How to keep your cryptocurrency safe after the FTX collapse

Published at: Dec. 3, 2022

The fall of the FTX crypto exchange forced many to reconsider their overall approach to investments — starting from self-custody to verifying the on-chain existence of funds. This shift in approach was driven primarily by the lack of trust crypto investors have in the entrepreneurs after being duped by FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF).

FTX crashed after SBF and his accomplices were caught secretly reinvesting users' funds, resulting in the misplacement of at least $1 billion of client funds. Efforts to regain investor trust saw competing crypto exchanges proactively flaunting their proof-of-reserves to confirm users' funds' existence. However, community members have since demanded that the exchanges show their liabilities to safeguard the reserves.

With SBF, the self-proclaimed “most generous billionaire,” commiting fraud in broad daylight with no visible legal implications, investors must maintain a defensive stance when it comes to protecting their investments. To safeguard assets from fraud, hacks and misappropriation, investors must take certain measures to keep total control of their assets — often considered as best crypto investment practices.

Move your funds out of the crypto exchanges

Crypto exchanges are widely used to purchase, sell and trade cryptocurrencies in exchange for a small fee. While other methods, including peer-to-peer and direct selling, are always an option, higher exchange liquidity allows investors to match orders and guarantee no loss of funds during the transaction.

The problem arises when investors decide to keep their funds in wallets provided and owned by the exchanges. Unfortunately, this is where most investors learn the lesson “not your keys, not your coins” the hard way. Cryptocurrencies being stored on exchange-provided wallets are ultimately in possession of the owner, which in the case of FTX users, was misused by SBF and associates.

Evading this risk is as simple as moving the funds out of the exchange to a wallet with no shared private keys. Private keys are secure encryptions that allow access to the funds stored in crypto wallets, which can be recovered using a backup phrase in case of misplacement.

Hardware wallet: The safest bet for storing cryptocurrencies

Hardware wallets offer total ownership over the private keys of a crypto wallet, thus limiting the funds' access only to the owner of the hardware wallet. After procuring cryptocurrencies from an exchange, users must voluntarily transfer their assets to a hardware wallet.

Once the transaction is completed, owners of the crypto exchange will no longer be able to access the fund. As a result, investors opting for a hardware wallet will no longer risk losing funds to frauds or hacks happening over the exchanges.

Related: What is a Bitcoin Wallet? A beginner's guide to storing BTC

However, while hardware wallets add to the overall safety of funds, cryptocurrencies remain at risk of impermanent losses when a token’s value goes down unrecoverably. Hardware wallet providers have witnessed a sharp increase in sales as investors slowly move away from storing their assets over exchanges.

Don’t trust, Verify

In all the crypto crashes that happened this year — including 3AC, Terraform Labs, Celsius, Voyager and FTX — breaking of investors’ trust was a common and evident theme. As a result, the motto of ‘Don't Trust, Verify’ has finally resonated with both new and seasoned investors.

Popular crypto exchanges, including Bitfinex, Binance, OKX, Bybit, Huobi and Gate.io, have taken proactive approaches to showcase their proof-of-reserves. The exchanges provided wallet information that allows investors to self-audit the existence of their funds within the exchange.

While proof-of-reserve shares a glimpse into an exchange’s reserves, it fails to provide the complete picture of its finances as information related to liabilities are often not made publicly available. On Nov. 26, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell called out Binance’s proof-of-reserve as “either ignorance or intentional misrepresentation” as the data did not include negative balances.

However, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao refuted Powell’s claims by stating that the exchange has no negative balances and will be verified in an upcoming audit.

The above three considerations are a good starting point for safeguarding crypto assets against bad actors. Some of the other popular methods to take away control from the crypto entrepreneurs are using decentralized exchanges (DEX), self-custody (non-custodial) wallets and doing extensive research (DYOR) on seemingly investible projects.

Tags
Related Posts
Police body cam leaks suspect's seed phrase during vehicle inspection
While self-custody is considered the ultimate way to secure one’s funds, many fail to acknowledge the risks associated with physically storing seed phrases. A search conducted by the State Police agency for Nevada ended up making a suspect’s seed phrase public after being picked up by the body cam. A viral video making rounds on Twitter showed two police officers searching a suspect’s car and coming across pieces of paper. It turns out, the suspect was a strong believer in self-custody as unfolding the pieces of paper revealed the suspect’s seed phrase, which was hand-written — a popular method to …
Bitcoin / Dec. 20, 2022
Altcoins notch triple-digit gains as Bitcoin price pushes toward $60K
If this past weekend is any indication of the current bull market cycle, then an altcoin season may be well underway. Similar to previous cycles, after Bitcoin (BTC) makes a significant run-up in price and then enters a consolidation period, funds begin to migrate into large and small market cap altcoins. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that while Bitcoin traded in a range between $57,000 and $60,200 over the past week, multiple altcoins saw double-digit gains as exchange listings and protocol developments brought a new wave of enthusiasm and trading volume for select projects. Tron ecosystem leads the …
Blockchain / April 6, 2021
Our Man in Shanghai: Huobi to become Grayscale of Asia, Yao Ming’s NFT wine and more ...
This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations. Huobi Asset Management is looking to be the Grayscale of Asia with the launch of four cryptocurrency-related tracker funds. The funds include a Bitcoin Fund, an Ethereum fund, a multi-asset basket of digital currencies, and a private equity fund for mining businesses. The aim is clearly to entice major institutional investors into the space with a product that feels familiar. The fund and asset management company is set …
Technology / April 30, 2021
Ethereum white paper predicted DeFi but missed NFTs: Vitalik Buterin
Rounding up the last decade, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revisited his predictions made over the years, showcasing a knack for being right about abstract ideas than on-production software development issues. Buterin started the Twitter thread by addressing his article dated Jul. 23, 2013 in which he highlighted Bitcoin's (BTC) key benefits — internationality and censorship resistance. Buterin foresaw Bitcoin’s potential in protecting the citizens’ buying power in countries such as Iran, Argentina, China and Africa. However, Buterin also noticed a rise in stablecoin adoption as he saw Argentinian businesses operating in Tether (USDT). He backed up his decade-old ideas around …
Adoption / Jan. 2, 2022
Price analysis 9/2: BTC, ETH, BNB, XRP, ADA, SOL, DOGE, DOT, MATIC, SHIB
Nonfarm payrolls rose by 315,000 jobs in August, down from the July increase of 526,000 jobs. The report was just below the Dow Jones estimate of 318,000 jobs and the slowest monthly gain since April 2021. The S&P 500 rose in response to the report, but later erased its gains, indicating that bears continue to sell on rallies. That may be because the U.S. dollar index (DXY), which had retreated from its Sept.1 20-year high, recovered part of its losses. The bears will have to pull the DXY lower to boost prices of stocks and the cryptocurrency markets as both …
Bitcoin / Sept. 2, 2022