Nobody Had Ever Legally Defined “Cold Storage” Before. It Was Sitting Undefined in Policy Language.

Raymond Zenkich’s path into crypto insurance ran through decades of insurance and technology infrastructure work — building back-office systems for banks and insurance companies as a software developer, then moving into IT management for financial services firms, then running his own technology-focused management consulting practice. The interest in blockchain and Bitcoin took hold in the early 2010s, driven by his existing software and database background. He met his co-founder at a conference — at the time building a blockchain practice at a large international custodian — and the two of them decided the crypto insurance problem was real and worth pursuing together, starting Evertas in 2017.

Evertas’s team is deliberately crypto-native rather than insurance-first: people who worked with digital cash in the mid-1990s, people who built actual custody systems for holding crypto assets, and people who led investigations groups — assembled specifically because Raymond considers claims handling, not just underwriting, the actual foundation of a meaningful insurance contract in a category this technically unfamiliar to traditional carriers.

In Episode 93 of InsurTechTalk, Raymond and I covered why insurance capacity for crypto risk remains tiny relative to the asset class’s size, how Evertas built underwriting definitions for terms the industry had never formally defined, and what actually happened to demand for crypto insurance after FTX.

About Raymond Zenkich

Raymond Zenkich is President and Founder of Evertas, a Lloyd’s of London cover-holder MGA focused exclusively on insurance for digital assets — crime, theft, D&O, technology E&O, and an emerging cyber product, serving institutional custodians, exchanges, and family offices rather than retail crypto holders. Before Evertas, Raymond built a career in insurance and financial services technology, including running his own management consulting firm. Evertas has been underwriting for over four years as of this recording.

Why Insurance Capacity for Crypto Is So Thin

Raymond’s opening framing sets up the actual scale of the problem: the amount of insurance capacity carriers are willing to put balance sheet behind for crypto risk is genuinely minuscule relative to the total size of the crypto market — single-digit percentage coverage, by his estimate, which isn’t enough even to fully address crime/theft coverage alone, let alone D&O, tech E&O, cyber, property, or recovery needs layered on top.

His diagnosis of the root cause: underwriting correctly requires genuinely understanding the risk, and crypto’s technical unfamiliarity to traditional carriers has kept most capacity providers on the sidelines. Evertas’s entire value proposition is built on closing that understanding gap directly, rather than trying to force crypto risk into insurance forms built for other asset classes.

Why the Private Key Changes the Underwriting Problem Entirely

The structural insight underlying Evertas’s whole approach: digital assets are, in Raymond’s framing, digital bearer assets — whoever holds the private key has full, unilateral control. If a custodian’s keys are compromised or stolen, the assets may become genuinely, permanently inaccessible, with no institutional recourse comparable to reversing a fraudulent bank transfer. That structural reality is exactly why third-party insurance oversight of a custodian’s security practices matters so much — insurance functions as an outside, objective check on how seriously a custodian is actually managing key security, not just a financial backstop after the fact.

Defining Terms the Industry Never Formally Defined

This was a genuinely striking, concrete example of the education gap Evertas set out to close. Raymond pointed to industry-standard terms — hot storage, cold storage, warm storage — used constantly across the crypto custody world, including inside actual insurance policy language, without rigorous, defensible definitions attached to them. Two years before this recording, Evertas built its own precise definitions for these terms and incorporated them directly into its policy forms — a small-sounding but genuinely foundational step toward making clear exactly what is and isn’t covered, rather than leaving coverage boundaries ambiguous in language borrowed loosely from industry jargon.

What Evertas Actually Underwrites

Evertas built its product line in a deliberate sequence, starting with the hardest problem first:

• Crime (theft/loss) — the founding product, chosen specifically because it required the deepest underwriting framework to build correctly
• D&O — a crypto-specific directors and officers product, built once the crime underwriting foundation existed, and described by Raymond as massively needed and well-received by both brokers and insureds
• Technology E&O — covering loss or inaccessibility resulting from a software or hardware failure, again built crypto-specific from the ground up
• A developing cyber product

Raymond was explicit about what Evertas deliberately avoided: retrofitting existing insurance forms — some originally designed decades or even centuries ago — to awkwardly accommodate a digital bearer asset they were never built to contemplate. Every Evertas form is crypto-first by design, which he considers the actual structural advantage over any traditional carrier attempting to extend legacy products into the category.

Who Actually Buys This Coverage

Evertas’s customer base is institutional, not retail: exchanges, custodians, larger family offices, and — increasingly — companies that simply find themselves holding digital assets on their balance sheet (often via acquisition) and need coverage they never previously required. Raymond flagged a specific, concrete driver of first-party demand: funds and institutional buyers are sometimes contractually required to represent that proper insurance is in place before they can allocate assets to a given custodian — and he’s seen real cases where funds simply couldn’t place assets with a custodian because that insurance representation couldn’t be satisfied. What looks like an insurance market failure from one angle, in his framing, is a genuine market opportunity from Evertas’s.

Bridging the Broker Education Gap

Given how few brokers have deep crypto expertise, Evertas invests heavily in direct broker education — building a growing library of educational material and often taking on a disproportionate amount of hands-on conversation time relative to what a broker’s crypto exposure might represent within a broader portfolio. Raymond’s stated goal isn’t turning brokers into crypto experts — it’s giving them enough grounding to ask the right questions and know when to bring Evertas directly into the conversation, at which point Evertas’s crypto-native underwriting team can speak peer-to-peer with the insured’s own technical staff, without needing basic concepts explained from scratch.

