Digital Asset Custody Explained: How Crypto Is Held, Secured, and Lost

One of the biggest ironies in the cryptocurrency industry is that most buyers spend weeks, even months, researching what to purchase, then barely spend minutes on where to keep their digital assets. In this article, we will take you through what digital asset custody means, the three ways to hold crypto, how keys are secured, and the handful of failures that explain why any of this matters at all. What Is Digital Asset Custody? At its simplest, digital asset custody is the safekeeping of the private keys that control cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies do not physically exist.