Client Overview
Bank Frick is a regulated financial institution and a leader in blockchain banking, delivering specialized solutions for blockchain enterprises, institutional crypto investors, and fintech firms. The bank provides secure custody, trading and staking services, regulatory-compliant fiat-crypto gateway infrastructure, and multi-currency account management.
Focused on institutional clients, Bank Frick combines strict regulatory compliance under EU and Liechtenstein frameworks with advanced digital asset infrastructure. With $1 billion in crypto under custody, its custody and key management systems are designed to meet the highest standards of operational resilience and security.
Key Security Objectives
As part of its commitment to institutional-grade custody, Bank Frick initiated an audited key ceremony, one of the most critical steps in the lifecycle of digital asset security. The objective was to validate and further strengthen its key generation and governance processes under independent oversight.
Two core priorities guided the engagement:
Eliminating single points of failure in key generation
Bank Frick places high value on assurance that its key ceremony process was designed to prevent any single actor or system from compromising key material. This included resilience against both external attacks and insider threats.
Ensuring regulatory alignment and operational integrity
As a regulated bank, Bank Frick is committed to shaping its key management processes so that they adhere to strict compliance requirements, with clearly defined roles, controls, and auditability across every stage of the ceremony.
Halborn’s Solutions
Halborn collaborated with Bank Frick’s internal teams to conduct an independent review, confirming that all technical controls and operational processes align with the bank’s high standards and institutional best practices.
The engagement included:
- Contributing to the development and refinement of detailed process runbooks governing the key ceremony lifecycle
- Defining governance frameworks and access controls to enforce strict separation of duties
- Reviewing and affirming the effectiveness of existing safeguards across insider risk, supply chain resilience, and system integrity.
- Participating in preparatory dry runs to validate procedures before execution
- Observing and attesting to the integrity of the live offline key generation process
Throughout the engagement, Halborn ensured that every step of the ceremony was structured, repeatable, and aligned with institutional expectations for security and compliance. As Laurin Krämer, Functional Lead Digital Assets Infrastructure at Bank Frick, put it: “Working with Halborn underlined our commitment to security, transparency, and ongoing excellence in digital asset custody. Their advanced approach to key ceremony auditing supported our mission to set industry-leading standards as a trusted blockchain bank.”
Outcomes Beyond the Core Engagement
The engagement delivered outcomes that extended beyond validating a single process:
- Strengthened institutional trust in custody infrastructure
- The independent audit reinforced confidence among stakeholders that Bank Frick’s custody systems meet the highest standards of security and governance.
- Robust, production-ready security controls
- The audited key ceremony resulted in a hardened set of controls designed to mitigate identified attack vectors, ensuring resilience across both technical and operational layers.
Through this process, Bank Frick achieved even higher standards of transparency, auditability, and regulatory alignment within its internal procedures.
Going Above and Beyond
Halborn’s role extended beyond auditing a predefined process. By contributing to runbook design, participating in dry runs, and validating execution in real time, Halborn helped shape a key ceremony framework that is both secure and operationally robust.
For financial institutions operating in regulated environments, key management is not just a technical requirement but a foundational element of trust. Bank Frick’s engagement demonstrates how independent, end-to-end validation of key ceremonies can strengthen both security posture and institutional credibility.
Through this collaboration, Halborn helped ensure that Bank Frick’s custody infrastructure is resilient, compliant, and prepared to support the evolving demands of institutional digital asset services.
