Crypto Self-Custody 101 (with Austin Federa)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Hello, Acquired LPs. Welcome back to the Acquired LP Show. We are joined today by Austin Federa, friend and longtime Acquired community member, who is the head of communications at the Solana Foundation. Hello, Austin.

Austin Federa (0:13)

Hey, how are you doing?

Ben Gilbert (0:15)

Welcome back. Are you hanging in there?

Austin Federa (0:17)

Yeah, it's been a long few weeks, but hanging in there, getting through, making progress, all we can do these days.

Ben Gilbert (0:24)

I bet.

For listeners who are wondering what Austin is referring to, we were out with Austin at Solana Breakpoint in Lisbon, which was an awesome developer conference, which of course, as everyone's flying out the next day, the FTX news breaks into the mainstream. And so nothing like a head of communications job to have to work with during a moment like that.

David Rosenthal (0:44)

And you basically organized the whole conference too.

Austin Federa (0:46)

Yeah, I was pretty tired at the end of Breakpoint, and then this happened, and there was a moment, I think three days in, this would have been the evening of the 9th or the 10th of November, where I basically delayed my flight because I was like, I can't afford to get on a plane for 12 hours. I got to be available.

Ben Gilbert (1:05)

And of course, every single participant in the crypto community is glued to this news and scandal that's going down in real time with FTX.

Austin Federa (1:14)

Yeah, the explosion of a centralized exchange, that doesn't necessarily mean that someone in my role who works for the Solana Foundation or any blockchain foundation is going to be on calls and intricately involved in this process. But FTX and Alameda Research had both been investing in companies on the Solana ecosystem. They had participated in token rounds, private token sales from the Solana Foundation and Solana Labs.

So there was concern about assets that they held, were they secure projects that had been building on Solana. A few of them had their treasuries or pieces of their treasuries with FTX, because a lot of folks keep money in a centralized exchange to do things like payroll, right? All those sorts of things, especially when you're paying international contractors. And so there was just a lot of stuff to help the ecosystem try and navigate in the wake of this kind of explosion of FTX and Alameda. And then at the same time, just a lot of folks, you know, anytime multiple billions of dollars of customers' funds go missing or disappear or get tied up in Chapter 11 bankruptcy like everything is now, there's just a lot of people who are hurting from that, especially, you know, folks who maybe don't live in the United States or they don't live in areas where they have banking systems that they can trust.

They may have used something like FTX as basically their bank account. And so there's a lot of folks who are just in trouble, not just the salon ecosystem, you know, folks in all blockchain ecosystems. It's a lot.

Ben Gilbert (2:40)

Yeah.

Well, listeners, we've gathered you here today in light of all that. David and I are putting our heads together on sort of what would make sense with all this going on right now to sort of do for the acquired community. And we asked Austin to do something with us to explain how does one stay safe in a time where you're not really sure like what organizations to trust, what are safe places to keep things. There is nowhere to put anything, any sort of asset that is 100% guaranteed safe from everything ever. You know, aliens invade and blow up all of our central banks. Like we've got problems then too.

Austin Federa (3:15)

I've seen Die Hard 3

Ben Gilbert (3:17)

But at least to like talk through the upsides and associated risks with a whole bunch of places that one could keep crypto and to keep fiat, because I think it's interesting to compare this stuff to the traditional banking system. Of course, we should say this is not financial advice. This is not investment advice. You should do your own research and you should figure out what risk level you are comfortable taking for whatever level of convenience with your funds, no matter where you keep it, makes sense for you.

We also would totally understand if you have a baby bathwater approach and you see what happened to FTX. Well, I don't want to say to FTX. You see what FTX caused and did and it scares you away from a lot of this stuff entirely. Nobody holds anything against anyone.