Digital asset custody & escrow
Crypto custody and on-chain escrow, held to a legal standard.
Escrow Chambers holds digital assets in segregated, multi-signature vaults on behalf of law firms, enforcement agencies, insolvency practitioners and their clients — with a tamper-evident record of every instruction, approval and transfer.
No pooled omnibus wallets. Every matter is assigned its own on-chain address.
One dedicated on-chain address per matter. Client assets are never commingled with those of other clients or of Escrow Chambers.
Minimum approval quorum before value leaves a vault. Higher quorums are available where a mandate requires them.
Continuous monitoring of every vault address, pending instruction and inbound deposit, with alerting to named contacts.
On-chain settlement. Every deposit and release is independently verifiable on a public block explorer.
What Escrow Chambers is
A crypto custody and escrow wallet built for regulated professionals
Escrow Chambers is a digital asset custody service that holds cryptocurrency on behalf of a third party until agreed conditions are met — the on-chain equivalent of a client account or stakeholder account.
Where a conventional escrow agent holds fiat in a client account pending completion, Escrow Chambers holds Bitcoin, Ether, stablecoins and other supported digital assets in a dedicated vault address controlled by distributed cryptographic keys. Funds cannot move without a quorum of authorised approvals, and every approval, rejection and transfer is recorded in an evidentiary log that can be exported for court, for a regulator, or for your own file.
The service is deliberately narrow. Escrow Chambers does not trade, lend, stake or rehypothecate the assets it holds. It does one thing: it keeps custody of digital assets, and it moves them only when the mandate says it may.
At a glance
- Service type
- Custody and conditional on-chain escrow for digital assets
- Built for
- Law firms, enforcement agencies, insolvency practitioners, arbitral institutions, corporate counsel
- Asset control
- Multi-party computation (MPC) key shares held in separate hardware security modules
- Release control
- Named signatories, configurable quorum, optional time locks and withdrawal allowlists
- Segregation
- One vault address per matter — no omnibus pooling
- Record
- Append-only audit log with on-chain transaction references, exportable as PDF or CSV
- Languages
- Instructions and reporting in English and German
Who it is for
Mandates we are built to hold
Escrow Chambers is designed around the obligations professionals already carry — client money rules, evidential continuity, court undertakings and reporting duties — rather than around retail trading.
Law firms
Hold digital assets for a client, a counterparty or an undertaking without taking the private keys onto the firm's own systems. Segregation, dual authorisation and reporting are designed to sit comfortably alongside client account rules.
Enforcement agencies
Take control of seized, restrained or forfeited digital assets into a vault whose chain of custody is documented from the moment of transfer. Access is limited to named officers, and every action is timestamped and attributable.
Insolvency & restructuring
Ring-fence estate assets, evidence the value under administration at any point in time, and distribute to creditors under a documented approval workflow with a full disbursement record.
Arbitration & dispute resolution
Place disputed digital assets beyond the reach of either party for the duration of proceedings, with release conditions drafted to reflect the tribunal's award or the parties' settlement terms.
Corporate transactions
Hold consideration, retention amounts or token allocations between signing and completion, releasing on delivery of agreed completion evidence rather than on a promise.
Regulators & public bodies
Receive, hold and account for digital assets connected to supervisory action, compensation schemes or public-sector disposals, with reporting formatted for the file rather than for a trading dashboard.
Security architecture
How the assets are actually secured
Custody is only as strong as the weakest place a private key has ever existed. Escrow Chambers is engineered so that a complete private key is never assembled in one place, on one machine, or in the hands of one person.
Distributed key generation
Signing keys are produced using multi-party computation. Independent key shares are generated separately and never combined, so there is no moment at which a complete private key exists to be stolen, copied or compelled.
Hardware security modules
Key shares are held inside tamper-resistant hardware security modules in geographically separated, access-controlled facilities. Shares cannot be exported, and physical access is logged independently of the platform.
