We're Working With AnchorWatch: Insured, Inheritable Bitcoin Custody You Still Control

Self-custody is the answer. It's also, for some people, the thing keeping them up at night.

Bitcoin Well has signed an agreement with AnchorWatch, the Bitcoin-native custody and insurance company. Eligible customers in Canada and the US can now be connected to AnchorWatch's collaborative custody vaults, with Lloyd's of London insurance available to eligible US customers. Here's what that means, why we said yes, and who it's actually for.

Picture a guy we'll call Dan. Dan did everything right. He bought bitcoin non-custodially, withdrew it to a hardware wallet, wrote his seed phrase on steel, and put the steel somewhere clever. Then his stack grew. And grew. And somewhere between "nice little position" and "this is most of what my kids will inherit," Dan stopped sleeping well.

Not because he doubted bitcoin. Because he started running the scenarios. What if the house burns down with my backups in it? What if someone who knows what he holds shows up at the door? What if he gets hit by a bus and his wife, who has heard the words "seed phrase" exactly twice, has to figure out where the clever spot is?

Dan isn't a hypothetical, by the way. We've talked to a lot of Dans. Some of them are Bitcoin Well Infinite clients. And for years our honest answer to Dan was: learn multisig, set up a good inheritance plan, and stay vigilant. That's still good advice. But it's a lot to ask of someone who just wants to hold sound money and get on with their life.

So, on September 14, we announced an agreement with AnchorWatch.

What we actually announced

The short version: Bitcoin Well can now connect eligible customers directly to AnchorWatch. If you're a good fit, we point you their way, they onboard you into one of their vaults, and we earn a referral fee for the introduction. That's the whole business arrangement.

A few things it isn't. It isn't Bitcoin Well launching a custody product. We're not holding anyone's keys, we're not building a vault, and we're not touching your coins. Our model stays exactly what it's been since day one: you buy bitcoin, it goes to a wallet you control, we never sit in the middle. We wrote a whole post about running a company with no vault, and nothing about this changes that.

What it is, is an answer for the customers who feel they've outgrown the "steel plate in a clever spot" phase. As our VP of Operations, Chantel Lillycrop-Kostiuk, put it in the release: our customers are at different stages of their bitcoin journey, and some of them, particularly Infinite clients with larger holdings, want more support with insurance and inheritance planning than a hardware wallet alone can give them.

Availability is Canada and the US for the custody side. The insurance piece is US-only for now, for regulatory reasons that are AnchorWatch's to navigate, not ours.

So what does AnchorWatch actually do?

Here's the plain-English tour. No whitepaper required.

AnchorWatch builds bitcoin vaults using something called miniscript. You don't need to know what miniscript is (I had to look it up twice), but you do need to know what it lets them do: write the rules for who can spend your bitcoin, and when, directly into the bitcoin itself. Not into a company database. Not into a terms-of-service PDF. Into the transaction on the timechain, where anyone with a block explorer can check it.

Their flagship setup, called Trident, works like this. You hold a key (or, in the three-key version, you hold three and need two of them). AnchorWatch holds its own separate set of keys. To move funds under normal conditions, both sides have to sign. You can't be drained by AnchorWatch, because they can't move a sat without you. And a thief who gets your hardware wallet can't drain you either, because they'd also need AnchorWatch, who has a verification process designed for exactly that moment.

Then comes the part I find clever. The vault also has time-locked recovery paths. If you lose your key, or something happens to you, alternative spending rules unlock after a set delay, so verified beneficiaries can recover the funds. And when the insurance policy ends, there's a recovery path you can execute yourself, with your own keys, through Bitcoin Core, with no AnchorWatch involvement at all. That's the "sovereign recovery path" Chantel was pointing to in the release: you can always move your bitcoin independently, and no third party, AnchorWatch included, can move it unilaterally. It's the reason we could sign this deal without swallowing our principles.

(A quick word on that. "Collaborative custody" gets thrown around a lot, and some versions of it are just a custodian with extra steps. The test we care about is simple: can the company move your coins without you, and can you eventually move them without the company? With AnchorWatch the answer is no and yes, in that order. That's the right pair of answers.)

