3am. Red portfolio. Liquidated. One tab open. I learned everything that night, but the most painful lesson wasn’t the 100x leverage on $SOL; it was watching my exchange balance vanish into thin air because I thought the platform was "too big to fail." You treat an exchange like a bank, but in crypto, you are the bank. If you don't hold the keys, you don't hold the asset. Think of it like keeping your life savings in cash under a stranger’s mattress. Sure, they might let you see it on a screen whenever you ask, but the moment they decide to lock the door or go insolvent, that cash isn't yours anymore. It’s theirs.

When I started, I kept my entire stack of $ETH and $OP on a centralized exchange, convinced I needed...