His practical bridging technique: starting conversations from insurance categories brokers already understand deeply (a bank’s Fidelity bond exposure, standard D&O) and working outward from that familiar foundation toward the crypto-specific nuances layered on top — rather than starting cold with unfamiliar terminology.

Deliberately Not a Token, Deliberately Traditional Insurance

I raised a genuine concern from evaluating crypto insurance pitch decks generally: a pattern of projects that felt closer to a “pump and dump” than a durable insurance business. Raymond’s answer was direct and specific: Evertas has no token, no crypto-native financial product of its own — it deliberately positions itself as a traditional insurance solution rather than co-mingling digital asset mechanics with the insurance offering itself, a choice he frames as bringing genuine comfort and professionalism to institutional buyers wary of exactly the pattern I described.

FTX and the “Third Crypto Winter”

Asked how FTX’s collapse affected Evertas’s business, Raymond situated it within a longer pattern he and his co-founder have now lived through three times — what he calls the third “crypto winter,” following an earlier 2017-2018 pricing collapse and a second downturn roughly three years prior, loosely tied to the ICO boom-bust cycle.

His genuinely counterintuitive read: rather than damaging demand, the FTX collapse drove a significant acceleration in interest in insurance and risk mitigation — both directly (people who experienced frozen assets or losses) and indirectly (institutions and even startups recognizing they could no longer treat D&O or E&O coverage as optional). Evertas’s own underwriting program grew through this period rather than contracting, and Raymond frames each successive “winter” as a maturation event for the industry broadly — participants regroup, improve infrastructure, and prepare more seriously for the next growth cycle, which he sees as structurally different (more institutional, more focused on genuine infrastructure investment) from the earlier speculative cycles.

The Claims Reality: Few Claims, But Real Investigative Depth Required

Raymond was candid that Evertas hasn’t processed a large volume of claims to date — but the company has still built out a genuine claims investigation capability, treating it as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought.

• Evertas performs its own KYC/AML on organizations and key personnel upfront, treating that diligence as a meaningful risk indicator during underwriting itself, not just a compliance formality
• Policy language requires specific operational practices (transaction handling procedures, log retention) precisely so that, in the event of a claim, Evertas can determine validity quickly rather than reconstructing events from scratch
• When investigation is needed, it draws on genuine human intelligence — investigators who understand what questions to ask and where to look — paired with specialized blockchain analytics and tracing software
• Recovery work frequently intersects with jurisdictional complexity: assets and the infrastructure holding them can span multiple legal jurisdictions, sometimes requiring coordination with local law enforcement or counsel in unfamiliar territories

Building Underwriting Models From Scratch, Without Legacy Actuarial Data

I pushed Raymond on the genuinely hard actuarial problem: how do you underwrite a risk category with essentially no historical loss data to build a model against — a problem cyber insurance has struggled with for years, and crypto has in a more extreme form. His answer described a deliberately digital-first, tiered underwriting platform rather than a one-size-fits-all questionnaire:

• Underwriting complexity is automatically calibrated to the insured’s profile — a small family office isn’t asked the same depth of questions as a multi-billion-dollar global custodian
• Evertas built roughly 22 underwriting categories, with target response benchmarks defined for each, based on years of studying loss events and drawing on team members’ decades of prior experience building actual custody systems
• The platform is explicitly designed for usability — Raymond’s point being that a genuinely usable underwriting form, not just a rigorous one, is itself part of making the underwriting process efficient enough to scale
• The framework is treated as a continuously evolving target, updated regularly against new threat vectors and market research rather than fixed once and left static

What Retail Crypto Insurance Would Actually Require

Asked what it would take to bring meaningful insurance to retail crypto holders (rather than just institutions), Raymond pointed to an emerging model Evertas is building: a “platform product” allowing an institution (a custodian, for instance) to extend a baseline level of coverage to its own retail customers as part of its offering — functioning both as a marketing signal (proof the custodian’s systems have been vetted by an outside underwriter) and a foundation retail customers could then build on by purchasing additional coverage beyond the baseline. He considers this genuine innovation the market currently lacks, distinct from the handful of smaller, more technology-driven products (he referenced one operating primarily through Telegram) already attempting something adjacent.

Key Takeaways

• Insurance capacity for crypto risk remains a tiny fraction of what the asset class’s actual size would require, primarily because most traditional carriers lack the technical understanding to underwrite the risk confidently
• Digital bearer assets create a fundamentally different custody risk than traditional financial assets — whoever holds the private key has full, often irreversible control, which is exactly why third-party insurance oversight of custody practices matters
• Foundational industry terms like “hot” and “cold” storage lacked rigorous definitions even inside policy language until Evertas built and incorporated its own — a small-sounding but structurally important step toward genuine coverage clarity
• FTX’s collapse drove a measurable acceleration in demand for crypto insurance and risk mitigation broadly, rather than suppressing it — consistent with a pattern Evertas has observed across two prior “crypto winters”
• Institutional buyers are sometimes contractually required to demonstrate adequate insurance is in place before they can allocate funds to a custodian — a structural demand driver independent of any individual loss event
• Building underwriting models for a category with no legacy actuarial data required a tiered, digital-first platform calibrated to insured complexity, based on years of direct loss-event research and team members’ decades of hands-on custody system experience
• A viable path to retail-level crypto insurance likely runs through institutions extending baseline platform coverage to their own customers, rather than direct-to-consumer products built from scratch