Crypto Exchange & Custody Security Assessment
An architectural and operational review of how an exchange or custodian actually moves value — hot/cold separation, withdrawal authorisation, key-management design and the admin paths that turn a small compromise into a total loss.
Verified Solvex Specialist
Verified by SolvexDirect specialist contact for Solvex engagements
What this means. An authorized Solvex administrator registered and approved this exact public identity. What it does not. Solvex has not inspected the account on the platform, and this is not the platform's own verification.
Solvex specialists never ask for your passwords, recovery phrases, one-time codes, or payments to a personal account. Work, scope and invoices are agreed in writing through the official channels on this site.
Signed authorization required. This engagement is performed only against systems you own or are contractually authorized to have tested, under an agreed scope. See the responsible testing policy.
What's covered
- Exchange and custody architecture review against the value flow
- Hot, warm and cold wallet separation and the promotion path between them
- Withdrawal authorisation controls, limits, allowlists and delay windows
- Administrative access, privileged action approval and separation of duties
- Key-management design: generation, storage, quorum, rotation and recovery
- Trading and internal API security, including internal service trust
- Transaction monitoring and anomaly-detection architecture
- Operational readiness: on-call, incident playbooks, and the halt decision
What you receive
- Architecture assessment with severity-ranked findings
- Value-flow diagram showing where authorisation actually happens
- Key-management design review with concrete recommendations
- Withdrawal-control and approval-path recommendations
- Operational readiness assessment and incident playbook gaps
- Executive summary written for a board or a regulator
Evidence and reporting
How the work is kept honest- Evidence, frozen at issuanceFindings tie to something observed. When the report is issued, the evidence behind it is frozen in the same transaction and cannot be edited afterwards.
- A signed reportAn Ed25519 signature covers both the report content and the delivered file. Alter a byte of either and verification fails.
- Signed scope firstTesting starts only after written scope and signed authorization for systems you own or are entitled to have tested.
Anyone holding a Solvex report can verify it publicly without seeing its contents.
Our boundaries
What this engagement does not do, stated before it starts.
- We never request, receive or handle private keys, seed phrases or signing material
- No custody of client funds at any point in the engagement
- Smart-contract code review is a separate audit engagement
- No assurance about market, counterparty or regulatory risk
How this engagement runs
- 01
Intake
Tell us the system, the goal and the constraints. If the work is not a good fit, we say so before anyone is invoiced.
- 02
Scope and authorization
Written scope and signed authorization before anything is touched. Security testing runs only against systems you own or are contractually entitled to have tested.
- 03
Investigation or build
Specialists matched to the work. Findings are proven by hand — scanner output is a lead, never a finding.
- 04
Evidence
Every finding ties to something observed. When a report is issued, its evidence is frozen in the same transaction, so what backed the report cannot change afterwards.
- 05
Delivery
A signed report: an Ed25519 signature over both the content and the file, with a short verification reference you can read down a phone.
- 06
Verification and retest
Anyone holding the report can verify it publicly without seeing its contents. Fixes are retested as part of the engagement — “fixed” means we confirmed it.
Questions we are asked
- Will you need access to our keys or wallets?
- No — and if any provider asks, that alone should end the conversation. We review architecture, configuration, code paths and procedures. Key material never leaves your control, and we design the engagement so it never needs to.
- What tends to be the real weakness?
- Almost never the cryptography. It is the operational path around it: an admin interface that can change a withdrawal allowlist without a second approver, a hot wallet topped up by an automated job nobody reviews, or a recovery procedure that has never been rehearsed.
- Can you assess a custodian we are considering using?
- We can assess what they are willing to disclose, and we will be explicit about what we could not see. A third-party review based on a questionnaire is worth something, but it is not the same as an assessment with access, and we will not present it as one.
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