Bespoke & Tetra at Southpac: Explore Beyond the Panels

Bitcoin is a bearer‑style, key‑based asset with no recovery desk. That raises the stakes: the plan must explicitly address key control, succession to those keys, and how heirs will be prepared to manage what they receive.

Self‑custody can be appropriate for smaller, transactional balances where loss would not be catastrophic and the client has real operational discipline. It becomes problematic once positions are wealth‑significant, inside fiduciary structures, or critical to family succession.

At scale, self‑custody creates operational, security, and succession risks that most families and trustees are not equipped to manage. Custodians provide infrastructure, controls, insurance, and reporting that make Bitcoin behave like other institutional‑grade assets held in fiduciary structures.

Succession should be built into both the legal documents (trusts, operating agreements) and the operational setup (custody, key management). That means named roles, clear processes, and no reliance on a single password or seed phrase no one can find.

When it becomes a meaningful percentage of net worth, appears among the client’s largest positions, or would materially affect the estate or trust if lost or mishandled. At that point, treating it as a side bet is no longer defensible.