If we fail to defend self-custody, we risk undermining the very principles that Web3 was built on, i.e. permission-less access, trust-less transactions, and individual sovereignty over digital assets. The industry cannot afford to think of security as an afterthought, a compliance checkbox, or a last-minute feature request. It must be built from the ground up, at every layer of the stack, in every tool, every UI, and every contract.

100%.

To paraphrase Ronnie Coleman

"Everybody wants self-custody, but nobody wants to follow heavy ass security procedures".

I'd also add the culture layer here.

In the pre-Internet 'cash era', there's been a whole culture of protecting your money. People didn't just walk around with $10,000 in their pockets. We also understood that you shouldn't be too flashy because it could turn you into a target. And people kept money in (physical) safes.

I think after 20+ years of digital banking we forgot some of these rules. But since crypto is programmable, we also have new ways to protect our money: whitelisting addresses, multi-sigs, timelocks, and so on.

I hope the last attack will serve as a wake up call for the whole industry to work together on building new security-first systems, just like you described. If we don't do it now and crypto keeps getting more adoption, it might result in even bigger disaster in a few years.