Quorum-based release
No single individual can move value. Each vault is configured with named signatories and a required quorum — 2-of-3 by default, higher where the mandate demands it — and approvals are collected over authenticated, separately-verified channels.
True segregation
Each matter receives its own vault and its own on-chain address. Balances are never pooled, so the assets attributable to a matter can be demonstrated on-chain at any moment without reference to internal bookkeeping.
Time locks & allowlists
Destination addresses can be locked to an allowlist agreed at onboarding, and releases can be held for a cooling-off period during which any signatory may veto. Both controls are designed to defeat social engineering and instruction fraud.
Continuous monitoring
Vault addresses are watched around the clock. Inbound deposits, unexpected transfers, dust attacks and interactions with sanctioned or high-risk addresses raise alerts to named contacts and are recorded on the matter file.
The escrow lifecycle
From instruction to release, in five stages
Every mandate follows the same documented path. Nothing moves out of sequence, and each stage leaves a record.
Evidence & reporting
A record you can put in front of a court
Digital assets are only useful as evidence or as recoverable value if you can show, without gaps, who controlled them and when. Escrow Chambers treats the audit trail as a primary deliverable, not a by-product.
- Every instruction, approval, rejection, login and configuration change is written to an append-only log with an accurate timestamp and the identity of the person responsible.
- Every deposit and release is recorded with its on-chain transaction hash, block height and confirmation count, so the platform record and the public ledger can be reconciled independently.
- Statements can be produced for any point in time, showing the balance held, the assets held and the state of each release condition on that date.
- Exports are available as signed PDF or CSV, formatted for exhibits, disclosure bundles, insolvency reporting or internal audit.
- Retention periods are set per mandate, so records survive the closure of the matter for as long as your obligations require.
| Timestamp (UTC) | Event | Actor |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Mar 09:14:22 | Vault created — LDN-2419-ESC | Custody officer |
| 12 Mar 09:31:07 | Signatories confirmed (3) | Instructing party |
| 13 Mar 14:02:55 | Deposit confirmed — 148.25 ETH | Network |
| 27 Mar 11:47:19 | Condition 1 evidenced | Counterparty counsel |
| 27 Mar 16:20:41 | Condition 1 approved | Signatory A |
| 28 Mar 08:05:33 | Release instruction raised | Instructing party |
| 28 Mar 08:44:10 | Release approved (2 of 3) | Signatories A, C |
Illustrative only. Live records include full transaction hashes, IP and device attribution, and the evidence attached to each condition.
Controls & compliance
Designed around the duties you already owe
Escrow Chambers does not ask you to relax your obligations to use it. The controls below exist because professional custody sits inside a framework of client money rules, anti-money-laundering duties and evidential standards.
| Control area | What Escrow Chambers does | What it means for your matter |
|---|---|---|
| Client identification | Identity, entity and beneficial-ownership verification for every party and named signatory before a vault is funded. | You can evidence who was entitled to instruct on the vault at any point in its life. |
| Source of funds | Blockchain analytics on inbound transactions, with provenance tracing and risk scoring against sanctions and illicit-finance datasets. | Tainted or sanctioned value is identified on arrival rather than after distribution. |
| Sanctions screening | Parties, signatories and destination addresses are screened at onboarding and re-screened continuously. | A party or address that becomes designated during the matter triggers an alert and a hold. |
| Segregation of assets | Dedicated vault and address per matter; no commingling, no operational use of client assets. | The estate, the client balance or the seized value can be demonstrated on-chain, independently. |
| Separation of duties | The person who raises a release instruction can never be the sole person who approves it. | Internal fraud and compromised-inbox instruction fraud both require multiple independent failures. |
| Data protection | Matter data is processed on a documented lawful basis, encrypted in transit and at rest, with defined retention and deletion schedules. | GDPR and equivalent obligations are addressed in the mandate documentation, not left to chance. |
| Business continuity | Key shares and recovery material are distributed across separate facilities, with a documented recovery procedure exercised on a defined cycle. | Access to the assets does not depend on any single site, system or member of staff. |
Regulatory status, licensing and audit assurance vary by jurisdiction and are confirmed in writing in the mandate documentation before a vault is opened.
