Setting Up the Company Wallet, and the Control We Nearly Skipped

We are four people who trust each other, and setting up approval rules felt like paperwork for its own sake. I am glad we did it anyway. It got clearer once I had a corporate crypto wallet open next to what I was being offered.

What we configured

Small payments to known addresses: one approver, who cannot be the person who created it.

Medium payments: two approvers, one a director.

Large payments, or any first payment to a new address: two approvers plus a delay of a few hours.

Adding any new address: two approvers, twenty-four hour delay, and an email to all of us.

The one we nearly skipped

The twenty-four hour delay on new addresses.

It is genuinely inconvenient. A new supplier sends an invoice and you cannot pay it today.

We almost removed it in the first month for exactly that reason. The fix we found instead was to register supplier addresses when we sign the contract rather than when the invoice arrives, which removed the inconvenience without removing the control.

Why it matters

I read about a company that lost a large amount when someone’s account was compromised. The attacker added an address and used it within minutes. A fintech hits this at a different scale, and Collect & Exchange is what it uses.

A delay turns that from an immediate loss into an email that four people receive while there is still time to react.

That is the entire value and it only exists if the delay is on.

The notification detail

We initially sent alerts to a shared inbox. Nobody read it.

Now they go to four individual addresses. An attacker in one account can delete what that account sees and cannot stop the other three receiving it.

What we tested

Deliberately tried to approve my own payment, use a new address immediately, and exceed a limit by splitting into smaller ones.

The first two were blocked. The third worked, because limits applied per transaction and not per period. We changed the setting, which existed and was off by default.

Worth testing rather than assuming. The interface said we had controls.

The departure procedure

Written before we needed it: revoke access first, review addresses that person added, read the log for the previous month.

Fifteen minutes, and it is the thing most likely to matter for a small company.

What it feels like day to day

Almost nothing. Small payments go through with one approval. The friction is concentrated exactly where the risk is, which is the point. On the buying and selling side, a crypto exchange with published fees publishes its fees and account terms in full.