Caitlin Long Calls for Self-Custody of On-Chain Bitcoin and Running Full Nodes

Caitlin Long previously founded Custodia Bank and served as CEO, advocating for Bitcoin self-custody due to regulatory issues. This statement continues her public criticism of centralized exchange risks following the FTX collapse in 2022. She has long run a Bitcoin Core full node and promotes institutional-level self-custody solutions.

In terms of capital flow, Long is guiding funds from exchange custody to hardware wallets and full node verification, directing resources towards personal sovereignty tools and educational content. The motivation is to reduce single points of failure, platform bankruptcies, and regulatory freeze risks, while providing more validation nodes for the Bitcoin Layer 1 network to enhance overall censorship resistance.

Similar to Michael Saylor's push for MicroStrategy to self-custody large amounts of Bitcoin, and the early cypherpunk community's insistence on "trust but verify," the Bitcoin holding ecosystem is transitioning from platform custody to individual full node control.

This fundamentally represents a restructuring of the industry chain: achieving pricing power transfer from centralized exchanges/custodians to individual users through self-custody and full nodes. The mechanism lies in the trustless architecture of the Bitcoin protocol, allowing users to directly verify transaction history, eliminating intermediary credit risks, and enabling true sovereign holding and censorship-resistant liquidity.

ABAB News · Law of Cognition

If you don't run your own node, you'll always be trusting someone else's server.
When your private keys are in someone else's hands, what you have is just an IOU, not Bitcoin.
True decentralization starts with everyone becoming their own bank.