GlassVault
GlassVault
November 2022. FTX, once the world's third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy. Over $8 billion in customer funds had vanished into opaque omnibus accounts, commingled and mismanaged beyond recovery. Then the whole industry puked.
One day I was leading high-stakes efforts across product and compliance channels, and the next day my entire unit at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange was eliminated. Fewer than three weeks after the FTX implosion, asset prices had tanked, and Kraken slashed over 1,100 employees, a third of its workforce. The layoffs rolled through Silicon Valley for months. While the industry scrambled to cut costs and rebuild trust, I saw the real problem: the custody model itself was fundamentally broken.
The FTX collapse wasn't just about fraud. It was enabled by architectural flaws that still plague the industry today. Omnibus holding accounts meant customer funds were pooled together. Commingling made individual balances invisible. Zero transparency left customers with no way to verify their assets were actually there. All it took was a greedy executive to actually make those assets disappear, and it was months before anyone noticed they were gone.
Three years later in 2025, the crypto industry is once again booming, but the same dangerously opaque custody models are still ubiquitous. I founded GlassVault to fix this, because we all deserve better.
At GlassVault, every client's assets are held in unique, client-specific wallet addresses. We don't pool funds. We don't commingle assets. We don't hide holdings in corporate treasury accounts.
This architecture delivers:
We've architected GlassVault with features the industry has overlooked:
Beneficiary Assignment: Designate one or more beneficiaries directly on your wallet. Estate planning for digital assets shouldn't require your heirs to become crypto experts. Now it doesn't.
Savings-First Architecture: Built for long-term holders who want to accumulate and preserve wealth. Think savings account mentality: secure, steady, sensible.
Industry-Leading Low Fees: We believe custody and trading should be accessible. Signup, deposits, and holding assets are totally free, and our exchange fees are among the lowest in the entire industry.
GlassVault is a fully registered Money Services Business (MSB) with FinCEN. We prioritize user privacy and comply with regulatory frameworks to ensure that cryptocurrency remains a respected and accessible asset class. We build trust by building the infrastructure that digital asset investors deserve.
Whether you're an individual building wealth, a company managing treasury assets, a trust administrator, or managing a Self-Directed IRA, GlassVault delivers what others fail to provide: transparency you can verify, security you can trust, and usability that is so simple it's obvious.
Here's to clear-as-glass custody for the digital age.
~ Kris D., Founder
11/11/2025