Is It Better to Transfer Coins to Exchanges Now or Later?

[Lida93]

For most of us who are holding coins outside of centralized exchanges, is it sound to transfer the coins to exchanges now or in spring 2025?

Decision to be made on this should be a product of your investment plan and timeframe. Do you plan on selling anytime from now? Then it's safe to say you transfer your coins from your noncustodial wallet to your CEX to save you from possible trx high fees by 2025 depending on the market price effect on mempool with selling traffic.

But if you planned on extending your hodling to next four to eight years then it would be risky leaving your coins in a CEX for that long.

[lixer]

As long as you are not selling your coins now do not risk sending it to any exchange and leaving it there in the wallet because the risk of leaving off your coins on exchanges is there. Transaction fees are not always high to scare you this early to exchanges

I can see that his main concern is the fees and he thinks the fees rises more the higher the price. But what about now? The price of the coins is also high but it is seems he had more courage now to make a transaction. Also he looks like he will sell once he transfer his coins inside the exchange. If he does then it is only okay. What you said there is only risky but if the exchange we are talking about is highly reputable then the risk can still be low.

There might also be perks if we will hold inside the exchange than in our wallets. Back in the fees again, he shouldn't be scared about it especially if he knows that he will still profit big time. It will only get compensated there.

[Trebor123]

Coinbase, which I'm not a big fan of, goes down, it'll be because of something like what FTX was doing. And if so, whatever deity you pray you, help us all.

Why?

Coinbase may look big but it is not big enough to have as significant an effect as MtGox had on the price.
Checking https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ we can see that out of the total $127.58 billion daily volume only 2% of it or $2.6 is coming from coinbase! Only 2%. MtGox back in 2013 had more than 85% of the total daily volume.

If a CEX with 2% of the total daily volume goes down, it will have a small impact like FTX. A temporary hiccup... not the end of the world

If Coinbase collapses the effect will be catastrophic! The knock on effect would be huge. Those without their crypto in a wallet trying to get off all exchanges would cause a run. If Coinbase one of largest, if not the largest, could go down which would be safe?
Plus the repetitional damage to the crypto industry as a whole would take years if not decades to recover from.

I don't think it's going to happen...

[markm]

That sounds like a buying opportunity!

It reminds me that cryptopia seems after all these years to be preparing to start returning users' coins.

Such things can be anticipated well in advance, even if with the uncertainty for some coins as to whether they might try to sneak some out from under the users by claiming they are too small to bother with.

Consider IXCoin and I0Coin for example, some of the verbiage from Cryptopia's liquidators has sometimes seemed to imply that the very suppression of prices that they have been causing by themselves creating uncertainty about what is going to happen to the coins they hold might be used as excuse for not returning the coins to their owners.

Thus long term Ixians and I0nians have possibly to try to balance between:

- on the one hand keeping prices low ready to absorb any "dumps" that could be precipitated either by owners actually getting their coins back at long last or by thieves finally completing the stealing of them by claiming they are too worthless to bother returning to their owners; and

- on the other hand keeping such precautionary prices too low thus precipitating precisely such an excuse for such thievery.

Likely of course IXC and I0C are not the only coins they hold which have spent the intervening years with this shadow hanging over them.

Suppressing the prices themselves as a long term excuse for their own thievery, ouch what next?

Hopefully they will yet do the right thing, actually giving back everyone's coins regardless of how badly their own dealings or fate has meanwhile affected the various coins.


-MarkM-

[FortuneFollower]

Coinbase, which I'm not a big fan of, goes down, it'll be because of something like what FTX was doing. And if so, whatever deity you pray you, help us all.

Why?

Coinbase may look big but it is not big enough to have as significant an effect as MtGox had on the price.
Checking https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ we can see that out of the total $127.58 billion daily volume only 2% of it or $2.6 is coming from coinbase! Only 2%. MtGox back in 2013 had more than 85% of the total daily volume.

If a CEX with 2% of the total daily volume goes down, it will have a small impact like FTX. A temporary hiccup... not the end of the world

If Coinbase collapses the effect will be catastrophic! The knock on effect would be huge. Those without their crypto in a wallet trying to get off all exchanges would cause a run. If Coinbase one of largest, if not the largest, could go down which would be safe?
Plus the repetitional damage to the crypto industry as a whole would take years if not decades to recover from.

I don't think it's going to happen...

Don't worry, be happy.
And you needed to read the post in the quotes - it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Maybe for a day or two - but that's it. Not a long-term shift in the space due to it.

[michellee]

It is good to hold your coins in self-custody wallet for time being. But some people already transfer their coins in the exchanges while they are waiting for the bull run and altcoin season. They did that because they don't want to be late to sell the coins at the high price.