Assets & networks
What we hold
Support is intentionally conservative. We custody assets with deep liquidity, mature tooling and reliable settlement finality, because an escrow that cannot be reliably released is not an escrow.
| Network | Assets | Confirmations before credit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | BTC | 6 | Native SegWit vault addresses; replace-by-fee monitored on inbound transactions. |
| Ethereum | ETH, USDC, USDT, DAI, WBTC | 32 (finalised) | Token contracts are pinned to verified addresses at onboarding. |
| Polygon PoS | USDC, USDT, MATIC | 128 | Used where fee efficiency matters on high-volume distributions. |
| Arbitrum One | ETH, USDC | Post-finality | Releases are confirmed against Ethereum finality, not sequencer acceptance. |
| Tron | USDT | 19 | Supported for inbound recovery matters; destination allowlisting is mandatory. |
| Solana | SOL, USDC | Finalised | Available on request where a mandate requires it. |
Additional networks and assets can be assessed for a specific mandate. Assets that cannot be held securely, valued reliably or released predictably are declined rather than accepted with caveats.
Custody principles
An escrow is a promise that value will move only when it should. Everything we build exists to make that promise verifiable rather than trusted.
Escrow Chambers custody principles
Why counsel and investigators choose us
- We are not a trading venue.No order book, no yield, no exposure to market operations. Custody is the entire business.
- We answer to the file.Reporting is designed for disclosure bundles and case files, not for dashboards.
- We work in your language.Mandates, instructions and reporting are handled in English and German by the same desk.
- We decline with reasons.Assets, counterparties and structures we cannot hold to this standard are declined, in writing, with reasons.
Questions
Frequently asked, briefly answered
The full set of answers — custody, escrow mechanics, legal treatment, assets and access — is on the FAQ page.
A crypto custody wallet is an arrangement in which a specialist provider controls the private keys to a blockchain address on your behalf, under a written mandate that defines who may instruct a transfer and on what terms. An exchange account is a trading relationship: your balance is usually an entry in the exchange's internal ledger, your assets are typically pooled with those of other users, and the exchange's terms often permit it to use those assets. Escrow Chambers holds a dedicated on-chain address per matter, never pools client balances, and never lends, stakes or trades what it holds.
Only the named signatories recorded for that vault, and only when the required quorum approves the same instruction. The default configuration is two of three. Escrow Chambers cannot release assets on its own initiative, and no individual member of Escrow Chambers staff holds sufficient key material to sign a transaction alone. Where a mandate requires it, releases can additionally be restricted to a fixed allowlist of destination addresses agreed at onboarding.
Conditions are drafted to match the underlying agreement. Common forms include delivery of completion documents, confirmation of a registration or filing, expiry of a defined period, receipt of a tribunal award or court order, confirmation from a named third party, or a milestone schedule releasing value in tranches. Conditions are recorded in the mandate at the outset; changing them afterwards requires the same quorum as a release, so neither party can move the goalposts unilaterally.
Held assets are client assets, not balance-sheet assets. They sit in segregated addresses attributable to a specific matter and are never used for operational purposes, so they do not form part of the general estate available to creditors. Recovery material is distributed across separate facilities under a documented procedure that allows the assets to be reconstituted and returned to the entitled parties independently of the continued operation of the business.
A straightforward mandate with a corporate instructing party and clean identification is typically ready to fund within two to three business days of complete documentation. Matters involving multiple jurisdictions, complex ownership structures, or seized assets requiring evidential handling take longer, and we would rather tell you a realistic date than a convenient one. Urgent enforcement matters can be escalated on the mandate desk.
Discuss a mandate with the custody desk
Tell us the matter type, the assets involved and the release conditions you need. We will confirm in writing whether we can hold it, on what terms, and how long onboarding will take.