# Sovereignty

Many popular key storage systems attempt to bypass the user-experience problems involved with managing keys directly by relying on a trusted third-party organization to hold keys. 

It’s easier to make a custodial product. Development costs are lower and timelines are shorter. Centralized key storage also makes it much easier to add features that mimic the existing financial system, which makes it easier to onboard new users. 

At Casa, we don't do this for several reasons. 

First, as Nick Szabo once said, “trusted third parties are security holes.” There is a long and dark record of exchange hacks and scams. Even sophisticated and well-funded entities have found themselves victims of malicious actors, both internal and external. Customers of custodial services are also frequent targets of social engineering attacks designed to gain access to their accounts.

A certain big tech company famously had the slogan of “don’t be evil.” For the crypto-asset space, this motto should be “can’t be evil.” The only way to ensure this is by maintaining user sovereignty. The user should be the only one who has control over their funds. It should be impossible for the service provider, through malice or negligence, to unilaterally create transactions or block the creation of transactions.

**For Casa, this is a matter of principle.** Bitcoin was created to give people control over their money. Individual sovereignty is the idea that brought us into the cryptocurrency space. This is in Casa's DNA.<br>


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.casa.io/wealth-security-protocol/system-design-principles/sovereignty.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.