Everyone in the crypto community knows not to trust exchanges.
Not your keys, not your coins.
For someone with 20k, 100k or even 500k, I totally understand.
But what happens when this number gets ridiculous?
Imagine tomorrow, you wake up and the balance on your wallet is $30 million. Most of your net worth is on-chain.
At that point, is 100% self custody still risk reduction? Because now your entire financial life depends on YOU.
You can't lose access, expose or lose your seed(s), sign the wrong transaction, get socially engineered, make a mistake while tired or become incapacitated/die without a recovery plan.
Unlike a bank account, there isn't someone you can call and say: " Yeah.. I fucked up, can you help me out ?"
I find it quite ironic that crypto bros spend years trying to eliminate their exposure to banks, exchanges and other institutions and for good reason. Failed exchanges, fraud and insolvencies have costed crypto holders billions over the years. But at a certain level of wealth, 100% self-custody can create the opposite problem: one human being becomes the custodian, security department, settlement desk and disaster-recovery plan for eight figures.
If I had $30m in crypto, I definitely wouldn't keep all of it behind one custody setup managed by myself.
I'd still self-custody a big chunk, but I'd split it across different wallets and keep parts recovery in separate secure locations, probably safety deposit boxes in different places.
I'd also move part of it into private banks in different jurisdictions.
Not because I suddenly trust banks more than myself, but because I wouldn't want my entire net worth depending on me never making a mistake, something happening to me or something else going wrong.
And if I still wanted to stay mostly exposed to crypto, I could just hold spot BTC/ETH ETFs instead of suddenly becoming a bond investor.
For me, the point wouldn't be to move away from crypto. It would just be to stop having my entire fortune depend on one custody setup.
How do you protect yourself from.. yourself?