In 2024, onchain transfers grew to more than $10.6 trillion in value. At the center of crypto transactions are private keys that, when exposed or misused, can lead to irreversible loss. A handful of control points decide the financial safety of the entire system, so teams should know where the failure modes sit and which controls reduce risk when money moves onchain.

Below, you’ll find a practical view of what secure crypto operations look like in businesses that need predictable, auditable, and resilient systems.

What’s in this article?

• What defines security in crypto?
  
• How do cryptographic keys, signatures, and wallet models work?
  
• What controls support secure crypto operations?
  
• What threats and vulnerabilities affect crypto systems?
  
• How can organizations implement a crypto security framework?
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

What defines security in crypto?

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets that move on public, open blockchain networks. Whoever controls the private keys controls the funds, and transactions settle without reversals or safeguards. Crypto security means protecting the keys as well as the systems, people, and processes that influence how the keys are used.

Three forces that shape crypto security are:

• Keys: A private key decides who can move value. Whoever can use a key can move the funds tied to it. Losing private keys means losing access, and there’s often no recourse if that happens.

• Transactions: Every transfer is a signed, onchain action. Once confirmed, it’s effectively permanent. Security has to ensure that only legitimate transactions are created and that they reflect the business's intent.

• Systems and people: Wallet software, signing infrastructure, administrative tools, deployment pipelines, and employee devices can all become the path to the key. Business discipline matters as much as cryptography.

How do cryptographic keys, signatures, and wallet models work?

When a business “holds crypto,” what it actually controls are private keys. A key is a secret value that, when the wallet uses it, produces a matching public key and address that others can pay. It never needs to leave the system that stores it.

When the business sends funds, a transaction is constructed and signed with a private key. The network verifies the signature and permanently updates the ledger onchain.

The wallet architecture is the complete set of decisions about how keys are created, where they live, who can request signatures, and what checks must be performed before a transaction goes out.

Wallets are considered “hot” or “cold” depending on whether they are connected to the internet:

• Hot wallets: Software wallets are a common hot wallet. They keep keys online for automation.

• Cold wallets: These wallets are kept offline to protect long-term holdings from online threats. Cold wallets include hardware wallets, hardware security modules (HSMs), and fully offline storage solutions.

Both hot and cold wallets can use safeguards such as multisignature (multisig) setups and multiparty computation (MPC) to split authority across multiple keys or participants. Businesses can also choose custodial setups, which outsource the entire model to a specialist.

In professionally designed wallets, the architecture typically incorporates multiple layers of defense to protect funds, though security standards can vary across different wallet types.

What controls support secure crypto operations?

Strong crypto security depends on layered defenses. Each layer addresses a different kind of failure, and together they can create a system that’s difficult to abuse and resilient when something goes wrong.

Here’s how the security stack works in practice.

The key environment

The first layer is the foundation of security. Secure systems keep keys sealed and expose them only to signing.

Essential elements include:

• Secure hardware (hardware wallets, HSMs, and secure enclaves) to prevent key extraction

• Controlled key generation with strong entropy and verifiable logs

• Backups that are stored separately, access-controlled, and traceable

The policy layer

This is where businesses create transaction pathways that can be reviewed, audited, and controlled.

Effective setups use:

• Multisig or MPC to avoid single points of failure

• Spending and velocity limits to catch anomalies early

• Address allowlists for vetted destinations

• Approval workflows for high-value or unusual transfers

Operational discipline

Most crypto incidents happen in the systems and people around the keys. In 2024, infrastructure attacks such as private key and seed phrase compromises accounted for nearly 70% of total funds stolen.

To prevent this:

• Administrative tools and internal dashboards need access controls, logging, and hardened interfaces.

• Developer and automation pipelines should restrict who can deploy or modify code that interacts with keys.

• Workstations and internal networks need device-hardening, multifactor authentication (MFA), and segmentation to prevent malware from reaching sensitive systems.

