Crypto self-custody faces hurdles before widespread adoption

cointelegraph.com:

The recent crash of centralized crypto exchange behemoth FTX has again brought the original intent of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto to the fore. Nakamoto’s original goal, brought about by the 2008 subprime mortgage mess, was the elimination of “trusted third parties” such as banks. Traditional finance and all its bells and whistles suddenly became pariahs in the blockchain community. People could supposedly safe keep their money themselves without the need for anyone to do it for them.

What ended up happening in the case of FTX, however, was that we built the same traditional finance infrastructure, but we let people without enough training in financial controls run it. News reports have stated that there was co-mingling of customer funds from FTX into the sister trading arm Alameda Research, which is illegal in traditional centralized exchanges and trading firms. 

This debacle was the very thing people said crypto would avoid, but ended up happening anyway, and many times worse. Venture firms like Sequoia and certain pension funds ended up having to write off their investment. Often, when someone experiences a massive financial loss like that, they end up becoming vocal critics of everything crypto. 

Going by Nakamoto’s original intent, these investors would have been better served if they had bought legitimate tokens and self-custodied those. But investors would still face problems doing that. One is that the current crop of digital wallets still leaves much to be desired. Also, decentralized finance sites look somewhat tailored for Gen Z, which may slow adoption for some.

Opening a wallet seems easy enough, though the need to remember a set of words as a seed phrase may turn some users off. But what is particularly