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Sigh... the idea of "not your keys, not your crypto" is one that is hammered home to all newcomers to our beloved crypto-space. I mean, it is one of the central pillars of cryptocurrency... the idea that you are the sole custodian of your assets and are responsible for everything that happens to it. Of course, not everyone wants that responsibility, and so trusted exchanges can serve as generally reliable custodians of digital assets. That said... a trusted exchange is only as good as its current reliability as Mt Gox and the current issue with that Turkish exchange have demonstrated.

I'm generally pretty good with this, but the allure of interest bearing loans have made me move some crypto exchanges to take advantage. However, as the exchange custodians hold your private keys, it does mean that any airdrops to those exchange addresses are strictly up to the exchange to fulfil or not. So, there are now a number of airdrops to users that had been loyal users of protocols throughout the crypto winter... seeing as I've generally been a good boy, and participating in some governance, I've been the lucky recipient of some of them... with some of them being quite lucrative for doing nothing really different to what I was already doing!

However, the AMPL/FORTH was the most recent airdrop that went to accounts that interacted with the AMPL contract. AMPL is an elastic supply token that rebases each according to the market price deviation from a preset USD peg. It means that each address has AMPL added or removed according to the rebase percentage whilst keeping constant in terms of proportion to the total supply. It isn't designed to be a stablecoin but it is designed to be a DeFi native financial primitive.

This constant rebasing means that it can be quite fun to trade AMPL to try and increase your proportion of the total supply, selling off as the rebase is positive and rebuilding your proportion when with the proceeds when the rebase is negative and shrinking the total supply. Of course, that is a pain in the arse to do on-chain with Ethereum... so, it made more sense to play around with the AMPL rebasing on CEX like KuCoin.

However, the majority of AMPL holders on KuCoin were not allowed to receive the FORTH airdrop (roughly 5k US). Now, in most cases I would have just passed that off as a bit of an idiot move by me to not keep crypto on my own private wallets. But for some reason, AMPL holders on exchanges like MCX did receive the FORTH drop! MCX is a bit of a strange CEX for me... I only use it to get access to some really new and small cap coins. For some reason, it is the only CEX that tends to list tokens that you generally can only get from Uniswap, so it is a nice place to hunt out those little gems in the early days!

In the end, 5k of FORTH tokens would have been really nice... but I guess I didn't have it yesterday, and nothing is different today! I'll take that as a reminder of that all important lesson... "Not your keys...". However, the ease of use of CEXs are starting to become more and more alluring compared to the pain in the arse that is managing your own private wallets on multiple chains!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.