Self-custody for Active DeFi

Self-custody means holding your own keys instead of trusting an exchange to hold assets for you. It is usually framed as a storage decision — hardware wallets, cold storage, coins kept untouched. But for a growing number of people the same wallet is also a daily driver: how they swap, earn yield, bridge across chains, trade, and reach tokenized assets, often from a phone.

Using a wallet actively is a different problem from storing in one. Holding your key settles who can initiate a transaction; it does not settle what happens to your assets once they are working inside a protocol. These references work through that active layer — what changes versus cold storage, how swapping, earning, bridging, and trading behave once assets are in motion, and what each exposes you to — for people who use a self-custody wallet, not just hold one.