Crypto glossary
MPC wallet
An MPC wallet splits signing power into key shares held by different parties or devices, which jointly sign without the full private key ever existing.
Multi-party computation (MPC) lets several parties compute a result together without revealing their private inputs. In an MPC wallet, the private key is never created in one place; instead, key shares are generated on separate devices or servers, and a threshold of them cooperates to produce a valid signature. To the blockchain, the result looks like an ordinary single-signature transaction.
Institutional custodians adopted MPC because it removes the single point of failure of one key or seed phrase, supports approval policies and works across chains that lack native multisig. Consumer apps use it too, typically keeping one share on the user's phone and another with the provider, so that losing a device does not mean losing funds.
MPC wallets usually have no seed phrase to export, which ties the user to the provider's recovery process and software. Because signing logic lives off chain, outsiders cannot audit the policy the way they can read a multisig contract. Implementations are complex, and flaws in threshold-signing libraries have been found by researchers. Ask who holds which shares before calling an MPC wallet self-custodial.
Example
A fund's treasury uses an MPC wallet in which a transfer only goes through when shares held by the trading desk, the compliance team and the custodian's server all take part in the signature.