Crypto D&O did not disappear after 2022 — it got precise. The collapse of FTX and the prosecutions that followed pushed the class through a repricing of both premium and language. The limit on the front page changed less than the exclusions behind it.
What the market did
Post-FTX wordings commonly arrive with broad digital-asset exclusions — sometimes excluding claims "arising out of" tokens or digital assets generally — and regulatory exclusions that can carve out precisely the investigations a crypto board most fears. Neither is uniform. Two policies with identical limits can leave very different people exposed, and the difference lives in the schedule, not the summary.
How to read a wording
Three structural questions do most of the work:
Where does each exclusion bite? D&O splits into Side A (paying directors directly when the company cannot indemnify), Side B (reimbursing the company when it does), and Side C (the entity's own securities claims). An exclusion applied to Side C is a commercial decision; the same words reaching into Side A strip the personal protection the policy exists to provide. Ask, clause by clause, whose cover each exclusion removes.
"Arising out of" versus "for". Exclusion preambles are load-bearing. Wording that excludes claims for a category is narrow; wording excluding anything arising out of it can swallow claims connected to digital assets only incidentally. In a business that is entirely digital-asset, an unbounded arising-out-of exclusion can hollow the policy.
Severability and conduct. Fraud exclusions are universal; what varies is whether they trigger on allegation or on final, non-appealable adjudication, and whether one individual's conduct is imputed to innocent directors. After a collapse, these clauses decide whether defence costs flow while facts are contested — which is when directors actually need them.
Alongside the language, expect underwriting itself to be forensic: governance structure, board independence, segregation of client assets, related-party dealings, and the quality of financial controls. The application is part of the risk assessment — and, in a dispute, part of the record.
The honest framing
None of this is a reason to skip the class. It is a reason to treat crypto D&O as a negotiated document rather than a commodity, reviewed line by line with an FCA-authorised broker who has seen the current generation of wordings — and to bring the exclusions, preambles and severability language to that conversation explicitly.
Sources
- Market practice post-2022: broad digital-asset and regulatory exclusions in crypto D&O are widely documented in specialist market commentary; specific terms vary by carrier and wording governs.
Where znobia sits in this. znobia is a specialist introducer — a trading name of BLD PROTECTION LTD (England & Wales, no. 13422142). We are not authorised by the FCA, and we do not arrange, advise on or underwrite insurance. What we do is connect digital-asset firms with the FCA-authorised brokers and the regulated insurers and Lloyd's syndicates who actually write this class — prepared, and in front of the right desk. Nothing in this primer is advice. Terms are set by underwriters, and the policy wording governs.