There is a common saying in the crypto world: "Not your keys, not your coins." But when it comes to traditional financial institutions managing billions in assets, this phrase has become a joke. Imagine a fund holding a large amount of Bitcoin, whose core asset security relies solely on a set of mnemonic phrases stored in a CTO's mind—that's an absolute nightmare in risk control and auditing. If the private key is lost, stolen, or leaked by an insider, the losses are irreparable.

The usual approach is to use a third-party custody service (Custodian), but this introduces another problem: trust shifts from the private key to the person. Even before the FTX collapse, they were touting their risk management systems. So now, institutions face a tough dilemma: fully decentralized solutions can't meet compliance requirements, while fully centralized ones are too risky to trust.

There is a project trying to bypass this paradox. Dusk Network, in collaboration with Cordial Systems, has introduced the concept of "Zero-Trust Custody"—using mathematics and cryptography to replace reliance on humans.

The core innovation is to eliminate the single point of failure caused by a "single private key." They employ Multi-Party Computation (MPC) combined with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to build a signature system that doesn't depend on any single trusted party. In this architecture, the private key never exists in its entirety anywhere.