What is Custody?

Custody is the question of who controls the keys to an asset. In self-custody you hold the private keys, in a hardware wallet, a phone or a browser extension, and nobody can move the asset without you; in custodial arrangements a third party, an exchange or a custodian, holds the keys and you hold a claim on the balance they show you. Both are legitimate; they fail in different ways, and most people hold both at once.

Custodial risk is counterparty risk. An exchange can freeze an account, be hacked, or become insolvent, and a balance shown on its screen is a promise until it has been withdrawn. Self-custody risk is operational: a lost seed phrase, a signed transaction that should not have been signed, a wrong address. Each side of the trade has produced spectacular losses, and the honest position is to know which risk you are carrying for each part of the portfolio.

Tracking sits outside custody entirely, or it should. A tool that reads balances needs no control over them: public addresses reveal self-custodied holdings, and read-only API keys reveal exchange balances, neither of which grants the ability to move anything. A tracker that asks for more than that is asking to become a custodian, with none of the obligations.

TrueHold never holds wallet keys, never connects a wallet, never signs a transaction and never requests an exchange permission beyond reading. It shows self-custodied wallets and custodial exchange accounts in one total precisely because it takes custody of neither.

The mixed setup most people actually run is worth stating plainly: a hardware wallet for long-term holdings, a hot wallet for on-chain activity, and one or two exchange accounts for trading and fiat. Each part has a different custody risk, and the value of seeing them in one total is that the mix becomes visible instead of assumed.