The concept of safety while trading is very important and you have to be very careful when moving your cryptocurrency on and off cryptocurrency exchanges to trade there, you must be careful storing your cryptocurrency there and you must be careful with decentralized finance tokenization and custody processes. This brings you to the next idea: Your crypto, in your wallet, secured by your keys.
When I first learned about Bitcoin I had to learn about the blockchain and the concept of decentralization. The main goal goal of cryptocurrency has always been decentralization and one important aspect of that is control over your money. The possession of your private keys always guarantees this control and concurrently, the safety of your money. As long as you keep your keys and your seed phrase safe. This brings us to the next concept; The Irony of Centralized Exchanges.
Ironically, this movement founded on decentralization where you controlled the keys to your wallet and this you controlled your money, has always had centralized exchanges.
And in order to trade cryptocurrency tokens on centralized exchanges, you send your cryptocurrency from your wallet, secured by your private keys and your seed phrase, to an exchange wallet. Which is secured by their private keys and their seed phrase.
While your exchange account has a password, it is not the same as the keys to a wallet. When you send your crypto to a centralized exchange, you are surrendering your cryptocurrency tokens to them and you must trust them to return your property. They then control your cryptocurrency.
You might not believe what I am writing, and feel like you have control over your account. But if the exchange freezes all trading on your crypto, or if the exchange just freezes trading in your account, you can't get withdrawal your crypto to your wallet or transfer it to another exchange. You then have to wait until they say you can have it, and they dictate how much, when and sometimes where you can send it. Sometimes, it is only when you come to this particular spot in your cryptocurrency journey, that you truly understand; Not your keys, not your crypto. Your crypto on the exchange is in their wallet, controlled by their keys. Now in that moment you understand why centralized exchanges are the antithesis of decentralization.
Which is not to say you shouldn’t trade on centralized exchanges, but that you should be aware of the risks involved. And considering the large amount of decentralized exchanges in existence, and the ease of using them, one must ask if you even need to use them anymore. It seems more consistent ideologically to use a hot wallet for trades and an offline hardware wallet fir the storage of your cryptocurrency.
@shortsegments@shortsegmentsShortsegments is a writer focused on cryptocurrency, the blockchain, non-fungible digital tokens or NFTs, and decentralized finance. He has been a community member for more then three years, and has earned a reputation of 75, on a scale of 0 to 80, which puts him in the top 300 of over 20,000 Hive accounts.
He is also a builder, with two current projects:
The first is the No Loss lottery, a prize linked savings account here on Hive, which awards more the 100 Leo in prizes weekly, and which recent surpassed 2000 tickets sold. 
His second project is Easy DeFi, which creates a community investment pool allowing community members not yet confident enough to invest on their own, a chance to easily invest in yield-farming and staking on Cubfinance. The investor pool account EasyDeFi recently reached over 6000 Leo value locked.
