way to grant it. Monitoring onchain transactions is tiring and complicated by noise and wallet dusting. Being able to track and reproduce a record of what was proposed, who approved it, what the rule required, and when it executed is key for auditors to verify independently.

Lastly, seed phrase wallets do not address physical risks. A wallet that reveals its full balance the moment a device is unlocked offers nothing to a holder being physically coerced. As onchain wealth becomes easier to associate with a named individual, the physical risks also rise.

Bron's Approach

As DeFi value locked recovers from its June lows, users are increasingly looking for more sophisticated self-custody options. In three months, TVL has risen more than 30% from its lows, with a portion of these pools captured by onchain whales managing large portfolios across lending markets, LSTs, and LP positions, often from a seed phrase wallet. These users are crypto-native and benefit deeply from better features beyond securing a private key. Users need infrastructure for administering assets across recovery, succession, governance, permissions, and day-to-day transactions. Bron positions itself as a platform for managing onchain wealth, with custody as one component of a broader control layer.

Bron leverages multi-party computation (MPC) by default. MPC removes the need for seed phrases and instead stores key shares across different environments. Bron uses a 2-of-3 structure with 3 key shares, where 2 must sign to approve a transaction or produce a signature. The user, Bron, and a trusted third party each hold a share, with the third used for recovery. This ensures that no complete private key exists at any point, and even if one share is compromised, assets cannot be withdrawn. MPC enables better recovery options as individual key shares can be regenerated without needing to migrate to a new wallet. Bron layers an additional method for seedless recovery, allowing users to designate trust guardians to help recover wallets. 

Inheritance is built natively in the platform through beneficiary designations. Users can choose individuals to recover wallet assets if an unfortunate event occurs, secured with time-based locks and multi-party safeguards. The transition process happens natively in the app, without needing a third party to custody users' assets. 

Bron makes a novel attempt to define role-based access to enable governance and oversight features. Not everyone who needs to use the account should have access to the entirety of its assets. For example, an accountant reviewing transactions should only need to see transactions without being able to sign them. Similarly, a family member may be allowed to spend up to a certain threshold, while any withdrawals above that amount must be approved by the account owner. Bron allows users to set these functions and enables account management features that align more closely with custody platforms people are familiar with. 

Additionally, Bron addresses concerns around real-world threats. Physical robberies and assaults motivated by crypto wealth have been on the rise, with 2026 set to be the worst year for attacks in France and reports up 76% between 2024 and 2025. There is a growing need to obfuscate wallet balances in the event users are ever forced to open their crypto wallets. To mitigate physical crypto robberies, Bron provides a feature that places balances behind a secret PIN, letting users shield their main assets by creating decoy accounts with different-valued holdings.

Strategic Outlook

Crypto exploits are set to be the worst in 2026, with more than 30 major incidents already. Many of these are phishing-related incidents, further highlighting the need for robust permission control and transaction limits. Most of these exploits stem from authorization failures, which a seed phrase and a bare quorum cannot fully address. As crypto users become more sophisticated and their onchain wealth grows, demand to move away from seed-phrase wallets multiplies. However, even with the best custody technology, users remain susceptible to phishing, malicious approvals they sign unknowingly, compromised devices, and software bugs. The key is that these platforms limit the damage that these mistakes and exploits can cause. 

Signing for transactions is a key risk point for crypto custody. Signing typically happens on an internet-connected device, which exposes users to Trojans, infostealers, malicious browser extensions, and clipboard injectors that swap a destination address between copy and paste. One way to mitigate this is to use a dedicated machine for crypto-related transactions and activity, a task that is both cumbersome and expensive for the average person and only addresses threats at the endpoint. If the application is compromised upstream, a clean machine offers no benefit. 

Users must also scrutinize what each transaction authorizes before approving it, since a signature can grant unlimited spending. Transaction data or calldata can be hard to understand, and not every platform parses the data into a human-readable sentence. Combined with FOMO or a sense of urgency, this can lead users to skip the review step entirely.  

Once users grant permissions to a site or dApp, they open themselves to further risks. Approvals are persistent, so they survive the session until they are revoked through a dedicated transaction. Exploits using these permissions can occur weeks or months after the user signed the transaction, by which point it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the attack vector. No wallet can guarantee a user reads calldata correctly or that their device is clean, but a custody platform can build safeguards that bound what a single approval is able to move.

Bron is better understood as an onchain wealth management platform than a wallet. Leveraging MPC, Bron provides a custodial foundation and eliminates seed phrases. The broader product suite, however, sits above the key-management layer: designating successors and guardians to support recovery and access while providing role-based protections so people can access only what they need. Bron builds these novel features on top of an existing stack we are all familiar with, including onchain swaps, staking, and on/offramping, leveraging industry-leading partners. Together, these functions turn a crypto account from a signing endpoint into infrastructure through which individuals and organizations can administer onchain wealth.

A measure of a mature custody environment is not whether users can be stopped from making mistakes, but rather how quickly the damage can be limited and how well platform controls minimize terminal outcomes.