Squads is the standard Solana multisig: audited, formally verified, with roles, time locks, and spending limits enforced on-chain. It answers who must approve. Coldstar answers where each approver's key lives. Most serious treasuries want both; this page is about where each one carries the weight.
Squads decides who; Coldstar decides where the keys live. A Squad whose members sign from Coldstar has no hot key anywhere.
| Coldstar | Squads | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | ~$10 — any USB drive. The software is free and MIT-licensed. | Basic: free plus a one-time 0.1 SOL deployment fee. Pro $49/month; roles and permissions need Business or Enterprise. 0.25% on limit orders. |
| Where the key lives | AES-256-GCM encrypted keyfile on a drive you own. Plaintext exists only in memory-locked RAM for the ~100 µs it takes to sign, then is zeroized. | Funds sit in an on-chain smart account. Each member's key lives in that member's own wallet, usually a hot wallet or a Ledger via Phantom/Solflare. |
| How a transaction reaches the key | Build online → QR (or file) to an offline machine → sign → QR back → broadcast. Fully air-gapped; the drive is storage, not a signer. | Members approve in the Squads app from their connected wallets. No air gap unless a member brings hardware; Ledger requires blind signing through Phantom or Solflare. |
| Source code | Open source (MIT) — every line that touches the key is readable on GitHub. | Program AGPL-3.0, Rust crate and TypeScript SDK public. Audits plus Certora formal verification. App frontend source status not confirmed. |
| What you trust | Code you can read, plus your own offline machine. No vendor silicon, firmware, cloud, or account. | The audited program, the threshold of member keys, and each member's own wallet security. |
| Recovery | Passphrase + encrypted keyfile. The drive is disposable: lose it and the file is useless without the passphrase; re-flash a new one. | Threshold of members can rotate a lost member key on-chain. |
| Automation & policy | CLI-first, scriptable, headless. Policy-gated agent signing: limits, allowlists, rate caps, escalation to air-gapped approval. | Threshold, roles, spending limits per member and token with reset periods and destination allowlists, global time locks (1h to custom). SDK for programmatic proposals; no AI-agent product. |
| Solana wallets | Coldstar CLI and Seeker app. | Members connect any Solana wallet; Ledger only via Phantom or Solflare. |
| Maturity | Beta — independent audit planned before the production release. | Production; secures large treasuries on Solana mainnet. |
Squads' spending limits are the only on-chain-enforced agent budget primitive we found in the Solana wallet landscape. That makes it complementary to Coldstar, not a rival: Coldstar can hold the spending-limit member key cold.
Squads moves the authorization question on-chain: funds move only when enough members approve, within whatever limits and locks the Squad set. That is the right place for quorum rules. What Squads cannot control is the security of each member's signing key, which is usually a browser wallet on a laptop.
Coldstar is a signer, not a multisig program. It controls where a key lives and under what local policy it will sign. Put a Coldstar-held key in each Squad seat and the multisig's threshold sits on top of keys that never touch a network.
Squads is production infrastructure; Coldstar is beta, pre-audit. For a treasury, use Squads for the quorum and be deliberate about how cold each seat's key really is.
A Coldstar-signed member key approves Squads proposals from an air-gapped machine over QR. A Squads spending limit assigned to a Coldstar-policy-gated key gives an agent an on-chain budget and a local policy at the same time.
Coldstar supports multisig flows, but Squads is the on-chain quorum standard on Solana. Coldstar's contribution is making each signer cold and scriptable.
Squads members sign with any Solana wallet. A Coldstar-held key can approve as a member; the approval transaction crosses the air gap by QR like any other.
Squads enforces a per-member budget on-chain; Coldstar enforces limits, allowlists, and rate caps locally before any signature exists and can escalate to a human. Used together, an agent gets both an on-chain ceiling and a local gate.
Open source, MIT. macOS, Linux, Windows — and on the Solana Seeker dApp Store.
pip install coldstar
Third-party facts were checked against the vendor's own pages on the date above. Pricing and feature sets change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.