Backed by Lloyd’s of London, new UK startup offers insured Bitcoin vault
"Bitcoin is also simply not very well understood beyond the tech community."
might be fundamentally bizarre, there’s clearly money in it—and perhaps even more money in stealing it.So with that in mind, on Thursday, Elliptic opened its doors as a Bitcoin vault. Unlike its competitors, Elliptic offers its customers protection by Lloyd’s of London, a venerable stalwart of the insurance business. (Matt Beasley, a Lloyd’s spokesperson, confirmed the arrangement, but declined to provide further details.)
“It's taken this long for Bitcoin
insurance to appear because the insurance industry is fairly
conservative and has probably been put off by the negative media
coverage around Bitcoin, although this has improved since the demise of
Silk Road,” Tom Robinson, a company co-founder, told Ars. “Bitcoin
is also simply not very well understood beyond the tech
community—insurance underwriters are unwilling to provide cover for
something for which they cannot accurately quantify the risks.”
The fee amount is variable, depending on how much “cover” someone might want, or how much they want each bitcoin to be insured for if the exchange rate reaches that level. For example, at £1,000 per bitcoin, Elliptic bills its users in bitcoins at two percent annually. So, insuring 50 bitcoins at that level could cost 0.169 bitcoins monthly.Beyond insurance, Elliptic says that its “deep cold storage” to store bitcoins
gives it a leg up over its competitors.“The private keys giving access to Bitcoin holdings are generated and stored offline, in highly secure facilities,” the company states on its site. “Multiple copies are maintained, and each is protected by additional layers of cryptographic and physical security, accessible only by a quorum of our directors.”
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