As financial institutions seek greater control over their digital asset infrastructure, self-hosted solutions are becoming the industry standard. This article explores how Cordial Treasury sets a new benchmark for on-premise digital asset custody—offering unmatched data sovereignty, operational resilience, and customizable deployment options.
Across the digital asset landscape, institutions of various stripes are choosing Cordial Treasury for their custody infrastructure. Companies like Jump Trading, SwissBorg, Figure Markets, Backpack, and the Douro/Pyth Network team are some of the various firms adopting Cordial Treasury to secure their operations and ensure long-term resilience.
In our previous blog, Why SaaS-Based Wallets Are No Longer Enough for Institutional Custody, we explored why institutions are shifting away from SaaS wallets and turning to self-hosted solutions. The key reasons driving this shift include:
- Data privacy and sovereignty concerns
- The need to enforce institution-specific security policies
- The demand for operational resilience with minimal external dependencies
This article takes a closer look at how Cordial Treasury addresses these requirements and sets a new standard for on-premise digital asset custody.
Data Sovereignty and Residency: A Regulatory Imperative
For financial institutions, data sovereignty is a fundamental requirement, not a discretionary choice. Data regulations like GDPR, cryptocurrency regulations like MiCA and DORA—as well as jurisdiction-specific data localization laws—require institutions to know where their data is stored, how it’s accessed, and how it’s protected across system boundaries.
Cordial Treasury ensures full data sovereignty by allowing institutions to self-host the entire custody stack within their own infrastructure and within certain geographical borders if needed. Security critical processes such as cryptographic key generation, policy enforcement, and sensitive access logs remain entirely within the institution's environment. This not only ensures compliance with evolving data and information technology regulations but also provides confidence on a first hand basis that sensitive information and processes maintain their integrity. Nor will the data be held hostage should you decide to offboard, a common concern with SaaS based solutions.
Supporting jurisdiction-specific data residency requirements is another critical advantage. Whether operating in the European Union, Asia, or North America, institutions can customize Cordial Treasury’s deployment to align with local compliance mandates.
In an industry where data breaches, regulatory scrutiny, and vendor mismanagement can lead to catastrophic losses, control over data infrastructure is no longer a nice-to-have—it's essential.
Customizing Your Control Framework and Security Requirements
Institutional-grade custody requires more than generic, vendor-defined security settings. Traditional SaaS wallets often impose rigid security and responsibility frameworks that don’t align with enterprise risk management and the expectations of the risk committee.
With Cordial Treasury, institutions can apply their own security posture, defining and enforcing policies tailored to their specific governance requirements, and implement a responsibility model that aligns best to their needs. The platform supports role-based access controls, allowing firms to create custom permissions based on job function, location, or operational risk profiles.
Institutions can also integrate Cordial Treasury into their existing security and compliance frameworks. This ensures policy consistency across teams and minimizes the operational overhead of managing parallel control environments. Gone are the days of having to engineer around the limitations and inadequacies of a SaaS based wallet.
The ability to customize security protocols internally rather than inheriting a third-party vendor's black-box model gives institutions peace of mind that their custody environment meets both internal and external requirements.
Operational Resilience: Built-In Fault Tolerance
Operational resilience is no longer optional for institutions managing regulated digital assets. Frameworks like DORA explicitly mandate that institutions implement measures to maintain service availability and recover quickly from disruptions.
Cordial Treasury’s architecture is inherently resilient, running on multiple distributed servers to provide fault tolerance and operational continuity by design. Institutions can back up their key shares to secure locations, along with system snapshots taken every few minutes. These snapshots include wallets, users, policies, and access rules, making it possible to rehydrate the entire system on new hardware within a few hours if disaster strikes.
This level of operational resilience supports intraday recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), ensuring that critical operations continue even in adverse conditions and no data loss is suffered. Importantly, since you self host Cordial Treasury, there is no impediment to your ability to conduct full end-to-end business continuity or disaster recovery exercises, and more stringent testing such as code audits or “red teaming”.
Flexible Deployment and Seamless Integration
Cordial recognises that there is no one size fits all. Technology leaders at each institution have a unique technology stack, and Cordial Treasury is designed to integrate seamlessly with upstream and downstream applications. Its flexible deployment options allow firms to choose between running the software in customer side data centers, private clouds, or hybrid environments.
APIs make it possible to connect Cordial Treasury with trading systems, analytics platforms, and reporting tools. The platform also supports machine users for automated processes, enabling efficient operations leading to straight through processing (STP). There is the option to include further controls such as know-your-transaction checks or connecting to your risk engine and other middle office systems.
Additionally, Cordial Treasury can integrate with existing identity and access management systems, ensuring smooth user provisioning and centralized oversight without disrupting established workflows.
Open Source Philosophy: Transparency by Design
Cordial Treasury is built with an open-source philosophy that prioritizes transparency and customer autonomy. A core strategic pillar of the product is to disintermediate Cordial Systems from day-to-day custody operations as much as possible, giving customers the freedom and flexibility to tailor the product to their needs.
This philosophy is reflected in the platform's source-available licensing, which provides institutions with full access to the codebase. Customers can review the software line by line, conduct internal audits, and validate security practices independently. This level of transparency is essential for conducting greybox and threat-led penetration testing, as required by regulatory frameworks like DORA.
The commitment to openness extends beyond the core custody software. Wherever possible, Cordial Systems open-sources additional components to further support its customers. One of the most valuable resources is the cross-chain library, which allows customer side developers to:
- Self-serve adding support for new blockchains as needed.
- Create various transactions such as transfers and staking.
- Soon this will also simplify integrations with your onboarded exchanges.
The cross-chain library is actively maintained on GitHub, where customer-side developers can submit pull requests. The Cordial Systems team regularly reviews, merges, and nurtures these contributions, ensuring the library remains a robust, long-term developer resource.
By giving customers the tools, freedom, and transparency to extend and adapt the product to their operational requirements, Cordial Treasury ensures true self-custody—where institutions have complete control over their wallet infrastructure without being dependent on external vendors.
Conclusion: The New Standard in Institutional Digital Asset Custody
Institutional requirements for security, control, and operational resilience are raising the bar for digital asset custody solutions. Cordial Treasury sets a new standard by delivering a self-hosted custody platform that ensures data sovereignty, operational resilience, and flexible deployment options while maintaining transparency through its open-source philosophy.
With Cordial Treasury, financial institutions can confidently own their custody infrastructure, apply their security framework, and ensure compliance with evolving regulatory standards—all without relying on third-party service providers. In our next article, we will explore what the first 90 days with Cordial is like and pull upon the experiences of existing customers. Be sure to follow our social media pages to stay informed on latest publications, news, and product updates.
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