BitGO Europe’s Brett Reeves Warns: ‘Diversify Your Crypto Custody – Never Rely on a Single Provider’

Crypto security just got a blunt reality check. BitGO Europe’s head Brett Reeves dropped a truth bomb in an exclusive with 99Bitcoins: institutional players—and even retail traders—are flirting with disaster by trusting single custody providers.

‘This isn’t your grandfather’s safe deposit box,’ Reeves says. ‘Cold storage isn’t enough anymore.’

The Multi-Signature Mandate

Reeves’ solution? Treat crypto custody like a hedge fund manager treats due diligence—spread the risk. Multi-provider setups with geographically segregated wallets are now table stakes for anyone holding eight figures or more. Even regulators are quietly nodding along (when they’re not busy writing MiCA violation notices).

Bankers Hate This One Trick

Traditional finance clings to single-point custody because it lets them charge 2% fees for 1990s tech. Crypto’s institutional adoption hinges on out-engineering that legacy complacency—without recreating the same centralized pitfalls that made crypto exist in the first place. Ironic? Absolutely. Profitable? Ask the guys shorting silver while long Bitcoin.

The takeaway: Your keys, your coins? Only if they’re scattered across multiple vaults with overlapping audits. Anything less is just giving hackers and regulators a single target.

“Traditional finance firms and banks are going to struggle a little bit. Because they are quite rigid in their ways”

Furthermore, talking about adaptability, Reeves said, “If you look at traditional finance, people had to adapt to come into this space. I think, if you’re a custodian or a wallet provider in this space, you’re continually having to adapt- whether it’s new tokens or real world assets and so on. It’s an evolving model but, our companies just need to keep going through this cycle. And this is where traditional finance firms, banks, and so on are going to struggle a little bit. Because they are quite rigid in their ways, still.

They are using a 1980s technology in SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) for sending assets around the world. So it is going to be harder for banks to keep up.

I’m not saying they’re not going to be able to, but that’s where they may choose to use something like Zodia Custody because they just want to outsource and use a sub-custodian model to look after the digital assets.”

He added, “BitGo has a slightly different approach. We can do that. But we can also do custody as service.”

“You can lean on MiCA”

Talking about clear regulations, reeves said, “I think Europe with Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) is one of the ones you could lean on. In the US, they’re still trying to come forward with that- a number of custodians who use trust structures over there.”

Notably, BitGo received its MiCA license just last month.

USA born @BitGo , a leading cryptocurrency custody provider, has secured a Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) license from Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin.https://t.co/ZnFIExhsVS

— Akriti Seth (@AkritiSethN) May 13, 2025

Adding to this, Di Meo said, “Some of the most highly regulated institutions in the world – they’ve got incredible fiscal power. Within reason they can do whatever they want. They can build whatever they want. The fundamental reason why this hasn’t proliferated through financial markets yet, and I’ll talk about crypto custody or digital asset custody, is that the regulatory picture hasn’t been there to facilitate these large institutions to actually operate. The only reason they WOULD offer the service is if they can have complete regulatory clarity and know that when they take this service to market, they’re going to be doing so within the confines of what the regulator is comfortable with. Let’s remember again, they’ve been established for in excess of 100, maybe 200 years. From a reputational standpoint, they have a lot to lose, right? And that’s where this trust model comes in, right? If you’re an established player in the space, you want to maintain that trust, you have to comply with the regulator.”

We’ve seen examples where the interpretation of MiCA has been very much that you need to rely on more than one provider in the custody space alone in order to be compliant.

“BitGo and Zodia have differing approaches to what one can do as a digital asset custodian”

Gerry Afentakis, Managing director Europe at Zodia custody weighed in and said, “Apart from being a custodian, the company has to do other things with those assets that involve generating a yield, borrowing, lending. You want to maybe stake, you want to trade, you want to do a variety of things. And so our approach at Zodia Custody (and there’s no right or wrong- it’s just a difference in philosophy and maybe it’s also a different commercial model), we believe that just doing the custody part is hard enough and that should be our priority.”

“We happen to find ourselves in a digital asset world where things are moving really fast and where a lot of the innovation and activity happens in the unregulated space. Things are adopted and seminal evolutions are happening. We need to somehow be participating in and supporting our more regulated risk managed service to include these kind of evolutions.”

“We plug in with best in class service providers who are going to do all the other little suite of services that our clients holding the digital assets want to do. And that has certain advantages,” Afentakis added.