I did it, I finally pulled my crypto off the exchanges

I'm still a small fish in the crypto scene, started with spare-time mining with my home PC in spring of 2021. As my assets slowly grew I was happy to keep my bags on exchanges where they were responsible for the keys instead of me. I saw horror stories of people losing their seed phrases or getting scammed and figured that wasn't worth the risk while I didn't really know what I was doing. I started on Coinbase, and eventually added assets on Kraken and Gemini. Transaction fees would chew up a significant amount of my meager earnings and my net worth certainly didn't justify the investment of a hardware wallet.

I lost a chunk of my portfolio with the LUNA crash, but steadied on, watching and waiting. Then the FTX crash. Luckily they were not one of my chosen exchanges but it became clear that the risk of me screwing up my keys was no longer greater than the risk of a large exchange freezing all assets and locking me out. I started looking at non-custodial wallets and planning to move my larger bags off of the exchanges.

With the news that Genesis was halting withdrawals and Gemini might not be able to fill earn redemptions in the promised time I knew it was time to secure my assets. Here's what I ended up using:

Coinbase Wallet (BTC & ETH): ironically, I went with an exchange-branded software wallet for the majority of my assets. I withdrew BTC from Gemini with no problem (started with a small test transfer first). Took less than 5 minutes. Connected to my Coinbase exchange account and was easy to transfer my BTC & ETH from my exchange balance to the wallet. All transfer fees were ~$0.50 or so.

Yoroi Wallet (ADA): The remainder of my significant holdings were in ETH and ADA on Kraken. But the ETH withdrawal fee from Kraken was going to be over $4, which was a significant percentage of my holdings there (I told you I'm a small fish, right?). I already had a decent sized ADA bag so I exchanged my ETH to ADA and sent it to my new Yoroi wallet. From there it was easy to delegate to a staking pool and start earning staking rewards without having to lose custody of my crypto.

I have a few smaller bags that I wanted to hold on to (MATIC, BAT, and others) that I decided to keep on the exchanges for now because the transfer fees are much too big of a percentage of the total worth to transfer in (and back out) of a private wallet. If the exchanges go down, so be it.

New things I learned: Your BTC wallet can have multiple public addresses. It freaked me out at first when my address changed after the first transfer. If you want to track your wallet balance on a portfolio tracker like accointing you need to find or generate your wallet's xPub address (Yoroi provides it in the "export" menu, I had to find a tool to generate it from my seed phrase for the Coinbase Wallet). Aside from Kraken's ETH withdrawal fee the transfer fees were actually a lot lower than I feared they would be, which makes it even more worthwhile for the small fish to take this step.

And we did it, Reddit. I now have over 90% of my assets in a self-custodial wallet, ready to ride out whatever storms may come. I do still trust Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken 100% and will use them in the future but the entire landscape is very treacherous right now. Time to grab a nice hot beverage, snuggle under a blanket and ride out this winter.