H33 Custody › What Are You Protecting? › Authority Custody
Who is allowed to act?
Authority Custody
The hardest custody question isn't where the asset is — it's who is allowed to act on it. Authority Custody answers that question, in a way that holds up at audit, in court, and decades from now.
The Problem
Why this question matters.
Problem 01
Authority is the question nobody owns
Wallets answer 'where is the asset.' Identity providers answer 'who are you.' Communications answer 'what was said.' But the load-bearing question — who is allowed to act on what, on whose behalf, with what limits, for how long — has no native answer in most digital infrastructure. It lives in spreadsheets, side letters, board resolutions, and the memory of whoever was in the meeting.
Problem 02
And the answers don't survive personnel change
A VP authorizes a vendor relationship. The VP leaves. The vendor relationship continues. Five years later, in litigation, nobody can prove the original authorization was valid. The company didn't have an authority record — it had a VP who remembered.
The Approach
How H33 Authority Custody answers it.
Solution 01
Authority as a first-class custody record
Every authorization becomes a verifiable record: who was delegating, who was receiving, what scope, what limits, what expiration. Stored in custody the same way an asset would be — auditable, transferable, revocable.
Solution 02
Designed to survive personnel and time
When the original delegator leaves, the authority record stays. When the receiving party changes roles, the limits update. When the company restructures, the chain of authority reconstructs itself from the underlying records.
Solution 03
Built for the hard cases
Emergency succession protocols. Multi-signer approval chains. Time-locked authority transfers. Beneficiary-triggered authority. Court-ordered authority changes. Each handled by the same custody model — without the side letters and post-hoc documentation.
Capabilities
What you get.
Capability
Delegation
Grant authority with scope, limits, and expiration — verifiable end-to-end.
Capability
Succession Protocols
Authority transfers triggered by events: death, incapacitation, role change, time.
Capability
Authority Transfer
Move authority between parties with verifiable handoff and lineage.
Capability
Approval Chains
Multi-signer authorization with explicit rules, deadlines, and escalation paths.
Capability
Emergency Recovery
Pre-defined protocols for when keys are lost, principals are unreachable, or assets are at risk.
Capability
Credential Custody
Hold credentials that grant authority — API keys, hardware tokens, signed certificates — with the same custody model.
Use Cases
Who uses it.
For boards
Resolutions and authorizations recorded as verifiable custody events. Successor boards inherit a clean chain of authority back to founding.
For family offices
Delegated authority across generations with explicit succession rules. Trustees, executors, and family members each hold authority bounded by what they're authorized to do.
For institutions
Approval chains that survive personnel turnover, audit at any point in time, and provide evidence in litigation.
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