In this week’s issue:

• Touch Grass: Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto (a wallet awakening)

• Hodl Me Tender: 🔥 Web3, Crypto + AI Jobs of the Week

Hodl Me Tender: 🔥 Web3 + AI Jobs of the Week

Looking for your next move in (or into) web3, crypto, or AI? Here are some fire openings for this week, all remote:

• Windranger Labs is looking for a Head of Community

• Eclipse Labs needs a DeFi/Capital Markets Lead

• Kraken is looking for someone to be their Senior Director - Product Growth

• Zscaler needs a Customer Success Manager to join their team

• Nascent is on the lookout for a Frontend Application Engineer

• CAIZ wants to find an AML Analyst—is it you?

• Number Group needs a Frontend Developer

• Solana is looking for a Solana Validator & Stake Pool Operator

• Want to be the Marketing Director at Libre Capital? Get it.

• Web3 Media has an opening for a Lead Marketing & Product Launch Manager (for a memecoin & DeFi project)

Want to see your company's job listed here? Reply to this email and lmk.

Speaking of opportunities in the space, here's one you don't need to apply for—becoming your own bank through self-custody. Read on for the Coinbase wallet scoop.

After months of keeping all my crypto in the digital equivalent of leaving cash under someone else's mattress, I finally took the partial self-custody plunge. Not going full degen yet—still keeping some assets in the Coinbase exchange for ease and liquidity, while moving others to my own wallet. A toe-dip into sovereignty, if you will.

Coinbase vs Coinbase Wallet: an existential question

Let's clear this up because it's actually a pretty big fucking deal:

When you buy crypto on Coinbase (the exchange), you're basically asking your mom to hold your birthday money. Sure, it's technically "yours," but Mombase has the keys to the safe. If Coinbase gets hacked, or pulls a 2022 FTX, your crypto could just… vanish.

Coinbase Wallet, meanwhile, is where YOU hold the keys. It's like moving out of your parents' house but for your money. Nobody can lock you out of your assets, nobody can shut down your account for buying too many cartoon monkeys, and nobody can stop you from making questionable 3am purchases that future-you will definitely question. Freedom! Responsibility! Existential dread! The holy trinity of adulthood!

Setting up yr wallet (less painful than the cat treadmill I just assembled)

After hearing crypto veterans chant "not your keys, not your crypto" approximately 5,839 times, I finally decided to see what all the self-custody fuss was about:

1. Download the app

   I grabbed the Coinbase Wallet app from the App Store, thinking I'd need to prove my humanness through a series of impossible captchas. Spoiler, it was actually super chill.

2. Create your wallet

   The setup process was refreshingly straightforward:

   • Make a username (this becomes your shareable address, instead of having to share a long strand of numbers)

   • Set a strong password

   • Write down your seed phrase (THIS IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL)

3. The seed phrase moment

   This is when your palms might start to sweat. The app generates a 12-word phrase that looks like it was spit out by a beatnik poet, and you need to write it down IN ORDER, multiple times on multiple pieces of paper, and keep it in multiple safe places.

Note: I immediately hit "copy to clipboard" and took some screenshots because efficiency, right? Wrong. The very next day in SheFi class, I learned that taking screenshots of and copying your seed phrase to your clipboard is basically the opposite of what you should be doing.

I promptly set up an entirely new wallet with a fresh seed phrase, this time writing it down on actual dead trees. No screenshots. No cloud storage. No let me just email this to myself real quick. Just old-school security with the vague anxiety that I'll somehow lose both the physical copy and my phone simultaneously, sending my crypto riding off into the sunset.

Learning the wallet transfer ropes

I've done my homework on wallet horror stories (so you don't have to). The classic newbie blunder? Sending funds to the wrong address. One wrong character—just one—and your hard-earned ETH is basically a digital message in a bottle floating to an address nobody owns.

The truly pants-shitting part? Once confirmed, that transaction is more permanent than most marriages. No customer service to call, no complaint form to fill out, no mulligan.

This isn't like when your bank calls to ask if you really meant to buy $500 worth of healing crystals at 2am. The blockchain does not care about your feelings, your financial future, or your but I didn't mean to sob story. Which, in and of itself, is kinda cool. Like ownership and sovereignty comes with responsibility. Imagine that.

Lesson absorbed: Triple check every fucking address every fucking time. Copy and paste is your best friend (you can copy/paste addresses, bc those are public anyhow, just not seed phrases or passwords). Trust nothing. Verify everything. This is the way.

What can you actually DO with a self-custody wallet?

Once you have your wallet set up, new possibilities can and do emerge:

Connect to DeFi apps: You can now swap tokens on Uniswap without asking anyone's permission. This is either deeply liberating or incredibly dangerous depending on your level of impulse control.

Hold your own NFTs: My wallet now displays all my questionable jpeg/gif purchases in one place. It's like a digital museum of decisions you may regret or that may fund your retirement—uncertainty is half the fun.

Earn yield: You can stake, provide liquidity, buy stabelcoins (and earn on them), and do other financial wizardry without a suit in a bank branch telling you that's not how we do things here, ma'am.

Experience the duality of self-sovereignty: One minute you’re feeling smug about yr financial independence, the next you’re like wtf because you alone are responsible for this digital money that exists nowhere and everywhere. It's for sure a vibe.

Big picture: cutting out The Man, including the greedy one in the middle

There's something weirdly profound about the whole self-custody thing when you zoom out. For most of human history, we've trusted institutions to hold our assets—banks, governments, brokers, that one friend who definitely still has your Nintendo 64.

Now we're in this bizarre historical moment where technology is enabling regular people to be their own financial institutions. And we're truly creating something that didn't exist before—a world where your money is actually yours in a meaningful sense. With nothing and no man in the middle to stand in your way.

For now, I’ll continue to keep some assets in the exchange (convenience has value) while experimenting with self-custody for others. I guess it's kinda like having both a checking account and a home safe. Different tools for different purposes, and you get to decide which is which. The power of choice is pretty rad.

Next up? Cold wallets, baby.

PS: Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic. Miss the last issue? It’s right here. Also literally none of this is financial advice. I’m sharing what I learn through Babe, and perhaps you’ll learn from my mistakes. Hopefully, maybe, who knows, ily.