#加密资产安全与托管 When I saw the news of these two cases, the first thought that flashed through my mind was — this is no longer just a technical issue.

Since the Mt. Gox exchange was hacked in 2013, over a decade has passed, and we have seen too many stories of private key breaches. But this time is different. The Vienna case shows us that when crypto assets become valuable enough, they fall from the digital world into the harsh reality. A young man accidentally revealed that his father had crypto assets, and he was tortured into revealing the password, ultimately leading to the burning of the car. And that note recording the seed phrase? It’s even more ironic — meant to be kept offline for security, it became deadly evidence.

This reminds me of the 2017 bull market. Back then, many people excitedly printed private keys, wrote them on paper, and locked them in safes. We thought as long as they weren’t on exchanges and were in our own hands, they were safe. Now it’s clear that this sense of security was built on a very fragile assumption — that this secret would never be known by anyone.

But humans are social animals, and secrets often leak unintentionally. A casual chat, a show-off, or even just overheard by the wrong person, and the entire defense line collapses. And when the amount involved is large enough, the motivation of the other party becomes strong enough.

Over the years, custodial solutions have emerged one after another — hardware wallets, multi-signature schemes, institutional custody. They all seem to address the same problem: how to let ordinary people hold assets without bearing the full risk of private key management. But each solution comes with its own cost. Trust the hardware manufacturer not to backdoor; use multi-signature and trust multiple signers not to collude; hand over assets to an institution and trust they won’t run away or get hacked.

In the past two years, I’ve noticed a trend: people with large assets are increasingly inclined toward diversified solutions — some in cold wallets, some in institutional custody, some in multi-signature setups. Not because this makes them completely safe, but because there is no such thing as perfect safety. Risks always exist; the best we can do is spread the eggs across different baskets.

The most ironic thing is, one of our original reasons for entering the market was to get rid of intermediaries and control our own assets. Now, some people still end up relying on intermediaries because the cost of self-custody — whether psychological or safety-related — is just too high.