I believe self custody of assets with private keys is legitimately one of the most powerful tools for sovereignty we have ever devised but the industry has completely bastardized this term to the point of uselessness. The original notion (in my mind at least) of self custody was having a string of letters and numbers or 12 words that unlock your assets. “Self-custody” when interacting with smart contracts and defi has become virtually meaningless at this point, encumbering coins with layers and layers of risks and dependencies, incredibly misleading A lot of this narrative was ostensibly for regulatory reasons: “we don’t take custody of your assets, you deposit them in this pool or contract with self-executing code” but that’s so obviously not true at this point it’s an insult to our lived experience. Or, if it is “true” in the literal sense that the code technically always does what it is allowed to do, the “self-custody” component is very far down the list of what is actually important with these systems, a red herring really. Clearly Drift depositors didn’t (don’t) have “self-custody” of their funds. And the common retort is “well Drift doesn’t really either.” ok but North Korea does now. At this point I liken self-custody in the context of defi to saying that you are the only one with the keys to the front door of a bank vault but there’s another door on the other side of the vault that criminals (or regulators, who knows) can enter with impunity and take your assets. Is it really that relevant that you’re the only one with a key to the front door? The reason this is jading is because truly securing your wealth with private keys if you choose is a 0 to 1 unlock for some people (maybe the only real 0 to 1 unlock in this space) but that was conflated with all of these systems that have multisigs, upgrade keys, oracle dependencies, layers upon layers, turtles all the way down, often times with very obvious single points of failure. What is the value of self custody when a multisig can reorg your assets out of existence? The whole thing is very disillusioning