If you are holding your coins on exchanges, you are exposed many risks such as getting locked out of your account, having restricted access due to a number of possible reasons and most of all - hacks.
Exchange hacks are not unusual and in fact, almost every exchange out there has been hacked at some point (some even multiple times).
Although I always say that keeping your coins on exchanges is not safe and definitely not something I advise for the longer term, there's still loads of users who prefer to keep their crypto holding on the exchanges for the convenience to sell/trade them whenever they want and sometimes they're also put-off by the fees that are involved in transporting them to another wallet back and forth.
So, here's one thing that I can recommend to you, if you're keeping your coins on exchanges. Not all exchanges have this option, so I will discuss here two of them - BINANCE and Kucoin, but there's also others who have similar features.
It's called staking - soft or fixed. Lending or yield farming is also recently added to this and in the case of Binance and KUCOIN Exchange the option you're looking for is called "EARN" - in Kucoin it's also known as Pool-X
These are pools where you can lock your coins and earn a profit in the meantime.
The profit varies from plan to plan and there will be various plans to choose from. Also, the percentages you will see advertised are annual returns, but they're being accumulated on a daily basis and you can choose between fixed terms (7-14-30-90 days) or flexible terms. The Flexible terms have the smallest profits of course, but either way, the point in doing this, is not to really make a big profit, (you won't really make a fortune from this) but rather - to make it more difficult for any hackers or wrong-doers, to steal your coins in the unfortunate case of the exchange getting hacked.
You see, when a hacker attacks an exchange platform, they would try to steal whatever coins they can get their hands on. They must act fast, as the developers of the platform begin their efforts to stop the attack as soon as possible, so in the short window they would have to cause the damage they're looking to achieve, they will aim for what is easiest. Meaning, they will steal whatever coins they can find readily available. This way, if you locked your coins in various staking plans, lending or farming, these coins will be less exposed to such a hacking attempt. The hacker would have to go through the effort of unstaking these before they can move them from your wallet, which will take extra time and if they're in a rush to get things done in a short time window, they most likely will not bother doing this.
This is just a way to make it less easy for hackers to steal your coins and it's one of the many things you can do to save your crypto. Of course, having all necessary security in place is essential - like 2FA, pin or other secondary security options that the exchange provides, this goes without saying. But on top of all of these, doing this staking that I just mentioned here will really make it less likely that hackers will go after these coins.
I explained all of this in my latest episode of Crypto Corner too.
For more Cyber Securty tips and advise, check out this video I published some time ago - these are my top tips on how to secure your accounts and make it harder for bad actors to get hold of your crypto: https://youtu.be/0XYhG4A0X40