Before you decide, we must research and select the exchanges that we can trust. We should consider many things before decide so we will not regret if something happen. Besides that, we must consider about the transaction fee that can jump suddenly following what happen with the market. But I don't think it is a good idea to transfer all of 1000 Bitcoin at once to the market because that can sound the exchanges alarm and they will check your account. It is better to transfer from small amount and stick to that.

[hero_the_bossman]

It is good to hold your coins in self-custody wallet for time being. But some people already transfer their coins in the exchanges while they are waiting for the bull run and altcoin season. They did that because they don't want to be late to sell the coins at the high price.

Before you decide, we must research and select the exchanges that we can trust. We should consider many things before decide so we will not regret if something happen. Besides that, we must consider about the transaction fee that can jump suddenly following what happen with the market. But I don't think it is a good idea to transfer all of 1000 Bitcoin at once to the market because that can sound the exchanges alarm and they will check your account. It is better to transfer from small amount and stick to that.

Only a small portion of such funds should be allocated to the exchange itself - all the other parts of it should be contained in a cold wallet.
You should only transfer the funds you are going to use for real on the exchange - to trade or stake.

[Hyphen(-)]

UPDATE: After reading some of the comments below, and the reasoning provided, I think I'll keep all my tokens in self-custody wallets for time being. Early in summer 2025 for some, and late in summer 2025 for others, I'll revisit this decision.

Thanks all.

Yes, for security reasons since you can be able to control your wealth yourself in your wallets since you have your private key or seed phrase in your custody.

If you can have a pear to pear transaction with a reliable person, sober even bother bringing them to the exchange anymore, but if you don’t have and you are ready to cash out your money, then you can send your coins down to any reliable centralized exchange and swap them as you may wanted

Always remember that not your keys, not your coins.

[SmartGold01]

Why would you do that? Are you security conscious enough and couples with the popular phrase, not your key not your coin, and you still wanna go ahead make deposit to exchange which you aren't sure about their security. If you must know it's not advisable sending coins to exchange in name to sell off when the market rises and also being afraid of fee, like I know there has been stable fee within the range of 4 sat/vbyte -16 sat/vbyte for the past months now and we have never incurred much significant fees on the run. You can only leave your coin in exchange if you are active trading it but there is no assurance that your coins are secured because any hack could likely happened and you lose your coins.

[john_egbert]

UPDATE: After reading some of the comments below, and the reasoning provided, I think I'll keep all my tokens in self-custody wallets for time being. Early in summer 2025 for some, and late in summer 2025 for others, I'll revisit this decision.

Thanks all.

Yes, for security reasons since you can be able to control your wealth yourself in your wallets since you have your private key or seed phrase in your custody.

If you can have a pear to pear transaction with a reliable person, sober even bother bringing them to the exchange anymore, but if you don’t have and you are ready to cash out your money, then you can send your coins down to any reliable centralized exchange and swap them as you may wanted

Always remember that not your keys, not your coins.

Great to see OP make a final decision on the matter.
And it can always be revisited once the need arises for such a course of action.

[pooya87]

Coinbase, which I'm not a big fan of, goes down, it'll be because of something like what FTX was doing. And if so, whatever deity you pray you, help us all.

Why?

Coinbase may look big but it is not big enough to have as significant an effect as MtGox had on the price.
Checking https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ we can see that out of the total $127.58 billion daily volume only 2% of it or $2.6 is coming from coinbase! Only 2%. MtGox back in 2013 had more than 85% of the total daily volume.

If a CEX with 2% of the total daily volume goes down, it will have a small impact like FTX. A temporary hiccup... not the end of the world

If Coinbase collapses the effect will be catastrophic! The knock on effect would be huge. Those without their crypto in a wallet trying to get off all exchanges would cause a run. If Coinbase one of largest, if not the largest, could go down which would be safe?
Plus the repetitional damage to the crypto industry as a whole would take years if not decades to recover from.

I don't think it's going to happen...

It will cause a panic sell but that's it. Collapse of coinbase exchange is not big enough to be considered catastrophic. Keep in mind that bitcoin does not rely on some centralized exchange, it is a decentralized money working fine without them; and nobody cares about altcoins (they just pump and dump regardless of what happens to exchanges).

As I said, if it happened, it wouldn't be the first major exchange to go down. None of the previous ones damaged "crypto industry" and that won't change in the future.

I wouldn't predict its demise but I'm also not sure about it not-happening...

[taufik123]

It will cause a panic sell but that's it. Collapse of coinbase exchange is not big enough to be considered catastrophic. Keep in mind that bitcoin does not rely on some centralized exchange, it is a decentralized money working fine without them; and nobody cares about altcoins (they just pump and dump regardless of what happens to exchanges).

