Not your keys, not your coins is a crypto truism. Fair enough. The underlying sentiment, the assumption that the cryptoverse makes is that if you keep you coins in cold storage, if they’re in your wallet you are insulated from the risk posed by centralized exchanges. If you have your own private keys and keep your coins in your own wallet you are meant to be protected from the collapse of exchanges like FTX or from having your funds frozen by BlockFi.

On a basic level, that's true. Keeping your coins and tokens in your privately controlled wallet does assure your access to them. However, it doesn’t make your coins impervious to the irresponsible behavior of crypto whales. What good is access to your coins if the value falls to zero, if projects die because the biggest names in crypto can’t be trusted.

Maximalists will surely argue that one Bitcoin still equals one Bitcoin. That bit of tautological reasoning only works if Bitcoin is adopted at scale. Broad crypto adoption depends on both ease and reliability. Without centralized exchanges crypto isn’t easy enough for the public at large. With them, as FTX proves, crypto is not reliable.

The cryptoverse needs to take a look in the mirror. Decentralization is a fiction if a handful of individuals can collapse markets and undermine faith in cryptocurrencies.