Last reviewed: 2 October 2026
In brief
- At some exchanges your coins sit in shared (omnibus) wallets, and your balance is an entry in the company’s own ledger.
- Whether those coins are still yours if the company fails depends mainly on its terms and the law that applies, as Celsius customers learned in January 2023.
- Read the custody section of the terms, find the legal entity that holds your coins, and check its licence before you deposit.
Crypto custody means control of the private keys that move a coin. Control and ownership are separate questions: whoever holds the keys can move the coins, while the contract and the law decide whose coins they are. On an exchange, the company holds the keys and your rights come from its terms. With self-custody, you hold the keys yourself and no company stands between you and your coins.
The model you use decides how you get your coins back if a company is hacked, frozen or bankrupt.
Where do your coins sit on an exchange?
An exchange does not have to give each customer a separate blockchain address. One model keeps customer coins in pooled wallets, often called omnibus wallets, and records each person’s share in an internal ledger.
Coinbase’s US user agreement says this plainly. It keeps separate ledgers for customer accounts and its own accounts, but “shall have no obligation to create a segregated blockchain address” for your assets. The Robinhood Crypto customer agreement (revised 29 September 2026) says coins are held “in one or more omnibus cryptocurrency wallets for the benefit of RHC customers”.
The risk with pooling is what the ledger hides. If the company lends, loses or mixes those coins with its own, the ledger can still show your full balance while the wallet is short. A proof of reserves can show selected wallet assets at a point in time, but without a reliable check of customer liabilities it cannot show that those assets cover every balance.
What do the terms say about ownership?
We compared the linked Coinbase, Robinhood and Kraken terms and our company profiles, read on 2 October 2026.
| Company | Who holds the coins | Ownership wording |
|---|---|---|
| Coinbase (US retail) | Coinbase, in wallets without a segregated address per customer | Title “shall at all times remain with you”; assets “are not property of Coinbase, and are not subject to claims of Coinbase’s creditors” |
| Robinhood (US) | Robinhood Crypto, LLC, in omnibus wallets | The customer “shall retain title” to crypto bought, and title “shall not transfer” to Robinhood Crypto |
| Kraken (Canada) | In trust at a third-party crypto custodian, or in hot wallets run by Kraken | Title “remains with you at all times and does not transfer to us, except as provided herein” (Canadian terms) |
| Anchorage Digital (institutional) | Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., a federally chartered trust bank | Our profile verified OCC charter 25243 as active at 31 August 2026 |
Each retail firm states that you keep title. Two add exceptions: Coinbase for the secured USDC terms of its card, Kraken “as provided herein”. Our Robinhood profile shows another catch: US customers deal with Robinhood Crypto, LLC and EU customers with Robinhood Europe UAB, so the US agreement does not set EU customers’ terms.
What happens to your coins if the company goes bankrupt?
The Celsius case shows why the wording matters. On 4 January 2023, Chief Judge Martin Glenn of the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that coins deposited in Celsius’s Earn accounts became Celsius’s property under its “unambiguous Terms of Use”. The coins left in those accounts when Celsius filed in July 2022 were therefore property of the bankruptcy estates, subject to defences the court reserved. About 600,000 Earn accounts held roughly $4.2 billion in crypto as of 10 July 2022.
As the opinion describes them, the Celsius terms gave the company “all right and title” to Earn deposits, “including ownership rights”. Earn customers were left with claims in the bankruptcy rather than ownership of specific coins. Custody terms like Coinbase’s say the opposite, which gives customers a stronger argument, but the outcome still depends on the facts, the court and the law of each country.
The EU sets rules for firms that offer custody. Article 75 of the MiCA regulation requires a licensed custodian to keep a register of positions for each client, segregate client coins from its own on the blockchain, and keep them legally separate from its estate, in accordance with applicable law, “so that creditors of the crypto-asset service provider have no recourse” to them, in particular in insolvency. Clients get a statement of position at least every three months, and the custodian is liable for losses attributable to it, capped at the market value at the time of loss. Our guide to the MiCA CASP licence explains how firms get authorised.
What are qualified custodians, trust charters and MPC?
A regulated custodian is one option for institutions. US examples include trust companies: a state-chartered one, such as a New York limited purpose trust company supervised by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), or a national trust bank chartered by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Our Coinbase profile notes that Coinbase describes its custody arm, Coinbase Custody Trust Company, as a New York fiduciary and a qualified custodian under the Investment Advisers Act. That status is company-reported, not one we verified on a register.
The SEC has proposed changes to these custody rules; they have not been adopted. On 1 October 2026 the SEC proposed letting state trust companies act as custodians for advisers and funds after checks, and letting advisers hold crypto themselves where no permitted custodian exists, as our report on the SEC crypto custody proposal explains.
Accounting changed earlier. Staff Accounting Bulletin 122, effective 30 January 2025, rescinded SAB 121’s guidance on safeguarding crypto for platform users. Firms now apply the normal loss-contingency rules (ASC 450-20 or IAS 37) to decide whether to record a liability. That is an accounting question; it does not decide who owns the coins.
A multisig wallet needs several keys to sign, for example two of three. Multi-party computation (MPC) designs spread signing material across several machines, so no one device holds a complete private key. Both reduce the risk of one stolen key, but neither tells you who owns the coins.
How do you check a company’s custody setup?
- Find the custody clause. Search the terms for “title”, “custody” and “property of”. Look for wording that you keep title and that assets are not available to the firm’s creditors. Good wording helps, but it does not guarantee recovery.
- Look for yield products. Lending, earn or staking programmes may move coins out of custody terms, as Celsius Earn did. Read their terms separately.
- Name the entity. Note which company holds coins in your country, and check that entity on the regulator’s register.
- Check segregation. Does the firm say client coins are held apart from its own, on chain or at a named custodian?
- Ask for the custody policy. MiCA-licensed firms must give clients a summary on request.
- Decide what to keep in self-custody. Coins in your own wallet do not depend on a custodian returning them, but you carry the risk: if you lose the seed phrase and have no other backup, nobody can restore access.
The full routine is in our guide on how to check a crypto company before you use it. In the US, watch whether the SEC’s custody proposal is adopted and in what form.
Sources
- US Bankruptcy Court, SDNY, In re Celsius Network LLC, Memorandum Opinion and Order Regarding Ownership of Earn Account Assets (Case 22-10964, ECF 1822, 4 January 2023)
- EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets (Article 75)
- SEC, Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 122 (effective 30 January 2025)
- Coinbase, User Agreement (US) (read 2 October 2026)
- Robinhood Crypto, Customer Agreement (revised 29 September 2026)
