Where it came from
Unchained's own timeline dates the company to 2016 and names Joe Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO, and Dhruv Bansal, Co-Founder and CSO. The first bitcoin-backed loan followed in 2017, a seed round in 2018, and what the company calls collaborative custody in 2019.
The legal footing sits across a few entities. Unchained Capital, Inc. carries NMLS ID 1900773; Unchained Trading, LLC carries NMLS ID 2273761. The terms of service name Unchained Capital, Inc. as the provider, give a mailing address of PO Box 662, Austin, Texas, and state that the terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas. The state of incorporation itself is not stated in the company's published material. The company's timeline records that Gannett Trust received a Wyoming charter in 2025.
What it built
The structural idea is a 2-of-3 vault. The client holds two keys, Unchained holds one, and no single party can move funds. That arrangement is what makes the rest of the product line possible: because Unchained already holds a key in a shared vault, it can lend against the bitcoin without taking custody of it, which is the difference between this and the lenders that collapsed in 2022 holding client coins on their own books.
On top of that sit bitcoin-backed loans, a retirement account the company describes as the only bitcoin IRA with key control (launched 2021), a trading desk, and Unchained Signature. In 2020 the company also released Caravan, an open source coordinator for multisig, published under its GitHub organisation.
What it changed
Collaborative custody is now a category, and Unchained named it. Before it, borrowing against bitcoin meant handing the coins to the lender and hoping. Splitting the keys turns counterparty risk into something a customer can reason about instead of something they have to take on faith. The failure modes are different rather than absent: a key you hold is a key you can lose, and a company that holds one is a company that can be served with process. Listing here is not endorsement.