We’re thrilled to welcome Jason Neiss as Onramp’s new Head of Product. Jason brings deep experience across financial infrastructure, custody, and product development—and he’s hit the ground running.

In his debut post below, Jason shares why he believes multi-institution custody (MIC) will define the next era of secure bitcoin ownership—and how Onramp is building the infrastructure to support it.

Why MIC Aligns with Bitcoin’s Ethos

By Jason Neiss, Head of Product at Onramp

Inspired to Build Solutions for Bitcoiners

Hi, I’m Jason, and I lead Onramp’s Product team, having recently joined from Custodia Bank. I’ll be periodically writing about Onramp’s product strategy and why I believe multi-institution custody (MIC) will become critical infrastructure for the emerging bitcoin-powered financial system.

MIC is elegant and can appear simple to users—but like most meaningful innovations, it hides real complexity under the hood. This series will offer more insight into how the model works and why we’re building atop it.

By way of background, I started my career as an engineer writing software for medical imaging systems before moving into product. I’ve built software across a range of industries—clinical research, defense and intelligence, autonomous robotics, and TradFi regtech—and along the way, I discovered bitcoin.

As a recovering engineer, I dug into bitcoin’s technical and monetary foundations. I built conviction and felt compelled not just to hold it, but to build for it. Like many, I’ve learned some lessons the hard way—losing bitcoin to poor decisions or untrustworthy third parties. That experience made it clear: custody matters. And it pushed me to start working on solutions that help people secure growing bitcoin balances the right way.

At Custodia, I helped bring its bitcoin custody product to market and worked to deliver regulated banking services for the industry. But ongoing regulatory headwinds, including the Federal Reserve lawsuit, took their toll. It was time to look ahead.

That led me to Onramp—and to multi-institution custody. After studying the model closely, I came to believe it could serve as the foundation, the custody layer, for bitcoin’s next chapter. A protocol-level upgrade to how capital is secured.

A New Custody Model Challenges Bitcoin’s History

When I first encountered multi-institution custody, I misunderstood it. I assumed it was just another collaborative custody setup—one where the client still holds a key. But that’s not how Onramp’s MIC works.

Instead, three independent institutions hold keys. The client doesn’t hold one—but also doesn’t cede control. That challenged my assumptions. Bitcoiners have long championed self-custody and the sovereignty of key ownership. So how could this model—where you don’t hold a key—still align with bitcoin’s values?

The reality is, even with better hardware and UX, self-custody still imposes a real technical burden on most users. Stories of lost seed phrases, inaccessible funds, and coercion attacks are all too common. Collaborative custody helps, but it still requires managing a device and private key material.

What MIC offers is different. After taking the time to understand it, I believe it fully aligns with bitcoin’s ethos—and may be the most important custody advancement we’ve seen. It distributes risk without requiring technical proficiency, offers institutional-grade security without centralization, and scales as bitcoin grows in value. It’s not a compromise—it’s a breakthrough.

Understanding Bitcoin’s Ethos

Bitcoin was created as a decentralized network—no single authority, no central point of failure. It promotes individual sovereignty, where users control their wealth directly, and trust minimization, where cryptographic rules replace institutional promises.

The early days of bitcoin were defined by DIY self-custody—paper wallets, full nodes, manual processes. But major failures, like Mt. Gox, made clear how dangerous centralized custody can be. The rise of hardware wallets brought self-custody to more users—but the cost was unforgiving: lose your keys, and you lose everything. That’s always been the tradeoff.

What is Multi-Institution Custody?

Multi-institution custody distributes private keys across multiple independent entities, with a quorum (e.g., 2-of-3) required to authorize any transaction. No movement happens without explicit client direction, and each institution independently verifies requests through its own controls.

This model is categorically different from single-custodian exchanges or DIY multisig. It spreads risk, eliminates single points of failure, and provides operational security that scales with user needs—without sacrificing the principles that make bitcoin what it is.

Alignment with Decentralization

Bitcoin’s network resists single points of failure. MIC echoes this structure. Keys are split across institutions, so no one party can act alone. That dramatically reduces the risk of hacks, fraud, or insolvency. And because institutional keyholders can be globally distributed, the system inherits the jurisdictional resilience of bitcoin itself.

While some assume any custodian introduces centralization risk, MIC’s quorum structure and transparent client governance flip that on its head. It’s decentralized by design.

Enhancing Trust Minimization

Bitcoin minimizes trust by relying on code and math—not people or institutions. MIC extends that model to custody. No institution can move funds alone. And with Onramp, clients can verify balances and vault structure directly on-chain—no need to request a statement or trust a dashboard.

It’s not purely "trustless" in the protocol sense—but it’s far more trust-minimized than any single counterparty or legacy financial infrastructure.

Preserving Individual Sovereignty

Sovereignty in bitcoin means control over your wealth. MIC preserves that by giving users the ability to authorize movement of funds without placing the technical or operational burden of key management on them.

At Onramp, clients initiate all withdrawals. Nothing moves unless you say so. That allows individuals and institutions to maintain true ownership, without needing to be technical experts.

Practical Benefits Augment Bitcoin

MIC also solves real-world challenges that self-custody hasn’t addressed.

• Inheritance: Bitcoin has no native inheritance mechanism. MIC allows for governance protocols that ensure assets can securely pass to heirs, without exposing keys.
• Insurance: Self-custody means no coverage. Onramp’s MIC solution is protected by a Lloyd’s of London insurance policy that explicitly covers collusion and operational failure at the institution level.
• Resilience and Redundancy: If one custodian fails, the system continues to function. That’s fault tolerance in action—and it’s exactly how critical infrastructure should work.

Addressing Counterarguments

I’ve seen some argue that multi-institution custody resembles traditional finance, risking centralization. But there’s no analogue in TradFi to a 2-of-3 quorum model with on-chain verifiability and distributed risk. Legacy custodians have unilateral control. MIC removes that.

My view is that in order for bitcoin to succeed, it needs a custody model that recognizes the historical reality that humans have used intermediaries to store bearer assets for hundreds of years. MIC enables trusted third-parties to be used without single-point of failure or centralization risk.

Cost is a valid concern as well. It’s true—custody has been “free” in TradFi because it’s subsidized by trading, lending, and hidden risk. Bitcoin doesn’t work that way. It’s a bearer asset. If you lose it, it’s gone. Paying to protect it is rational. Over time, we believe the market will come to see custody not as a cost—but as a security layer worth investing in.

Conclusion

After years of working on custody from different angles—across banking, fintech, and now bitcoin—I’ve come to believe multi-institution custody is the model that best reflects bitcoin’s values while solving for its real-world challenges.

It decentralizes control. It minimizes trust. It preserves sovereignty. And it does so in a way that can scale—safely, transparently, and durably.

That’s why I’m here. And that’s why I’m excited to help make MIC the standard for serious bitcoin holders.

I’ll be sharing more in the months ahead. If you’re thinking about these problems too, we’d love to talk.

– Jason