There is a difference between owning bitcoin and owning a claim to it, and most people who think they own bitcoin actually only own this claim. Their coins are held on an exchange, with a broker, or in a fund. In reality, they have only an entry in someone else's ledger and a promise that they will be able to access their funds. Most of the time, this promise is kept. The problem lies in what happens on the days it isn't, and how little say you have when that day comes.
This summer we witnessed a situation like this across Europe. When new EU crypto regulations came into full effect, several exchanges that failed to obtain a license in time were forced to stop providing regulated services to users in the EU; the largest of them affected millions of customers overnight. No hacks, no fraud, no wrongdoing against anyone. Just a change in the nature of the service. People were told they could withdraw their funds, but even that deserves a closer look: the ability to withdraw money was something the platforms chose to maintain during an orderly wind-down. It was not a right users possessed. In such situations, withdrawal timelines can be lengthy, withdrawals can be partial or cumbersome, and such options exist only as long as the company decides to provide them. The ability to trade, move, or ultimately access your assets depended on decisions made in boardrooms users had no access to.
This is the essence of self-custody in one sentence: when your access to your own money goes through a company, it is always and only dependent on that company's reliability. Its solvency, security, licenses, decisions, and what a court or regulator instructs it to do. You control none of these factors, and any one of them can come between you and your coins. Self-custody removes the company from the equation entirely. Coins stored on your own device cannot be frozen in a bankruptcy, lost in a hack of someone else's servers, restricted by a licensing decision, or made inaccessible because a company decided to change its terms. There is no counterparty to go bankrupt, because there simply is no counterparty. The keys belong to you, and they keep working no matter what happens to anyone else.
Trezor was built specifically to remove this counterparty dependency. Exactly twelve years ago, our founders, Marek Palatinus and Pavol Rusnak, released the first hardware wallet and created a product category that didn't exist before. They weren't trying to build just a gadget. They had a problem they couldn't solve any other way.
The problem was that safely storing one's coins was practically impossible for an ordinary person. Our founders were engineers who worked in Linux and could more or less secure their bitcoins, but even they didn't consider it a given. If it was hard for them, it was hopeless for everyone else. The solution they arrived at was to completely remove the private key from an internet-connected computer and move it to a small, specialized device. The key is generated on this device and never leaves it. The device is never connected to the internet. When you make a transaction, it is sent to the device, signed inside it, and returned already approved, so the secret controlling your coins never touches your computer, phone, or the network. This principle hasn't changed in twelve years across any of the products we've built since, because it was never just one of the features. It is the whole point.
Only the threat has changed. In 2014, the barrier to self-custody was complexity. Today, the barrier is persuasion. Storing your own keys has become easier than ever, but people are being gently discouraged from it.
The most common way is through an exchange-traded fund (ETF). Tens of billions of dollars in bitcoin are now in spot ETF structures, where they are held for people who wanted exposure to crypto without taking on the responsibility of self-custody. As an "on-ramp" for people who would otherwise never touch crypto, these products have done real good and have their place. But an ETF share is not bitcoin. It is a price exposure held for you by a financial institution within the very traditional financial system bitcoin was meant to be an alternative to. You own a claim. You don't own the asset itself. You cannot withdraw it from the platform, move it yourself, spend it, or hold the keys to it. It's the exchange problem again, just in a suit.
My colleague Danny Sanders, Communications Director at Trezor, put it bluntly earlier this year: the worst outcome for this industry would be if everyone just decided to invest in an ETF and call that owning bitcoin. The numbers show how far this can go. Out of approximately 600 million crypto users worldwide, only about 10 percent store their own keys, and only 12–13 million use a hardware wallet. The overwhelming majority already entrust the storage of what they believe they own to someone else.
The summer's regulatory events and the ETF trend are the same lesson delivered from two sides. One shows how access to assets changes under forces outside your control. The other invites you to voluntarily sign up for such a scheme. In both cases, you are left with a promise instead of the asset itself. We've seen how that ends. When the FTX exchange collapsed in 2022, the people who lost everything weren't reckless. They simply trusted a custodian—which is what almost everyone in crypto is subtly nudged towards.
If self-custody is clearly the answer, why do so few people use it? Our industry must be honest here. For years, it was assumed that once the hardware was good enough, people would use it, and the whole problem was viewed purely as a technical one. But it was never just about the tech. The real barrier was trust. Telling someone they are fully responsible for their money and that there is no one to turn to if something goes wrong is a serious step, and for a long time the industry sidestepped this issue instead of addressing it. The important task was not just building secure devices. It was earning enough trust for people to feel ready to use them.
That work has paid off. Today, self-custody has nothing to do with the command line exercises our founders started with. With the right tools, it has become genuinely accessible, and millions of people now manage their keys without ever touching a line of code. The device handles the hardest part. What remains is less a usability problem and more an awareness problem: most people still don't know how far this technology has come, and that the safest option is now also the easiest.
So this twelfth anniversary is not really about the device itself. The first hardware wallet mattered because it proved the principle could work—an ordinary person could store their money, and no one would stand between them and their funds. Twelve years later, this principle is under more pressure than it was when almost no one could implement it, because now the pressure has become familiar. Convenience is a more compelling argument than complexity ever was. Rather than just marking the date, we are dedicating this day to why we exist. This week, Trezor is running a 'Self-Custody Week'—a campaign to encourage more people to stop being on the sidelines and start storing their own keys.
The solution is not to lecture people about ideology. It is for self-custody to become increasingly accessible, understandable, and impossible to dismiss as the difficult option, because it no longer is. Regulation will continue to change the rules of who can offer what. Exchanges will continue to make decisions their customers cannot foresee. None of that touches a key held only by you. Twelve years ago, we made it possible. Now our job is to make sure everyone knows about it and aims for it, before they learn firsthand why it matters.
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