I see a bunch of people working for foreign companies, receiving a boatload of USDT, and just letting it sit there rotting on the exchange until it's time to convert and pay the bills. Seriously? This is the equivalent of handing over the keys to your production server to a third party and hoping they don’t run a rm -rf / on your life.
"Not your keys, not your crypto" isn't a meme. If the CEX freezes withdrawals or enters "infinite maintenance," your salary turns into smoke. The move is to push it to your own wallet (Phantom, MetaMask, whatever) and have total control.
Back in the day, it was a pain because to actually use the money, you had to send it back to the broker, but nowadays you can live on-chain and spend directly from self-custody. Anyone still trusting an exchange to store their wealth in 2026 is just asking for trouble.
How are you guys doing in order not to be an hostage to the exchange and still manage to apy your bills in the real world?

