Joseph Kelly and Dhruv Bansal, co-founders of Unchained Capital, join Sunny Ray to trace their path from early bitcoin buyers in 2013 to builders of one of the industry's first bitcoin-collateralized lending platforms. The two met in Austin after running a big data analytics company, Infochimps, which they sold before turning their attention fully to bitcoin. They describe how a 2016 HODL waves chart revealed how long bitcoin sits unmoved in addresses, sparking the idea for financial products built for long-term holders rather than traders. That insight led to Unchained's collateralized lending business, launched in 2017, and eventually to a deeper realization that custody itself was the real unsolved problem. Rather than pooling customer funds like exchanges, Joseph and Dhruv built multisig vaults and pioneered collaborative custody, distributing keys between clients, Unchained, and outside partners to eliminate single points of failure. The conversation covers their origin story, the thinking behind HODL waves, why they chose lending as an entry point, and how collaborative custody became the philosophical core of their company, with hints at future products like bitcoin inheritance.
Unchained Capital's founders explain how HODL waves and bitcoin lending led them to invent collaborative custody.
Can you give us a quick introduction and how you two met?
I'm Joseph Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Unchained Capital. I was born in Alaska, traveled a lot as a teenager, and decided early to be an entrepreneur. I met Dhruv when I was about 20 and we started our first company together, Infochimps, a big data analytics company, and ran it about four years before it was acquired.
When did you two first come across bitcoin?
It was 2013 when our first business was acquired and we had cash we could afford to lose, so we bought bitcoin then. I had actually heard about it back in 2011 but dismissed the economics of it. By 2013 the price had grown 100x from 2011, which made me realize it had to be solving a real problem for someone, so I bought in.
How did the idea for Unchained's lending business come about?
We produced a chart in 2016 called HODL waves, which shows how long bitcoin sits unmoved in an address. It showed about 60 percent of bitcoin hadn't moved in over a year, which matched our own behavior. That made us realize nobody was building products for long-term holders, so we started asking what we could sell to people who just hold bitcoin and sometimes need liquidity.
Did the idea to use multisig come before or after the lending business?
The lending idea came first. We weren't setting out to be a custody company; we were solving a financial product question. Once we decided to launch lending, we had to figure out how we'd actually custody customer bitcoin, and that's when the multisig and custody questions became unavoidable for us.
How did you land on multisig and collaborative custody specifically?
We didn't want to put customer funds on an exchange like Coinbase since we'd already moved our own bitcoin off exchanges onto hardware wallets. We also didn't want one person holding all customer keys, since that's a disaster waiting to happen. So from before we even launched, we decided we had to do self-custody using multisig, and our very first fifty thousand dollar loan went into a multisig wallet.
How did collaborative custody evolve out of that early multisig approach?
About a year in, we realized lending was becoming commoditized and nobody else in the space understood custody, they were all using third parties. We thought, why not collaborate with customers and other providers to spread the keys out, so an attacker would need to compromise multiple parties instead of just us. That insight led us to launch our vault product in 2019, and it became the foundation for our whole company.
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