Your money is in your name.
Ours is a different account.
Most apps that hold dollars for you hold them in the company's name, in the company's account, and show you a number that represents your claim on it. HOLD does not work that way. The money sits at addresses that belong to your account, and it takes a signature from your phone to move a cent of it — including for us.
What that actually changes
“Non-custodial” is an industry word for a very ordinary idea: we are not holding your money, so we cannot do the things a company holding your money can do to you.
We cannot freeze it
There is no button in our systems that suspends your balance, because there is no balance of yours in our systems to suspend. If we decided tomorrow that we did not want you as a customer, the most we could do is stop serving you the app. Your money would carry on sitting where it sits.
We cannot spend it
Not for you, not by mistake, not under pressure. Every movement needs a signature that only your device can produce. This holds for the useful things too, which is the honest cost: we cannot undo a payment you regret, because we could not have made it in the first place.
Our problems are not your problems
If HOLD ran out of money tomorrow, none of what you are holding would be part of the mess. Customer money being caught up in a company's collapse is possible because the company was holding it. Here it never was.
Where the key lives
A key that only exists on one phone is lost with that phone. A key we could restore for you is a key we could use. The way out of that is to split it, so that neither side holds enough on its own.
Your phone makes the key, and never sends it
It is generated on the device, in the storage the operating system reserves for secrets — the same place your saved passwords and card details live, protected by the phone's own security chip. It does not travel to us in a form we could read, at setup or ever.
A locked copy goes to us, so a lost phone is not a lost account
Before it leaves, your device encrypts it with a secret that stays on the device. What arrives with us is a sealed blob. We store it, we back it up, and we cannot open it — which is the entire point of doing it this way rather than the easy way.
We add a second lock, and hold that one
A random secret of ours, unique to your account, goes into the encryption alongside your device's secret. So opening the blob needs both halves: the one on your phone and the one we release only to a properly signed-in session. Someone who stole our entire database would have our half of a lock and nothing to turn it with.
Every subsequent account comes from that one key
Main, Savings, your Pockets, and the addresses on each network are all derived from the same key by a published, standard method. That is why you never manage a second phrase, and why moving to a new phone brings everything back rather than one account of five.
The building blocks are all standard and public — scrypt to turn your device secret into a key, HKDF to combine it with ours, AES-256-GCM to do the encrypting. We did not invent any cryptography, which is the correct number of cryptographic primitives for a company to invent.
Where this stops being true
Three of them, and the first is the one nobody in this industry puts on a marketing page.
The limit
We cannot freeze your money. The people who issue the dollars can.
The digital dollars in your account are issued by regulated companies, and those companies keep the ability to freeze a specific address holding their token. They use it rarely and generally under a court order, usually against addresses tied to theft or sanctions. But it exists, it does not need our cooperation, and no wallet on earth can prevent it.
So the accurate sentence is the one we use: we cannot freeze your account. Not that nobody can. Anyone selling you the second sentence is either misinformed or counting on you being.
The limit
A payment that has gone is gone.
There is no chargeback, no reversal and no recall. If you send to the wrong person, we cannot claw it back — the same property that stops us seizing your money stops us retrieving it. The app pushes back hard on first-time recipients and on addresses that do not look right, because prevention is the only tool that exists here.
The limit
If you lose every way back in, we cannot let you in.
Your passkey, your recovery codes, your phone: lose all of them at once and the account is unreachable, by you and by us. We would not be withholding anything — we genuinely could not do it, and a company that could do it for you could also do it to you.
This is why the app gets insistent about a second recovery method once you are holding real money, and why that whole system has a page of its own.
The questions people actually ask
If you cannot move my money, how does the app move it?
It does not. Your phone does. When you tap send, the instruction is signed on your device with your key, and what reaches us is an already-signed instruction we pass on to the network. We are the postman, and the envelope is sealed. This is also why a HOLD employee cannot move your money for you if you ask nicely, and why a court order served on us cannot make us move it either — the thing being asked for does not exist on our side.
So what happens if HOLD shuts down?
Your money is not on our books, so it is not part of anything that would be wound up. It sits at addresses in your own name on public networks that keep running whether we exist or not. In Hybrid or Native mode you already have the recovery phrase that reaches those addresses from any other wallet in the world. We would also publish what you need to do it — but the point is that the money is already outside us, not that we promise to be nice on the way out.
Can you see my balance?
Yes. We can see the addresses your account uses, so we can see what is in them and what has moved — that is how the app shows you a balance at all, and anyone else looking at the public network can see the same thing. What we cannot do is anything about it. On Pro, your incoming payments land on rotating addresses, so an outside observer watching one address does not get your whole income history.
Do I have to write down twelve words?
Not unless you want to. In the default mode we never show them to you, and getting back in is done with your passkey and your recovery codes instead — the things people actually manage to keep. The phrase still exists underneath, and if you switch to Hybrid or Native mode you can see it and write it down. Both routes reach the same money.
What if I lose my phone?
Sign in on the new one with your passkey. Passkeys sync through your Apple or Google account, so on a replacement phone this usually takes a few seconds and no recovery codes at all. If the passkey is gone too, a recovery code gets you back. Losing everything at once is what the recovery codes exist to prevent, which is why the app keeps asking about them once your balance is worth something.
Is this insured?
No. There is no deposit guarantee scheme behind a non-custodial account, in any country, and any company telling you otherwise about this kind of product is misleading you. What you get instead is that there is no institution in the middle whose failure could take your money down with it — a different protection, not a stronger one, and you should decide for yourself which you would rather have.
Keep reading
How your account is protected
Passkeys, your PIN, two-factor, recovery codes and the list of devices signed in. What each one actually stops.
Networks and dollars
The four networks we settle on, the dollars we support, and why you are never asked to choose between them.
Who pays the network fee
Moving money on these networks costs something. Most of the time we pay it. Here is exactly when we stop.
Three ways to see one account
The same balance shown as plain dollars, as the dollars you actually hold, or with every network in view. You pick.