Wallets · 16 / 86 · 3 min
Multisig
Multisig means more than one key must agree before the money moves. It is how a group, or a careful person, avoids a single lost phone becoming a total loss.
One lost key is no longer the whole loss, if the threshold is higher than one. The remaining keys still have to be real and separate.
A worked case
A company says it uses a multisig. All three keys are held by the same founder. The threshold is two. That is one person. The word multisig was the costume.
Why more than one key
One key can be stolen or forgotten. Two of three means one failure is survivable. The cost is coordination. Someone has to hold the other keys, and those people can also refuse, disappear, or collude.
When a signer disappears
If you needed two signatures and one person is gone, the money can sit forever. Write down who holds which key, and what happens if one of you dies or leaves.
A company that holds one of the keys has a veto. That can be a feature. It is also a firm in the middle.
Several keys, one person
Multisig means a threshold. Two of three keys, or three of five, must sign before the coins move. It is how a company, a family, or a careful person avoids a single lost phone becoming a total loss. It is also a word that appears in pitch decks. The threshold only helps if the keys are held by different people, in different places, who would not all sign a bad idea on a Tuesday night.
Quadriga, the Canadian exchange, is the grim version of one person holding the door. The Ontario Securities Commission staff report, published in 2020, describes a platform whose founder, Gerald Cotten, died in 2018 and whose clients then could not get their money. Staff's review describes missing assets, fake balances, and control concentrated in one man. It was not a tidy multisig story. It is what one-person control looks like when the marketing said otherwise. The report is staff's view. It says so. It is still the public record of where the money was not.
If you are told a treasury is a multisig, ask who holds each key and what happens when one of them disappears. A founder with three shares on one laptop is one key.
Read it yourself
These links are the record. They are not a recommendation, and they are not instructions. A news story or a court paper can still be wrong about a detail. The check does not change because a famous name is in the story.
Apply the check
Open a question. The line is about this topic. It is not a verdict that anything is safe.
The signers, if they can pay themselves.
Whoever holds enough keys to meet the threshold.
Those same keys, including a signer who goes missing and blocks everyone.
Check yourself
Does multisig mean the money cannot be stolen?
No. Enough signers, working together or tricked, can still move it.
After this you can name every signer, and what happens if one of them is gone.