Multisig

This is the fourth post in a series about SMSF Bitcoin audit evidence. The first post covered what auditors need to verify. The second post compared evidence standards. The third post covered the regulatory pressure making all of this urgent. This post covers multisig — why it’s best practice for SMSF custody, and why it creates a new audit evidence challenge. If you’re holding Bitcoin in your SMSF with a single key, you have a single point of failure. One lost seed phrase, one compromised device, and the fund’s assets are gone. No insurance, no recovery, no phone number to call. ...

Key Ceremony is a free tool for documenting your Bitcoin multisig wallet setup. You record who holds each key, where devices and backups are stored, and how to recover. It generates a professional ceremony record as a PDF. That’s it. Getting to that simplicity took some work. Origin The idea came from Dale Warburton’s Bitcoin self-custody quiz. Taking it highlighted real gaps in my own setup. Not in the keys themselves, but in the documentation around them. I knew where my keys were. I hadn’t written down how someone else would find and use them if I couldn’t. ...

I run CertainKey, a service that provides ownership and control verification reports for self-managed super funds (SMSFs) holding bitcoin. Part of that process involves proving that the fund trustee controls specific keys in a multisig wallet — not by moving funds, but by signing a message with each key individually. For this I built Gatekeeper, a tool that verifies BIP-322 message signatures. The flow is simple: the customer signs a known message with their hardware wallet at the relevant derivation path, and Gatekeeper confirms the signature matches the expected public key from the wallet descriptor. ...