Benjamin “Bader” Ampen

Whether you’re a @CasaHODL’s member or not, you don’t want to miss this conversation if you’re interested in Bitcoin and security 🔐

« Why would I pay a subscription to hold my own bitcoin? » Fair question. A hardware wallet is a one-off purchase, and for small amounts it's a perfectly good setup I think. What the subscription pays for is everything around the keys: coordinating several keys across devices, guided replacement if one fails, inheritance for your family, emergency lockdown, and people you can actually reach when something feels off. Casa Standard starts at $21 a month or $250 a year. The question I'd ask back: at what amount would losing your bitcoin really hurt?

Spreading wealth across places has been standard advice for a long time. With bitcoin it can be done with a few keys and some planning, no holding structures needed. The idea: instead of one seed in one place, you use a multisig vault where, say, any 3 of 5 keys can sign. Then you spread the keys. One at home, one in a safe deposit box, one with a trusted person in another city, one in another country. Lose two keys, or have two out of reach, and you can still move your funds. Someone who gets hold of one or two can't. It's more work than a single hardware wallet in a drawer for sure, but you benefit from much better security! For people whose lives span several countries, which describes a lot of people in this region in particular, it's worth thinking about seriously. PS: remember, in a multisig setup, the different keys enable you to sign transactions to move funds; they don’t individually “hold” a part of your assets, that’s why losing one or two in a 3-out-of-5 architecture doesn’t mean you’ve lost any of your funds.

Thank you @lopp for making your letter public 🙌 Your points about personal freedom and sovereignty really resonate with me. Proud to work for @CasaHODL and happy to help anyone who needs support with their “smart self-custody architecture” 🤝

The riskiest moment in self-custody is often the transfer. Buy on an exchange. Copy an address. Paste it. Hope your clipboard hasn't been tampered with. Check the first and last characters. Wait. Repeat every month if you're stacking. In the US, Casa members can buy bitcoin directly in the app and send it to their vault in seconds, and ACH purchases now come with zero fees for transfers of $250 or more. For larger positions, our OTC desk handles execution. Fewer apps, fewer copy-pastes, fewer moments where things can go wrong.

If you already own a hardware wallet, you're closer to multisig than you think. A lot of people I speak with assume that moving to Casa means starting from zero. It’s not true! On the Standard plan you bring your own device, and it becomes one of the keys of your vault. Your phone becomes the second one for example, and Casa holds a third for recovery. Here you go, a more secure 3-key vault 😊 Same hardware you already trust, but no longer a single point of failure. If that one device breaks, gets lost or turns out to have a flaw (as seen recently in multiple situations…), your bitcoin doesn't go with it. And if you'd rather not do it alone, our team can walk you through the setup live.

People often assume self-custody is a bitcoin-only topic. More and more of the conversations I have, especially in this region, are about stablecoins. Businesses paid in USDT. Families holding USDC as their dollar savings. Freelancers invoicing clients abroad. The risks are the same as with bitcoin: an exchange account can be frozen, a single wallet can be drained, a seed phrase can be lost. And the answer is the same too. Casa vaults secure BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC with the same multi-key setup, recovery and inheritance. Same app, same advisors. A caveat tough: stablecoin issuers can freeze tokens at their end. Multisig protects you from losing your keys, not from the issuer.

When someone calls Casa, it's sometimes because things are not going well. A lost phone. A hardware wallet that won't turn on. A message that looks like it's from us but isn't. And, occasionally, something more serious. That's why our advisors go through a six-month training programme before they support members on their own. In a world where more and more services get automated, I'm glad this part of Casa stays very human. Software protects the keys. Our people help you make good decisions when you're stressed. Shout-out to the team 🤝

Important reminder. Your setup is what matters, solutions have been built to protect you from specific risks. Make the right choice. Happy to help if you want to choose @CasaHODL

Quick self-custody check for your Monday. Especially relevant after what started over the weekend with Ledger… (still developing) Is there a photo of your seed phrase on your phone? A note in your email drafts? A screenshot sitting in a cloud backup? If yes, your cold wallet isn't that cold anymore. The security of the whole setup is now the security of your iCloud or Google password. Same problem, in a different way, if the only copy is one piece of paper in one drawer. One fire, one flood, one house move: gone. The words need to be offline, and they shouldn't all sit in one place. That's hard to do well with a single seed, and it's one of the reasons multisig exists: several keys, in several places, none of them enough on its own (this could be the difference between losing everything from your hijacked single wallet and being safe, back to my intro point).

Something I've noticed doing both sales and coaching: the best conversations in both are the ones where I talk the least. On a good discovery call, the prospect tells me what actually worries them, not what they think I want to hear. In a good coaching session, the client hears themselves say something they hadn't quite put into words before. In both cases, the work on my side is mostly this: ask a real question, then stay quiet a little longer than feels comfortable. It took me years in management to learn it. Leading large teams, I was usually the one expected to speak first and have the answer. Coaching taught me that the most useful thing I can bring is space. Still practising. Some days better than others.

Here we go again …