Binance CEO on Risks of Crypto Self Custody: Most People Will Lose Their Private Keys

On Wednesday (14 December 2022), CZ, who is Co-Founder and CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange (by trading volume) shared his thoughts on people holding their own crypto.

According to a report by Alys Key for Decrypt, during an AMA session hosted on Twitter, CZ said:

“For most people, for 99% of people today, asking them to hold crypto on their own, they will end up losing it… Most people are not able to back up their security keys; they will lose the device,” he said. “They will not have the proper encryption for their backup; they will write it on a piece of paper, someone else will see it, and they will steal those funds. And also today, very fundamentally, if a person passes away, they don’t have a way to give to their next of kin. Whereas we have a standard operating procedure [for that]…

“I always try to educate people so they understand there are risks,” he said. “Holding your own crypto in your wallet is not risk-free; I actually think more people lose money holding their own—lose more crypto when they’re holding on their own than on a centralized exchange.“

On 6 December 2022, CZ took to Twitter to address some of the “wrong narratives” he had come across in the past few weeks:

“Crypto doesn’t need saving. Crypto is fine. It’s the beauty of decentralization. We are just part of it. We want to help other good projects that may be in a cash crunch because of recent events. It’s in our collective best interest… FTX killed themselves (and their users) because they stole billions of dollars of user funds. Period… Lying is never with good intentions…

“No healthy business can be destroyed by a tweet. However, there was a tweet that may have, Caroline’s tweet 16 minutes after mine on Nov 6. Data shows it was the real cause for people to dump FTT… She gave her floor price away…

“SBF perpetuated a narrative painting me and other people as the ‘bad guys’. It was critical in maintaining the fantasy that he was a ‘hero.’ SBF is one of the greatest fraudsters in history, he is also a master manipulator when it comes to media and key opinion leaders…

“We don’t focus on competitors because it’s a waste of time and resources when the industry has only touched 6% of the population. We want multiple exchanges, multiple blockchains, multiple wallets, etc, to co-exist in the ecosystem… Back to Building!“