In context: Chris Seedor didn't set out to build a company focused on bitcoin security. In fact, when he first got his hands on the cryptocurrency, he saw little reason to use it. Now, he's trying to solve one of its biggest challenges: how to securely store bitcoin for people who choose to hold it themselves.

His journey began in 2011, when a friend handed him what would later turn out to be a small fortune in digital assets. At the time, Seedor was a mechanical engineering student at a university in Germany and saw little use for bitcoin.

"He gave me tons and tons of free Bitcoin," Seedor says. "I didn't see any use for it because I live in Germany and PayPal is a thing and I didn't have a drug habit or something."

He eventually spent nearly 1,500 of those coins on a graphics card – an ordinary purchase at the time that would look very different once bitcoin's price took off. "I famously own the most expensive graphics card in the world," Seedor told The Block during an interview at BTC Prague. "I bought a graphics card for a little less than 1,500 bitcoin in 2011."

Fifteen years later, Seedor is focused on a different challenge: securing bitcoin for people who choose to hold it themselves.

That trade-off is built into cryptocurrency. When people hold their own assets, there's no middleman – but they're also solely responsible for keeping those assets safe.

For Seedor, addressing that challenge first meant building a physical product rather than a financial one. He developed a stainless steel seed phrase backup – a durable storage device for the recovery phrase that controls access to a crypto wallet – designed to withstand disasters such as fire.

The product, known as the Seedor Wallet, reflects a practical approach shaped by his engineering background. It is intentionally simple. As Seedor puts it, it is "the most primitive form to store the most advanced sound money."

That same line of thinking eventually expanded into Bitsurance, a company focused on insuring bitcoin held in hardware wallets. The premise is straightforward: software can only go so far, and many of the biggest risks facing crypto holders are physical.

Seedor points to scenarios that extend beyond lost passwords or hacked exchanges. "I always had this fear of the $5 wrench attack," he said. "What if somebody comes to my house, kicks my door and threatens me or my family? What do I do in that scenario?"

Those concerns are not hypothetical. He referenced cases in France where crypto holders have been targeted in violent incidents, including a reported kidnapping attempt involving the wife of Sébastien Borget, co-founder of the Ethereum-based virtual world The Sandbox.

Bitsurance is designed to address those kinds of risks, along with more conventional threats such as fire and flooding. The policies cover bitcoin stored on hardware wallets and are underwritten by Liberty Specialty Markets, part of the Liberty Mutual Group. If a claim is approved, the payout is made in fiat currency rather than bitcoin.

The company currently offers coverage of up to €500,000. While that limit may cover only a portion of some larger holdings, it illustrates how traditional insurance is beginning to move into a market that has long operated without it.

The approach stands out because it brings together two very different worlds. Bitcoin was built to eliminate reliance on centralized institutions, yet services such as insurance inevitably reintroduce elements of that structure. In practice, that means translating decentralized risks into something insurers can model and price.

Seedor's journey – from casually spending bitcoin to building tools and services to protect it – mirrors a broader shift in the crypto landscape. Early users could afford to treat bitcoin as an experiment. That is no longer the case.