We have just seen the longest duration of withdrawals outpacing deposits on exchanges, ever. People are actually waking up to self-custody.

The key word for the current and the last year for Crypto will undoubtedly be “self-custody“, especially after this bear market full of centralized scams being exposed such as , wherein reality we had no power at all over our own coins. The key aspect of Crypto. Just recently it was revealed how $8.7B in costumer deposits were falling short at FTX and they already knew that in August 2022. Just showing once again the magnitude of this scam.

But happily every bad situation we undergo in our life still gives us much needed new experience, even here we have that. People finally understood why the key principle of Crypto has always been “not you keys, not you coins“ and actually started to implement that principle into your life.

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Chart showing Withdrawals (red) vs Deposits (green), from James V. Straten

Here we can see the direct results of it, it may seem like a small thing. But down below the red line being over the green line shows a period where withdrawals on exchanges outpaced the amount of deposits on exchanges, this is actually quite rare in the whole history of Crypto. In fact, the recorded history of the blockchain shows that this is the longest period withdrawals has ever outpaces deposits, emphasising self-custody.

As I always like to say, it is literally nothing bad in making mistakes. Actually it is very important to mistakes so that you can learn from them. Here we are talking about some very expensive mistakes and those often seem t be the most effective.