Monitoring and detection

Because crypto transactions settle quickly and can’t be reversed, detection must be both fast and specific.

An effective setup monitors:

• Unusual signing patterns

• Unexpected destinations or transaction sizes

• Hot-wallet balance shifts

• Attempts to send funds to known bad addresses or sanctioned destinations

• Configuration drift or tampering in signing logic

What threats and vulnerabilities affect crypto systems?

Crypto systems don’t fail in one dramatic way. Rather, attackers exploit human weaknesses. Threats include employee inboxes, smart contract code, and more.

Here are the threats you should have on your radar.

Human access pathways

Many attacks are designed to break people and the systems people rely on.

These are the human access pathways to monitor:

• Phishing and social engineering: Attackers impersonate vendors, coworkers, or wallet providers to trick someone into revealing a seed phrase, approving a malicious signature, or logging in to a fake interface.

• Misrouted or mistaken transactions: A single miskeyed character can send funds to the wrong address with no way to retrieve them.

• Insider access or untracked privileges: Broad or poorly tracked internal permissions let a single person, or their compromised device, reach signing pathways they shouldn’t.

Compromised systems

Even if your keys are stored securely, upstream systems can be manipulated:

• Malware can alter destinations or steal credentials.

• Backend services can be exploited to request unauthorized signatures or rewrite logic that governs how money moves.

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) compromises can inject malicious logic.

Weak wallet setups

Poor structural design magnifies mistakes. Watch for:

• Single-key wallets that control principal balances

• Weak key generation or plaintext key storage

• Backups stored where attackers know to look

• No separation between hot (operational) and cold (treasury)funds

Application and protocol risks

Applications built on top of blockchains introduce their own risks.

Be wary of:

• Logic bugs and misconfigured roles

• Vulnerabilities in bridges, oracles, or offchain components

• Economic attacks exploiting incentives or Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)-related behavior

Network-level risks

Some chains are more exposed than others. Smaller chains are vulnerable to attackers rewriting recent history or double-spending their own transactions.

Congestion and degraded network conditions are prone to fee spikes or stalled networks, which can break assumptions about timing, settlement, and availability.

Operational gaps

Many crypto incidents are failures of visibility.

These happen because:

• There’s limited real-time monitoring

• No one is reviewing logs and alerts

• Teams don’t have the experience in responding to real incidents

How can organizations implement a crypto security framework?

A crypto security framework ties all these elements together. It gives the business a deliberate, reviewable structure for managing keys, controlling transactions, and responding to threats.

Here’s how to implement a comprehensive crypto security framework.

Map what you’re securing

• Inventory every wallet, key, and balance.

• Document every system or person who can influence transaction creation.

• Identify high-risk points such as hot wallets and admin consoles.

Establish policies that reflect how the business uses crypto

• Define transaction rules: Set spending limits, rate limits, and approval flows for high-value or unusual movement.

• Set address-approval logic: Decide which destinations are preapproved and what review happens when something new appears.

• Segment risk: You need distinct separation between operational wallets and treasury storage.

Build the key-management stack around separation and redundancy

Core management strategies include:

• Secure key generation

• Tamper-resistant storage (HSMs, enclaves, or MPC systems)

• Carefully controlled, distributed backups

• Multisig or MPC for high-value wallets

Harden every system that touches the signing path

Build internal tools and pipelines with identity controls, scope-limited permissions, and full auditability.

Monitor everything that could affect funds

Set real-time alerts, screen outbound transfers, measure behavioral baselines, and continuously verify the integrity of signing systems.

Practice incident response before you need it

Teams should rehearse:

• Who responds

• Who gets paused

• How funds move into a safe posture

• How internal and external communications unfold

Validate the system externally

Independent oversight keeps systems honest, so plan for:

• Regular audits

• Penetration tests and red-team exercises

• Staying in line with established standards such as the CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS)

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world. Businesses can accept stablecoin payments from almost anywhere in the world that settle as fiat in their Stripe balance.

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• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, including stablecoins and crypto.

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Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.