Pooya Gohardani knew which bitcoin custody service he wanted to use. When he applied from his home in Amsterdam, the founder of Keystody told me at Bitcoin Amsterdam, he got “a big banner, hey, we don’t serve Europe.” That banner, and a question he had already been asking about his own setup, “can I maintain it over a long run?”, is where Keystody began.
Keystody, based in Amsterdam, describes itself as software and guidance for bitcoin self-custody built around a multisig wallet. I sat down with Pooya on Friday, the second day of the conference at the SugarFactory, and the thread through his answers was what happens in the years after a setup is finished.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Pooya Gohardani founded Keystody, an Amsterdam company whose site describes a 2-of-3 bitcoin multisig and says: "No key of ours can move your Bitcoin." |
| 2He says he started building after a collaborative-custody service he applied to from Amsterdam showed him a banner saying it did not serve Europe. He expected it to take two weekends; by his account it has taken two and a half years. |
| 3His case for self-custody: a custodian, he says, is "obliged to respond to the government and the regulations", so "you can again face that freezing". Self-custody, in his words, brings "lots of responsibility". |
| 4My read: the question he keeps coming back to is who keeps a multisig working ten years after it is set up, for him and for the people around him. |
The full conversation runs just over ten minutes.
A setup he could build, and a question about the years after
The idea, he told me, came out of his own problem. He believes bitcoin “is going to be a huge thingy in the future”, and he did not want to keep his part of it the way many holders do:
So how can we preserve this wealth for the future in a generational manner? So it shouldn’t be something that we do as a one man, do it and then putting it in every corner and then forget about it and someday when the price goes up we wake up, whoa, what should we do, and then that should be almost a late time.
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
Multisig, a wallet that needs more than one key to move funds, was where he landed. He traces the instinct to an engineering background of “15 to 16 years” in banking and payments, naming ING and ABN AMRO; that background, he said, is why a single point of failure stood out to him. He was just as quick to name the catch: “If you look at any earlier demos or talks about multisig, it is difficult.”
I tried to understand it a couple of years ago with Sparrow Wallet, the wallet that everybody knows. And it was quite difficult for me with having a technical background, some robotic background.
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
Anyone who looks up his full name, he added, will find “some person with robots”. His X profile lists three RoboCup world championships. The test he then applied was the people at home:
If it is difficult for me, then I was looking at my wife, my brother, that would be damn difficult for them if I explain everything. And in a few years, it would be even difficult for me.
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
Then he asked the question his company now tries to answer:
I will have kids, we’ll have lots of adventures, so I need something to help me to stay on top of my setup. I can do a great setup, but can I maintain it over a long run?
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
Read the thread on X
The banner that read: we don’t serve Europe
Before writing any code, he went looking for a company that already did this. “We are already about 15 years in Bitcoin. There should be solutions,” he said. What he found was collaborative custody, in which the client holds most of the keys to a multisig and a company holds one, and he named Unchained and Casa. Unchained was his pick: “That was a great product in my opinion and it still is a great product.”
I tried from my home in Amsterdam, tried to apply. That time, unfortunately, I got a big banner, hey, we don’t serve Europe. I was like, oh man, what does it mean? Then I looked for other companies, noticed that they are all outside of Europe. And then there was a contradiction moment for me. So the Bitcoin, we want to be our own bank, have the control. But I just saw that, hey, we don’t serve that.
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
The worry went further than one sign-up form. Even with a provider that would take him, he asked himself whether “any jurisdiction issue” could one day leave him with a setup in place and a company saying “we cannot serve you”. That left two options he did not want: doing it all himself in Sparrow, with “all the tiny technical stuff”, or handing “one of the keys to somebody or a company outside of Europe”.
Keystody’s way out of that choice, as the company describes it, is to hold no key at all. Its site says “Today we hold none at all”, and that an optional recovery key it may offer later “will be built so it can never move funds on its own”.
Two weekends that became two and a half years
“So there was a gap that I noticed and I gave it a try,” he said. He had done a couple of startups before, he knew software engineering, and he thought he could build it in “two weeks, two weekends”.
That two weeks took two and a half years until now. So here we are, so it took lots of time so that I can understand what is there in Bitcoin.
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
He had a warning for anyone who plans to shortcut that at home with vibe coding and AI agents: they will end up “into the rabbit hole” and get “lots of nonsense along the way”. In his words, “for some people who think hey we can do it at home, it takes time. It took for me, probably it will take more time.”
In April, Keystody posted on X that its beta was live on mainnet, with testnet available for practice.
Why a custodian is not his answer
I asked him how much the self-custody movement matters to him. He started with what bitcoin offered in the first place, the chance “to be your own bank”, and with the risk of leaving your money with an organisation that “might freeze your account for any reason”. The dilemma, as he sees it, arrives when a stack grows: “when the value goes up, if it becomes something very valuable, do I dare to take care of it myself”, or do you hand that responsibility to a custodian?
Some people feel that a custodian will help if it is an option for them. But with that option, again, there can be because of the situation, the regulations that are there, if you have something there as a company or an individual, they are obliged to respond to the government and the regulations. So you can again face that freezing and so on. But with self-custody, you’re out of this. But you have lots of responsibility.
Pooya Gohardani, Keystody
That last sentence is the part his company is built around. In his telling, self-custody takes the freeze off the table and hands the holder every job a custodian would otherwise do, for as long as the coins are held.
What Keystody says it does
He described two steps. The first is a best-practice multisig for an individual, or for a company with several partners, using “different brands of hardware wallets”, with auditing and what he called “granular role-based access controls”. The second is ongoing: “the continuous support of you to see what is happening in your system, who is using what”, so that “in 10 years if you want to get back you will have lots of good documentation and readiness for your setup”.
On its website the company describes the vault as a standard 2-of-3 multisig in which “any two of three keys can spend”. It also publishes a guide to recovering a vault without Keystody: you need the vault’s output descriptor (the notation specified in BIP 380), plus two of the three keys and a wallet that reads descriptors. The guide names Sparrow as the wallet it has tested most, and Bitcoin Core 29 or later as an option mainly for viewing. According to the site, Ledger and Trezor sign over USB in the browser, and other devices, Coldcard among them, sign through wallet software such as Sparrow.
The list of devices may grow. On X this afternoon, Keystody called the BitBox it picked up at the event “a natural next integration for Keystody”.
The same recovery guide recommends a watch-only “recovery drill” in Sparrow, so the descriptor is checked before anyone needs it. Pooya’s own test was whether he could still run his setup in a few years’ time. A drill like that is one way to answer it for any multisig, whoever set it up.
Read next
- All of our Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026 interviews, from both days at the SugarFactory.
- Rob Segers of Bitsaga on choosing a hardware wallet and on the moment one device is no longer enough, the step before a multisig like the one Pooya describes.
- Lyudmyla Kozlovska of the Open Dialogue Foundation on the morning her bank accounts were gone, the risk Pooya cites when he talks about custodians.
- Michaƫl van de Poppe on why he sees no single safe place to keep your coins.
- Keystody is at keystody.com, on X and on LinkedIn. Pooya Gohardani is on X.
I recorded the interview with Pooya Gohardani at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, at the SugarFactory in Halfweg, on 6 November 2026. Quotes are verbatim, with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026; I moderated a panel there on 5 November and am the MC of the Orange Stage on 6 November. Nothing here is financial advice.
