Self-custody

In self-custody, you hold the keys. Nobody else can move the funds, freeze them or lose them for you. You also carry everything a custodian would: key generation, secure storage, backups, signing, approvals, and recovery when something goes wrong.

For an individual, self-custody can be as simple as a hardware wallet. For a business holding customer funds it means running real infrastructure: nodes for every network, deposit detection, reorg handling, nonce and fee management, sweeps, approval flows and on-call cover.

When it makes sense

When keys and chain operations are your product, or regulation requires you to hold keys yourself, self-custody can be the right call. When they're a means to an end, most teams are better served putting their engineers on the product.

On Valtu

Valtu is a custodial service, so it isn't self-custody. It's built so you can check how keys are held instead of trusting it: the enclave code is reproducibly built and anyone can verify the running version with remote attestation.