Then there's the insurance. AnchorWatch is a Lloyd's of London coverholder, which is why they can offer policies that actually cover bitcoin held in your own vault, rather than bitcoin held on some exchange's balance sheet. Coverage is optional, from zero up to the full value of the vault, and it spans theft (including the physical, wrench-attack, someone-at-the-door kind), catastrophic loss like fire and flood, and collusion. The minimums and pricing are meaningful (policies start in the six figures and run a fraction of a percent a year, last we checked), which tells you who this is built for: people holding enough that a single bad day would be life-altering.

For the full details, current pricing, and the FAQ that answers the questions I skipped, go straight to the source at anchorwatch.com. They explain their own product better than I will, and the numbers move.

Why would anyone want this?

Fair question from the people who've been holding their own keys since 2017 and sleeping fine. If that's you, this isn't for you, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Keep doing what you're doing.

For everyone else, here's the case, and it starts with an old idea from Ludwig von Mises.

In Human Action, Mises draws a line between two kinds of probability. Class probability is when you know how often something happens across a large group but nothing about any single case: one house in every so many burns each year, and you have no idea which. Case probability is the one-off, the thing that has never happened before in quite this way, where all you have is judgment. Insurance, Mises pointed out, only works on the first kind. You can pool a class. You can't pool a hunch.

For most of bitcoin's life, losing your coins was case probability. Every disaster was a weird story. Nobody could price it, so nobody insured it, so every holder carried the entire tail risk alone. That's what Dan is feeling at 2 a.m. He's self-insuring a risk that no actuary would touch.

What's changed is that bitcoin has been around long enough, held by enough people, in enough standardized setups, that theft and loss have quietly migrated from case probability to class probability. There's data now. Lloyd's, which has been pricing weird risks since ships were wooden, is willing to underwrite it. That's not a small thing. It's the moment an asset class grows up.

And once you can insure it, the sovereignty math changes. The old choice was: hold your own keys and carry all the risk, or hand your coins to an exchange and carry the counterparty risk instead. Both options make you eat a whole tail. A vault where you keep a key, nobody can move funds alone, and the residual risk is priced and covered by a 330-year-old insurance market is a third door. It doesn't replace self-custody. For someone like Dan, it makes self-custody something he can actually live with.

Then there's inheritance, which is the part people avoid talking about until they can't. A seed phrase is a terrible estate plan. It either passes intact to someone who knows exactly what to do with it, or it's gone. Time-locked recovery paths turn "I hope my spouse finds the steel" into a written, verifiable rule that executes on the timechain whether or not anyone remembers where the clever spot was. That alone will be the reason some of our customers call.

Why we said yes

We get asked about partnerships constantly, and we turn most of them down, because most of them ask us to hold something, promise something, or stand between a customer and their coins. This one didn't. It asked us to introduce people we already know to a company that shares our view on custody. Capital-efficient, as the press release says. Consistent with our mission, as I'd put it.

It also helps that we know these folks. If you've watched our Bitcoin Family Office Group sessions, you've already met Becca Rubenfeld and Rob Hamilton from AnchorWatch, and you've heard them make the case for insured self-custody far more thoroughly than I have here. Becca's line in the release was that their custody options let bitcoin owners stay in control of their funds while avoiding single-party risk, and Chantel's was that working with Becca and her team lets us offer more choice "without compromising the principles Bitcoin was built on." That's the same thing we've been saying about exchanges for years, just pointed at the storage problem instead of the buying problem.

The housekeeping bit

The same release wrapped up a debt settlement we announced in our August update: 2,101,200 common shares issued at $0.04 to settle $84,048 owed for sponsorship services delivered between March and July. Arm's-length creditor, no new insiders, four-month hold, subject to the usual exchange approval. If you own BTCW, that's the whole story. If you don't, feel free to skip this paragraph, which you've now finished reading.

Where this leaves us

Not your keys, not your coins. Still gospel. Nothing about this deal moves it an inch, because in an AnchorWatch vault you still hold a key, and you always have a path out that doesn't need anyone's permission. What the deal adds is the thing sovereignty has been missing for people with more at stake than a hardware wallet can comfortably carry: a way to hold your own bitcoin, keep the risk priced and covered, and know your family can reach it when you can't.

If that's the stage you're at, reach out and we'll make the introduction. If you'd rather read first, AnchorWatch's own site is the place to start. Either way, we'll keep doing the part we've always done: get you real bitcoin, in a wallet you control, and then get out of the way.