Onramp Launches Institutional Bitcoin Custody Platform With Global Multisig

Onramp, a Bitcoin-only financial services company, recently launched an institutional-grade asset management offering, built on top of their multisignature, multi-institutional, multi-jurisdictional custody platform. Onramp is by all intents and purposes a 21st-century, full-reserve Bitcoin bank, leveraging Bitcoin’s unique and paradigm-shifting technology, in partnership with institutional custodians like BitGo, CoinCover, and Tetra Trust. 

Founded in Texas in 2022 by Michael Tanguma, a former Google and Unchained Capital executive, Onramp looks to democratize institutional-grade custody, offering the full range of financial services to Bitcoiners of all sizes; Onramp offers IRAs, trusts, bitcoin-backed loans, inheritance planning, tax/advantaged accounts, and more. 

Onramp operates globally (except for nations sanctioned by the U.S. like Venezuela and Iran), offering its services not just to institutions but to Bitcoin OGs and Bitcoiners with more than 10% of their portfolios in the emerging asset. Today, Onramp is a “profitable business that has billions of dollars in assets under custody,” with a lean team of over 25 people, according to Tanguma, who spoke with Bitcoin Magazine. 

A Bitcoin Bank in Cypherspace

Looking to take full advantage of the paradigm shift in financial security that Bitcoin unlocks, Onramp leverages Bitcoin’s smart contract tools, one of which is known as multisignature script (or multisig for short). These are a high-security, low-complexity set of programming tools native to the Bitcoin protocol that have wide ranges and use cases — from payment networks like the Lightning Network, to wealth protection greater than any single bank can offer.

Historically there’s been only two fundamental forms of wealth custody: People either buried their gold in their own land, the modern equivalent of putting cash under the mattress, or they looked for a reputable bank with the most compelling trust-me-bro offer, and had them hold that wealth instead (in exchange for an IOU note or a title of ownership over the assets). This second form of custody is how fiat currency was born. Both forms of custody have their benefits and risks_ one is vulnerable to petty crime and home invasion theft, the other to financial fraud and invading armies. Users have to trade off one for the other, or split their wealth and diversify their risks. The invention of Bitcoin shattered this paradigm.

As a distributed or decentralized network, Bitcoin effectively exists everywhere, with over 80,000 known copies of itself all over the world, gossiping with each other about the latest transactions is a way that routes around bottlenecks and choke points by design. To guarantee the value of its transactions, the network leverages the most powerful computing network in history, known as proof-of-work or Bitcoin mining. What most people don’t know is that Bitcoin transactions are programmable. Users can effectively create transactions that are…