Bitcoin Family moving more than $1 million into DEXs after FTX
The Taihuttu family in November, days after moving back to Phuket.
Didi Taihuttu
Confidence is quickly eroding in the crypto sector, as it faces a wave of bankruptcies and investigations into Sam Bankman-Fried and his failed exchange, FTX, for losing and misspending billions of dollars in user deposits.
But Didi Taihuttu, his wife, three daughters, and Teddy, a Pomeranian puppy they adopted in Portugal last year, are as confident as ever in their bet on bitcoin — they’re just changing how they store it.
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Ever since liquidating all of their assets and buying bitcoin in 2017 back when it was trading at around $900, the Taihuttus have safeguarded their crypto riches in three main places: centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Bybit and Kraken, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap, and hardware wallets hidden in secret vaults on four different continents. But as digital asset brokers, lenders, and exchanges continue to fall into bankruptcy — locking up customer funds in the process — the Dutch family of five is proactively moving $1 million in crypto into decentralized exchanges, which allow users to hang on to custody of their tokens.
“For me, bitcoin is still about freedom, and decentralized currency should be able to be used by everyone in the world without needing to do KYC or any other regulatory stuff,” Taihuttu told CNBC, referring to the know-your-customer, or KYC compliance, required by many centralized platforms like Coinbase. DEXs don’t require users to connect an ID or bank account to the platform, hence making it an ideal custody solution for the Taihuttus.
The Taihuttu family in Lagos, Portugal on the day they adopted Teddy, their Pomeranian puppy.
Didi Taihuttu
CNBC caught up with the 44-year-old patriarch a few days after the family made the move from Lagos, Portugal, to Phuket, an island just off the western coast of mainland Thailand in the Andaman Sea. The family is currently living on 0.3 bitcoin a month — about $5,000 — and they are buying back the bitcoin that they sold when the cryptocurrency was trading at around $55,000 a year ago. For the Taihuttus, the cascade of crypto bankruptcies and failed tokens just shows that “bitcoin is the king” and “completely different than all the other projects.”
While the Taihuttus did not have any tokens tied up with FTX, Celsius, Voyager Digital, or any of the other platforms to recently go under, the wave of failures did remind them of the importance of ownership.
In crypto, one of the mantras is “not your keys, not your coins,” meaning that rightful possession of tokens comes through the custody of the corresponding private keys. DEXs like Uniswap and SushiSwap are peer-to-peer platforms where transactions happen directly between traders, entirely cutting out intermediaries like banks and brokers. That means that users retain…
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