Disaster recovery is essential, yet it’s often an afterthought. What happens if you lose access to your wallet or your custody provider suddenly shuts down? In crypto, disaster recovery is the plan a counterparty uses to safeguard assets, maintain operations, and quickly bounce back from hacks, theft, system failures, or other unforeseen events. Only a few groups truly make this their top priority, and at the end of the day, it all boils down to how you want your assets recovered - and how you want your keys, seed phrases, and secrets stored.
This year, we’re releasing comparison articles on all types of counterparties in the digital asset industry. In this article, we focus on disaster recovery solutions, breaking down their core offerings and highlighting the features that matter most. To simplify your decision making, we’ve created a detailed comparison table of all the solutions we’re aware of. Think of this as your cheat sheet - a side-by-side view of featured disaster recovery solutions to help you navigate your options and find the best fit for your needs. Remember, a checklist is just the starting point - thorough due diligence is key.
Legend:
Year: The year the company launched.
Products: Services offered for asset protection, recovery, and risk mitigation.
Automatic Asset Extraction: A process that broadcasts pre-signed transactions to sweep assets from compromised wallets into backup wallets.
Risk Screening: Assesses blockchain transactions to identify potential threats and notifies users.
Key & Seed Phrase Generation & Encryption: The process of creating cryptographic keys using approved algorithms (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, Advanced Encryption Standard, or Elliptic Curve Cryptography) for authentication, encryption, and transaction signing.
Backup Storage: Cryptographic keys and/or physical backups stored offline in multiple locations, to avoid unauthorized access or loss.
Asset Recovery: A mechanism to restore access to digital assets by verifying ownership using identify verification before recovering access or assets.
Secret Generation & Encryption: Offline software generates secrets and encrypts them for clients.
Device Construction: Clients construct hardware signing devices offline.
Legacy Planning: Provides structured solutions for passing on digital assets to designated trustees and beneficiaries in the event of incapacitation or death.
Partners: Service providers that support integration with the disaster recovery solution, either directly on their platform or through collaboration. If a client wishes to use the solution with a specific provider not listed, they should contact the disaster recovery provider directly, as they welcome additional integrations.
Direct Engagement with DeFi Clients: MPCH works directly with decentralized finance (DeFi) clients.
Account Recovery Process: The procedure for recovering client access to digital assets.
Failover Wallets: A backup wallet solution that allows continued access to digital assets in case of primary wallet failure, such as an outage or security breach.
Validation Reports: Audit reports for cryptographic validation of backups and recovery keys, provided on a customer-configurable basis to show continued security and integrity.
Audits & Certifications: Independent assessments and approvals that help verify a platform’s security, compliance, and adherence to industry standards and best practices.
SOC 2 Type 1 & 2: Audits assessing operational and security controls.
ISO 27001: International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 focuses on information security management.
Cyber Essentials (+ Plus): A UK government-backed cybersecurity certification framework that helps organizations protect against common cyber threats.
Cyber Essentials: A self-assessed certification that verifies an organization has implemented fundamental security controls, such as firewalls, access controls, malware protection, and secure configuration.
Cyber Essentials Plus: An advanced certification that includes independent third-party testing and verification to ensure compliance with security best practices.
Insurance: Counterparties may have various types of insurance to mitigate risks and protect assets against unexpected events. Coverages can include: Technology Errors & Omissions (E&O), Cyber, Crime, Specie, Network Security and Privacy, Claims Made Contractual Liability, Key Man, Professional E&O, Directors & Officers (D&O), Business Liability, General Liability, and Umbrella (or Excess) Liability.
Insurance Partners: While the provider does not offer insurance directly, they have established partnerships with insurance firms, allowing clients to bundle coverage with their disaster recovery solutions to help mitigate risk and potentially reduce costs.
Pricing Based On: Pricing models typically scale with factors such as Assets Under Custody (AUC), transaction volume, number of backups and recovery services, and level of service.
I hope these comparisons give you a clearer picture of the crypto disaster recovery landscape for 2025. To dive deeper into each solution and its features, be sure to explore their profiles on Counterparty Catalogue.
What’s New on Counterparty Catalogue:
ODD Reports: We recently released an Operational Due Diligence (ODD) report on Dfns, which users can request access to in their profile. Stay tuned on Counterparty Catalogue for more reports!
If you’re looking for ODD on specific digital asset service providers or funds, want to participate in our comparisons, or are interested in CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS) audits, feel free to reach out to us at info@digopp.group.
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