As I said, if it happened, it wouldn't be the first major exchange to go down. None of the previous ones damaged "crypto industry" and that won't change in the future.

I wouldn't predict its demise but I'm also not sure about it not-happening...

Panic selling will certainly occur and those on the investor will also want to move their assets to other exchanges.
There will be more panic on every coin in the market, all will go down and include bitcoin, but of course this panic will soon end and everything will recover.

Remember that in the past there were more exchanges with a fairly large volume, at that time many experienced bankruptcy because they were hacked and the like.
And only the top exchanges are left that are able to survive and continue to grow in terms of management and security for users and user funds.

And yes, Bitcoin is not only on the Exchange but in every holder's personal wallet that cannot be touched by anyone.
The collapse of the Exchange is not the end of everything, but a warning that management and security need to be paid attention to and continue to be improved.
Learning from MT. Gox in the past with its security vulnerabilities and FTX as the most corrupt and embarrassing Exchange CEO.

These are some of the CEXs that have gone bankrupt, hacked and other issues, and also include current Exchange numbers (but didn't find Coinbase on this list)

DATE	EXCHANGE	CAUSE	THE AMOUNT STOLEN (USD)
April 9, 2023	GDAC	Gains access to hot wallet	$13 million
November 12, 2022	FTX	Unauthorized transaction	$600 million
January 17, 2022	Crypto.com	Unknown	$34 million
December 11, 2022	AscendEX	Gains access to hot wallet	$80 million
December 5, 2021	BitMart	Gains access to hot wallet	$150 million
August 19, 2021	Liquid	Gains access to hot wallet	$97 million
April 29, 2021	Hotbit	Gains access to hot wallets	0
December 23, 2020	Livecoin	System/server compromised	Unknown
December 21, 2020	EXMO	Gains access to hot wallet	$4 million
December 1, 2020	BTC Markets	Internal staff error	270,000 data user
September 25, 2020	KuCoin	Data leak	$275 million
July 11, 2020	Cashaa	Malware	$3.1 million
June 29, 2020	Balancer	Vulnerability in protocol	$500,000
April 19, 2020	Lendf.me	Bug and re-entrancy attack	$24.5 million
April 19, 2020	Uniswap	Bug and re-entrancy attack	$500,000
February 5, 2020	Altsbit	Gains access to hot wallet	$70,000
December 19, 2019	Youbit	Gains access to hot wallet	Unknown
November 26, 2019	Upbit	Gains access to hot wallet	$49 million
November 5, 2019	Vindaks	Unknown	$500,000
July 11, 2019	Bitpoint	System/server compromised	$32 million
June 27, 2019	Bitrue	System/server compromised	$4.5 million
June 6, 2019	Gatehub	Unknown	$9.5 million
May 7, 2019	Binance	Gains access to hot wallet	$40 million
March 29, 2019	Bithumb	Unknown	$29 million
March 25, 2019	Coinbene	Alleged insider	$40 million
March 24, 2019	DragonEX	Unknown	$1 million
February 15, 2019	Coinmama	Data leak	450,000 data user
February 1, 2019	Cryptopia	Unknown	$16 million
January 26, 2019	LocalBitcoins	Phishing	$27,000
October 28, 2018	Maplechange	Alleged insider	$51,000
September 14, 2018	Zaif	Gains access to hot wallet	$60 million
June 18, 2018	Bithumb	Unknown	$31 million
June 10, 2018	Coinrail	Unknown	$40 million
April 13, 2018	CoinSecure	Alleged insider	$3.5 million
February 10, 2018	Bitgrail	Alleged insider	$146 million
January 27, 2018	CoinCheck	Unknown	$560 million
December 20, 2017	EtherDelta	DNS server compromised	$1.4 million
July 5, 2017	Bithumb	Unknown	$7 million
April 22, 2017	Yapizon	Gains access to hot wallet	$5.3 million
August 2, 2016	Bitfinex	Unknown	$623 million
May 9, 2016	Gatecoin	Gains access to hot wallet	$2.14 million
April 7-9, 2016	Shapeshift	Alleged insider	$230,000
February 16, 2016	BTER	Unknown	$1.75 million
December 11, 2015	Bitstamp	Malware	$5 million
August 15, 2015	BTER	Alleged insider	$1.65 million
July 13, 2014	Mintpal	Gains access to hot wallet	$2 million
March 4, 2014	Poloniex	Gains access to hot wallet	$50,000
February 2014	Mt.Gox	Various methods	$460 million
November 11, 2013	Bitcash	System/server compromised	$100,000
September 2, 2012	Bitfloor	System/server compromised	$250,000
March 1, 2012	Bitcoinica	System/server compromised	$87,000

Source: https://chainsightnews.com/post/deretan-exchanges-crypto-yang-jadi-korban-peretasan-sejak-2012