Why I Built Keystody

I am building something that helps me protect my Bitcoin for generations. Not a tool, a system. Something that doesn't depend on individual memories or scattered documentation. Something simple enough that non-technical people can use it. My wife, a notary, my kids, even if I'm not around.

But let me start from the beginning, because I wasn't always a Bitcoin person.

I'd done some mining with my brother back in 2017. Antminer S9s. It was a good experience, but honestly, the whole crypto and blockchain world felt speculative and complex to me. I'm a software engineer. I've been building systems for over 15 years, worked in robotics, won RoboCup world championships. But crypto wasn't my thing.

That changed when a friend asked me to help him with a startup called FinalLedger. It was a Bitcoin and Ethereum inheritance platform. That's when I started learning about Bitcoin properly. And the deeper I went, the more I realized two things: the startup would go nowhere (based on reasons I'll explain), and Bitcoin itself was something worth taking very seriously.

Bitcoin is the best-performing asset in history. The same big banks that once called it a scam started buying it. Companies began adding it to their balance sheets. These weren't small signals. To me, they meant: this is worth investing in and protecting. Not for months. For generations.

But how?

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I studied everything. Duplicating seed phrases smartly. Splitting them into pieces. Adding a 25th word. Shamir Secret Sharing. I went through the pros and cons of each and concluded that multisig is the strongest approach. I also looked at MPC, but multisig felt more natural to Bitcoin. It's already built into the protocol.

So I set up my own multisig. Followed best practices. Split keys geographically. Did all the things you're supposed to do. And I still found it challenging. As a DIY setup, there are too many moving parts. I've been an expert software engineer for many years, and I realized: without a proper system, even a very strong setup cannot survive for generations.

I started looking for existing solutions. I found a few. Tried to use them. The one I liked most doesn't accept anyone outside the US, and even within the US, it's not available everywhere yet. The others all inject at least one of their own keys into your setup. Their reasoning is recovery assistance, but it means you're trusting them with partial control of your Bitcoin.

I also noticed that none of them are based in the EU. It's not that I don't trust them, but I had a personal experience with the BlockFi bankruptcy, and the jurisdiction challenges that came with it. My preference became clear: I want to work with a system, and an entity, that's close to where I live now.

I couldn't find anything that matched. So I said to myself: hey man, you're a strong developer, and nowadays you can use AI to develop things quickly. Maybe a few weeks!

I started building. And the more I developed, the more I understood how much I didn't know yet. I went back and forth between building and learning many times. Multiple rewrites from scratch. What I thought would take a few weeks took a year and a half.

Along the way, I shared what I was learning with friends. Eventually I finished an MVP and started talking about it with more people. Some feedback was very promising. Some was very disappointing. But whatever it is, I believe in Bitcoin, and I believe it deserves good tools built with care.

That's what I'm building with Keystody. The system I needed for myself. Setup, monitoring, maintenance, everything that makes the difference between a snapshot of security and something that actually lasts.

It's still in beta, and I'm excited to share more about it.