Michael Tanguma, Co-Founder and CEO of Onramp – Interview Series

Michael Tanguma is the co-founder and CEO of Onramp, a financial platform for people who think about wealth in decades, built on Multi-Institution Custody. Onramp Finance, its latest offering, brings cash accounts with Onramp-funded rewards up to 5% through a partnership with Bridge, low-cost bitcoin brokerage in all 50 states, bitcoin IRAs, direct gold access, and a rewards card with cash back up to 1.5% into a single account. Before founding Onramp in 2023, Michael spent his career at the intersection of finance and Bitcoin. He leads Onramp’s vision of building the money platform of the future on a foundation of institutional-grade Bitcoin custody.

You spent years at the intersection of Bitcoin and traditional finance, including roles at Unchained Capital and Ten31, before launching Onramp in 2022. What gap in the market convinced you it was time to build the company, and how did those earlier experiences shape your vision for it?

Bitcoin in 2022 was where personal computing was in the 1970s. A handful of brilliant tinkerers were assembling motherboards in garages. Everyone else watched and waited for someone to ship the finished product.

That was the gap. The asset had been working for over a decade. The architecture wrapped around it had not. Every cycle, a major custodian failed. Self-custody worked for hobbyists but did not scale to the way wealth is actually held, passed down, and integrated into someone’s financial life. Anyone who studied gold knew Bitcoin was on the same path toward centralization unless someone built a fundamentally different architecture.

My time across traditional tech and Bitcoin-native finance pointed at the same conclusion. The industry needed commercialization at scale. Not another exchange. Not another hardware wallet. A real financial services company built on an architecture that removed the single point of failure issue that has plagued the industry since its inception, for both individuals and institutions. That is the gap Onramp was built to close.

Onramp’s Multi-Institution Custody model sits at the center of the platform, using a 2-of-3 multisig structure across separate institutions. What makes that model more compelling than either pure self-custody or reliance on a single custodian?

It is the first time in Bitcoin’s history that you can hold the asset without a single point of failure. Not yourself. Not an institution. Neither.

Self-custody puts the entire failure mode on the individual. Travel, theft, inheritance, human error. Single-custodian custody puts the entire failure mode on one company, in one jurisdiction, under one court’s reach. Multi-Institution Custody distributes keys across three independent institutions across multiple jurisdictions. No single party can move the asset. No single failure can lose it. The client retains visibility and economic ownership throughout.

The right analogy is the personal computer. Hobbyists built motherboards. Apple shipped a MacBook. Same underlying technology. A completely different experience. Multi-Institution Custody is what shipping the MacBook looks like for Bitcoin custody. Institutional-grade architecture, usable in minutes, with a real path for your family to access it if something happens to you.

Bitcoin custody remains one of the biggest barriers for high-net-worth individuals, advisors, and institutions. What are the most common concerns you hear from prospective clients, and how is Onramp designed to address them?

Most people do not even know custody is the barrier. They have spent a decade watching headlines about exchanges blowing up and coins lost in landfills. So they assume Bitcoin is the problem. It is not. The custody architecture wrapped around it is.

The three concerns that actually surface in conversations are these. What happens if a custodian fails? Who can access my Bitcoin and under what conditions? How does this work when I am gone?

The architecture answers all three. With keys distributed across three independent custodians in three jurisdictions, no single failure can take the asset and no single party can unilaterally move it. The client governs access through predefined verification, time locks, and approval procedures. Inheritance becomes a planned event with legal pathways across three regulated entities rather than a hardware device in a drawer and a prayer.

Onramp is building far more than a custody product, with offerings spanning Bitcoin brokerage, IRAs, inheritance planning, and broader financial services. What is the strategic thinking behind bringing all of those tools into one platform?

Bitcoin is money. Money requires financial services. That is the entire thesis.

When you bank with a Goldman or JPMorgan, you do not log in to one platform for your retirement account, another for inheritance planning, a third for dollar movement, and a fourth for lending. They are all in one place. As more of someone’s wealth lives in Bitcoin, the rational expectation is the same. The Bitcoin platform should be the primary financial services provider, but only if it offers the full set of adjacent services people actually need.

That is what we are building. Custody is the foundation. Brokerage, IRAs, inheritance planning, lending, cash management, and a spend card sit on top of it. One platform. One relationship. Built on the only custody architecture that scales as Bitcoin moves from a side allocation to a core part of how people hold wealth.

Your platform emphasizes long-term wealth preservation, including inheritance and estate planning. Why do you think those conversations have become so important for Bitcoin holders, especially as adoption matures?

The math changed. A meaningful Bitcoin position used to be five or six figures of dollar value. For many clients today, it is the largest line on their balance sheet. When the size changes, the conversation changes.

