A few days ago I received a timely reminder from HTX formerly Huobi regarding users to be more vigilant with how they look after their investments. If you store your tokens on an exchange you are looking for trouble and the moral of the story being not your keys not your crypto.
Two users lost $3 million between them which tells us they were using the exchange to not only trade, but as their crypto wallet. I only use HTX to purchase COTI which is then transferred immediately to my COTI Viper wallet ad is on the exchange for less than 5 minutes. The only reason I use HTX is the token price is normally slightly cheaper than other exchanges and more importantly the fees paid for a withdrawal are significantly cheaper being 20 COTI in this case. Binance requires using the bridge converting the erc20 token to the COTI native taken and this costs even more COTI on top of the withdrawal fees.
The idea you keep your tokens off the exchange either in a cold wallet or better still staked in a crypto project is a sound one. I have roughly $1500 on Binance currently and will be moving the bulk of that off into a cold wallet when I purchase one later this month on my overseas trip. The previous Trezor I had was stolen by our temporary gardener and he had no clue what it was. There was nothing on the Trezor wallet and even if there was it was protected.
Speding $200 is well worth every cent knowing your crypto is safe.
I will be going one step further and will be purchasing a new laptop just for crypto and no surfing the internet. This for me is important knowing the computer is not compromised in any way and it will be kept that way. Security measures will be installed and I should be fine.
Over the coming years the crypto values are only going to rise which means we have to be even more security conscious. One has to treat their portfolio with the utmost care and there should be the same thought process whether you have $100 or $1 million. Having $1 million on the exchange is absurd as you are just leaving yourself wide open with too much risk.
These recent attacks on HTX were not public knowledge as I never read about them ,but I knew it was not great. I went to withdraw some COTI the other day and I received an email offering a different address than what I knew. I ignored this and deposited the tokens to the correct address, but this highlights how HTX is compromised internally. If you are not checking and double checking every transaction you do it is easy to fall for these scams.
I kind of feel sorry for new investors as they have to learn what we already know and they are going to feel some pain along the way. These notifications are always a good reminder telling us to pay attention to security and knowing that there is bad people out there wanting what we have.
