River retweeted
At River a culture of security and paranoia has been in our DNA since day 1. Often that meant doing things the hard way instead of moving fast.
For example, we have always operated our own custody system. This meant doing the work to be a regulated financial institution in our infancy instead of delegating the backend to companies like Prime Trust.
We have always worked to minimize reliance on third parties where possible, and as our ability to build software systems accelerates we continue to delete both software and corporate dependencies.
We budget a substantial % of our engineering resources every year to tackle tech debt and invest in security hardening. This means moving slower, but having confidence in our foundation and doing right by our clients.
I personally give the company security training to every new employee who joins River and we constantly drive a culture of vigilance at the company. We tell every employee at River that their job is to be a security professional.
Security isn't a team or a "thing" you do. It's a culture of extreme paranoia and humility - never feeling like you're secure enough and always trying to do better.
River retweeted
If you keep your Bitcoin on an exchange there are two doors that need to be guarded to keep your funds safe: your account login and the exchange custody system.
Multi-factor authentication, device verification, withdrawal restrictions like ForceField, etc. are great features to prevent an attacker from compromising your account.
However, none of these protections help you if the custody system backing the exchange is compromised, which is what just happened at Binance.
Here is how River manages securing your coins internally:
Hot wallet:
Coins in a hot wallet are the most at risk. These coins are on systems connected to the public internet to process demand withdrawals for clients. The strategy is to keep enough coins in here to allow everyone to withdraw on-demand, but never too much that a hack could be financially devastating. River maintains a very low hot wallet balance, and on top of this we have strict internal manual approval policies if withdrawals exceed certain rate limits. Even if an attacker got through every single line of network defense and completely compromised our systems, they wouldn't be able to walk away with much BTC before being shut out.
In order to ensure we always have sufficient coins hot, we have a staging "warm" wallet that is not accessible to process demand withdrawals, but can send funds to top up the hot wallet with sufficient internal approvals.
However, the ultimate layer of defense is cold storage:
Cold storage is a custody system where the signing keys are held offline, such that a full compromise of all computer systems could still not lead to a theft of funds.
At River, we prove every month that we have more coins cold than we have in client BTC liabilities. You can verify this yourself at river.com/reserves. Our multi-sig cold storage system is designed for Bitcoin and Bitcoin alone. We are not exposed to any of the smart contract complexity that was exploited in the Binance hack. We will be sharing more in depth about our cold storage in the coming months.
Some exchanges outsource custody, which effectively removes their ability to make any direct claim to you about the integrity and security of their systems. Choose your exchanges carefully. Ask yourself: “are the people running my exchange the most qualified to build a highly secure custody system?”
River retweeted
It looks like a number of offshore exchanges are being targeted in this attack. @River is safe and will do what we can to support the industry.
River retweeted
The design team at @River has pushed over 250k lines of code in the past year.
With Ai and a solid design system behind us we're building smaller client features, adding polish, and taking control of the design system ourselves .
You'd think that means we're slowly turning into engineers. Honestly it's the opposite, we're more creative than we've ever been.
The boring parts of design get automated, so most of our time goes on design thinking.
Which is kind of the whole point of design anyway
River retweeted
Today we launched a new @River web app, rebuilt from the ground up.
Beyond a sleeker, easier experience, it includes a major technical overhaul:
- Faster, smoother flows across the product
- A new frontend component system that speeds up development
- A more performant, observable, and ergonomic shared API for web and mobile
- Backend upgrades for reliability, speed, and security.
Building the world’s most trusted financial institution means investing in the systems underneath.
Try it out yourself at river.com on web or mobile. We'd love your feedback!
River retweeted
This is the team building River for you.
We only build things that allow us to sleep at night.
We insist on the highest standards.
We are obsessed with serving our clients.
We take ownership of our work and lives.
And we are taking Bitcoin investing to the next level. 🔥
River retweeted
The money printer will not be stopped. Inflation cannot be solved within our current political system. Bitcoin is the lifeboat.
River retweeted
A sample of businesses onboarded to @River this week:
- Carpenter
- Christmas Light Installer
- Spa & Wellness Center
- Accountant
- Painter
- Health Tech
Main street likes the orange coin 🚀
River retweeted
The $100 trillion Zimbabwe note has appreciated 24x more than the US dollar since 2011.
You would have been better off saving in a defunct, worthless currency than dollars.
River retweeted
This month's @River Proof of Reserves has been published! Verify it for yourself at river.com/reserves.
River retweeted
JUST IN: River's Research Analyst says their model has Bitcoin priced between $250,000 and $840,000 over the next 3-5 years. 👀
"I think it's quite reasonable and conservative once you start looking at what we're saying."
River retweeted
It's been almost two years since we launched Bitcoin Interest on Cash. Since then, @River clients have earned over 138 BTC on their cash deposits 💰
River retweeted
A sample of businesses onboarded to @River this week:
- Datacenter
- Digital Marketer
- Freediving Instructor
- Accounting
- Industrial automation
- Bitcoin mining
River retweeted
Our September 2026 Proof of Reserves has been published. You deserve to know your coins are safe. river.com/reserves
River retweeted
How does a Bitcoin exchange upgrade its systems with zero downtime?
We performed a massive ledger system upgrade to:
- Improve performance
- Power new products
- Prepare for a new level of scale
Here's a technical deep dive on how we did it.
river.com/content/we-replace…