Most of the wealth outside of Bitcoin sits with individuals over forty. They are planning for their families. They are thinking about what they pass on. The first wave of serious Bitcoin holders has reached that same moment. They have spouses, children, and grandchildren. They have spent a decade accumulating an asset and now they are asking the question every other generation has asked. How do I make sure this outlasts me.

The catch is that the traditional planning tools do not fit the asset. Most trust administrators want you to custody with a single counterparty, which is the opposite of how the largest Bitcoin holders accumulated their position. Multi-Institution Custody is the only architecture that resolves the contradiction. You get the legal and tax structures that protect generational wealth without abandoning the architectural sovereignty that protected it in the first place.

Onramp also highlights insurance support through Lloyd’s of London for certain accounts. How important is that extra layer of protection when building trust with clients who may be moving significant wealth into Bitcoin?

Insurance is a layer on top of architecture. It is not a substitute for it.

The strongest form of insurance in Bitcoin is the way the private keys are held. Distribute them across three independent regulated institutions in three jurisdictions and the single-point-of-failure surface goes away. That is the primary defense. The Lloyd’s of London coverage we layer in is a secondary stamp of approval, structured around segregated vaults rather than pooled risk, and it reinforces the assurances clients expect from any serious financial platform.

If you are relying on insurance as your primary protection, you have already lost the structural argument. The architecture protects the asset. The insurance protects the edges. That order matters.

You have worked across Bitcoin-native finance, venture investing, enterprise sales, and large technology companies. How has that mix of experience influenced the way you think about scaling a company in the Bitcoin ecosystem?

The biggest lesson is that this industry has never had real commercialization at scale. Coinbase comes closest, but the dominant model has been speculation, not financial services. Watching the gap between how a Google or a great SaaS company operates and how Bitcoin companies operate showed me exactly what was missing.

What we are building is a lean, AI-native company with people who can operate with agency in a flat architecture. That is a different operating model than the traditional venture playbook of raising hundreds of millions and hiring an army. In an AI-native world, a small team of high-agency builders can match or outperform a much larger one. Capital efficiency is not a tagline. It is the operating philosophy. It shows up in every hiring decision, every architectural choice, and every product we ship.

Through your work at Ten31 and Early Riders, you have had a front-row seat to the evolution of Bitcoin infrastructure. Which areas of the ecosystem do you think are still underestimated today?

The most underestimated layer is the unsexy one. The onramps. The ability for any local currency to move into Bitcoin and for the financial services around that asset to actually exist. A fraction of one percent of the global population has any material Bitcoin allocation. Until that number moves meaningfully higher, every Lightning channel, eCash protocol, and credit market built on top of Bitcoin is downstream of a problem that has not been solved yet.

Two specific opportunities sit inside that. First is the convergence of stablecoins and Bitcoin. Stablecoins are how the rest of the world moves dollars onto programmable rails, and once those rails exist, Bitcoin is one click away. That convergence is already happening inside Onramp Finance, which runs on a stablecoin backend and lets clients move seamlessly between dollars and Bitcoin in one experience. Second is the convergence of AI and Bitcoin. Both are early. Both are compounding. The businesses that sit on top of that intersection have not been built yet.

The custody conversation in digital assets often comes down to balancing security, control, and usability. Do you see Multi-Institution Custody as the model that can finally bring those pieces together at scale, or is the industry still early in that evolution?

Multi-Institution Custody is the model. Security, control, and usability stop being a trade-off and start being a feature set. You get institutional-grade security across three independent custodians, control over how and when the asset moves, and usability that does not require you to manage cryptographic material yourself. A client traveling abroad can still operate with full confidence, because the keys are not with them and they are not with any single party.

The industry is still early in adopting this. Most capital flowing into Bitcoin today is moving into single-custodian solutions or ETFs that themselves depend on a single custodian. The architectural shift from single counterparty to multi-institutional is one of the defining transitions still ahead of this asset class, not behind it.

Looking out five to ten years, what does success for Onramp look like, and how do you expect the relationship between Bitcoin and traditional wealth management to change over that period?

The line between Bitcoin financial services and traditional wealth management disappears. That is the end state.

Onramp grows into something that looks more like a traditional financial services platform of the future. At the same time, the largest traditional institutions integrate Multi-Institution Custody and the architecture underneath it to offer Bitcoin to their own clients. There is a natural convergence happening on both sides. We meet in the middle.

Success is being the platform at the center of that meeting. The place where Bitcoin, dollars, and gold all live in one experience. The infrastructure layer that institutions plug into when they decide to offer Bitcoin properly. The private digital bank for the people who want their wealth to outlast them. That is the company we are building.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Onramp.