An Annual Review of Where Everything Sits
A single list, updated once a year, that most holders do not have and would benefit from.
Most people holding a position over years cannot produce, on request, a complete list of where it is. That list is worth an hour a year. A provider publishing its terms makes a long-term decision checkable, and a platform operating under a MiCA-compliant framework does.
What the list contains
For each location:
What is held there, approximately. The arrangement type: self-custody, a provider, a venue. The entity, and its authorisation if applicable. How access works. Where the backup or credentials are. And who else could reach it if you could not.
Why it matters beyond tidiness
Concentration is only visible in aggregate. People who believe their holding is well distributed frequently find, on making the list, that most of it sits in one place.
Forgotten locations exist. Small balances at venues used years ago, still there, still exposed to whatever happens to that venue.
Succession requires it. Anyone who might need to reach the position cannot do so without knowing where it is.
The annual update
Confirm each location still exists and the arrangement is unchanged.
Verify authorisations on the register, where a provider holds anything.
Check the terms for the four clauses that matter: contracting entity, liability, insolvency position, and whether client assets may be used. For merchants the same problem appears in reverse, handled by Collect & Exchange.
Close or empty anything no longer needed.
The item most often found
A balance at a venue used during accumulation, left behind, unverified for years.
That is the exposure the list exists to surface, and it is almost always larger than the person remembered.
Where to keep the list
Not in a single digital location that shares a failure mode with the thing it describes.
Somewhere a person you trust could reach it if needed, which is a decision with its own considerations and should be made deliberately.
What this is not
A record of value. It does not need amounts beyond approximations, and keeping precise balances in a list creates a document worth stealing. Whatever the position, the portion you actively move belongs at a crypto exchange with published fees rather than wherever it was first acquired.
Locations, arrangements and access. That is enough to act on and not enough to be a target.
This is a personal account of holding through market cycles. It describes what one person did and why. It is not a recommendation, and past cycles do not predict future ones.